4.2.12 WC: 191694
Chapter 2: My Secular Education—Brooklyn and Yale
I loved everything about Brooklyn College. The inner city campus was green and lush. The professors were phenomenal teachers—many of them en route to more elite universities. The students, though mostly Jewish, seemed diverse to me because so few were Orthodox. Intellectual and political debate filled the classrooms, the lunchrooms and the quad. No one said “Meturneshed.” Every idea was acceptable (except, perhaps Communism, since the stench of McCarthyism still hung in the air.)
I felt free to experiment with my thoughts and words, but not yet with my actions. I remained an Orthodox Jew in practice and I did not try drugs or even alcohol. (I tried to try sex, but couldn’t find any willing partners.)
My friends and I founded a “house plan” — an urban fraternity for students who lived at home with our parents, as we all did. We called it “Knight House” and our boastful Latin slogan was “semil equis satis’—“once a knight is enough.” Since we were all orthodox Jews, we could not attend the usual Friday night parties, so our orthodox Jewish house plan had its parties on Saturday or Sunday night. We were desperate to defy the stereotype of orthodox Jewish wimps, so we worked hard on our athletic skills, ultimately winning the house-plan championship in several sports. I still have newsclippings attesting to my athletic accomplishments: “Knight soccer champs”—“AlI Dershowitz led the knighters to victory, scoring two large goals.”
In my senior year in college, a group of friends decided it was time to lose our collective virginities. We heard that there was a special deal over Christmas vacation to travel to Havana, then a wild city. We all went down to Florida in another friend’s old car and bought round trip tickets to Havana for $59. We had the name of a house, which specialized in transitioning young boys into men. We were scheduled to make the hour-long flight the day before the 1959 New Year. We couldn’t wait to get to Havana, but a bearded guy named Fidel got there first and we couldn’t make it. For years, I had been telling people that the flights were cancelled, but a couple of summers ago I was at a party with a man (now married to a prominent public figure) who was at Brooklyn College with me. He and several of his friends were also going to Havana for the same reason. I had forgotten that the trip to Florida was actually sponsored by the Brooklyn College Student Government. When I told him my story, he said, “I made it to Havana,” and I said, “but the flights were cancelled.” He said, “No they weren’t. The State Department just issued a warning that it was a little bit dangerous.” I guess he was more determined to lose it than I was. His wife, who was then his college girlfriend, said that she didn’t “touch him for a year after that.”
I took another trip with my college friends. It was to Washington D.C. On the day we arrived, the king of Saudi Arabia was a state visitor. In his honor, green Saudi flags draped all of the important federal buildings and monuments. When I saw the flag of that slave-owning dictator on the Lincoln Monument, I got angry and tore it down. I was immediately taken into custody by a park policeman. His superior was sympathetic, however, and let me go with a warning: “Next time, make sure no one sees you when you tear down the rest of those damn flags.”
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