In this age of global Islamic terrorism, those positions brought him to the center of the heated debates that have deeply divided America along lines of red and blue.

He’s incurred the wrath of Congressional liberals, and even faced down death threats. But political foes never ruffled Michael Mukasey, former US Attorney General and past chief judge of Manhattan’s federal courts — the only observant Jew ever to hold either post. Yet it wasn’t all opposition, like when President Bush “put his arm around my shoulder and told me I had real guts”.

“History doesn’t come with a musical score to tell you when the dramatic moments are arriving — you’ve got to figure that out yourself.”

I’m sitting with Michael Mukasey in his office at the tony Manhattan law firm of Debevoise and Plimpton as he utters that line, and although he’s referring to world events in our turbulent age, it could as easily refer to his own eventful life in the public eye. It has been only a few short years since his time as Attorney General of the United States under George W. Bush and before that, as chief judge of Manhattan’s federal courts — the only observant Jew ever to hold either post. And in this age of global Islamic terrorism, those positions brought him to the center of the heated debates that have deeply divided America along lines of red and blue.

Knowing something of Mr. Mukasey’s record of accomplishment, it’s hard for me not to feel some dissonance as I take stock of the avuncular-looking gentleman on the other side of the desk. A 70-something man of conservative dress and mild-mannered demeanor, he could easily be, indeed is, someone’s zeidy.

But he’s also the eminent jurist who presided magisterially over the trial of the infamous “blind sheikh,” Omar Abdel-Rahman, and nine codefendants for plotting to blow up the United Nations and other New York City landmarks. After a trial that lasted the better part of a year, Rahman and El Sayyid Nosair, the murderer of Meir Kahane, were sentenced to life in prison. Later, as Attorney General Mukasey, he faced down the fury of liberals in the Senate and the media over the controversial interrogation practice of waterboarding, which critics call torture but proponents say has helped save American lives.

Judge Mukasey’s appreciation for both learning and the rule of law began early. Born in 1941, he began first grade at Yeshiva Torah V’emunah, a small school near the Mukaseys’ southeast Bronx home. Then his mother learned of another school, Ramaz, just a subway ride away on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, but a universe away from the Bronx educationally and socially.

Michael entered the second grade there and the family hasn’t left since. The Mukasey kids, Jessica and Marc, both attended Ramaz and the judge’s wife, Susan, was headmistress of its lower school for many years. Rabbi Haskel Lookstein, Ramaz’s longtime principal and rabbi of the Kehilath Jeshurun congregation that’s affiliated with the school, recalls a Sunday morning father-and-son program for which the Mukaseys would travel in from the Bronx, which began with Shacharis, followed by breakfast and gym time. Michael, the rabbi says diplomatically, “was better at praying than he was at basketball.”

The elder Mukasey immigrated to these shores in 1921 from a small town near Baranovich in Belarus. When I wonder about the unusual family surname, which sounds Irish enough to be followed by “Bar and Grill,” the judge explains that in the old country it was pronounced Mukashay, with emphasis on the last syllable, and meant something like “flour-grinder” in either Russian or Polish. Trained as a pharmacist but unable to get licensed here, Michael’s father ended up in a series of successive business ventures, each of which, the judge says, “was slightly less successful than the one before it. He opened hand laundries, and later a candy store, which, of course, I enjoyed, because I got to play with the toys in the back.

“My parents did, however, own the 16-family apartment building that we lived in, which threw off income that enabled us to get by. It was right next to the elevated train that ran along Westchester Avenue, which meant conversations got periodically interrupted depending on how frequently the trains were running and whether the windows were open or closed.”

Mr. Mukasey is quick to name Rabbi Solomon Berl as one of his early life influences. The Mukaseys attended his shul, the Young Israel of Bronx Gardens, and “although there weren’t any gardens in sight, Rabbi Berl was a very effective speaker and I loved listening to his sermons. To the extent I know anything about public speaking, I learned it watching him,” he adds. He also fondly recalls various teachers at Ramaz whose classes he enjoyed, easily ticking off their names and the subjects they taught. One, a Mr. Neiman, was a superb limudei kodesh teacher with a no-nonsense attitude; when one kid in Chumash class piped up with a “how do you know?” challenge, Mr. Neiman replied matter-of-factly, “I was there.”

But it was a fleeting incident in the middle of one wintery Bronx night that taught Michael more about the value of learning than anything he learned in the classroom. “One night, we woke up to find that the stores adjacent to our apartment building were on fire. It was very scary to look out and see that the roofs were just one sheet of flame. The firemen were going through our building, getting everybody out and we too put our coats on and went to stand across the street.

“All of a sudden, I see my father run back across the street, across the police line, past the firemen and back into the building. A few tense minutes later, he emerged, clutching the schoolbooks my sister and I were going to need for school the next day. He didn’t know what was going to happen to our home, but regardless, the one thing he knew was that we were going to go to school. I didn’t think about the episode much at the time, but later I realized that it made an indelible impression.”

In the Genes

From Ramaz it was on to Columbia College, where Michael wrote editorials for the campus paper, doing the expository writing he still enjoys — in contrast to creative writing, which, he readily admits, “I can’t do to save my life.” It was also during his time at Columbia that he began a rightward progression in his political orientation, precipitated by the 1963 Cuban missile crisis.

Upon graduating Yale Law School in 1967, Mukasey practiced privately for five years and then joined the United States Attorney’s office in Manhattan, where he developed a friendship with another young prosecutor on staff, Rudy Giuliani. In his memoirs, Giuliani writes of rehearsing with his friend Mukasey the cross-examination of Brooklyn congressman Bert Podell, who was on trial for corruption. Giuliani recalled that “cross-examining Mukasey was much more difficult than cross-examining Podell.”

The Mukasey-Giuliani connection has continued through the years: The two were later law partners at the Manhattan firm of Patterson Belknap, and Michael’s son Marc is now a partner at Bracewell & Giuliani, the former mayor’s current firm. Both the senior and junior Mukaseys also advised Giuliani on legal matters during the his unsuccessful 2008 presidential bid.

In 1988, after a decade at Patterson Belknap, Mr. Mukasey was nominated by Ronald Reagan for a federal judgeship in New York’s Southern District, possibly the country’s most prestigious judicial posting. He spent a total of 18 years on the bench, the last six of them as the district’s chief judge, earning high plaudits from both prosecutors and defense attorneys for his fairness and high level of preparation for the cases that came before him.

Andrew Patel, a defense lawyer who was on the losing side in the 1995 “blind sheikh” case, later described his “enormous respect” for Judge Mukasey, deriving from the latter’s “sense of fairness and due process [which is] more than intellectual. It’s really down to the genetic level. It’s in his DNA.”