Description: A Jewish boy with the head of Webster and a head of clay.

Transcript:

I’m the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School where I’ve been teaching for 43 years. Larry Summers and I had a contest for who got tenure youngest. I had been the youngest professor to get tenure at Harvard, and then he beat me by three months when he got tenure.

I grew up in a frightened community. I was born on the eve of the Holocaust in 1938. My mother . . . when my brother was born my mother kept saying she didn’t know whether she would have him in some bunker or in the basement somewhere. We were all terrified of war, and we were all terrified of what was happening to the Jewish community. It was a powerless community at the time. Hard to imagine today, but no influence in Congress. No influence really in any aspect of politics. It was a community that really felt that they were guests in somebody else’s country. They were second-class citizens. They were tolerated at best and they’d better behave. And it was a community of people who were very patriotic, quite conservative in their outlook toward many things. People sometimes stereotype the Jewish community as being a very radical community, and there aren’t many secular Jews who were radical during that period of time . . . some Communist, some Socialist; but in the Orthodox community that I grew up in, quite conservative, quite patriotic, and frightened is the word I think I would use more than any other. The message I constantly got from my parents and grandparents was, “Shush. Still. Be quiet. Be quiet. Don’t rock the boat. Don’t do anything. Don’t make your hosts – the real Americans – mad at you. Whatever you do, do quietly.” Obviously it didn’t take with me and I reacted, I think, to that. It’s always nice to say your parents had the greatest influence. I would say in my case my father had very little influence on me growing up. He was very busy. He had a small store which was not particularly successful. He was away all the time six days a week at work, and the seventh day was the Sabbath, the day of rest where his job was to get me up and drag me to the synagogue, and sit me next to him while he went, “Shhh! Shhh! Pray. Pray.” So the interaction wasn’t particularly intimate or close. My mother was somewhat ambitious for me. She did defend me when I got into trouble and kind of showed me a little bit how you can stand up for rights. But I think my greatest impact came from teachers and peers. Particularly after I got out of the Yeshiva system. I don’t think the Jewish parochial school system had much of an impact on me. I rebelled against it. In that respect it did have an impact. But when I got to Brooklyn College and Yale Law School, I was looking for role models. I quickly learned there’s no such thing, and that every hero has clay feet, and that everybody I respected was a flawed human being. But I was able to learn quite a bit both intellectually and morally from some of my mentors, particularly the two judges I clerked for after I finished law school. Justice Arthur Goldberg of the United States Supreme Court and Judge David Bazelon, who were activists, left liberal, moderate left wing Jews. Labor Union activists, progressives. And they showed me how I could live a Jewish life. A life in which I was not embarrassed about my heritage, and could make the best of it and use the best from it and still contribute to America, the world, and not live in the ________, in the ghetto from which I grew up and grew out. If I had to pick one moment it would probably be one summer in camp I was between my junior and senior year in high school. I was a terrible high school student. I got Cs and D minuses. In fact, my year book originally said I was a good speaker. So my yearbook said, “Dershowitz, he has a mouth of Webster and a head of clay.” It was cute. And my rabbi said to me, “Look Dershowitz. You got a good mouth on you, not a very good brain. You gotta figure out a profession that you can use your mouth a lot and not your head. You should either be a lawyer or a conservative rabbi.” Of course he was an orthodox rabbi and that was the biggest putdown you could have. So I was put down a lot in high school. And there was this one guy in camp who was four or five years older than me who was a counselor. And he picked me to play the leading role in a play. Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand. I remember it as if it were today. It was not only my long nose that qualified me for the job, but I was not a bad actor. And he was the first person who sat me down one day and said, “You know, you’re smart. You have a very interesting mind. You see things differently. You’re gonna be a great student in college.” I said, “Come on. I can’t even get decent grades in a third-rate, crummy high school. How am I gonna do well in college?” And he said, “The better the school you go to, the better you’ll do.” And he was absolutely right. I went to Brooklyn College. I did very, very well and then I went to Yale Law School and I was first in my class. Yale Law School is one of the elite institutions. He was so right that the more challenging the institution, the better I was going to do. And that was an insight I just didn’t have.The day I started to speak. I knew it was never any other path for me. I knew I was a lawyer from the time I was five or six years old. My father – although uneducated, and didn’t finish high school, and didn’t read very much . . . a worker basically – he liked to stand up for the underdog. And he did convey that to me. And my family had a tradition of standing up for the underdog. My father’s family helped rescue people from the Holocaust. And social action and social commitment was part of my heritage in some respects; but I always thought I was gonna be a lawyer. And the only kind of a lawyer I ever thought of was a criminal lawyer. What else is there? I’m not working for the government. I wouldn’t work for big government or big corporations. I had to be the lawyer for the underdog. So I don’t think I ever made a decision to be a lawyer or a criminal lawyer. It was just something that I always thought I would do and others thought I would do. It was expected of me. It was a role I played since the time I was a child.Recorded On: 6/12/07