Alan Dershowitz to Speak at Yale on Anti-Semitism

New Haven, Conn. — Legal scholar and renowned attorney Alan Dershowitz will speak on “Anti-Semitic Hate Speech: Incitement to Violence in the Absence of a Marketplace of Ideas” in the Levinson Auditorium at Yale Law School, 127 Wall St., on October 11 at 7 p.m.

The talk is free and open to the public. Sponsored by the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism (YIISA), this is the inaugural Professor William Prusoff Lecture, honoring a researcher who has been on the Yale faculty for over 50 years, and who created the first generation of anti-viral and anti-HIV medication.

Dershowitz, an alumnus of Yale Law School, is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Best known for defending celebrity clients such as Claus von Bülow, O.J. Simpson, Michael Milken and Mike Tyson, he also frequently represents indigent defendants and takes half of his cases pro bono.

Dershowitz is the author of 20 works of fiction and non-fiction, including “Blasphemy: How the Religious Right is Hijacking the Declaration of Independence”; “Why Terrorism Works: Understanding the Threat, Responding to the Challenge”; “The Vanishing American Jew: In Search of Jewish Identity for the Next Century”; “America on Trial: Inside the Legal Battles That Transformed Our Nation” and others.

Other YIISA speakers this semester include Hillel Neuer, executive director of U.N. Watch, on Nov. 1; David Menashri, senior research fellow at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Tel Aviv University, on Nov. 15; and Matthew Levitt, senior fellow and director of the Washington Institute’s Stein Program on Terrorism, Intelligence, and Policy, on Dec. 6.