Harvey Silverglate's Introduction of Dorothy Rabinowitz     Photo copyright Elsa Dorfman   FIRE’s anniversary dinner, Saturday, Nov 5,  2005               In an era increasingly marked by easy classification of people into distinct categories, we come to appreciate more and more those among us who defy being readily pigeon-holed. Among those resistant to convenient and conventional labels, there is an even smaller number about whom we can say that they are one of a kind. We are privileged to have such a person deliver the keynote address this evening. And I have the privilege of introducing our speaker, who has become a much-valued friend of mine ever since Alan Kors introduced us during the infamous “water buffalo” imbroglio, in which she played a major role for liberty, as she does in so many controversies.               Dorothy Rabinowitz joined The Wall Street Journal in 1990 and has been on its editorial board since 1996. She writes the “Critic at Large” feature as well as periodic hard-hitting pieces for the paper’s editorial page. Dorothy won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in commentary for a series she wrote in 2000 on American culture and society, including several pieces in an area in which she has gained an international reputation – her intrepid and powerful pieces on the American tragedy involving false allegations of and prosecutions for sexual abuse of young children in day care centers around the nation. It is no exaggeration to say that, but for Dorothy’s work, dozens of palpably innocent men and women would still be in prison for crimes that not only did they not commit, but that never even occurred.               Before joining the Journal, Dorothy was a freelance writer, syndicated columnist, and commentator on New York’s WWOR-TV News. She is the author of New Lives, a book about survivors of death camps, published in 1976 by Alfred Knopf; Home Life, a book about old age, published by Macmillan in 1970; and, most recently, No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusation, False Witness, and Other Terrors of Our Times, published by The Free Press in 2003.               Dorothy has earned numerous accolades and awards in addition to her Pulitzer. She is probably the only one at the law-and-order oriented Wall Street Journal to be the recipient, in 1997, of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyer’s annual Champion of Justice Award. In 1993 she won the Distinguished Writing Award from the American Society of Newspaper Editors for commentary. And, perhaps most impressively, three of Dorothy’s most memorable columns about the insanities and inanities on college campuses today have won an honored place on the FIRE Website.               Dorothy was raised in the Corona section of Queens, earned her bachelor’s degree from Queens College, and did postgraduate work at New York University, while teaching in the English departments at NYU and the Pratt Institute. She is a life-long New Yorker and resides in Manhattan with her gorgeous Tibetan Terrier, Simon, to whom I occasionally deliver organic dog biscuits, knowing of the Wall Street Journal’s skepticism toward the whole organic farming movement. Simon, utterly apolitical, is reported to much enjoy these occasional natural treats.               But this resume, partial yet impressive as it is, does not tell the whole story of this unique person. She is adored and loved, and also feared and hated, by a variety of people on both the right and the left of the political spectrum. In thinking about the people who adore Dorothy – and they are legion – it seems to me that they have one set of traits in common – they abhor hypocrisy, lies, moral cowardice, knee-jerk responses to difficult questions, blind adherence to the politically correct ideologies of the day, the Orwellian destruction and abuses of the English language, and myriad idiocies and cruelties of one kind or another. Those who loathe and fear Dorothy have good reason to be worried. Armed with a searing wit and devastating insights into morality, culture, and politics, Dorothy is able to expose evil of every variety with a single swipe of her powerful pen.               Don’t just take my word for it. Don Hewitt, executive producer of 60 Minutes, has said: “Dorothy is my favorite kind of right-winger. She is right without being righteous.” New York Times columnist Frank Rich has said of Dorothy: “She’s a lively, funny, incisive person, which is obviously a quality of her writing as well.” Her current editor, Paul Gigot, has said: “What she did with the abuse cases was the sort of thing that all of us originally got into this business to do. She got people out of jail. That’s worth a lot more than a Pulitzer Prize.” And, indeed, it is.                         It has been reported that Dorothy, in fourth grade, hit a boy in the head with an apple, and once impressed her classmates by picking up a live, wriggling snake. For these feats of valor, a classmate told Dorothy that she was “daring and everyone else is shrinking.” This is doubtless part of the secret of her success: she is daring when others are shrinking. And when she writes, it matters. Her friend Norman Podhoretz, former editor of Commentary, described Dorothy’s prose in this manner: “She writes one sentence and the whole world comes.” One of her landmark pieces was published before she got to the Journal. Harper’s Magazine ran her article detailing the outrageous abuses in New Jersey’s prosecution of Margaret Kelly Michaels, convicted of 115 counts of sexually abusing 20 nursery-school children in 1988 and sentenced to 47 years. After several rejections, Lewis Lapham published the piece in Harper’s, and Michaels went free. “It came out,” Lapham has said, “and reopened the case and got Kelly Michaels out of jail. That’s one of the best things that Harper’s Magazine has ever done.”  And when Dorothy turned her attention to a similar case in Massachusetts, involving the wrongful conviction and incarceration of three members of the Violet Amirault family – mother, son, and daughter – the case began to fall apart and roiled the Massachusetts judiciary and prosecutorial establishment. The Amiraults started to gain their release, one by one, under Dorothy’s persistent assaults in her Journal column. Dorothy, a bulldog much like Winston Churchill, whom she much admires, ain’t no quitter.               Dorothy was a favorite of Robert Bartley, the legendary editor of the Journal’s editorial page until his untimely death in 2003. About Bartley, Dorothy has said: “He was the sanest, most eccentrically wonderful creature, and everyone knew that about him.” Well, I had the high honor to have spoken to Bartley on one occasion when he waxed poetic about Dorothy, who was one of his favorites. Dorothy’s description of Bob can just as easily and accurately be said of her.              And so I now have the high honor and privilege of introducing FIRE ’s stalwart ally, my friend, and, truly, “the sanest, most eccentrically wonderful creature,” Dorothy Rabinowitz.