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Harvard Law School Professor Emeritus Alan M. Dershowitz, a high-profile defense lawyer and a fierce supporter of Israel, will speak at the JFK Jr. forum on September 16 for the first “Middle East Dialogues” event of the fall.

Dershowitz, 87, who told the Jewish Press in May that killing innocent civilians in Gaza might be necessary as part of a cost-benefit analysis for Israel, will appear at the Harvard Kennedy School with Tarek E. Masoud, an HKS professor who hosts polarizing figures to talk about the Israel-Palestine conflict.

The event was publicized on the Institute of Politics website last week, but it has since been taken down. An HKS spokesperson confirmed the event plans for Sept. 16.

Though Dershowitz taught at HLS for 50 years, he told The Crimson on Sunday that he has not been invited back to Harvard since he left the school in 2013, adding that he was “pleasantly surprised” by Masoud’s invitation.

“I’m commending him, but I’m condemning, for example, the Harvard Law School, where I taught for 50 years has never invited me back to speak,” Dershowitz said.

“Students heard my view for 50 years, and then suddenly my views got cut off 11 years ago,” he added. “And I think it’s a healthy thing to have my views and the views of others who reflect my kind of middle of the road attitudes.”

Dershowitz has made headlines in recent years for offering to represent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu before the International Criminal Court. But he first became a household name in the 1990s as a member of O.J. Simpson’s defense team. He also served as a legal advisor to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and billionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. He told The Crimson in July that he “never renewed a personal relationship” with Epstein after representing him in court.

After retiring from the law school, Dershowitz served as an informal advisor to President Donald Trump on Middle East policy during his first term and later defended the president in his 2020 impeachment trial.

Masoud said it was “not difficult to decide” to extend an invitation to Dershowitz.

“There’s all kinds of people that I don’t invite,” Masoud said. “If the implication is that Alan Dershowitz might be one of those, my view is that he’s the Felix Frankfurter professor emeritus at Harvard Law. He’s a major national voice. He’s a member of the Harvard community. He’s spoken before many times.”

“If you cannot engage with a member of your community that happens to have very strong views on this issue, then that speaks poorly to our ability to engage with anybody,” he added.

Dershowitz is not the first controversial guest invited by Masoud. In early 2024, Masoud came under fire for hosting Dalal Saeb Iriqat, a much-maligned Palestinian professor who called Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack a “normal” freedom struggle. At the time, then-HKS dean Douglas W. Elmendorf distanced the school from Masoud’s series and harshly condemned Iriqat.

Masoud will host Saudi Arabia foreign minister Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud in late September. Al Saud, the public face of Saudi foreign relations, has said the blockade of aid into Gaza “can only be described as a form of genocide” and conditioned normalization of relations with Israel on the creation of an independent Palestinian state.

Robert Malley — a diplomat who was Joe Biden’s special envoy to Iran — will also join Masoud for an October forum. Malley, a longtime fixture in Democrat foreign policy circles, sat on the National Security Council in the Obama Administration and spearheaded negotiation of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.

Masoud’s series has lately been touted as a blueprint for the type of constructive conversations the University is hoping to foster.

Harvard’s Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias, released in April 2025, cited Masoud’s programming as offering “meaningful and significant conversations about the Middle East, with guests representing a wide range of experiences and perspectives.”

The University has doubled down on its effort to get students talking about hard subjects by launching several debate and dialogue initiatives including HKS’ Candid & Constructive Conversations initiative and Harvard College’s Intellectual Vitality initiative, accompanied by training like the first-year “Perspectives” module.

But Masoud said that students are more ready than the University thinks.

“I have a particular philosophy when it comes to what have been started to be called on this campus, ‘difficult conversations’ or ‘candid conversations,’ which is that our students are actually better equipped for these than we give them credit for,” Masoud said. “They don’t actually need specialized training.”

—Staff writer Elise A. Spenner can be reached at elise.spenner@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X at @EliseSpenner.

—Staff writer Tanya J. Vidhun can be reached at tanya.vidhun@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @tanyavidhun.