According to JNS editor-in-chief Jonathan Tobin, Americans may be failing the Jeffrey Epstein Rorschach test.
He says the eagerness of so many people not merely to jump to conclusions about the notorious case but to use it as a vehicle to promote antisemitism says a lot about contemporary America. And it also shows how Jew-hatred has been mainstreamed by the corporate media and popular culture.
He’s joined in this week’s episode of “Think Twice” by famed legal scholar and author Alan Dershowitz. The retired professor emeritus of Harvard Law School is someone who has been in the middle of the Epstein controversy, being one of his attorneys, and was at one time falsely accused of participating in associated crimes. That charge was retracted by his accuser. He says he wants all the material related to the case released. But he tempers that by saying those who anticipate some terrible secrets yet to be revealed will probably be disappointed.
He agrees that the Epstein case is being exploited by conspiracy theorists, including antisemites like Tucker Carlson and others who claim that the accused sexual abuser was a Mossad agent—a wild charge that Dershowitz says is categorically false.
The legal authority also discussed his new book, The Preventive State: The Challenge of Preventing Serious Harms While Preserving Essential Liberties. He argues that what is needed is a jurisprudential framework that will help provide a way to balance the state’s need to protect society while not destroying liberty.
Dershowitz also argues that what is needed in private settings like college campuses is fairness and a single standard. Instead, what has been happening is that while expressions of prejudice against blacks or Hispanics are often severely punished, Jew-hatred is both tolerated and even encouraged. That’s why he supports President Donald Trump’s efforts to defund universities like Harvard, where he taught for 50 years, though he wants the punishment to be targeted against divisions of the school that are offenders, leaving the sciences and medicine untouched.
He places a good deal of the blame for the surge in antisemitism on biased press coverage of Israel and the war on Hamas. He says the worst offenders are not merely mainstream publications but ones with Jewish audiences like The Forward and Haaretz, which he says do more to foment antisemitism than Al Jazeera. By contrast, Dershowitz praised JNS’s honest coverage of Israel as among the few reliable sources of information about the Middle East and the Jewish world.
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