Dershowitz on Rehnquist

[Marshall Dayan]

In the grandest tradition of legal academe, I'll respond to JNF, without
having read "Chutzpah," that perhaps Dersh was referring not to
ethnicity, as FF was clearly ethnically a Jew, but to, strangely enough,
theology and religion.  FF was notoriously anti-religion, though he was
steeped in it as a boy.  Contrast, e.g., LD Brandeis, who was not raised
as a religious Jew, but who, after his conversion, shall we say, to
Zionism, began to familiarize himself with his own literary heritage at
least, and wrote and spoke about Jewish religious/ethical values after
studying some Torah.  Of course, there is a Jewish ethical value
prohibiting gossip, particularly of a malicious nature, that may have
infected some of Dershowitz' reflections on, as Nixon called him,
Renchberg.  If WHR was in fact anti-Semitic, that must have really irked
him.  Marshall Dayan, NCCU School of Law