Court sets date for hearing on defamation suit

More than two years after an appeals court revived Rabbi Pinchas Lipner's $10 million defamation suit against the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation, the State Supreme Court has set a date to hear the case.

On Oct. 2, the court — meeting at Santa Rosa's Sonoma Country Day School as part of an outreach program aimed at students — will hear arguments from Lipner and the federation.

If the court sides with Lipner, the case will go to trial at San Francisco Superior Court. If the JCF prevails, the long-running case will end.

The case goes back to 2002, when Lipner, headmaster of the Hebrew Academy in San Francisco, sued the JCF and its former president, Richard Goldman, over harsh statements Goldman made about Lipner and the academy in a 1992 interview.

The interview was one in a series of "oral histories" funded by the federation and undertaken by the Regional Oral History Office of U.C. Berkeley's Bancroft Library.

Two years later, a San Francisco Superior Court judge dismissed Lipner's case, ruling he had exceeded the one-year statute of limitations for libel and slander cases. In May 2005, however, a 2-1 appellate court decision found that the oral history was "inherently undiscoverable" — in other words, so obscure and hard to locate that the one-year statute was too restricting — thereby reinvigorating Lipner's suit.

Following that ruling, lawyers for Goldman and the JCF petitioned the State Supreme Court.