For at least some being an outwardly Jewish lawyer means being able to be in the thick of it:
Consider this excerpt about Allan Dershowitz in the Harvard Crimson on the recent resignation of Harvard's Jewish president Lawrence H. Summers :
Three and a half years after his “in effect, if not in intent” remarks, Summers has resigned. Some—most notably Peretz Professor of Yiddish Ruth R. Wisse—have suggested that Summers’ unapologetic faith and his fall from power might be connected.
In an interview with The Crimson last week, Wisse stated that she did think anti-Semitism figured in the opposition to Summers.
“Of course, the divestment petition was anti-Semitic,” says Wisse. “Is it one of the factors at play? Yes. Is it the factor at play? No.”
Wisse’s comments are blunt, but critics allege that other supporters are being ambiguous.
“Along with [Frankfurter Professor of Law] Alan Dershowitz, [Glimp Professor of Economics Edward L.] Glaeser now becomes the second Harvard professor strongly suggesting that Summers’ critics are anti-Semitic,” blogger Richard Bradley writes. “Neither man has come out and said so explicitly, but they’re inching up to it...If Dershowitz and Glaeser believe [this], then they have an obligation to make their case explicitly, with all the seriousness it merits. Otherwise, they should stop hinting.”
On February 27, Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam pondered the role of anti-Semitism in Summers’ resignation in a piece titled “Summers, Harvard, and Israel.” He asked if “support for or opposition to Israel [was] the new fault line dividing the Harvard faculty.”
Alan Dershowitz took exception to Bradley’s characterization of him.
“I do not believe it was anti-Semitic and indeed a lot of the strongest opponents of Summers are Jewish,” Dershowitz said last week. “I want to categorically deny any link between anti-Semitism and the ouster of Summers.”
“Anti-Semitism is a matter of intention,” Dershowitz says. “I don’t like that formulation—‘anti-Semitic in effect if not in intent’—I would not make that argument at all. I would say that his ouster had to with hard-left opposition, some of it anti--American, some of it anti-patriotic, some of it having to do with the military. In other words, I think it was political, not religious. [There] is a very sharp distinction.”