A caricature maligning famed legal professor Alan Dershowitz appeared in the University of California, Berkeley’s student newspaper, the Daily Californian, last Fall. The paper’s retraction even admitted the cartoon “hearkened to clearly anti-Semitic tropes.”
In reaction, Dershowitz could have responded in a juvenile, combative, or even litigious manner. Nevertheless, as he has his whole career as a lawyer and an educator, Dershowitz maintained the courage of his convictions. Sadly, as professor pay dips and administrative wages rise astronomically on par with accelerating college tuitions, many professors no longer possess the courage of their convictions.
Dershowitz nobly maintained his defense of the right of an individual to publish such a caricature. Jurisprudence surrounding the First Amendment implies that speech may be intuitively extreme, but that it should not be equivalent to “shouting fire in a crowded theater.” Although he found the material profoundly contemptible from a personal standpoint, Dershowitz tacitly asserted that the caricature would not inspire East Bay residents to wreak havoc on synagogues. In making this nuanced juridical distinction, Dershowitz exhibited that he possessed the courage of his convictions.
To ignore such a visceral response and put forth a response reflective of his career and the ethics of his field puts him miles above the average person. Professors used to indulge harmlessly in this elevated distinction and received distinction in turn from those who lacked such monastic tact, such bravery in terms of adhering to one’s beliefs as a scholar even in the turbulence of personalized attacks. Prior to the co-optation of college campuses by special interest groups and hedge funds, professors used to walk a fine line with the adeptness of Dershowitz on a daily basis. Could Dershowitz’s elegant defense of free speech upon being maligned by an insensitive cartoon be one of the last instances of a professor acting like a scholar rather than a petulant partisan?
Dershowitz’s position on Israel has been criticized, but there is a difference between academic differences and outright slander, villainization, and retrograde ad hominem attacks. For example, Edward Said has criticized Dershowitz’s position on Israel in his essay “An Ideology of Difference.” Said provides a detailed, well-researched, and elegant assault on Israel’s so-called aggression in the Middle East. Said advocates compromise with regard to Israel not personal degradation towards the one who holds differing beliefs. In regard to the cartoon published by the Daily Californian, it unnervingly embodied the archaic assaults of slander, villainization, and retrograde ad hominem attacks.
If any pundit seeks to attack Dershowitz, why can’t they attack his arguments rather than his character, identity, or, more gravely still, his propagandistically perceived identity?
Although Dershowitz has not been incarcerated for his opinions, he has been sentenced. Ad hominem attacks are viewed to be the weakest rhetorical mechanisms available and Dershowitz deserves better as a lifetime legal educator. Consequently, those who disagree with Dershowitz’s politics should demonstrate at least the respect Edward Said did and attack him on the facts of his arguments rather than some Medieval phantasm of Jewry that sadly persists even on liberal-leaning university campuses like UC-Berkeley.
As epic professors such as Dershowitz fade from college campuses in favor of activists who lack the courage of their convictions, how will students suffer? More importantly still, can the university system survive the conversion of the professor from the stoic, indefatigable Dershowitz archetype to those who routinely flip sides, change opinions, and waver in any which way to gain tenure and maximize their monetary situation?
It is not about Dershowitz’s publications, his ethnicity, or his legacy as much as it is about his academic and noble defense of a set of beliefs and his willingness to engage those less educated than himself in a mentorship role. His tempered reaction to the ferocious cartoon from last October showcased this unique devotion. To lose this type of professor in the U.S. collegiate system is to lose the U.S. collegiate system altogether.
