It is perhaps unfair to the rest of humanity to slot Alan Dershowitz in as a specific type of guy. He fits into a number of variously rancid cohorts: Inner Circle Jeffrey Epstein Associates; Celebrity Attorneys (Derogatory); People With "Harvard" As Their Personality; People With "Actually I Have Voted Democratic" As Their Personality; Podcaster. But the category into which he fits the most cleanly is more abstruse, and has less to do with anything Dershowitz has done or the (many) scary monsters and super-creeps that he has represented, than the way that Dershowitz himself is, and the uniquely grating hazard he represents.
So while it is true that Alan Dershowitz is quite literally someone who got into a huffy argument with a pierogi vendor at a farmer's market on Martha's Vineyard, was escorted from the premises by police, and subsequently threatened a lawsuit, it is also and more significantly true that Alan Dershowitz is exactly the sort of person who would do all those things, to the point where my first reaction upon hearing this news was trying to remember whether this was the first time he'd done it. And while I can now confirm that this was Dershowitz's first pierogi-specific Martha's Vineyard contretemps—as I was writing this, there was a second—there have been enough other things like it that it was a reasonable enough thing to be confused about. Give or take going on TV whenever anyone asks and writing books with titles like The Price Of Principle: Why Integrity Is Worth The Consequences, Guilt By Association: The Challenge Of Proving Innocence In The Age Of #MeToo, and Palestinianism: The Newest Attack On Peace And Human Rights And Democracy, this is just how Dershowitz spends his time—getting into weird public disputes and treating himself to outlandish takings of umbrage re: his seemingly very unhappy experience on Martha's Vineyard, where he has vacationed for 50 years, and then threatening lawsuits and recording emergency episodes of his delightfully named podcast, The Dershow, about it.
Here is another way to put it: While Alan Dershowitz might well be the only living American who could wind up accusing a nonbinary greenmarket pierogi vendor of "pure McCarthyism," it is more salient that, just given the type of person that he is, it was very nearly inevitable that Dershowitz would wind up doing this, or something like it. If there are other ways this might have gone—a butterfly flaps its wings differently in Chilmark and maybe there's a 40-minute video on YouTube of Dershowitz looming towards his webcam like a sleep paralysis demon while accusing a pizza delivery guy of "doing The Cultural Revolution on me"—it was also always going to go more or less like this.
Here is how it went, according to the 30-minute Dershow episode that the Harvard Law Professor posted last week and the reporting of the Vineyard Gazette: Dershowitz tried to buy pierogi from a vendor at the West Tisbury Farmer's Market in Martha's Vineyard, and the vendor refused to serve him. "Mr. Dershowitz is a regular at the farmers’ market," the Gazette reported, "and can often be seen there wearing a shirt that reads 'Proud American Zionist.' He mentioned the shirt during his YouTube video, and claimed that Wednesday’s incident was another example of the 'intolerance of the island.'"
Dershowitz also said in the video that the vendor told him they didn't like "some the people I had represented," by which, as the Gazette drily notes, the vendor might have meant Donald Trump or O.J. Simpson or Jeffrey Epstein, and which I will add could also include Harvey Weinstein or Claus von Bülow. "A lot of people don’t like the people I’ve represented," Dershowitz said into his webcam. "But they don’t refuse to serve me. And I said ‘That was pure McCarthyism.'" Dershowitz continued to say things like that from the front of the line at the Good Pierogi stand until such time as the police were called. That was around 10:00 a.m. The Gazette's report continues:
A video taken by a bystander shows Mr. Dershowitz’s interaction with a police officer. In the video, posted on social media, Mr. Dershowitz claims that the refusal of service was against the law and he goes on to have a several minute conservation with the officer.
The officer asks Mr. Dershowitz to stop standing at the front of the stand as other customers come up and also notes that because the stand was a private establishment, they had the right to refuse service.
“They have the right to refuse customers of their choosing,” the officer can be heard saying.
When a friend of the vendor pointed out to Dershowitz that the vendor was nonbinary, and the police officer suggested Dershowitz address the vendor Doing Pure McCarthyism To Him by their preferred pronoun, he refused. "I'll use whatever language I choose to use," Dershowitz said in his video that he responded. "That's between me and my grammarian." This, again in Dershowitz's own telling, led the attorney to pose a series of increasingly heated hypothetical questions about discrimination first to that Martha's Vineyard police officer and then also to "the very nice young man" in charge of the farmer's market until such time as Dershowitz was finally escorted from the premises. "I'm going to take legal action against the farmer's market to make sure that they only have booths by people who will sell to everybody," Dershowitz said that he said to the police officer and the farmer's market manager and presumably some number of horrified onlookers. And I have to say: I bet he really did say that.
Earlier this week, the pierogi vendor released a statement on Instagram explaining why they chose not to sell pierogi to Alan Dershowitz. "I personally know too many sexual abuse survivors," the vendor, Krem Miskevich, wrote. "Mr. Dershowitz consciously decided to befriend and defend men who have been accused of abusing and harming women." (Miskevich also notes that they are Jewish.) Dershowitz may or may not have seen that statement before he showed up at Miskevich's stand again on Wednesday, in what he called "an effort to try to restore community, in the interest of keeping the island together."
Dershowitz arrived bearing an autographed copy of his book Ten Big Anti-Israel Lies And How To Refute Them With The Truth—he noted that it was inscribed "To Krem, please learn the truth"—and offered the vendor an opportunity to at long last sell him pierogi and "show that you're prepared to sell to anybody, and not allow your anti-Zionism to decide which people you'll sell to." Video of the event features various vendors telling Dershowitz off, a woman who organized a protest that offended Dershowitz (and appears to be the main reason he believed Miskevich was antisemitic) telling him the ways in which he is wrong about all that, and a man saying "there are other people that want pierogis" in a plaintive voice. It ends with the large crowd that had come out to support Miskevich chanting "time to go" and Dershowitz once again being led out of the farmer's market. (The farmer's market manager who led Dershowitz off-site later told the Vineyard Gazette "all of my vendors have ridiculous business, so that’s what’s making me happy.")
It goes without saying that this is all obviously extremely good and normal shit for a person to be doing, and as such perfectly on-brand for someone who has for decades stood out for being a noticeable tick or two more disagreeable and personally unpleasant than even other high-profile attorneys. It is also seemingly in line with how Dershowitz spends his vacation time on Martha's Vineyard, where in recent years he has gotten into a screaming argument at a general store with Larry David and spent nearly a year threatening to sue a Martha's Vineyard public library for violating his First Amendment rights by not inviting him to talk about his books. "I’m gonna fight," Dershowitz told the Martha's Vineyard Times in 2022. "It’s losing me friends, and my wife, who doesn’t agree with what I’ve done and said, is losing friends." In that same story, the director of the Chilmark Library, who said she was threatened by email after Dershowitz told his tale on Steve Bannon's podcast, told the Times that "my message to Mr. Dershowitz would be: you’re retired, enjoy it."
That he is fighting still is proof both that Dershowitz is kind of an asshole and that he is enjoying it. Dershowitz himself, who is otherwise grinding out his own disputatious endgame and explaining repeatedly that he was wearing underwear when he received a massage at Jeffrey Epstein's home, mostly seems to be doing all this because he doesn't know any other way to be. But to behold the barely disguised amusement and delight he brings to all the unpleasantness he visits and revisits upon his neighbors is to understand instantly that he lives for this shit, and that moving through the world as an open bear-trap is his true calling. It is also enough to see him as the type of person that he is.
In a moment that is ruled by people like this—prissy bullies, people who are self-righteous but otherwise luridly and proudly without righteousness, sloppy and seething and unappeasable and utterly secure in their belief that they will never be held to account for anything they do—there is something clarifying about seeing it laid out so plainly, and so pettily. This is a big country with a lot of different types of people in it; most but by no means all of those people understand that we all have to share it. The trick of navigating this life is being able to spot the ones who can't, or just won't. They are out there, and some of them are rich and powerful and bored—even at a greenmarket, on vacation—and absolutely determined to make their sour selves everyone else's problem.
