Taking the Stand Read online

  I wanted to go to Flatbush Yeshiva High School, which was the elite Jewish school, but I was turned down and went instead to Yeshiva University High School, a few blocks from Ebbets Field. I spent my four high school years in what was called “the garbage class,” which focused more on discipline than learning.

  I had a well-deserved reputation in both elementary and high school as a “bad kid”—a bon-dit. My grades were low (except on statewide standardized tests called “the Regents,” on which I generally did well). My conduct, called “deportment,” was terrible. I was always getting into trouble because of my pranks, because I “talked back” and was “fresh” to teachers, because I questioned everything, because I didn’t show “respect,” and because I was a “wise guy.”

  One day I asked Rabbi Oretsky a particularly provocative question. Instead of trying to answer, he called me a shtik drek. I had no idea what that Yiddish phrase meant, so I asked my grandmother. She smacked me for talking dirty. It meant “piece of shit.” From then on my friends and I referred to our teacher as Rabbi “Or-drek-sky.”

  My parents were shocked to learn how disrespectful I was in school, because I was always on good behavior with them and with my grandparents, whom I deeply respected, despite their lack of formal education. I had little respect for my teachers, especially the rabbis, because they showed no respect for, or interest in, me or in the questions I was always asking.

  This was the greatest gift—OK, I will even say “blessing”—of my yeshiva education: learning to question everything and everyone. It may have been merely an unintended consequence of the yeshiva method, but I was certainly not its only beneficiary or (according to the rabbis) its only “failure.” The Jewish characteristic of questioning is not a coincidence. It is a product of experiences, and surely the yeshiva education—which juxtaposes religion and science with little explicit effort to reconcile these distinct approaches to the search for truth—is an element of these experiences for at least some young Jews. It certainly was for me, and for that I will be eternally grateful.

  What then was my take-away from yeshiva? For me it has been a lifelong belief in the certainty of doubt. For most of my classmates, the take-away has been a lifelong belief in the certainty of certainty. Why the difference? Surely minor genetic disparities do not explain such a profound difference in worldviews. Nor does mere intelligence, since many of my “certain” classmates were brilliant. I think it was the environment underneath the roof of our homes. I came to yeshiva ready to doubt. Although my parents were both strictly observant, Modern Orthodox Jews, they too were skeptics, especially my mother. Despite her lack of formal education and culture, she was a cynic, always doubting, always questioning, though this became less apparent as she grew older and observed—to her chagrin—what she had actually transmitted to her children. She doubted while continuing to observe all the rituals. That was the traditional Jewish approach to learning and ritual. My brother and I started that way, but ultimately our doubts carried over into action—or, more precisely, inaction. We stopped observing all the religious prohibitions and obligations in our mid-twenties. My mother couldn’t accept that. “I don’t care what you believe or don’t believe,” she would insist, “as long as you go to shul, keep kosher and don’t work [broadly defined to include driving, watching television, or going to a ball game] on Shabbos. Is that so much to ask!”

  When we started to break the rules, my mother began to doubt her doubting. Doubting was good as long as it didn’t lead to breaking with the rituals—and it didn’t in her case. She believed in doubt until she saw, with her own eyes, the wages of it in her own children. This led her to embrace certainty. She would never completely abandon her doubting nature, but she no longer believed that doubt was cost-free. It had cost her the loss of her own children to “excessive doubt” and the real sin of acting on one’s doubt. I certainly don’t mean to suggest that our mother “lost” us in any sense other than the observance of ritual, but that was important to her. Although my brother and I maintained an extremely close relationship with her until her death at age ninety-five—we spoke to her every day—it was never the same once we left the “club” and followed our own rules as they pertained to Jewish practices.

  My mother may not have been happy with the way I used the doubt she instilled in me, but for me it has become the most important quality in my life—and the most significant ingredient in whatever success I may have achieved. It certainly played an important role in my decision to become a lawyer defending freedom of speech, accused criminals, and other unpopular causes. So thank you, Mom! And even thank you, Yeshiva Etz Chaim and Yeshiva University High School, for provoking me to be a skeptic, a doubter, and an agnostic about life.

  My mother influenced me in many ways with her skepticism, not the least of which was when she repeatedly had to defend me for my conduct at school. I remember one incident in particular. I was playing “Ring a Levio” in the schoolyard on any icy day and chasing a classmate named Victor Botnick. He slipped and his leg got stuck under the gate, and he broke it while trying to stand up. I was accused of breaking his leg and called into the principal’s office. My mother came to school. I told her the story and assured her that I would never break my friend Victor’s leg purposely. My mother served as my defense attorney, making charts and diagrams that proved that I could not have possibly broken his leg deliberately and that he caused it to break while trying to stand up with his foot stuck under the gate. I was acquitted, though the principal still had his suspicions. This was my first experience with the adversarial process and with a defense attorney. My mother, of course, was not a lawyer. But she was an important inspiration for why I decided to become a defense lawyer. For me the presumption of innocence was not a theory. I knew I was innocent, yet the principal presumed me guilty. Only my mother’s advocacy kept me from being suspended.

  My decision to become a criminal lawyer was certainly not influenced by any exposure to real crime. I lived in a neighborhood where we never locked our doors and where violent crime was unheard of. There were of course fights, in which I sometimes participated, but the Boro Park section of Brooklyn was a safe neighborhood.

  Several years after I moved out of the house, my parents’ apartment was burglarized. The burglars took Jewish ritual items, such as the Chanukah menorah, the Sabbath candles, and so on. When my mother called to tell me about the burglary, I responded, “See, Jews can be burglars too.” My mother rebuked me. “They weren’t Jews, they were Israelis.” For my mother, real Jews, who in her world were all Orthodox, and Israelis, who tended to be secular, were different breeds.

  My father, though rarely at home, influenced me as well. He had a small store on the Lower East Side where he sold men’s underwear, socks, and work clothes wholesale during the week and retail on Sunday (he was closed on Saturday). I would sometimes help him on Sunday after my school finished at 1 P.M. It was really the only time I ever got to spend with him, because he worked six days a week and we spent Friday night and Saturday in shul, where we were always being shushed—meturnished redin (“not allowed to talk”). One Sunday my father got a ticket for violating the local Sunday closing law. I went to court with him a few days later, and the presiding judge was a man named Hyman Barshay. It was my first experience in a real court. The judge asked my father why he was open on Sunday, and my father responded that he had to stay closed on Saturday because he was an Orthodox Jew and he couldn’t afford to be closed for two days. “Did you go to shul on Saturday?” the judge asked. My father replied, “Of course.” The judge challenged him, asking, “Then what was the Torah portion of the week?” When my father responded correctly, the judge tore up the ticket. If he had gotten the answer wrong, the judge would’ve doubled the fine. So much for separation between church and state.

  This was not my only experience with the First Amendment. My friends and I formed a social athletic club—a euphemism for a Jewish gang, but without the rough stuff. We named our club the
Shields, and we designed our own jackets, which we got wholesale, since the father of one of our members owned an athletic store. His name was “Snot” Chaitman. I leave the source of that nickname to your imagination. Whitey, the leader of our club, decided that we should have something sexy and not at all Jewish-looking (whatever that meant). The colors we selected were chartreuse and black. We really wanted to look like hoods, despite our wimpy nature. Our yeshiva immediately banned the jackets as too tough-looking and not consistent with the Jewish values of the school. Fortunately one of our club members lived across the street from the school, and so we would go to school wearing approved clothes, then, upon leaving school, go to our friend’s house and change into our costumes. We felt like superheroes, but I was no longer jumping out of windows.

  Boro Park in the 1940s and ’50s was not only a religious neighborhood; it was a funny neighborhood. Two houses away from me lived Jackie Mason. Around the corner was Elliott Gould (née Goldstein). A few blocks away, in my uncle’s building, lived Buddy Hackett. Woody Allen grew up in a nearby neighborhood, as did Larry David and Mel Brooks.

  Joke telling among my friends was a competitive sport. We didn’t know anybody who actually made up a joke. Every rendition would begin with “I heard a good joke” or “Have you heard the one about—the rabbi and the farmer’s daughter?… or the rabbi, the priest, and the minister?” (The rabbi was always the butt of the joke!)

  The first joke I remember hearing involved a put-down of Russia. It was about the time the Russians wanted to one-up the Americans by ordering a large number of condoms fourteen inches long. The Americans sent them the fourteen-inch condoms—marked “medium.” The jokes improved as we got older!

  Our favorite radio show was Can You Top This?, which involved professional comics who would try to top one another and listeners who submitted jokes. A “laugh meter” determined whose joke was funniest. There were cash prizes for listeners who topped the pros. The jokes told by the panelists, such as Harry Hershfield and Joe Laurie, Jr., had to be spontaneous and related to the subject of the original joke. The panelists boasted that they knew fifteen thousand jokes among them.

  We would sit around the radio and try to top the pros. We would also send in our own jokes, which were never chosen.14

  Living in a funny neighborhood served me well. I use humor in the courtroom, in the classroom, and in every other aspect of my life. A highlight of my current summers is sitting on the porch of the Chilmark Store on Martha’s Vineyard and playing a contemporary version of Can You Top This? with my friend Harold Ramis, who easily knows more than fifteen thousand Jewish jokes! Sometimes Larry David, Ted Danson, Clyde Phillips, Gary Foster, Nick Stevens, Seth Meyers, or Tony Shalhoub will drop by. I never “top” Harold, but I hold my own.

  I learned many of my jokes in the Catskill Mountains, where I worked as a busboy over the Jewish holidays. The only hotel that would hire me was the King David. It was a run-down place that conveniently burned to the ground right after the Jewish holidays. (We called it “Jewish lightning”!) It was across the road from the posh Brown’s, made famous by Jerry Lewis, who frequently performed there. Nearby were Grossinger’s, Concord, Kutsher’s, President, Nevele, Tamarack, Pine View, and Pioneer. I played and watched basketball, played Simon Says with Lou Goldstein, who claimed to have invented the adult version of the game. My mother was the champ at Simon Says, because she figured out a way to beat Goldstein, who always fooled the participants by giving an oral direction—“Simon Says, raise your right arm”—while at the same time doing the opposite: raising his left arm. My mother’s secret: Play with your eyes closed, so as to avoid confusion between the verbal and the visual! I snuck into the shows that featured Alan King, Freddie Roman, Shecky Greene, and Red Buttons. It was Can You Top This? on steroids. Plus, there were girls.

  I need to thank my local synagogue for helping me discover sex. I am convinced that some higher authority built the benches at precisely the right height to introduce sexual feelings at precisely the right time. When Orthodox Jews pray, they shake back and forth while standing. When I reached a certain height, the top of the bench in front of me, which had a curve, was exactly parallel to my genitals. It was while shuckling back and forth in the synagogue that I experienced my first arousal.

  Although we were Orthodox, none of us abided by the rules regulating sexuality. We were as anxious to make out as anyone; the problem was we had no one to make out with, because the girls all had to be beyond reproach. In our senior year we discovered that a bus ride to Union City would get us to the burlesque house, where at least we could see what we could not touch. One day we took along one particularly Orthodox classmate who insisted on wearing his yarmulke. The rest of us had tucked ours into our pockets. Of course we sat in the front row, to get the best view. When a guy in the back started screaming, “Take it off! Take it off!,” Irving was sure he was referring to his yarmulke. He stood and confronted the guy, shouting, “I will not take it off!” To this day, whenever I see Irving, I always yell, “Take it off! Take it off!” He’ll never live it down.

  The yeshiva I went to was strongly Zionist, supporting Israel’s struggle for independence, but some of the rabbis hated David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first leader, who believed that Israel should be a secular socialist democracy. These rabbis wanted it to be an Orthodox Jewish theocracy. Thank God Ben-Gurion won. (Recently, I acquired a letter he wrote in 1963, stating that the religious and secular elements of Israeli society must be sensitive to each other’s beliefs:

  There is no doubt that the feelings of a religious man are to be respected, but religious people must respect the freedom of choice of a fellow man, and no coercion is to be exercised for or against religious conduct.15

  Words that could have been spoken by Jefferson or Madison!)

  One day, Ben-Gurion was giving a speech in Manhattan to a vast audience of supporters. My friend Tsvi Groner, who subsequently made aliya to Israel, and I decided to cut school to listen to Ben-Gurion. When we were caught being out of school, we told the rabbis that we’d gone to a Brooklyn Dodgers baseball game. For that we received less of a punishment than we would have if we had admitted going to hear the atheist Ben-Gurion.

  My mother was summoned to my high school so often that some of the students thought she worked in the principal’s office. One day, after I had done something egregious—I threw a dummy dressed like me off of the building, after threatening to jump off the roof when my teacher threw me out of class16—the principal demanded of my mother, “What are we going to do with your son?” Without any hesitation my mother responded, “I don’t know what you’re going to do, but as for me, I’m going to keep him.” Ultimately I was suspended for a few weeks on the ground of “lack of respect” and spent them at the local library and museum, where I learned considerably more than I was learning in my classes.

  It was not my last encounter with my principal, Rabbi Zuroff, who in my senior year called me to his office for some career advice: “You have a good mouth, but not much of a Yiddisher kop,” which means “Jewish head (or brain),” as distinguished from a Goyisher (“non-Jewish”) kop—a slightly bigoted concept suggesting that Jews are endowed with special mental qualities or capacities.17 He continued: “You should do something where you use your mouth, not your brains.” I asked him what he would suggest. He replied: “You should become either a lawyer or a Conservative rabbi.” (He was an Orthodox rabbi who held his Conservative colleagues in utter contempt.) To make sure the latter part of his advice was followed, he urged Yeshiva University, which trained Orthodox rabbis, to reject me, which it did.

  My classmates as well valued my verbal over my intellectual skills. The first draft of my high school yearbook description said that I have “a mouth of Webster, but a head of Clay.” (My mother made them change it!)

  Rabbi Zuroff’s career advice was better than the choices given to me by the New York City Department of Employment, to which my mother turned in desperation. After revi
ewing my high school record and administering an aptitude test, the counselor told my mother that because of my verbal skills I could aspire to work in an advertising firm or a funeral parlor. My mother asked whether I could be a lawyer, to which the counselor replied, “Mrs. Dershowitz, I’m afraid you have to go to college to be a lawyer, and your boy just isn’t college material.”

  Many years later, following a talk I gave at a temple in Los Angeles, a man about my age asked whether I was related to a guy he went to high school with named Avi Dershowitz. “Avi” was the Hebrew nickname by which I was known all through high school. I began to use my “real” name, Alan, when I started Brooklyn College, though my old friends and family still call me Avi.

  I decided to put the questioner on, so I said, “Yeah, yeah, we are related.”

  “Whatever happened to Avi?” he asked.

  I continued the put-on: “We don’t talk about him in our family. He came to no good.”

  Showing no surprise, my questioner replied: “I knew he would come to no good. He was such a bad kid in high school.”

  I’m sure some of my critics would agree that I came to “no good,” but at least by objective standards I’ve exceeded the expectations my high school teachers and principal had for me. None of them thought I was “college material.”

  The only successful part of my high school career, other than my debating, was making the varsity basketball team in my junior year. Though I was never a starter (except when the starters were sick), I did manage to accompany my team to Madison Square Garden for the inter-yeshiva finals. I shared a locker with Dolph Schayes, whose team, the Syracuse Nationals, was playing against the New York Knicks in the main event, to which our game was a preliminary. One of the people on the opposing team was a kid shorter than me named Ralph Lifshitz. He eventually decided that to make it in the fashion business he would have to change his name. So Lifshitz became Lauren.