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and Ralph Branca (whose mother, it now turns out, was Jewish!). Jackie Robinson, who was our
real hero, generally was driven to the stadium for safety reasons. I will never forget Jackie
Robinson’s first game with the Dodgers. We persuaded our European-born rabbi to make a
special blessing for him, without his knowing whom he was blessing, since he never would have
approved blessing a baseball player. We made up a Hebrew name for Jackie Robinson, calling
him Yakov (Jacob) Gnov (Rob) buh (in) Ben (son). When he got his first hit, we were convinced
the blessing had worked. I had a spiral notebook in which I had collected autographs of every
single Brooklyn Dodger who played during my high school years. As soon as I moved out of the
house my mother tossed it in the garbage pail, along with my signed baseball cards and comic
book collection. I could’ve been a millionaire….
When the Dodgers were not at home, we would play softball in the parking lot adjacent to Ebbets
Field. One day we made headlines when one of my classmates hit a homerun from the parking lot
over the Ebbets Field wall. The Brooklyn Eagle reported that it was the first time anyone had hit
a home run into rather than out of the ballpark.

It’s not surprising that my high school memories are long on sports and short on academics,
because my academic performance was abysmal. In my senior semester my first half grades were
as follows (I still have the report card): English 80; Math 60 (F); Hebrew 65; History 65; Physics
60 (F). With two failing grades, I couldn’t graduate, and so by the end of the last semester, I
raised my physics grade to the minimum passing number of 65; my math grade to 75; and my
history grade to 70 (the others remained the same). Yet despite my poor grades, I still remember
much of what the teachers taught, often quite poorly. Other, more useful, information from
Yeshiva has also stayed with me, especially from the Torah, the Talmud and Jewish history. Half
a century after finishing my religious education, I wrote a book entitled “The Genesis of Justice,”
in which I analyzed the first book of the Bible from a secular lawyer’s perspective. I never could
have done this without my Jewish education. When I showed the galley proofs to my Uncle
Zacky, an Orthodox rabbi, he said he admired its intellectual content but not its heretical views.
He pleaded with me to “change just one word.” I asked him, “which word?” He responded “the
word ‘Dershowitz’ on the cover.

In my family, directness was more of a virtue than politeness, and interrupting someone was a
sign of respect. It meant, "I get it, so you don't have to finish your thought. Now let me tell you
why you're wrong." The interrupter fully expected to be interrupted in turn, and so on. Nobody
ever got to finish what they were saying. Now that's a good conversation. I'm reminded of the
joke about the pollster who approaches four random people in Times Square and says, "Excuse
me, I'd like your opinion on the meat shortage." The first one, an Ethiopian replies, "There's a
word I don't understand, what ‘meat?’ is?" The second, an American, also says there's a word he
doesn’t understand: "What's "shortage?"" The third, from China, also doesn't understand
something: "What's opinion?" Finally, the Israeli too says there's something he doesn't
understand: "What's 'excuse me?'" We never said "excuse me." Conventional politeness was not
part of our language. Nor was rudeness. We simply didn't regard interrupting someone as rude,
as long as everyone eventually got to say what they wanted.

My mother regarded people who were “too polite” with suspicion: “You never know what
Muriel is really thinking,” she would say about my extremely polite Aunt (by marriage, of course)
Muriel, who lived upstairs from us and was married to my somewhat rude (in the best sense of

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