© Yonkers TribuneAlan Dershowitz
It was his crowd, he really is a rock star. The suburban lanes were filled with cars and older yarmulke-wearing Jews streaming toward the synagogue like Woodstock. We were half a million strong! Four hundred anyway, but Jews punch above their weight.
That was Dersh's theme:
We earned our influence in this country by contributing more to its success than others, so now use your influence.Dershowitz held forth for 50 minutes before he had to sign books and head to CNN. The crowd was on their feet at beginning and end. Dershowitz started out with self-effacing humor. At his yeshiva in Brooklyn he was a terrible student. The head of the school said Dershowitz, what are we going to do with you.
You have to find a job where you don't have to think and you just run your mouth. You could be a lawyer. Or a conservative rabbi. The man couldn't even say the word Reform, Dersh said. By his last year he was suing the school (for an arbitrary rule on who could apply for NY state scholarships; he won).
The news. Dersh said that Trump has a better chance of getting peace in the Middle East than Obama; that he [Dershowitz] only got into the Israel defense racket because of Noam Chomsky and Daniel Berrigan; that all of
Israel's second and third-rate academics come to the U.S. and Europe to get jobs and sell themselves as anti-Zionist because people will hire a talking dog; that the dissident human rights group
Breaking the Silence is a small bunch of malcontents who lie about the Israeli army, and that's a "real tragedy"; that it's getting harder and harder to defend Israel among Democrats; Dersh is now blacklisted at campuses; and
Jews should use Jewish power, from intellectual to financial, to punish those who criticize Israel.The best quotes are about outsize[d] Jewish influence and how we're entitled to it. #8 and #11 below. "We have to hit them in the pocketbook. Don't ever ever be embarrassed about using Jewish power."
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