Coordinates	24°05′15.3″N46°37′44″N
name	Rabbi Meir Kahane
birth date	August 01, 1932
birth place	Brooklyn, New York, USA
death date	November 05, 1990
death place	New York City, New York, USA
occupation	Political activist
religion	Orthodox Judaism
website	}}

Rabbi Martin David Kahane also known as Meir Kahane (), and by the pen-names Benyac and David Sinai and the pseudonyms Michael King, David Borac, and Martin Keene (1 August 1932 – 5 November 1990) was an American-Israeli rabbi and ultra-nationalist writer and political figure. He was an ordained Orthodox rabbi and later served as a member of the Israeli Knesset.

Kahane gained recognition as an activist for Jewish causes, such as organizing Jewish self-defense groups in deteriorating neighborhoods and the struggle for the right of Soviet Jews to immigrate. He later became known in the United States and Israel for political and religious views that included proposing emergency Jewish mass-immigration to Israel due to the imminent threat of a "second Holocaust" in the United States, advocating that Israel's democracy be replaced by a state modeled on Jewish religious law, and promoting the idea of a Greater Israel in which Israel would annex the West Bank and Gaza strip. In order to keep Arabs, who he stated would never accept Israel as a Jewish state, from becoming a numerical majority in Israel, he proposed a plan allowing Arabs to voluntarily leave Israel and receive compensation for their property, and forcibly removing Arabs who refused.

Kahane founded both the Jewish Defense League (JDL) in the USA and ''Kach'' ("This is the Way!"), an Israeli political party. In 1984 he became a member of the Knesset when ''Kach'' gained one seat in parliamentary elections. In 1988, the Israeli government banned ''Kach'' as "racist" and "undemocratic" under the terms of an ad hoc law. In 1994, following the Cave of the Patriarchs massacre perpetrated by a Kahane follower, ''Kach'' was outlawed completely. The U.S. State Department listed it as a terrorist organization in 1994.

Kahane was assassinated in a Manhattan hotel by an Arab gunman in November 1990, after concluding a speech warning American Jews to emigrate to Israel before it was "too late."

Early life and education

Rabbi Kahane was born in Brooklyn, New York City, New York in 1932 to an Orthodox Jewish family. His father, Rabbi Yechezkel Sharaga Kahane, was born in Safed, Ottoman Palestine (in present-day Israel), in 1905, and went to study in Polish and Czech yeshiva religious schools.

As a teenager, he became an ardent admirer of Ze'ev Jabotinsky and Peter Bergson, who were frequent guests in his parents' home, and joined the Betar (Brit Trumpeldor) youth wing of Revisionist Zionism. He was active in protests against Ernest Bevin, the British Foreign Secretary who maintained restrictions on immigration of Jews (including Nazi concentration camp survivors) to Palestine after the end of the Second World War. In 1947 Kahane was arrested for throwing eggs and tomatoes at Bevin, as the latter disembarked at Pier 84 on a visit to New York. A photo of the arrest appeared in the New York Daily News. In 1954, he became the mazkir (director) of Greater New York’s sixteen Bnei Akiva chapters.

Rabbi Kahane’s formal education included elementary school at the Yeshiva of Flatbush and high school at the Brooklyn Talmudical Academy. Kahane received his rabbinical ordination from the Mir Yeshiva in Brooklyn, and earned a B.A. in political science from Brooklyn College. He was fully conversant with the Talmud and Tanakh (Jewish Bible), and worked as a pulpit rabbi and teacher in the 1960s. Subsequently, he earned a J.D. from New York Law School and an L.L.M. from New York University Law School.

Serving as Pulpit Rabbi

In 1956, Rabbi Kahane married Libby, with whom he had four children. In 1958, he became the rabbi of the Howard Beach Jewish Center. Located in Queens, New York, the synagogue was traditional rather than strictly Orthodox. At the Jewish Center, Rabbi Kahane influenced many of the synagogue’s youngsters to adopt a more observant lifestyle. But when he attempted to install a mechitzah, a partition that is used to separate men and women, many of the key synagogue members turned against him. His contract was not renewed and he soon published an article entitled “End of the Miracle of Howard Beach.” This was Rabbi Kahane’s first article in the ''Jewish Press'', American-Jewish weekly, for which he continued to write until his murder in 1990.

Infiltrating John Birch Society

In the late 1950s to early 1960s Rabbi Kahane led a life of secrecy. His strong anti-Communist views landed him a position as a consultant with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). According to his wife Libby, his assignment was to infiltrate the anticommunist John Birch Society and report his findings back to the FBI.

As reported by Michael T. Kaufman in The New York Times (and subsequently followed up by The Village Voice in the early 1980s), Rabbi Kahane (under his pseudonym Michael King) allegedly had an affair with a non-Jewish woman, Gloria Jean D'Argenio. In 1966, Kahane/King allegedly sent a letter to D'Argenio in which he unilaterally ended their relationship. In response, D'Argenio jumped off the Queensboro ("59th Street") Bridge; she died of her injuries the next day. According to Kaufman, Rabbi Kahane admitted to him that "he loved Ms D'Argenio and had sent roses to her grave for months after her death." He also established a foundation which carried the name she used in her modeling career, Estelle Donna Evans. Ads for the foundation appeared weekly in the Jewish Press, although the group never filed legally required financial documents detailing what it did with the money it collected.

Activism

Rabbi Kahane founded the Jewish Defense League (JDL) in New York City in 1968. JDL's self-described purpose was to protect Jews from local manifestations of anti-Semitism. Hate crimes and discrimination against Jews were very relevant at the time of mass exodus of urban Jewish population into suburbs; those Jews unable or unwilling to move often became victims of violent crimes in the racially and ethnically changing neighborhoods. JDL members led protests against anti-Semitic teachers in the public school system, provided escorts for elderly Jews and educated Jewish youth in the art of self-defense. However, it was the criticism of the Soviet Union that garnered support for the group, transforming it from a "vigilante club" to an activist organization with membership numbering over 15,000. JDL organized mass rallies in New York against the Soviet Union's policy of persecuting Zionist activists and curbing Jewish immigration to Israel. JDL played lead role in the "Free Soviet Jewry" movement ("Let My People Go!") and pushed for the release of Russian refuseniks and their resettlement in Israel. JDL also protested against the oppression of Jewish population in Muslim countries, fought Neo-Nazis in the United States and resisted Christian missionaries' activity to convert Jews.

Emigration to Israel, Knesset service

In 1971, Rabbi Kahane fulfilled his lifelong dream and emigrated to Israel.

When he moved to Israel, Kahane declared that he would focus on Jewish education. However, he soon began initiating protests advocating the expulsion of Arabs from Israel and the occupied territories. In 1972, Jewish Defense League leaflets were distributed in Hebron, calling for mayor to stand trial for the 1929 Hebron massacre. He was arrested dozens of times. In 1971, he founded the Kach party. In 1973, the party ran for the Knesset (Israeli parliament) during the general elections under the name "The League List". The party won 12,811 votes (0.82%), just 2,857 (0.18%) short of the electoral threshold at the time (1%) for winning a Knesset seat. The party was even less successful in the 1977 elections, winning 4,836 votes.

In 1980, Kahane was arrested for the 62nd time since his emigration and jailed for six months following a detention order based on allegations of planning armed attacks against Palestinians in response to the killings of Jewish settlers. Kahane was held in a maximum-security prison in Ramla, where he wrote the book ''They Must Go''. Kahane claimed in the book's preface that one of his cellmates was a Bedouin from the Negev about to be released after serving an eighteen-year prison sentence for the rape and murder of a Jewish girl.

In 1981, Kahane's Kach party again ran for the Knesset during the 1981 elections, but did not win a seat, receiving only 5,128 votes. The Central Elections Committee had banned him from being a candidate on the grounds that Kach was a racist party, but the Israeli Supreme Court overturned the ban on grounds that the committee was not authorized to ban Kahane's candidacy. The Supreme Court suggested that the Knesset pass a law that would authorize the exclusion of racist parties from future elections, and the Anti-Racist Law of 1988 was later passed. In the 1984 legislative elections, Kahane's Kach party received 25,907 votes, enough to give the party one seat in the Knesset, which was taken by Kahane. Kahane refused to take the standard oath of office and insisted on adding a Biblical verse from Psalms, to indicate that when the national laws and Torah conflict, Torah (Biblical) law should have supremacy over the laws of the Knesset.

Kahane's legislative proposals focused on transferring the Arab population out from the Land of Israel, revoking Israeli citizenship from non-Jews, and banning Jewish-Gentile marriages and sexual relations, based on the Code of Jewish Law compiled by Maimonides in the ''Mishneh Torah''.

As his political career progressed, Kahane became increasingly isolated in the Knesset. His speeches, boycotted by Knesset members, were made to an empty parliament, except for the duty chairman and the transcriptionist. Kahane's legislative proposals and motions of no-confidence against the government were ignored or rejected by fellow Knesset members. Kahane often pejoratively called other Knesset members "Hellenists" in Hebrew (a reference to Jews who assimilated into Greek culture after Judea's occupation by Alexander the Great). In 1987, Rabbi Kahane opened a yeshiva (HaRaayon HaYehudi) with funding from US supporters, for the teaching of "the Authentic Jewish Idea".

Despite the boycott, Kahane's popularity grew among the Israeli public, especially among working-class Sephardi Jews. Polls showed that Kach would have likely received three to four seats in the coming November 1988 elections, with some earlier polls forecasting as many as twelve seats (10% of popular vote), possibly making Kach Israel's third largest party.

In 1985, the Knesset passed an amendment to Israel's Basic Law, barring "racist" candidates from election. The Central Elections Committee banned Kahane a second time, and he appealed to the Israeli Supreme Court. This time, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the committee, disqualifying Kach from running in the 1988 elections. Rabbi Kahane was thus the first candidate in Israel to be barred from election for racism.

Assassination

In November 1990, following a speech to an audience of mostly Orthodox Jews from Brooklyn, as a crowd of well-wishers gathered around Kahane in the second-floor lecture hall in midtown Manhattan's Marriott East Side Hotel, Kahane was assassinated. He was shot to death by El Sayyid Nosair, an Egyptian-born American citizen who was initially charged and acquitted of the murder. Nosair was later convicted of the murder in United States district court incident to the trial for his involvement in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, and also later made a confession to federal agents. Kahane was buried in Jerusalem.

Ideology

Kahane argued that there was a glory in Jewish destiny, which came through the observance of the Torah. He stated that, "democracy and Judaism are not the same thing."

Kahane also believed that a Jewish democracy with non-Jewish citizens was self-contradictory because the non-Jewish citizens might someday become a numerical majority and vote to make the state non-Jewish: "The question is as follows: if the Arabs settle among us and make enough children to become a majority, will Israel continue to be a Jewish state? Do we have to accept that the Arab majority will decide?" "Western democracy has to be ruled out. For me that's cut and dried: there's no question of setting up democracy in Israel, because democracy means equal rights for all, irrespective of racial or religious origins."

Kahane proposed the forcible deportation of nearly all Arabs from all lands controlled by the Israeli government. He framed this deportation as an "exchange of populations" that would continue the Jewish exodus from Arab lands: "A total of some 750,000 Jews fled Arab lands since 1948. Surely it is time for Jews, worried over the huge growth of Arabs in Israel, to consider finishing the exchange of populations that began 35 (50) years ago." Kahane proposed a $40,000 compensation plan for Arabs who would leave voluntarily, forcible expulsion "for those who don’t want to leave," and encouraged retaliatory violence against Arabs who attacked Jews: "I approve of anybody who commits such acts of violence. Really, I don’t think that we can sit back and watch Arabs throwing rocks at buses whenever they feel like it. They must understand that a bomb thrown at a Jewish bus is going to mean a bomb thrown at an Arab bus."

Kahane proposed that Israel expand its boundaries "according to the description given in the Bible." He said, "the southern boundary goes up to El Arish, which takes in all of northern Sinai, including Yamit. To the east, the frontier runs along the western part of the East Bank of the Jordan River, hence part of what is now Jordan. Eretz Yisrael also includes part of Lebanon and certain parts of Syria, and part of Iraq, all the way to the Tigris River. When critics suggested this would mean perpetual war between Jews and Arabs, Kahane answered, "There will be a perpetual war. With or without Kahane."

Political legacy

Following Kahane's death, no charismatic leader emerged to replace him in the movement, although the idea of transferring populations gained traction in Israel. Two small Kahanist factions later emerged; one under the name of ''Kach'' and the other ''Kahane chai'' (Hebrew: כהנא חי, literally "Kahane lives [on]"), led by his younger son, Binyamin Ze'ev Kahane.

In 1994, following the Cave of the Patriarchs massacre of Palestinian Muslim worshippers in Hebron by Kach supporter Dr. Baruch Goldstein, in which 29 Palestinian Muslim worshippers were killed, the Israeli government declared both parties to be terrorist organizations. The U.S. State Department also added Kach and Kahane Chai to its list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. Providing funds or material support to these organizations is a crime in both Israel and the USA.

In late 2000, as bombing attacks on Israel during the Al-Aqsa Intifada began, Kahane supporters spray-painted graffiti on hundreds of bus shelters and bridges all across Israel. The message on each target was identical, simply reading: "Kahane was Right".

On December 31, 2000, Binyamin Ze'ev Kahane and his wife Talya were shot to death as they returned from Jerusalem to their home in the Israeli settlement of Kfar Tapuach, and five of their six children wounded. Palestinian gunmen fired more than 60 machine-gun rounds into their van.

In the 2003 Knesset elections Herut, which split off from the National Union list, ran with Michael Kleiner and former Kach activist Baruch Marzel taking the top two spots on the list. The joint effort narrowly missed the 1.5% barrier. In the following 2006 elections Jewish National Front led by Baruch Marzel, fared better but also failed to pass the minimum threshold. Michael Ben-Ari, elected to the Knesset in the 2009 elections on renewed National Union list, is a self-declared follower of Rabbi Kahane who was involved with Kach for many years.

Supporters

In an article written in January 2001 on a forum of the Jewish Defense League, activist Joe Kaufman praised the Kahane movement and its founder Meir Kahane. In that article Kaufman said of Kahane: "It was perfectly understandable, if he were to have hated Arabs. Just like, during the Holocaust, it was perfectly understandable for a Jew to hate Germans…If the Kahanes' memory serves us any purpose, it's to show that trust (and peace) is ultimately between only ourselves."

In a 1971 interview, Bob Dylan made positive comments about Kahane. In Time Magazine, Dylan stated, "He's a really sincere guy. He's really put it all together." According to Kahane, Dylan did attend several meetings of the Jewish Defense League in order to find out "what we're all about" and started to have talks with the rabbi.

See also

Politics of Israel

Publications

(Partially under pseudonym Michael King; with Joseph Churba) ''The Jewish Stake in Vietnam'', Crossroads, 1967

''Never Again! A Program for Survival'', Pyramid Books, 1972

''Time to Go Home'', Nash, 1972.

''Letters from Prison'', Jewish Identity Center, 1974

''Our Challenge: The Chosen Land'', Chilton, 1974

''The Story of the Jewish Defense League'', Chilton, 1975, 2nd edition, Institute for Publication of the Writings of Rabbi Meir Kahane, (Brooklyn, NY), 2000

''Why Be Jewish? Intermarriage, Assimilation, and Alienation'', Stein & Day, 1977

''Listen, Vanessa, I Am a Zionist'', Institute of the Authentic Jewish Idea, 1978

''They Must Go'', Grosset & Dunlop, 1981

''Forty Years'', Institute of the Jewish Idea, 2nd edition, 1983

''Uncomfortable Questions for Comfortable Jews'', Lyle Stuart, 1987

''Israel: Revolution or Referendum'', Barricade Books (Secaucus, NJ), 1990

''Or ha-ra'yon'', English title: ''The Jewish Idea'', n.p. (Jerusalem), 1992, translated from the Hebrew by Raphael Blumberg, Institute for Publication of the Writings of Rabbi Meir Kahane (Jerusalem), 1996

''On Jews and Judaism: Selected Articles 1961–1990'', Institute for Publication of the Writings of Rabbi Meir Kahane (Jerusalem), 1993

''Perush ha-Makabi: al Sefer Devarim'', Institute for Publication of the Writings of Rabbi Meir Kahane (Jerusalem), 1993, 1995

''Pirush HaMaccabee: al Sefer Shemu'el u-Nevi'im rishonim'', Institute for Publication of the Writings of Rabbi Meir Kahane (Jerusalem), 1994

''Listen World, Listen Jew'', 3rd edition, Institute for the Publication of the Writings of Rabbi Meir Kahane (Jerusalem), 1995

''Beyond Words'', 1st edition, Institute for the Publication of the Writings of Rabbi Meir Kahane (Jerusalem), 2010.

''Kohen ve-navi: osef ma'amarim'', ha-Makhon le-hotsa'at kitve ha-Rav Kahana (Jerusalem), 2000

''Cuckooland'', illustrated by Shulamith bar Itzhak (yet unpublished).

''DVD-quality downloadable videos of Meir Kahane's lectures'', SamsonBlinded.org

Also author of Numbers 23:9: "... lo, it is a people that shall dwell alone and shall not be reckoned among the nations," I. Block, 1970s. Contributor—sometimes under pseudonym Michael King—to periodicals, including New York Times. Editor of Jewish Press, 1968.

For supplementary information and insights:

The Wit and Wisdom of Rabbi Meir Kahane by Lenny Goldberg

''Miracle Man'', Yeshivat HaRaayon HaYehudi (Jerusalem), 2010

''Kahane et le Kahanisme" by Shulamith Bar Itzhak.

''Meir Kahane: Ideologue, Hero, Thinker'' by Daniel Breslauer. Lewiston/Queenston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1986.

''The Boundaries of Liberty and Tolerance: The Struggle Against Kahanism in Israel'' by Raphael Cohen-Almagor. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1994.

''The False Prophet: Rabbi Meir Kahane, from FBI Informant to Knesset Member'' by Robert I. Friedman. Brooklyn, NY: Lawrence Hill Books, 1990.

''Heil Kahane'' by Yair Kotler. New York: Adama Books, 1986.

''Israel’s Ayatollahs: Meir Kahane and the Far Right in Israel'' by Raphael Mergui and Phillipe Simonnot.

''The Roots of Kahanism: Consciousness and Political Reality'' by Aviezer Ravitzky.

''Kach and Meir Kahane: The Emergence of Jewish Quasi-Fascism'' by Ehud Sprinzak.

''Rabbi Meir Kahane: His Life and Thought''. By Libby Kahane, 2008.

References

External links

The Internet's Ultimate Rabbi Kahane Resource Kahane books online Kahane.org "The official Kahane website" "Kahane was right"

"Kahane Tzadak"

Rabbi Meir Kahane at the Jewish Virtual Library

Rabbi Meir Kahane Audio

International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism: Kach and Kahane Chai

Jewish Defense League

FBI file on Meir Kahane

Video and audio links

Videos

Rabbi Meir Kahane in Yeshiva University

Rabbi Meir Kahane in Beverly Hotel

Rabbi Meir Kahane "Why Be Jewish?" (Part 1)

Rabbi Meir Kahane "Why Be Jewish?" (Part 2)

Rabbi Meir Kahane "Why Be Jewish?" (Part 3)

Rabbi Meir Kahane Addressing Camp "Sdei Chemed"

Debate: Rabbi Meir Kahane vs. Alan Dershowitz

Rabbi Meir Kahane Speaking at Brandeis University

Rabbi Meir Kahane in Thunderbird Motel

Rabbi Meir Kahane in the National Press Club

Audios

Debate: Rabbi Meir Kahane vs. Alan Dershowitz

Category:1932 births Category:1990 deaths Category:Islamist terrorism in the United States Category:Assassinated activists Category:Assassinated American people Category:Assassinated Israeli politicians Category:Assassinated Jews Category:Assassinated religious leaders Category:Members of the Knesset Category:Israeli activists Category:Jewish American writers Category:American Orthodox Jews Category:American Zionists Category:American Kahanists Category:Israeli Orthodox Jews Category:Israeli Kahanists Category:People from Brooklyn Category:People murdered in New York Category:Religious Zionist Orthodox rabbis Category:New York Law School alumni Category:Israeli people murdered abroad Category:Deaths by firearm in New York Category:Burials in Jerusalem Category:American emigrants to Israel Category:Kohanim Category:Philosophers of Judaism Category:Kach and Kahane Chai politicians Category:Jewish terrorism Category:Racism

ar:مائير كاهانا cs:Meir Kahane de:Meir Kahane es:Meir Kahane eo:Meir Kahane fr:Meir Kahane he:מאיר כהנא nl:Meir Kahane ja:メイル・カハネ no:Meir Kahane pl:Meir Kahane pt:Meir Kahane ru:Кахане, Меир fi:Meir Kahane tr:Meir Kahane yi:מאיר כהנא

Coordinates	24°05′15.3″N46°37′44″N
name	Alan Dershowitz
alt	photograph
birth date	September 01, 1938
birth place	Brooklyn, New York
nationality	American
education	Brooklyn College (A.B.) Yale Law School (LL.B)
occupation	Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School
spouse	1. Sue Barlach 2.Carolyn Cohen
parents	Harry and Claire Dershowitz
website	www.alandershowitz.com

Alan Morton Dershowitz (born September 1, 1938) is an American lawyer, jurist, and political commentator. He has spent most of his career at Harvard Law School where in 1967, at the age of 28, he became the youngest full professor of law in its history. He has held the Felix Frankfurter professorship there since 1993.

Dershowitz is known for his involvement in several high-profile legal cases and as a commentator on the Arab–Israeli conflict. As a criminal appellate lawyer, he has won 13 of the 15 murder and attempted murder cases he has handled, and has represented a series of celebrity clients, including Mike Tyson, Patty Hearst, and Jim Bakker. His most notable cases include his role in 1984 in overturning the conviction of Claus von Bülow for the attempted murder of his wife, Sunny, and as the appellate adviser for the defense in the O.J. Simpson trial in 1995.

He is the author of a number of books about politics and law, including ''Reversal of Fortune: Inside the von Bülow Case'' (1985), the basis of the 1990 film; ''Chutzpah'' (1991); ''Reasonable Doubts: The Criminal Justice System and the O.J. Simpson Case'' (1996); ''The Case for Israel'' (2003); and ''Rights From Wrongs: A Secular Theory of the Origins of Rights'' (2004).

Early life

Dershowitz was born in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to Harry and Claire Dershowitz, an Orthodox Jewish couple, and was raised in Borough Park. His father was a founder and president of the Young Israel Synagogue in the 1960s, served on the board of directors of the Etz Chaim School in Borough Park, and in retirement was co-owner of the Manhattan-based Merit Sales Company. According to Dershowitz, Harry had a strong sense of justice and talked about how it was "the Jew's job to defend the underdog."

Dershowitz's first job was at a deli factory on Manhattan's Lower East Side in 1952, at age 14. He recalls tying the strings that separated the hot dogs and once getting locked in the freezer. He attended Yeshiva University High School, where he played on the basketball team. He was a rebellious student, often criticized by his teachers. The school's career placement center told him he had talent and was capable of becoming an advertising executive, funeral director, or salesman. He later said his teachers told him to do something that "requires a big mouth and no brain ... so I became a lawyer." After graduating from high school, he attended Brooklyn College and received his A.B. in 1959. Next he attended Yale Law School, where he was editor-in-chief of the ''Yale Law Journal'', and graduated first in his class with a Bachelor of Laws (LL.B.) in 1962. He has been a member of a Conservative minyan at Harvard Hillel, but is now a secular Jew. He is married to Carolyn Cohen and has three children.

Career

After being admitted to the bar, Dershowitz served as a clerk for David L. Bazelon, the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. He said that "Bazelon was my best and worst boss at once ... He worked me to the bone; he didn't hesitate to call at 2 a.m. He taught me everything—how to be a civil libertarian, a Jewish activist, a mensch. He was halfway between a slave master and a father figure." During the 1963–1964 term, he served as law clerk for the Supreme Court Associate Justice Arthur Goldberg. He told Tom Van Riper of ''Forbes'' that getting a Supreme Court clerkship was probably his second big break; his first was when, at age 14 or 15, a camp counselor told him he was smart but that his mind operated a little differently. He joined the faculty of Harvard Law School as an assistant professor in 1964, and was made a full professor in 1967 at the age of 28, at that time the youngest full professor of law in the school's history. He was appointed Felix Frankfurter professor of law in 1993.

Much of his legal career has focused on criminal law, and his clients have included high-profile figures such as Patty Hearst, Harry Reems, Leona Helmsley, Jim Bakker, Mike Tyson, Michael Milken, O.J. Simpson and Kirtanananda Swami. He sees himself as a "lawyer of last resort"—someone to turn to when the defendant has few other legal options—and takes those cases that are what he calls "the most challenging, the most difficult and precedent-setting cases." He is currently advising Julian Assange's legal team.

Recognition

Dershowitz has been described by ''Newsweek'' as America's "most peripatetic civil liberties lawyer and one of its most distinguished defenders of individual rights." He was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 1979, and in 1983 received the William O. Douglas First Amendment Award from the Anti-Defamation League for his work on civil rights. In November 2007, he was awarded the Soviet Jewry Freedom Award by the Russian Jewish Community Foundation. He has been awarded honorary doctorates in law from Yeshiva University, the Hebrew Union College, Monmouth College, University of Haifa, Syracuse University, Fitchburg State College, Bar-Ilan University, and Brooklyn College. In addition, he is a member of the International Advisory Board of NGO Monitor.

Cases

Pornography (1976)

In 1976, Dershowitz handled the successful appeal of Harry Reems, who had been convicted of distribution of obscenity resulting from his acting in the pornographic movie ''Deep Throat''. In public debates, Dershowitz commonly argues against censorship of pornography on First Amendment grounds, and maintains that consumption of pornography is not harmful.

Claus von Bülow (1984)

Dershowitz represented Claus von Bülow, a British socialite, at appeal for the attempted murder of his wife, Sunny von Bülow, who died in 2008 after going into a coma in Newport, Rhode Island in 1980. He had the conviction overturned, and von Bülow was acquitted in a retrial. Dershowitz told the story of the case in his book, ''Reversal of Fortune: Inside the von Bülow case'' (1985), which was turned into a movie in 1990. Dershowitz was played by actor Ron Silver, and Dershowitz himself had a cameo role as a judge.

Józef Glemp (1989)

In 1989, Dershowitz filed a defamation suit against Cardinal Józef Glemp, then Archbishop of Warsaw, on behalf of Rabbi Avi Weiss. Glemp had accused Weiss and six other New York Jews of attacking nuns at a much-disputed convent on the site of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Glemp's statement about Weiss, made in July 1989, was coupled with suggestions that Jews control the world's news media. Dershowitz's account of the lawsuit appears in his book ''Chutzpah'' (1991).

Mike Barnicle (1990)

Dershowitz sued ''The Boston Globe'' in 1990 over a remark reporter Mike Barnicle attributed to him, in which Dershowitz allegedly said he preferred Asian women because they are deferential to men. Dershowitz reportedly received a $75,000 out-of-court settlement and the newspaper's ombudsman questioned Barnicle's credibility, according to ''The Boston Phoenix''.

O.J. Simpson (1995)

Dershowitz acted as an appellate adviser to O.J. Simpson's defense team during the trial, and later wrote a book about it, ''Reasonable Doubts: The Criminal Justice System and the O.J. Simpson Case'' (1996). He wrote: "the Simpson case will not be remembered in the next century. It will not rank as one of the trials of the century. It will not rank with the Nuremberg trials, the Rosenberg trial, Sacco and Vanzetti. It is on par with Leopold and Loeb and the Lindbergh case, all involving celebrities. It is also not one of the most important cases of my own career. I would rank it somewhere in the middle in terms of interest and importance." The case has been described as the most publicized criminal trial in American history.

Views

On Israel

While Dershowitz is an outspoken supporter of Israel, Dershowitz self-identifies as "Pro-Israel and Pro-Palestine". Dershowitz engaged in highly publicized debates with a number of other commentators, including Meir Kahane , Noam Chomsky, and Norman Finkelstein. When former U.S. President Jimmy Carter had his book ''Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid'' (2006) published—in which he argues that Israel's control of Palestinian land is the primary obstacle to peace—Dershowitz challenged Carter to a debate at Brandeis University. Carter declined, saying, "I don't want to have a conversation even indirectly with Dershowitz. There is no need to debate somebody who, in my opinion, knows nothing about the situation in Palestine." Carter did address Brandeis in January 2007, but only Brandeis students and staff were allowed to attend. Dershowitz was invited to respond on the same stage only after Carter had left.

He also took part in the Doha Debates at Georgetown University in April 2009, where he spoke against the motion "this House believes it's time for the US to get tough on Israel," with Dore Gold, President of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. Speakers for the motion were Avraham Burg, former Chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel and former Speaker of the Knesset; and Michael Scheuer, former Chief of the CIA Bin Laden Issue Station. Dershowitz's side lost the debate, with 63 percent of the audience voting for the motion.

Harvard-MIT divestment petition

Randall Adams of ''The Harvard Crimson'' writes that, in the spring of 2002, a petition within Harvard calling for Harvard and MIT to divest from Israel and American companies that sell arms to Israel gathered over 600 signatures, including 74 from the Harvard faculty and 56 from the MIT faculty. Among the signatures was that of Harvard's Winthrop House Master Paul D. Hanson, in response to which Dershowitz staged a debate for 200 students in the Winthrop Junior Common Room. He called the petition's signatories antisemitic, bigots, and said they knew nothing about the Middle East. "Your House master is a bigot," he told the students, "and you ought to know that." Adams writes that Dershowitz cited examples of human rights violations in countries that the United States supports, such as the execution of homosexuals in Egypt and the repression of women in Saudi Arabia, and said he would sue any professor who voted against the tenure of another academic because of the candidate's position toward Israel, calling them "ignoramuses with Ph.D.s."

"New Response to Palestinian Terrorism" (2002)

In March 2002, Dershowitz published an article in ''The Jerusalem Post'' entitled "New Response to Palestinian Terrorism." In it, he wrote that Israel should announce a unilateral cessation in retaliation, at the end of which it would "announce precisely what it will do in response to the next act of terrorism. For example, it could announce the first act of terrorism following the moratorium will result in the destruction of a small village which has been used as a base for terrorist operations. The residents would be given 24 hours to leave, and then troops will come in and bulldoze all of the buildings." The list of targets would be made public in advance. The proposal attracted criticism from within Harvard University and beyond. James Bamford argued in ''The Washington Post'' that it would violate international law. Norman Finkelstein wrote that "it is hard to make out any difference between the policy Dershowitz advocates and the Nazi destruction of Lidice, for which he expresses abhorrence—except that Jews, not Germans, would be implementing it."

Norman Finkelstein

Shortly after the publication of Dershowitz's ''The Case for Israel'' (2003), Norman Finkelstein of DePaul University said the book contained plagiarism. He offered several examples, one of which was a quote from Mark Twain appearing on pages 23–24 of ''The Case for Israel'', which he said was the same as one on pages 159–160 of ''From Time Immemorial'' by Joan Peters, including with the ellipses in the same place. Dershowitz said the quote was taken from Mark Twain, to whom he gave credit. Harvard's president, Derek Bok, investigated the allegation and determined that no plagiarism had occurred.

In early 2004 it was announced that Dr Finkelstein would publish a study rebutting Professor Alan Dershowitz’s The Case for Israel and documenting that extensive passages in his book had been plagiarized, Dershowitz and his attorneys entered into a protracted correspondence with the publisher, originally New Press and subsequently University of California Press also involving Governor Schwarzenegger . Dershowitz had pressured the publishers suppressing the release of Beyond Chutzpah, yet refused to release his correspondence – indeed, falsely claiming that he had released it. Later in 2007 a California Public Records Act (CPRA) request was made to the University of California Press and the letters were released .

In October 2006, Dershowitz wrote to DePaul University faculty members to lobby against Finkelstein's application for tenure. The university's Liberal Arts and Sciences faculty voted to send a letter of complaint to Harvard University. In June 2007, DePaul University denied Finkelstein tenure.

Mearsheimer and Walt

In March 2006, John Mearsheimer, Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, and Stephen Walt, Professor of International Affairs at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, co-wrote a paper entitled "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," published in ''The London Review of Books''. Mearsheimer and Walt criticized what they described as "the Israel lobby" for influencing U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East in a direction away from U.S. interests and toward Israel's interests. They referred to Dershowitz specifically as an "apologist" for the Israel lobby. In an interview in March 2006 for ''The Harvard Crimson'', Dershowitz called the article "one-sided" and its authors "liars" and "bigots." The following day on MSNBC's ''Scarborough Country'', he suggested the paper had been taken from various hate sites: "every paragraph virtually is copied from a neo-Nazi Web site, from a radical Islamic Web site, from David Duke’s Web site." Dershowitz subsequently wrote a report challenging the paper, arguing that it contained "three types of major errors: quotations are wrenched out of context, important facts are misstated or omitted, and embarrassingly weak logic is employed." In a letter in the ''London Review of Books'' in May 2006, Mearsheimer and Walt denied that they had used any racist sources for their article, writing that Dershowitz had offered no evidence to support what they said was his false claim.

2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict

In July 2006, Dershowitz wrote a series of articles defending the conduct of the Israel Defense Forces during the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict. There was an international outcry at the time regarding escalating Lebanese civilian deaths and the destruction of civilian infrastructure resulting from Israel's stated attempt to weaken or destroy Hezbollah. After the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour indicated that Israeli officials might be investigated and indicted for possible war crimes, Dershowitz labeled her statement "bizarre," called for her dismissal, and wrote about what he called the "absurdity and counterproductive nature of current international law." In a ''Boston Globe'' editorial several days later, he argued that Israel was not to blame for civilian deaths: "Israel has every self-interest in minimizing civilian casualties, whereas the terrorists have every self-interest in maximizing them—on both sides. Israel should not be condemned for doing what every democracy would and should do: taking every reasonable military step to stop the killing of their own civilians."

Second Amendment and the U.S. Constitution

Dershowitz is strongly opposed to firearms ownership and the Second Amendment, and supports repealing the amendment, but he vigorously opposes using the judicial system to read it out of the Constitution because it would open the way for further revisions to the Bill of Rights and Constitution by the courts. "Foolish liberals who are trying to read the Second Amendment out of the Constitution by claiming it's not an individual right or that it's too much of a public safety hazard don't see the danger in the big picture. They're courting disaster by encouraging others to use the same means to eliminate portions of the Constitution they don't like."

Views on torture

Following the September 11, 2001 attacks, Dershowitz published an article in ''The San Francisco Chronicle'' entitled "Want to Torture? Get a Warrant," in which he advocated the issuance of warrants permitting the torture of terrorism suspects, if there were an "absolute need to obtain immediate information in order to save lives coupled with probable cause that the suspect had such information and is unwilling to reveal it." He argued that authorities should be permitted to use non-lethal torture in a "ticking time bomb scenario," and that it would be less destructive to the rule of law to regulate the process than to leave it to the discretion of individual law-enforcement agents. He favors preventing the government from prosecuting the subject of torture based on information revealed during such an interrogation. The "ticking time bomb scenario" is the subject of a play, ''The Dershowitz Protocol'', by Canadian author Robert Fothergill, in which the American government has established a protocol of "intensified interrogation" for terrorist suspects.

William F. Schulz, Executive Director of the U.S. section of Amnesty International, found Dershowitz's ticking-bomb scenario unrealistic because, he argued, it would require that "the authorities know that a bomb has been planted somewhere; know it is about to go off; know that the suspect in their custody has the information they need to stop it; know that the suspect will yield that information accurately in a matter of minutes if subjected to torture; and know that there is no other way to obtain it." James Bamford of ''The Washington Post'' described one of the practices recommended by Dershowitz—the "sterilized needle being shoved under the fingernails"—as "chillingly Nazi-like."

Animal rights

Dershowitz is one of a number of scholars at Harvard Law School who have expressed their support for limited animal rights. In his ''Rights from Wrongs: A Secular Theory of the Origins of Rights'' (2004), he writes that, in order to avoid human beings treating each other the way we treat animals, we have made what he calls the "somewhat arbitrary decision" to single out our own species for different and better treatment. "Does this subject us to the charge of speciesism? Of course it does, and we cannot justify it, except by the fact that in the world in which we live, humans make the rules. That reality imposes on us a special responsibility to be fair and compassionate to those on whom we impose our rules. Hence the argument for animal rights."

Books

1982: ''The Best Defense''. ISBN 978-0-394-50736-1. 1985: ''Reversal of Fortune: Inside the von Bülow Case''. ISBN 978-0-394-53903-4. 1988: ''Taking Liberties: A Decade of Hard Cases, Bad Laws, and Bum Raps''. ISBN 978-0-8092-4616-8. 1991: ''Chutzpah''. ISBN 978-0-316-18137-2. 1992: ''Contrary to Popular Opinion''. ISBN 978-0-88687-701-9. 1994: ''The Advocate's Devil'' (fiction). ISBN 978-0-446-51759-1. 1994: ''The Abuse Excuse: And Other Cop-Outs, Sob Stories, and Evasions of Responsibility''. ISBN 978-0-316-18135-8. 1996: ''Reasonable Doubts: The Criminal Justice System and the O.J. Simpson Case''. ISBN 978-0-684-83021-6. 1997: ''The Vanishing American Jew: In Search of Jewish Identity for the Next Century''. ISBN 978-0-316-18133-4. 1998: ''Sexual McCarthyism: Clinton, Starr, and the Emerging Constitutional Crisis''. ISBN 978-0-465-01628-0. 1999: ''Just Revenge'' (fiction). ISBN 978-0-446-60871-8. 2000: ''The Genesis of Justice: Ten Stories of Biblical Injustice that Led to the Ten Commandments and Modern Law''. Warner Books. ISBN 978-0-446-67677-9. 2001: ''Letters to a Young Lawyer''. Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-01631-0. 2001: ''Supreme Injustice: How the High Court Hijacked Election 2000''. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-514827-5. 2002: ''Why Terrorism Works: Understanding the Threat, Responding to the Challenge''. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-09766-5. 2002: ''Shouting Fire: Civil Liberties in a Turbulent Age''. Little Brown. ISBN 978-0-316-18141-9.

2003: ''The Case for Israel''. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-0-471-46502-7

2003: ''America Declares Independence''. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-0-471-26482-8. 2004: ''America on Trial: Inside the Legal Battles That Transformed Our Nation''. Warner Books. ISBN 978-0-446-52058-4. 2004: ''Rights From Wrongs: A Secular Theory of the Origins of Rights''. ISBN 978-0-465-01713-3. 2005: ''The Case for Peace: How the Arab-Israeli Conflict Can be Resolved''. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-0-471-74317-0); . 2006: ''Preemption: A Knife That Cuts Both Ways''. W.W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0-393-06012-6. 2007: ''Blasphemy: How the Religious Right is Hijacking the Declaration of Independence''. ISBN 978-0-470-08455-7. 2007: ''Finding Jefferson: A Lost Letter, a Remarkable Discovery, and the First Amendment in an Age of Terrorism''. ISBN 978-0-470-16711-3.

2008: ''Is There a Right to Remain Silent?: Coercive Interrogation and the Fifth Amendment After 9/11''. ISBN 978-0-19-530779-5.

2008: ''The Case Against Israel's Enemies: Exposing Jimmy Carter and Others Who Stand in the Way of Peace''. ISBN 978-0-470-37992-9.

2009: ''Mouth of Webster, Head of Clay'' essay in ''The Face in the Mirror: Writers Reflect on Their Dreams of Youth and the Reality of Age''. ISBN 978-1-59102-752-2.

2009: ''The Case For Moral Clarity: Israel, Hamas and Gaza''. ISBN 978-0-9661548-5-6.

2010: ''The Trials of Zion''. ISBN 978-0-446-57673-4.

Notes

Further reading

Upham, S. Phineas (ed.). ''Philosophers in Conversation: Interviews from the Harvard Review of Philosophy'', Routledge, 2002, pp. 64–70.

Berkow, Ira. ''Court Vision: Unexpected Views on the Lure of Basketball'', University of Nebraska Press, 2004, pp. 207–216.

Dershowitz, Alan (ed.). ''What Israel Means to Me: By 80 Prominent Writers, Performers, Scholars, Politicians, and Journalists'', John Wiley & Sons, 2007, pp. 1–6.

Goldberg, Elizabeth Swanson. ''Beyond Terror: Gender, Narrative, Human Rights'', Rutgers University Press, 2007, pp. 88–95, 101.

Loewenstein, Antony. ''My Israel Question'', Melbourne University Press, 2007.

Dershowitz, Alan. "Echoes of 1938" in Helmreich, William B.; Rosenblum, Mark; Schimel, David. (eds.). ''The Jewish Condition: Challenges and Responses — 1938–2008'', Transaction Publishers, 2008, pp. 39–44.

Norwood, Stephen H.; Pollack, Eunice G. (eds.). ''Encyclopedia of American Jewish History'' (Volume 1), ABC-CLIO, 2008, pp. 53–54.

Rejali, Darius. ''Torture and Democracy'', Princeton University Press, 2009.

External links

Alan Dershowitz at ''The Huffington Post'' (June 2005– ). Dershowitz's blog.

Alan M. Dershowitz Faculty directory entry at Harvard Law School, incl. hyperlinked "Bibliography."

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Alan M. Dershowitz Official website. (Top menu features hyperlinks to his biography and selected publications.)

Interview with Alan Dershowitz from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

Alan M. Dershowitz Personal group space at Gather.com.

SWINDLE Magazine Interview

Alan Dershowitz debates Meir Kahane 1985

Alan Dershowitz Playlist Appearance on WMBR's ''Dinnertime Sampler'' May 11, 2005

Category:1938 births Category:Living people Category:People from Brooklyn Category:American Jews Category:American lawyers Category:American legal writers Category:American legal scholars Category:Jewish American writers Category:Jewish agnostics Category:Brooklyn College alumni Category:Yale Law School alumni Category:Law clerks of the Supreme Court of the United States Category:Harvard Law School faculty Category:Guggenheim Fellows Category:O. J. Simpson murder case

Category:Interdisciplinary Center faculty Category:Zionists Category:Members of the American Civil Liberties Union Category:Writers on Zionism Category:Scholars of antisemitism Category:Historians of Israel Category:Academic scandals Category:Animal rights advocates

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