In his best-selling new book, perfectly titled “Chutzpah,” Dershowitz argues that American Jews should stop allowing themselves to be treated as second-class citizens. Part autobiography, part call to action, “Chutzpah” includes discussions of Israel, Harvard, Auschwitz and the Pollard spy case. It also takes on the leaders of the American Jewish Congress, president Robert Lifton and executive director Henry Siegman, who last week counterattacked in a four-page letter to Dershowitz. The two men charged that he libeled them in his account of their December 1989 meeting with Cardinal Jozef Glemp, the Roman Catholic primate of Poland. In an interview with NEWSWEEK, Siegman called Dershowitz an “unscrupulous and self serving” liar. Dershowitz said he had caught Siegman “toadying up to an anti-Semite.”
All this schoolyard namecalling grows out of a chapter in “Chutzpah” on the legacy of the Holocaust. According to Dershowitz, Lifton and Siegman were “sycophantic” in their Warsaw meeting with Glemp, thereby giving the cardinal a reason not to apologize for controversial remarks made four months earlier. Glemp had accused New York Rabbi Avi Weiss and his students of beating nuns at a convent located at Auschwitz, the onetime Nazi concentration camp. Weiss was there to protest delays in moving the convent off the Auschwitz site. Since Glemp didn’t retract his comments, Weiss has sued Glemp for defamation-with Dershowitz representing him. Siegman acknowledges that he and Lifton did tell Glemp that Weiss’s protest had been “counterproductive,” but he says the meeting had no impact on Glemp’s refusal to make peace with Weiss. Indeed, Siegman says Glemp never intended to apologize and that Dershowitz’s account is fiction. And he offers up an affidavit from a Polish senator, Edward Wende, who was an intermediary between Dershowitz and Glemp. In the affidavit, Wende denies that he brokered any agreement concerning Weiss.
For all their public bombast, Dershowitz and the AJC leaders are keeping their accusations out of a regular court. They’ve agreed to appear before a Bet Din (literally, House of Judgment), a three-rabbi religious court. “I can’t wait to get Wende on cross-examination,” Dershowitz says. “And Siegman will look like a fool.” Oh yeah. “I find that it takes a very special arrogance for him to presume to lecture a Holocaust survivor, such as myself, about the evils of antiSemitism,” says Siegman. It will only get more personal. And it will no doubt make for a quite a sideshow-Steve Brill and Court TV, get in your request now-but it will hardly begin to address some of the legitimate questions raised by “Chutzpah.” There was a time when such a fight would have been impossible; a meek, uncertain ethnic group would hide its squabbles. No more. Chutzpah, schmutzpah, it’s a great country: let it all hang out.
