Fighting antisemitism and terrorism, one case at a time
Attorney Akiva Shapiro combines Jewish knowledge with lawfare
Akiva Shapiro of Teaneck is about to begin a new job. He will be the managing partner of the D.C.-based Holtzman Vogel law firm’s new New York office.
That’s great for him, and presumably for Holtzman Vogel, but why does it matter for the rest of us?
It matters because Mr. Shapiro, whose background blends an understanding of Jewish law and Jewish history and American jurisprudence in an unusually deep way, has used his knowledge to fight terrorism and antisemitism in court. In his new role, he will have even more latitude to pursue those cases, armed with his knowledge and experience.
So who is he, and what does he do?
Mr. Shapiro was born in Palo Alto, California. “I came from a yeshiva background,” he said. “I had gone to Jewish school, and then to the Skokie Yeshiva in Chicago, and then spent a year in Israel, at Sha’arei Mevaseret Zion.” Then, instead of going to college back home on the West Coast, in 1997 he came east to begin his undergraduate career at Columbia.
In the last few years, Columbia’s reputation among Jews has soured, but then “it was the golden age for the Jewish experience in the Ivies,” Mr. Shapiro said. “I studied under Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, one of the giants of the study of Jewish history in the 20th century.” Dr. Yerushalmi was Columbia’s Salo Wittmayer Baron Professor of Jewish History, Culture and Society. “I wrote my senior thesis on women and gender in the Hebrew First-Crusades Chronicles,” Mr. Shapiro added.
He also took classes with another giant, the talmudic scholar Rabbi Dr. David Weiss Halivni.
And to move from the academic to the personal, “I met my wife, Allison, there, on our first day of freshman year.”
Jewish students of all backgrounds were able to meet each other, and they also were an integral and valued part of the larger student body. “There were hundreds of Jewish kids who would come for Friday night services, and for Shabbat dinner and lunch.”
They wouldn’t go to the Kraft Center for Jewish Student Life, Hillel’s headquarters at Columbia, because it had not yet been built. “Actually, in those days there was no Hillel,” Mr. Shapiro said. “There was a building that was a kind of multidimensional religious space, a multi-purpose type space, and we Jews got it on Friday. We’d come in to set it up.”
It’s not that he doesn’t value Hillel and the Kraft Center — he very much does — but Mr. Shapiro also sees benefits to the more “student-driven” Jewish life he enjoyed on campus. “There was just one Jewish chaplain,” he said. “All the chaplains had their offices down in the basement. You’d walk by the Jewish chaplain, the Muslim chaplain, the Catholic chaplain — all of them. The Jewish chaplain would give classes here or there, but most of the Jewish experience was student-driven.
“It was very exciting to be part of this vibrant, eclectic community,” Mr. Shapiro said. “It was a wonderful time, and I had a wonderful experience.”
Akiba and Allison got married before their senior year at Columbia. They lived in Riverdale, and he got a job as a paralegal. “It was just a job,” he said. “I wanted to see if I was interested the law.” It turned out that he was, at least a little bit.
The couple moved to Israel for another two years. When they came back, “I applied to law school, Mr. Shapiro said. “I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be a lawyer or to go into academia. I was torn. My wife was a little concerned with the academia route.” It’s a hard, often insecure life.
“And then I found out that there are some joint JD-Ph.D. programs, and I made a deal with her. If I got into a program, I’d start it and see where it led.
“That left both doors open.”
Mr. Shapiro got into law school at Columbia and a doctorate program at Yale; he went first to law school for a year and then to graduate school the next year.
“I loved law school,” he said. “I loved learning about cases and constitutional issues, and thinking like a lawyer.” The next year, at Yale, he joined the religious studies department, studying ancient Judaism and focusing on Talmud and legal theory. “I was interested in Jewish legal theory and how you can look at contemporary American law through a Jewish lens.” He was particularly interested “in the work of a law professor named Robert Cover, who had a very strong Jewish background, and used the Jewish legal tradition to look at the relationship between law and narrative.” (Dr. Cover had worked at Yale but died decades before Mr. Shapiro got there. His influence was through his law journal articles.)
“I also loved graduate school,” Mr. Shapiro said. “But, you know, I didn’t have the same passion for it that I did for law, and it wasn’t enough passion to make it my life’s work. So I got a master’s in religious studies and then I completed law school. I wanted to be a practicing lawyer.”
Those influences — Jewish life, Jewish history, Jewish law, narrative and law, constitutional law, the diversity of Jewish life and of religious life and of just plain life, the absolute joy that came come through rigorous study — all were formative, Mr. Shapiro said. “They were the foundation under which I went into the practice of law.”
He also was greatly influenced by Nathan Lewin, the nearly legendary attorney who has argued many cases before the Supreme Court and taught at Columbia.
Right after law school, Mr. Shapiro joined the law firm Gibson Dunn. “I was there for my whole career, until two weeks ago,” he said. He started as an associate and left as a partner. “The firm was very supportive,” he said. “They do a lot of pro bono work, and I was active in finding it.
“From the beginning I was interested in constitutional issues and religious liberties. In those days, pre-October 7, the action was more on the religious liberties side, in terms of employment discrimination and making sure that governments weren’t discriminating in land use decisions.”
One of Mr. Shapiro’s first cases was a local one, when he still was an associate, in 2012 or so, he said. He and his family had moved to Teaneck and joined Ohr Saadya, an Orthodox synagogue there. (It was named Etz Chaim then.) “The Teaneck Board of Adjustment had imposed a bunch of conditions on the shul’s practice,” he said. “They could have only a certain number of minyanim and a certain number of classes, and they couldn’t use their outdoor space for any activities.
“I felt that this was very problematic and intrusive, and I represented the shul pro bono. We sued the town, and we ended up getting them to remove the restrictions.
“In those days, that was where my interest was, and where the activity was. There was always antisemitism, obviously, and there always were people who were combatting antisemitism, but that was less of a focus.”
And then there was another big case, “which was formative,” Mr. Shapiro said. It was about what a Jerusalem-born American citizen’s American passport would list as that person’s birthplace. Until then, it was Jerusalem — true enough, but Jerusalem is not a country. But “State Department policy was that it had to say Jerusalem, not Israel, even though Congress had directed that it say Israel.”
It was Mr. Lewin’s case, and Mr. Shapiro volunteered to work with his old professor and mentor. It was not only a case about a passport — a deeply Jewish case — it was even more “about the president’s authority versus congressional authority. About the legislative branch versus the executive branch.” Mr. Shapiro represented Congress — “I arranged it and ended up submitting a brief for something like 30-something senators and 75 members of the House, arguing that the Supreme Court should hear the case as a constitutional issue. The executive branch had been arguing that it was a political question, about foreign affairs, and the Supreme Court shouldn’t weigh in.
“We said that if there’s a constitutional issue at stake, the Supreme Court should weigh in, regardless of the foreign policy implications. The court agreed with us, and it’s been cited many times in the ensuing years, when there have been issues that have a foreign policy element to them, but also have religious liberty or constitutional issues.
“The irony of the case was that it was returned to the Supreme Court another time for the court to decide whether the president or Congress has the ultimate authority to decide whether or not to recognize the capital of a country; the court said that it was the president. That was a loss for us.
“But then, in a twist of fate, the next president was Donald Trump, who decided that Jerusalem should be treated as the capital of Israel, and the embassy should be moved. So you never know how these things will turn out.”
The decision to have the passports of Jerusalem-born American citizens list Israel as the holder’s birthplace also was personal for Mr. Shapiro. “We lived in Israel for two years, and our oldest daughter was born in Jerusalem. She’s an American citizen. Her passport said that she was born in Jerusalem, not Israel. After the policy was changed, she was one of the first people to have her passport changed.”
The Shapiros have four children. Their two oldest — their two daughters — live in Israel. Their two younger children — their two sons — both are in high school in Teaneck.
While he was at Gibson Dunn, where he became chair of a practice group, Mr. Shapiro founded a Sabbath-observant affinity group. “By then I was more senior, but I felt it was important for more junior people to have support and mentorship, and the chance to connect with other observant people at the firm. We started having services and Shabbat dinners at firm retreats, for people of all kinds of Jewish backgrounds. I saw how powerful it can be to create those communities within a firm.
“After October 7, we had a Zoom, and about 120 people from across the firm joined it, because people were looking for connection. For a shoulder to lean on. Then we had a series of get-togethers relating to October 7 and the hostages. I turned my focus more to antisemitism and anti-terrorism litigation, which suddenly seemed to be very relevant all over again.
“We founded an antisemitism legal hotline for students on campus; they can call in and then get referred out to pro bono representation with the ADL and the Brandeis Center. The firm also set up another, broader antisemitism hotline, also with the ADL.
“There was a lot of activity, and a lot that I was able to do.”
Mr. Shapiro represented Sara Saleem, an Iraqi-born Kurd who was kidnapped and tortured by Hezbollah and another terrorist group called Asa’ib Ahl al-Haqq in 2014. She’s now an American citizen, “and we brought her antiterrorism lawsuit in the United States on her behalf.”
Ms. Saleem is a “very successful real estate developer, and she was involved in a business deal to secure new housing” in Basra as Iraq tried to rebuilt itself. “She was kidnapped by vehicles bearing the prime minister’s seal.” That’s the seal of former prime minister Nouri al Maliki, “who now is trying to make a comeback,” Mr. Shapiro said.
Ms. Saleem was taken to an apartment where she was held for 43 days; she was beaten with electrical cables. “They accused her of being a CIA mole, which was not true, but they held her and demanded that her family pay a $2 million ransom to free her.
“Because of her status as a high-profile, successful woman, there was a feeling that she was a threat to the political establishment.
“They gave her a metal spoon to eat with, and she used it to carve around the window. Eventually she was able to pry open the window and escape. She was on the third floor but she was able to shimmy down a drainpipe.
A gun battle followed, but Ms. Saleem escaped. She lives in Virginia now, Mr. Shapiro said, and she’s suing Iraqi government officials and the two terrorist groups that kidnapped her under the Torture Victims Protection Act. The suit is in federal court, and when he was at Gibson Dunn, Mr. Shapiro represented her.
Mr. Shapiro was happy at Gibson Dunn. “I wasn’t looking to move, but I was watching what Holzman Vogel was doing with a kind of envious eye,” he said. “They’ve been at the leading edge of these antisemitism and terrorism cases since October 7.
“They brought a bunch of big cases against various universities, including Harvard, MIT, and UCLA. They brought a lawsuit against Students for Justice in Palestine and others for supporting terrorism and being a mouthpiece for Hamas. Now they’re in litigation supporting Governor DeSantis” — that’s Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida — “in his crackdown on the Council of American Islamic Relations, which is an outgrowth of a prior organization that had been an unindicted co-conspirator in a terrorism case.”
Gibson Dunn couldn’t do all the work that Holzman Vogel does because it is constrained by its size — it’s huge, and has a presence all over the country. Holzman Vogel is smaller and therefore more nimble, and also necessarily more focused.
So now, Mr. Shapiro said, “I’m looking forward to having free rein in bringing antisemitism and anti-terrorism cases on the issues that are most affecting the Jewish community in the United States.
“We are still seeing the rise of the antisemitism that exploded after October 7, and the continuation of the efforts to demonize both Israel and, by extension, the Jewish community that supports it.
“I think that now is an important moment to continue the fight against antisemitism.”
And Mr. Shapiro intends to bring every resource he has gathered from his wide range of intellectual and legal experience to that fight.