Advertisements for Himself
Chutzpah.
by Alan M. Dershowitz.
Little, Brown. 378 pp. $22.95.
Alan Dershowitz has raised, or lowered, the practice of law to a Hollywood art. A very successful appellate lawyer with a talent for self-dramatization, he takes on difficult and sensational cases, then writes them up, or rather scripts them, to show how he has rescued the underdog. As Batman serves the cause of justice by standing up alone for the innocent against an indifferent or incompetent establishment, Dershowitz (Bratman) presents himself as a solitary lawyer of courage who is constantly bucking the system in order to keep it honest.
In his latest book, Chutzpah, he takes on, pro bono, the defense of the biggest client he has had so far, the Jewish people, which is certainly in need of all the help it can get against its prosecutors. Since he is arguing this case before the court of public opinion rather than a court of law, Dershowitz adopts the posture not of a lawyer armed with facts but of a television host armed with his personality. Mixing elements of autobiography, excerpts from his old articles, debates he has participated in, letters he has written and received, with occasional background briefings on such items as Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe, Zionism, the Holocaust, tradition, and modernity, he offers a running commentary on the current condition of the Jews and on what they should do to improve it. The slapdash, first-person prose—more likely taped than written, and almost certainly never carefully rewritten—gives the sense of a breaking story that its author is too harried to treat in greater depth.
The main argument of the book is as follows: Dershowitz grew up, a third-generation American Jew in a religiously observant family in Brooklyn, and from there made his way through Yale Law School to the faculty of Harvard and thence to international renown. Whenever he has encountered anti-Semitism, he has fought it, and the result has been a series of juridical and social advances. So, too, American Jews, following his brave pioneering example, should abandon their characteristic policy of “sha-shtil” (keeping quiet), of apologetics and deference to power, and stand up for themselves as proud Jews and proud Americans. Anything short of chutzpah, a policy of “boldness and assertiveness, a willingness to demand what is due,” not only endangers the Jews as a people, but weakens the fabric of America, a country that expects its citizens to demand fairness and justice for themselves.
Dershowitz’s aggressive style seems well suited to combating anti-Semitism, which specializes in all forms of deceit and intimidation. Indignant when he first discovered discrimination as a law student in the 1960’s, he remains refreshingly piqued by every new manifestation of bigotry and tries to attack it head-on. Still, while one hesitates to sound like a “sha-shtil” Jew, one has to say that in this case Dershowitz does far more to promote himself than to advance the interests of his “client.”
Thus he describes the various manifestations of anti-Semitism in the order that he encountered them, in terms of their significance to his development and his career. There is nothing wrong with a little self-dramatization in a worthy cause, as long as one remains in service to that cause. Yet in casting himself as the tough defender of an otherwise cowering people, Dershowitz not only fails to distinguish among the degrees of threat posed to Jews, he ignores those Americans who have gone before and also beyond him in standing up for the rights of the Jews.
_____________
The omission of any mention of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is particularly striking in a book that promotes the self-assertiveness of Jews in America. For AIPAC was the true pioneer in the use of the democratic process to protect the democratic state of Israel; and in doing so it avoided the two fatal temptations of Jewish politics, to both of which Dershowitz himself succumbs: personal grandstanding on the one hand, cries of victimhood on the other. To this level of boldness Dershowitz has not even begun to ascend.
If he neglects AIPAC, Dershowitz misrepresents the movement for Soviet Jewry, inflating his own very visible but fleeting role at the expense of an extraordinarily sustained and complex political struggle.
In 1977 Dershowitz was invited to help in the defense of Natan Sharansky (then Anatoly Shcharansky) who had been sentenced in the Soviet Union as a spy for the crime of declaring his intention of emigrating to Israel. A natural leader, and one of the most politically astute Jews of our time, Sharansky had been a figurehead of the refuseniks, the “Prisoners of Zion.” At some point during his incarceration, he came to be perceived also as having joined forces with other Soviet human-rights activists, uniting his struggle with that of Andrei Sakharov, Ukrainian nationalists, monitors of the 1975 Helsinki Accords, and other dissidents. Although Sharansky himself strenuously differentiated his own position from theirs—he did not want to reform the Soviet Union, he just wanted to get out—the perception of him as part of a larger dissident group created a tactical problem for a movement which operated on the strict principle of family reunification and was sensitive to the damage that attacks on the Soviet system per se might do to the prospects of Jewish emigration to Israel. This larger tactical policy determined a temporary neglect by the movement of Sharansky, in any event soon righted.
In telling the story of Sharansky, Dershowitz once again turns all the world into his stage. He casts himself as the hero, defender of a victim whom the political establishment was too corrupt to save; in particular, he accuses Israeli authorities of having “disqualified” the imprisoned Sharansky from their protection. This is a pernicious distortion of the truth—and the kind of thing that Sharansky himself, who has yet to utter a single word of complaint about his treatment by his friends in the Soviet Jewry movement, in Israel or elsewhere, would never say. But even a genuine hero like Sharansky, it seems, can be sacrificed when Dershowitz is intent on praising himself.
_____________
In this way and others, Chutzpah, which advertises itself as a call for a new attitude by and toward American Jews, represents a retreat from ground already painfully won. Dershowitz tacitly admits as much when he goes out of his way to attack the one group among American Jewish intellectuals (as distinct from American Jews as a whole) who could be said to have adopted the politics of self-assertiveness as their own. In terms worthy of the infantile leftism of the Village Voice he characterizes these intellectuals, the neoconservatives, as a bunch of wealthier Jews who “look for rationales to vote their pocketbooks.” It may be a sufficient response to the vulgarity of the charge to note that Dershowitz is the one raking in the dough.
Among neoconservatives, Dershowitz singles out Norman Podhoretz for attack. In the pages of the magazine of which Podhoretz is the Editor-in-Chief I am inhibited from devoting to this chapter of Chutzpah the discussion it deserves. Yet it is impossible to think back from Chutzpah to Podhoretz’s Making It and Breaking Ranks, two classics of Jewish and American self-assertiveness, and not be struck by the enormous falling off, not only in the literary and intellectual quality of American Jewish discourse, but in the level of its maturity and nerve. For what Dershowitz proposes, in effect, is to move American Jews politically backward from manhood to adolescence.
What AIPAC, the Soviet Jewry movement, and Jewish neoconservatives have done in common is to assume political responsibility for the Jews. Yet it is precisely where the individual must take account of the political process and join forces with others if he is to effect real improvement that Dershowitz retreats into righteous posturing, often at the expense of the larger cause. Consider again his definition of chutzpah: “boldness, assertiveness, a willingness to demand what is due, to defy tradition, to challenge authority, to raise eye-brows.” What is this but the posture of the perpetual adolescent, who would rather sneer at authority than assume it?
Authority for Dershowitz comes in two forms, the traditional Judaism of his home and community, and the Protestant American social establishment; to challenge authority may thus mean to play the non-Jew among Jews, or the Jew among non-Jews, but in either case it is to spurn responsibility for the perpetuation of a tradition or a way of life. The attraction of such an arrested, narcissistic conception of “assertiveness” is obvious and may account for the huge sales of this book. But from the point of view of Jewish dignity and effective action it represents a regression and a loss.
