As a combative defense attorney, Alan M. Dershowitz cut his teeth representing such controversial public figures as Mike Tyson and O.J. Simpson. Today the Harvard Law School professor continues to make headlines with his outspoken views on everything from free speech (for) to torture (against). “Speech is very dangerous and very harmful and yet the arguments for censoring it are not as persuasive as the arguments for enduring the dangers and trying to prevent the outcomes in different ways,” said Dershowitz, in a lecture at the Woody Tanger Auditorium at Brooklyn College. An alumnus of Brooklyn College, class of 1959, Prof. Dershowitz, who donated his papers to the college’s library in 2005, discusses his 27th book, “Finding Jefferson: A Lost Letter, a Remarkable Discovery, and the First Amendment in the Age of Terrorism,” in which he argues the third President’s views on the limits of free speech.
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A decade-long study of adult children of immigrants in the New York area reveals they’re more successful than their parents, often outperforming native-born Americans. Philip Kasinitz, a sociologist at the Center for Urban Research at the Graduate Center and one of study’s four authors, calls it the “second-generation advantage…They’re able to choose what’s best in the host society and what’s best about their immigrant communities.” Three of the authors including political scientist John H. Mollenkopf of the Graduate Center, discuss the study, including the finding that Russian and Chinese second-generation adults have higher high school and college graduation rates than native-born whites of the same age. The study has just been published as a book, “Inheriting the City: the Children of Immigrants Come of Age.” Listen Now

Former NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw has been a journalist for more than forty years. For his decades of service, the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism presented Mr. Brokaw with their Lifetime Achievement Award. During the school’s first Excellence in Journalism Awards ceremony, Mr. Brokaw discusses his experiences, convergence in the newsroom and the fundamental skills needed to be a successful reporter.
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In thirteen years, Craig Newmark has built Craigslist.org into an Internet powerhouse that has helped millions of people find apartments, jobs, even dates. The newspaper classified advertising business will never be the same. Hear what he had to say to CUNY J-school students about his Web site, the media, and his unorthodox business philosophy.
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The names Himmler and Goering are synonymous with the horrors of the Holocaust but very few people have ever heard of Father Joseph Andre, Sister Jadwiga, or Father Pierre-Marie Benoit, all members of the Christian clergy who risked torture and death to help Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe. Through the exhibit “Defying the Devil: Christian Clergy who Saved Jews from the Holocaust,” at the Harriet & Kenneth Kupferberg Holocaust Resource Center and Archives, Dr. Arthur Flug hopes to rectify that by honoring these extraordinary individuals. “There are [Holocaust] survivors in our community who were able to survive because of the various clerics who helped them,” says Dr. Flug, director of the center, which is based at Queensborough Community College. Dr. Flug talks about the center’s mission and his role since taking the helm three years ago.
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Subcommittee meeting of the Board of Trustees, Subcommittee Investment, Wednesday, May 21, 2008.

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Executive Committee meeting of the Board of Trustees, Wednesday, May 21, 2008.

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Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer and former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor examine the relationship between U.S. presidents and the Supreme Court in a discussion moderated by longtime New York Times Supreme Court correspondent Linda Greenhouse. In “The President and the Constitution,” the third of four “Aspen at Roosevelt House: Conversations on Presidential Leadership” at Hunter College, the Justices examine instances in which presidents have not always followed the High Court’s orders. In one case cited by Justice Breyer, Andrew Jackson’s 1831 decision to ignore the Court led to the eviction of Cherokee Indians from their land in Georgia. Ms. Greenhouse sees the executive branch’s reliance on the Court’s Constitutional interpretations as double-edged, “as a source of power for the president and a source of constraint.”
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Holocaust survivor Saul Friedlander has authored some of the most important works on Nazi Germany over the last three decades, including this year’s Pulitzer Prize-winner for General Nonfiction, “The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945.” In The New York Times Book Review, renowned Cambridge University history professor Richard Evans wrote, “[Friedlander] has written a masterpiece that will endure.” At the Graduate Center, Prof. Friedlander, who has taught European history at UCLA for 25 years, discusses Europe’s indifference to Jewish persecution during the war and why so many Jews waited, before it was too late, to escape the Third Reich.
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When he moved to the United States from the former Soviet Union in 1976, Gary Shteyngart was 7 years old and did not speak a word of English. Today, with his breakthrough debut novel, “The Russian Debutante’s Handbook,” hailed by Esquire magazine as an “acute, accurate, intelligent look at America in the 90s,” the Leningrad native is one of the country’s most exciting new writers. As part of Hunter College’s Distinguished Writers Series, Mr. Shteyngart reads an excerpt from his 2006 work, “Absurdistan,” a satirical account of a Russian-Jewish boy’s journeys through America and Russia, named by The New York Times as one of the 10 best books of 2006.
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