Harvard Welcomes Back Alan Dershowitz for First Speaking Event in More Than a Decade

After more than a decade away from his former academic home, Alan Dershowitz will return to Harvard later this month to discuss Israel’s war against Hamas.“It’s about time that Harvard students were exposed to views like mine,” the Harvard Law School professor emeritus tells the Sun. “It’s something they’ve been denied now for a good many years.” The renowned criminal defense attorney will appear at the Kennedy School on September 16 as part of the “Middle East Dialogues” event series. The series, launched following Hamas’s October 7 attack, brings together scholars, intellectuals, and public servants for public conversations with a Kennedy School professor, Tarek Masoud, who chairs its Middle East Initiative.The series aims to provide students and community members with “varied and vital perspectives on the region, the transformations and turmoil underway, and prospects for peace and prosperity,” according to the Kennedy School website.Mr. Dershowitz, a longtime Israel advocate and author of several books on the Israel-Palestine conflict, emerged as an energetic defender of Israel’s military campaign against Hamas from the war’s outset. His commentary has appeared across major platforms — from the Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages to debates on Piers Morgan’s talk show to The New York Sun’s own Sanity podcast.Despite his media presence, Mr. Dershowitz has not had the opportunity to talk about the war at the university where he taught for 50 years. Until now, he says, Harvard had not extended any invitation since he stopped teaching classes in 2013.“Nobody at Harvard has reached out to me for 11 years, including the Harvard Law School faculty,” Mr. Dershowitz tells the Sun. It’s not for lack of effort on his part: Mr. Dershowitz says that he sent copies of his latest book on law to “every member” of the Harvard Law School faculty but “did not get a single letter in response.” Following his departure from Harvard, Mr. Dershowitz returned to private legal practice and consulting. Notably, he advised President Trump on Middle East policy during his first term, later serving as defense counsel during Trump’s 2020 impeachment trial. He has also been a vocal critic of what he sees as the weaponization of the legal system against Mr. Trump’s political ambitions.Mr. Dershowitz has suggested that his defense of Mr. Trump and unwavering support for Israel have made him “essentially persona non grata at Harvard.”Mr. Masoud is unfazed by Mr. Dershowitz’s reputation. “It came to my attention that he was saying that he was banned from speaking at Harvard,” Mr. Masoud tells the Sun. “And my view was that, well, he is not banned from my forum.” The political science professor says he extended the invitation because he believes that Mr. Dershowitz “has something important to contribute” to the discussion and will generate meaningful dialogue. This approach has defined Mr. Masoud’s programming choices, even when they’ve proven controversial. He previously hosted Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who is a former senior White House adviser. That, he says, left many “furious” with him.He also drew criticism for platforming a Palestinian professor, Dalal Saeb Iriqat, who characterized Hamas’s October 7 massacre on the morning of the attack as “just a normal human struggle for freedom.” “Look, I run a program on the Middle East at a major school of public affairs and this is the issue of our time. We have to engage with the people who are in the argument about how this conflict should be resolved,” he says. The invitation comes as Harvard and other elite universities face criticism over their overwhelmingly liberal faculty and student demographics. This scrutiny intensified under the Trump administration, which in April ordered Harvard to improve viewpoint diversity in admissions and hiring practices.When Harvard rejected these and other proposed changes, the administration terminated more than $2 billion in federal funding — a decision currently being contested in court.Mr. Masoud, one of Harvard’s few registered Republican professors, acknowledges the university “absolutely” faces “serious challenges around open discourse.” However, he hopes his series and similar campus initiatives will “complicate the narrative that Harvard is entirely captured by a left-of-center political culture.”Mr. Dershowitz offers a harsher assessment of Harvard’s current trajectory, describing it as so “completely backward” that it “has nowhere to go but forward.” Nevertheless, he views Mr. Masoud’s invitation as an encouraging development.“ I’m happy to be part of a step forward,” Mr. Dershowitz says. “As long as it’s only the beginning and not the end.”

Harvard Welcomes Back Alan Dershowitz for First Speaking Event in More Than a Decade

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