When Deborah Lipstadt set out to become a historian, she never intended to make history herself. But after being put on trial by British Holocaust denier David Irving, who sued her for libel last year, she has done exactly that.
“One of the newspapers talked about this trial as having done for the new century what the Eichmann trial did for the old one,” she said in a telephone interview from her parents’ apartment in New York. That the trial will enter the history books as evidence of the ongoing repercussions of the Holocaust 55 years after it ended “is a surprise. But yes, it will be taught in history classes.”
Lipstadt will be speaking here at the Jewish Community Federation Women’s Division “Power of One” on Tuesday. She’ll return to the Bay Area to San Francisco on May 2 to participate in the series “Silent Voices Speak.”
Her London trial, which began in January 2000 and ended with Lipstadt’s victory three months later, quickly became much more than just one person suing another. It not only made headlines around the world, it also seemed to put on trial the veracity of the Holocaust itself.
With the outpouring of support Lipstadt received from survivors, Jews and non-Jews, she said, “I realized that I was not there just for myself, but on behalf of lots of other people.”
Irving, a noted military historian who later became affiliated with the Holocaust denial movement, took on Lipstadt, a professor of history at Emory University in Atlanta and a Holocaust scholar. He charged that in her 1994 book “Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory” she and her British publisher, Penguin UK, were responsible for sullying his reputation and making it difficult for him to find work.
The British libel laws differ from those of the United States, putting the burden of proof on the defendant rather than the plaintiff. As a result, Irving was able to take Lipstadt to court on the grounds that she called him an anti-Semite, a racist, a distorter of history, a partisan of Hitler and a Holocaust denier.
When Lipstadt first heard Irving was suing her, she laughed. But as she was to find out, there was nothing funny about it. The woman who continually refused invitations to debate Holocaust deniers on the grounds that debating them gives legitimacy to their argument, found herself, for 32 days in court, facing a man she considers a dangerous anti-Semite.
When the verdict came, which not only exonerated Lipstadt and her publisher, but ruled that Irving would have to pay some $5 million in legal fees, Lipstadt said it was “overwhelming.”
“We never thought we’d lose, but we weren’t sure we’d win in the big way that we won. It was really so amazing.”
Meanwhile, almost one year after the verdict, the trial isn’t quite over. Irving has requested permission to appeal the decision, and Lipstadt must return to London in June to face him yet again.
“We’re going to try to fight him,” she said.
Of the man who has so greatly impacted her life, but with whom she has never spoken directly, she said: “Fighting Irving was like when you step in dirt on the street. It’s really meaningless unless you get rid of every last drop of it. It becomes putrid and smells and mucks up things. This man has no intrinsic importance except the trouble he can create, unless we do something about it.”
Lipstadt has turned into a celebrity of sorts; she is recognized sometimes, and is constantly invited to speak.
“I’ve been inundated with people wanting to thank me and reach out to me in an unbelievable fashion,” she said. “It’s really very humbling.”
As a Jew, she said, the trial taught her that “when you face wrong, you can’t sit idly by. I know it now in a different way.”
When asked what has happened to her other work during this busy time, she laughed and said “what other work?”
Lipstadt is writing a book about the trial, and continues to teach. “It’s hard,” she said, about her high demand as a speaker. “But I feel it’s very important to speak about it. But my commitment to Emory still comes first.”