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commentator on such subjects as
human rights and Jewish survival. He
takes half of his cases on a pro bono
(no fee) basis.
Most recently, he has been
involved in defending 13 Iranian Jews
charged With spying. It's an onerous
task, but one Dershowitz has confi-
dence he will carry off.
Law is more than courtrooms and
legal briefs, Dershowitz pointed out.
"I have been in close, personal touch
with the president of the United
States, members of the U.N. Security
Council, the U.S. government. There
is an enormous force assembled."
Like his fictional character
Menuchen, Dershowitz, too, is a pro-
fessor. He was appointed to the
Harvard Law School faculty at age 25;
at 28, he became a full professor, the
youngest in the school's history. In
addition to the standard law school
curriculum, he has taught courses in
human rights, the Bible and justice,
and a collaborative philosophy course
called "Thinking about Thinking."
As a defense attorney, his clients
have ranged from Patricia Hearst to
Jim Bakker to Rabbi Meir Kahane.
"I wouldn't turn down anyone
based on his ideology," Dershowitz
said. "There is no one I would, in
theory, turn down, if no one else
would represent him."
However, he said, he would not
represent someone involved in an
ongoing crime, or defend someone
based on bogus pseudo-psychological
analysis.
He added that he would like to
clarify his answer for people who ask
if he would have represented Hitler.
"If he had asked me in 1943, I would
have agreed, so I could get into his
bunker and murder him," he said.
Dershowitz has never represented a
Holocaust survivor who, like his fic-
tional protagonist, takes revenge on
his family's murderer. To his knowl-
edge, no such case has come before
the courts.
At one point in his career, he was
asked to represent a survivor accused
of defrauding the U.S. government.
In his 1994 collection of essays, The
Abuse Excuse, Dershowitz quotes the
man's psychiatrist as saying that his
patient suffered from "Holocaust sur-
vi\ or syndrome," a condition in
which survivors engage in illegal con-
duct "because of a deep-seated dis-
trust of government that grew out of
their experiences in the war."
Dershowitz refused CO take the case.
"It would be an insult to the
integrity of (the) brave men and
women who had learned to live with-
in the rules to stigmatize all — or
even most — survivors as incapable
of playing by the rules," he writes.
In the same essay collection,
Dershowitz objects to victims taking
the law into their ow hands, depriv-
ing the accused of their day in court.
But the circumstances that he cre-
ates in Just Revenge call into question
absolute answers to these difficult
questions. By the time Menuchen
stumbles across Marcelus Prandus,
the Lithuanian militia leader respon-
sible for destroying his family,
Prandus is an old man with an incur-
able illness. There's no time left to
find satisfaction through the legal sys-
tem. And, as an atheist, Menuchen
takes no comfort in the idea of a
punishment after death.
Are Menuchen's actions in causing
The perpetrators
went free.
the mental anguish and death of
another human being morally or
legally defensible? Dershowitz stops
short of answering the questions he
so intriguingly raises.
"I wouldn't dream of writing a
novel that came to a conclusion,"
Dershowitz said. "I'm a professor. My
idea of a successful class is one where
the students leave the room and are
all standing in the halls, arguing."
His first novel, The Advocate's
Devil, published in 1994, deals with
another thorny issue — the responsi-
bility and ramifications of defending
a person a lawyer realizes is guilty.
Dershowitz's numerous works of
non-fiction include Chutzpah in
1991, a No. 1 New York Times best-
seller; and The Vanishing American
Jew in 1997, praised by Hadassah
magazine for providing "the crux of
the Jewish dilemma of unmitigated
freedom to totally assimilate." 7
Alan Dershowitz is opening-night
speaker at the 1999 Jewish Book
Fair, 8:30 p.m., Saturday, Nov. 6, at
the D. Dan & Betty Kahn
Building of the Jewish Community
Center in West Bloomfield, co-
sponsored by the DeRoy
Testamentary Foundation.