BOOK REVIEW : Dershowitz Charms With His ‘Chutzpah’ : CHUTZPAH <i> by Alan M. Dershowitz</i> ; Little, Brown; $22.95, 384 pages

Perhaps it’s only because of Ron Silver’s depiction of celebrity attorney Alan Dershowitz as a pompous jerk in “Reversal of Fortune”--or maybe it’s the relentless self-promotion of the real-life Dershowitz on the op-ed pages and lecture circuits of America--but I confess that I approached “Chutzpah,” Dershowitz’s latest book about himself, with some anxiety.

Almost from the first page of his book, however, Dershowitz manages to win the reader over with his Yiddish jokes, his little asides to his mother, his reminiscences of friends and family, his unabashed self-revelation, and--rather surprisingly--his big, big heart.

“Chutzpah” is rich with what Dershowitz characterizes as the essential quality of Jewishness-- rachmones , which Dershowitz defines as “the Hebrew-Yiddish word for compassion .”

“Chutzpah” is yet another look at Dershowitz’s high-profile law practice, but the perspective is an especially intimate one. Here, Dershowitz reflects on some of his more famous (or notorious) cases as a way of explaining what it means to be a Jew in late 20th-Century America--and why he sees chutzpah as the key to the survival of the Jewish people.

Dershowitz, for instance, is currently championing the cause of Jonathan and Anne Pollard, a pair of American Jews who confessed to espionage on behalf of Israel, and he noisily condemns the fretfulness and timidity that some Jewish leaders have displayed toward the Pollard case, the “ sh’a shtill (keep quiet) mentality” of an earlier immigrant generation.

“The time has come for us to shed our self-imposed second-class status . . . and rid ourselves of our pathological fear of offending our ‘hosts,’ ” urges Dershowitz.

“The byword of past generations of Jewish Americans has been shanda --fear of embarrassment in front of our hosts. The byword of the next generation should be chutzpah --assertive insistence on first-class status among our peers.”

Of course, “Chutzpah” is much more than special pleading for the Pollards--it is the heartfelt confession of a self-described “Jewish Jew” who entered the world of law at a time when even a so-called Jewish law firm would not hire an observant Jew like Dershowitz because he would be unavailable for work on the Sabbath.

In that sense, “Chutzpah” is an original and important addition to the literature of the Jewish experience in America, a kind of latter-day Harvard Yard version of Norman Podhoretz’s “Making It” or Alfred Kazin’s “New York Jew.”

Dershowitz loves to quote his own clips, and he offers up his pronouncements on a catalogue of contemporary issues, from Auschwitz to affirmative action, from Noam Chomsky to Meir Kahane, from Anatoly Scharansky to Jesse Jackson.

But the blood and marrow of “Chutzpah” are to be found in Dershowitz’s war stories about his lifelong struggle to remain faithful to his Jewishness--a struggle that was no less difficult at Harvard and Yale than in Poland and the Soviet Union.

At moments, Dershowitz can be off-putting or exasperating or plainly outrageous, and surely he means to make precisely that impression on his readers.

For example, when a Polish cardinal implied that Jewish demonstrators at Auschwitz intended to destroy a controversial convent or kill the nuns who reside there, Dershowitz boldly threatened to sue him for libel--and when the threat prompted the cardinal to call off a trip to the United States, Dershowitz credited himself with “a great victory for decency . . . (and) also a victory for Jewish power.”

Dershowitz makes no apologies for casting himself in the role of defender of the faith--or for invoking anti-Semitism and the Holocaust as the defining experience of Jewish identity.

Insists Dershowitz: “The world owes Jews, and the Jewish state, which was built on the ashes of Auschwitz, a special understanding.”

As a matter of fact, Dershowitz apologizes for exactly nothing, and that’s the whole point of “Chutzpah,” a book that argues for audacity and pugnacity as the moral destiny of the Jewish people.

Even so, between his chutzpah and his rachmones, there’s something endearing about this tummler (an affectionate Yiddish term for troublemaker), this man whose dudgeon is softened with sentiment.

Next: Richard Eder reviews “Bet They’ll Miss Us When We’re Gone” by Marianne Wiggins.