Withey added that it was not clear to her whether Dershowitz only wanted Finkelstein’s book to be published by another press.
“He tried to convince us not to publish,” she wrote. “I have to assume that means he doesn’t want the book published at all.”
Dershowitz responded that he believes that the committee’s approval reflects “a completely biased selection.”
“I have no objection to arguments on the merits, but Finkelstein has refused to confront me on the merits,” he said. “I’m very confident in the conclusions I made in “The Case for Israel.’”
Withey told Inside Higher Ed why the University of California Press decided to remove Finkelstein’s suggestions that Dershowitz did not write “The Case for Israel.”
“It was unclear the point he was trying to make, and he couldn’t document that, so we asked him to take it out,” she said, noting that there could have been multiple readings of the reference in Finkelstein’s book.
Dershowitz said he sees the press’ decision as a victory.
“They took it out because they knew that if the reference had appeared, I would have sued them, I would have owned the University of California Press, and the First Amendment would have been in fine shape,” said Dershowitz, who is a well known defender of the First Amendment. “If they say that I either didn’t write the book or that I plagiarized it, I will sue them.”
The article in The Nation, written by Jon Wiener, a history professor at the University of California at Irvine, struck a particularly powerful cord because it implied that Dershowitz’s actions in this instance make him a hypocrite.
“The way you challenge an untrue book is not to prevent its publication, but to argue against it in print,” Wiener said. “If you go back to John Stuart Mill…you don’t try to silence your opponents, you argue against them.”
“I think I’ve served the interest of the First Amendment,” Dershowitz responded. “In America, you just can’t get away with writing false stories about people.”
According to Wiener’s article, which was posted online on June 23, Dershowitz’s lawyers sent letters to University of California demanding that the press not publish the book, and Dershowitz himself asked California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and top administrators at the University of California.
“No one as far as I can tell has tried to get a governor to intervene in publishing a book,” Wiener said in an interview.
In last week’s interview, Dershowitz expressed his satisfaction with the present outcome, saying that he hopes Finkelstein’s work will be “judged in the marketplace of ideas.”
—Staff writer Daniel J. T. Schuker can be reached at dschuker@fas.harvard.edu.