Counterpunch has a piece proving to my satisfaction–as far as I could read, before my head turned to blue cheese–that when Alan Dershowitz wrote Beyond Chutzpah, he picked up material from Joan Peters’s hateful book, From Time Immemorial– a lot of quotes from Mark Twain’s book Innocents Abroad (that’s as far as I got anyway)–without footnoting that he had gotten the stuff from Joan Peters’s book. It’s clear that Dersh picked up the Mark Twain quotes from Peters because the same errors that Peters made, Dershowitz made. Little stuff. Left out commas and semicolons.
Myself, I believe the investigator’s "evidence" against Dershowitz because in Dersh’s anti-assimilation book The Vanishing American Jew, there were many literary references, say to the great I.L. Peretz, which struck me as glosses of Peretz’s stuff that Dersh had picked up somewhere else–from a grad student or an email, or another book, or a memorandum, without reading Peretz’s marvelous short stories himself (which I read, after reading Dersh’s book. Check Peretz out on the corruption of weath…).
So what? This is a foolish fight for anyone to get mixed up in. It is immaterial. People read stuff in other books all the time and then quote them. Yes they should check the cites, if they’re good scholars, but it’s clear that the quotes from Twain are substantively accurate. So a couple of commas are left out. Who cares? People pick up stuff from Bartlett’s Quotations all the time. They take quotes from the New York Times. This is not plagiarism. It’s parroting. Does Peters feel taken advantage of? I’m sure not. Dershowitz never passes off Twain’s ideas as his own. Yes, surely, Dersh’s office is a dual-loyalty mill to which pro-Israel messengers bring in ideas and citations; and he then puts them in briefs and books under his name. Big deal. We want people to pass ideas around!
The real issue here is Dershowitz’s support for apartheid policies in Israel, rationalizing check points and landgrabs, and his vicious campaign to wreck the noble Norman G. Finkelstein’s position at DePaul. That is the scandal…
