Deborah Lipstadt teaches at a prestigious university. She has written several scholarly books about the Holocaust. But she’s no dry, dispassionate academic. When it comes to existential threats to the Jewish people, she sees things in black and white.
Best known for her war against Holocaust denial, Lipstadt will speak at the Osher Marin JCC in San Rafael on Thursday, May 27. The title of her lecture: “The ‘New’ Anti-Semitism: How New? How Bad?”
According to Lipstadt, very bad. Especially when it comes to delegitimizing the Jewish state, something she equates with anti-Semitism.
Deborah Lipstadt
“There’s just a shrillness [against] Israel that’s beyond anything we’ve seen,” Lipstadt says. “And I’m not one of those who say ‘it’s worse than it’s ever been.’ ”
Lipstadt, 62, ticks off the manifestations of the new anti-Semitism. It comes in the guise of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel. It comes in the form of intense anti-Israel activity on college campuses (though not at Atlanta’s Emory University, where she teaches modern Jewish and Holocaust studies).
It comes through as the so-called one-state solution, proposed by some anti-Israel activists, that posits a single nation on land that is now Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. It would do away with Israel and form some sort of Jewish-Muslim binational state.
The one-state solution crosses a line for Lipstadt because “that’s going to result in Jews being killed,” she says. “Anybody who thinks otherwise is naive.”
And it comes in the form of Holocaust denial, a phenomenon she understands perhaps better than anyone. Lipstadt is known for her court battle against British denier David Irving, who sued Lipstadt for libel in 2000. She chronicled her experience in her 2006 book “History on Trial.”
After she had branded Irving a Holocaust denier in one of her books, Irving sued Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin Books, demanding her titles be stripped from shelves.
Under English law, the burden of proof lies with the defendant –– in this case, Lipstadt, who had to prove she had not committed libel. “I wasn’t nervous that we were going to lose,” she recalls, “but I thought we would get a wishy-washy judgment.”
That didn’t happen. Lipstadt won and Irving lost. Big time. Ultimately, the disgraced pseudo-historian was forced to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in court costs and other trial-related expenses. Ultimately he lost his home and filed for bankruptcy.
One down. So many to go.
“Some things don’t change,” she says of anti-Semitism. “Certain new things have been added. You have in place a strong element of Holocaust denial. It’s not the hard-core denial I saw in my trial; no denying of gas chambers. It’s more ‘Israelis are like the Nazis’ and ‘What they do to Palestinians is genocide.’ ”
She concedes it’s acceptable to criticize Israeli governmental policies, even harshly. Yet to equate Israeli treatment of Palestinians with Nazi treatment of Jews “misconstrues what happened during the Holocaust. It’s a denial of what it is, what it was.”
A native of New York City, Lipstadt grew up in a Modern Orthodox home. Living in Israel as a young adult around the time of the Six-Day War in 1967 opened her eyes to the impact of the Holocaust and the experience of survivors.
She went on to earn a doctorate at Brandeis University and, later, to serve as a consultant to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Lipstadt makes it her policy never to debate Holocaust deniers, even though many of them cloak themselves in the respectable veneer of academia. She says she sees through them.
“The point is, these people are anti-Semitic,” she says. “Prejudice is irrational, so you can’t expect a rational response from them.”
She may not debate them, but she calls them out in her books, her lectures and her blog (http://www.lipstadt.blogspot.com). She’d do it on street corners if she thought it would help.
Lipstadt’s battle never ends. The David Irvings of the world represent only one kind of Holocaust denier. The sentiment is rampant in the Muslim world, with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad conspicuously vocal in his own Holocaust denial.
Somehow, Lipstadt contents herself fighting the good fight on behalf of the Jewish people.
“We left one guy reeling,” she says of her victory over Irving. “He was very much destroyed as a competent Holocaust denial figure. That’s a pretty good feeling.”
Deborah Lipstadt will speak at 7 p.m. Thursday, May 27 at the Osher Marin JCC, 200 N. San Pedro Road, San Rafael. $12-$15. Information: (415) 444-8000 or http://www.marinjcc.org.
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05/21/2010 at 03:55 PM
With all due respect to the learned doctor, she should understand that while there are Holocaust deniers, they are only a small, a very small, percentage of those who De. Lipstadt would call “anti-Semitic.”
Among those who I guess the doctor would call “anti-Semitic” are many diaspora Jews and Israelis who decry Israel’s brutal occupation and oppression of the Palestinians, a people who bore no responsibility for the virulent anti-Semitism that led a handful of European Jews to call for a Jewish state. In the end, the Palestinians have also been victims of European anti-Semitism having lost much of their homeland while watching more and more of their lands being stolen by the Israeli government for the illegal Jewish-only settlements.
If Dr. Lipstadt really care about growing anti-Semitism she would call on Israel to end its brutal occupation. Many of us know that what is causing anti-Semitism can be summed up in this accurate expression. It is the Occupation, Stupid.
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