Editor’s Note: The below is an expanded version of a piece that appears in the April issue of National Review.
In the early 2000s, after 9/11 and the launch of the War on Terror, Bernard Lewis was in great demand. He was the “dean of Middle East historians,” as many people said. He had studied the Arab world and the Middle East generally all his life. He was in his mid 80s at the time. (He would die in 2018, at 101.) I asked Lewis, “Did you ever think people would be so interested in your field? Did you ever think that so many people would be so curious about what you know?” He chuckled and said, “No, I did not.”
Deborah Lipstadt is not quite in the same position. She has studied antisemitism all of her life — and antisemitism never quite goes out of style. Still, the world has seen an explosion of antisemitism since October 7, when Hamas massacred 1,200 Israelis, launching the latest Gaza war.
Why should a massacre of Jews occasion antisemitism? Antisemitism is a somewhat mysterious, as well as a vile, thing.
Lipstadt tells me, “In the little over a year and a half since I’ve been in office, the issue has escalated in a way that, even though I have spent my whole life studying antisemitism and its impact, I never would have imagined. I say, not even half in jest but just a quarter in jest: ‘I work in a growth industry. And sadly, business is booming.’”
What is this “office” she speaks of? Professor Lipstadt is a State Department official, an ambassador at large. Her formal title is “special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism.”
Does she feel that her decades of study and related experience have prepared her for this moment and this job? She allows that she has a framed Bible verse in her office. It has long been one of her favorite verses. It comes from the Book of Esther and reads, “Perhaps you were born for a time such as this.”
Lipstadt is a professor of modern Jewish history and Holocaust studies at Emory University, in Atlanta. (She is on leave, naturally.) She came to world attention in the 1990s when David Irving, the British Holocaust-denier, sued her and her publisher for libel in a British court. She had written a book called “Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory.” In it, she places Irving among the deniers. At trial, she and her publisher prevailed.
The trial was a “teachable moment,” as people say. Some likened it to the Nuremberg trials and the Eichmann trial.
Lipstadt is an interesting combination of scholar and warrioress. “Deborah is irrepressible,” the late David Ellenson once said. (He was a rabbi, an academic, and a college president.) “She is a prototypical redhead, fiery and vivacious, with an incredible zest for life.”
Deborah E. Lipstadt — “E” for “Esther” — was born in 1947 and grew up in New York. She had a Jewish upbringing, meaning Jewish schools, Jewish summer camp. But many people have that and they don’t go on to devote themselves to Jewish studies — to a sustained examination of antisemitism, Holocaust denial, and the rest. Why did Deborah go in that direction? She tells me about a couple of pivotal moments in her life.
In the mid 1960s, she was a student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “I remember the dark days of May ’67,” she says. People were digging graves in parks, in anticipation of mass casualties. (The Six-Day War would break out on June 5.) After Israel’s victory, there was great joy, renewed confidence. Excitement was in the air. Jews could set foot in the Old City, from which they had been excluded.
All of this concentrated the mind of the young American woman. She was supposed to leave for home in July ’67. She stayed for another year. Ultimately, she got her bachelor’s degree from CCNY (the City College of New York).
She went to graduate school at Brandeis. During this time, in 1972, she had a chance to go to the Soviet Union — “the late, unlamented Soviet Union,” as she says. She went there in order to meet refuseniks, i.e., Jews who wanted to move to Israel but had been refused permission to leave by the Soviet government. She saw the burden of antisemitism they bore. But she also saw their boldness, their courage.
Which impressed her.
She mentions something else to me: At just this time — 1972, when she was meeting refuseniks — Palestinian terrorists committed their massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. That was a jolting moment for many, around the world.
At Brandeis, Lipstadt would write her dissertation on Louis Lipsky, an important American Zionist leader. Other books, in the years to follow, would include Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933–1945; The Eichmann Trial; and Golda Meir: Israel’s Matriarch.
When it was suggested to her, in the 1980s, that she look into Holocaust denial, she balked. Was that a worthy area of study? Sure, there were Holocaust-deniers on the fringes, but weren’t they like flat-earth theorists, hardly worth bothering with? She discovered that the problem was wider and deeper.
In 1993, her book on Holocaust denial came out. The legal battle with David Irving lasted six years. She was defended by Anthony Julius, the formidable London lawyer. Afterward, Lipstadt wrote a memoir of the experience: History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier. In 2016, the memoir became a movie, Denial, in which the British actress Rachel Weisz played Lipstadt. (The actress’s parents escaped the Holocaust as children: her father from Budapest, her mother from Vienna.)
Here is an excerpt from an article by Tad Friend, published in The New Yorker in September 2016:
The two women met for breakfast recently at Café Mogador, in the East Village. Lipstadt, a sixty-nine-year-old redhead, wore a flowery silk scarf that she’d loaned to Weisz for the film. She said, “The first thing Rachel said to me was ‘David Irving said you have a Brooklyn accent, as a put-down, but I’ve been listening and it’s Queens.’” She put her hand on the arm of Weisz, forty-six, who’d arrived in a tweed jacket. “My family is annoyed because I didn’t correct you. It was the Upper West Side.”
In the mid 2000s, David Irving was imprisoned in Austria for 13 months — imprisoned for Holocaust denial. Deborah Lipstadt has explained that she does not believe Holocaust denial should be a crime. “I’m a free-speech person. I’m against censorship.” Laws against Holocaust denial turn it “into forbidden fruit,” making it “more attractive to people.”
A question: Will Holocaust denial increase or decrease in coming years? Increase, Professor Lipstadt says to me. This is, in part, because there will be no survivors left. “I can give a pretty good lecture,” she says. “I can hold my students’ interest.” But nothing equals bringing a survivor into the classroom — to tell his or her story firsthand. Soon, they will all be gone.
And consider: The October 7 massacre was committed months ago. And almost immediately after, people around the world were denying it — despite the fact that the perpetrators filmed it, documented it, celebrated it.
The memory hole has a terrible pull.
Day after day, people say, “I’m not antisemitic, I’m anti-Zionist.” I once brought up this issue with Paul Johnson, the late British historian and journalist. He said, “Scratch someone who says he is anti-Zionist, and it won’t be long before you reach the antisemite within.” He was generalizing — but the generalization strikes me as true. It comports with what I have seen in my own experience.
Think about what we have seen since October 7, Professor Lipstadt says. A synagogue in Montreal is firebombed. Pro-Hamas slogans are scrawled on Jewish institutions. A girls’ basketball game in Greater New York has to end early because Jewish players are subjected to disgusting taunts (anti-Jewish, pro-Hamas).
If anti-Zionism and antisemitism are separate, says Lipstadt, “then why the hell — excuse my language — why are you attacking girls on a basketball team or firebombing a synagogue,” etc.? Bad actors blur the line.
Lipstadt hastens to say what should not have to be said — but she says it in light of the diplomatic position she holds: Criticism of Israel is hardly the equivalent of antisemitism. “Yes,” I interject. “Otherwise, every Israeli would be guilty.” No doubt, Lipstadt says — “because the national sport of Israel is not soccer but criticism of the government.”
As we talk, I tell Professor Lipstadt something personal: Earlier in my life, I read a lot about antisemitism. Explanations for it were good but not entirely satisfying. Envy was a common explanation — and a good one. But did it really account for so persistent and murderous a hatred, amid all the sundry hatreds of the world? Eventually, I gave up trying to understand antisemitism and simply wanted it defeated, or curbed — at least combatted.
A funny question for a renowned expert on antisemitism: Does she understand antisemitism, really and truly? “The more I study it, the more I understand aspects of it,” Lipstadt says, “but I don’t fully understand it.” She says that I and others might bear one thing in mind: Antisemitism is irrational. And we can drive ourselves dizzy if we spend too much time trying to figure out the irrational.
Like many of us, Lipstadt is not too fond of the term “antisemitism,” though she uses it, as we all do. There is a whiff of the scientific, or scientistic, about it. She prefers the good old-fashioned Judenhass, or “Jew-hatred” — a term she also uses. It can make people sit up straight.
She used it during her Senate confirmation hearing. She used it last November, when she spoke at the March for Israel on the National Mall. (She ended that speech with a stirring and cherished phrase from the Bible: “Chazak v’amatz,” meaning, “Be strong and have courage.”)
Ambassador Lipstadt describes her work against antisemitism, or Jew-hatred, as a “three-pronged pitchfork.” Obviously, antisemitism is a danger to the Jews. That’s one. Also, it is a danger to democracy, she says. Why? “Because if you buy into conspiracies — the Jews control the media, the Jews control the banks, the Jews control politics — then democracy, to you, is a sham.”
The third prong is closely related to the second: Antisemitism is a danger to national security. It destabilizes a society. It leads to, or foreshadows, chaos. “No good thing ever follows antisemitism,” says Lipstadt, simply. Of historical examples, there is no shortage.
She has been saying to her colleagues in government — in intelligence, in diplomacy — “If you see antisemitism, that doesn’t mean, ipso facto, you’re going to see a failed state. But take a good look — because it could be a warning sign.”
To say it once more, Deborah Lipstadt has been immersed in the world of antisemitism and Holocaust denial her entire life (from, say, grad school on). I wonder whether she ever gets weary. Yes, she says. “I take a day off here and there.” But she thinks of history, and everything that is now at stake, and always at stake.
On her desk is a book by David Nirenberg: Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (2013). “It’s a tour de force,” says Lipstadt, and “it’s not bedtime reading” (unless you want nightmares). The book details what the Jews have endured: the pogroms, the expulsions, the Holocaust. And, amazingly, they are still here — on their feet, if battered or endangered.
Ambassador Lipstadt wants to be in the fray. She wants “to monitor and combat antisemitism,” as her official title says. “I am so grateful,” she tells me. “Because so many people want to do something. I get the chance to do it. So that gets me out of bed.”