Deborah Lipstadt | |
|---|---|
 Official portrait, 2022 | |
| United States Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Antisemitism | |
| In office May 3, 2022 – January 20, 2025 | |
| President | Joe Biden |
| Preceded by | Elan Carr |
| Succeeded by | TBD |
| Personal details | |
| Born | Deborah Esther Lipstadt (1947-03-18)March 18, 1947 (age 78) New York City, U.S. |
| Education | City College of New York (BA) Brandeis University (MA,PhD) |
Deborah Esther Lipstadt (born March 18, 1947) is an American historian and diplomat, best known as author of the booksDenying the Holocaust (1993),History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier (2005),The Eichmann Trial (2011), andAntisemitism: Here and Now (2019). She served as theUnited States Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Anti-Semitism from 2022 to 2025. Since 1993 she has been the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies atEmory University inAtlanta,Georgia, US.[1][2]
Lipstadt was a consultant to theUnited States Holocaust Memorial Museum. In 1994,President of the United StatesBill Clinton appointed her to theUnited States Holocaust Memorial Council, and she served two terms.[3] On July 30, 2021, PresidentJoe Biden nominated her to be theUnited States Special Envoy forMonitoring and Combating Anti-Semitism.[4][5] She was confirmed by voice-vote on March 30, 2022, and sworn in on May 3, 2022.[6][7] She served in that position until January 2025. Lipstadt was named one of the100 most influential people in the world byTime magazine in 2023.[8]
Lipstadt was born in New York City to a Jewish family, the daughter of Miriam (née Peiman; 1915–2013) and Erwin Lipstadt (1903–1972).[9] Her mother was born in Canada, and her father, a salesman, was born in Germany. Her parents met at their neighborhood synagogue. She has an older sister, Helene, a historian, and a younger brother, Nathaniel, an investor on Wall Street.[citation needed]
In her youth, she studied at the Hebrew Institute of Long Island, and grew up inFar Rockaway, Queens. She studied with RabbiEmanuel Rackman at Temple Shaarei Tefillah. Lipstadt spent summers atCamp Massad.[citation needed]
She spent her junior year of college — which turned out to include theSix-Day War — in Israel, where she stayed as an exchange student at theHebrew University of Jerusalem. She completed aBachelor of Arts inAmerican history at theCity College of New York in 1969. She then enrolled atBrandeis University where she completed her master's degree in 1972 and then her Ph.D. in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies in 1976.[10] Her doctoral dissertation was entitled "The Zionist Career ofLouis Lipsky, 1900–1921".[10]
After receiving her Ph.D., Lipstadt began teaching, first at theUniversity of Washington in Seattle[1][11] from 1974 to 1979, then as an assistant professor atUCLA. When she was denied tenure there, she left in 1985 to be the director of the independentBrandeis-Bardin Institute for two years, during which time she also wrote a monthly column forThe Jewish Spectator. Lipstadt then received a research fellowship from theVidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism atHebrew University of Jerusalem, during which she studied Holocaust denial, and taught atOccidental College part time.[12]
Lipstadt then became an assistant professor of religion atEmory University in Atlanta in January 1993, becoming the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies that fall. She helped to create the Institute for Jewish Studies there.[12] She considered teaching as a visiting professor atColumbia University but didn't take the post as she felt at risk and Columbia would use her as a sop to show it was fightingantisemitism when that was not true.[13]
In May 2021, Lipstadt was considered for an ambassadorship position at theOffice to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism in theBiden administration.[14]
On July 30, 2021, PresidentJoe Biden nominated Lipstadt for this role.[15] Opposition from SenatorRon Johnson, whom she had tweeted was advocating "white supremacy/nationalism", delayed her nomination for many months.[16] Her initial nomination expired at the end of the year and was returned to President Biden on January 3, 2022.[17]
TheSenate Foreign Relations Committee held hearings on her nomination on February 8, 2022. On March 29, 2022, the committee favorably reported her nomination out of committee. Her nomination was supported by all committee Democrats, as well as senatorsMitt Romney andMarco Rubio.[16] It was confirmed by voice vote on March 30, 2022, and she was sworn in on May 3, 2022.[18]
Lipstadt was part of the Biden administration team that launched theU.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism on May 25, 2023.[19]
On October 17, 2023, in a joint statement withMichal Cotler-Wunsh (Israel's antisemitism envoy), published by theU.S. State Department, Lipstadt condemned theOctober 7 Hamas attack on Israel.[20]
In September 2024, Lipstadt attended theJewish New Year ceremony at theIsraeli embassy in Washington, D.C. with Israeli AmbassadorMichael Herzog, Zioness founderAmanda Berman, andcybertechnology officialAnne Neuberger.[21]
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On September 5, 1996, authorDavid Irving sued Lipstadt and her publisherPenguin Books forlibel in an English court for characterizing some of his writings and public statements asHolocaust denial in her bookDenying the Holocaust.
Lipstadt's legal defense team was led byAnthony Julius ofMishcon de Reya while Penguin's was led by Kevin Bays and Mark Bateman ofDavenport Lyons. Bothdefendants instructedRichard RamptonQC, while Penguin also instructed Heather Rogers as junior counsel. The expert witnesses for the defence includedCambridge historianRichard J. Evans,Christopher Browning,Robert Jan van Pelt, andPeter Longerich.
English libel law places the burden of proof on the defendant rather than the plaintiff.Lipstadt and Penguin won the case using the justification defense, namely by demonstrating in court that Lipstadt's accusations against Irving were substantially true and therefore not libelous. The case was argued as abench trial beforeMr Justice Gray, who produced a written judgment 349 pages long detailing Irving's systematic distortion of the historical record of World War II.The Times (April 14, 2000, p. 23) said of Lipstadt's victory, "History has had its day in court and scored a crushing victory."[22]
Despite her acrimonious history with Irving, Lipstadt has stated that she is personally opposed to the three-year prison sentence Austria imposed on Irving for two speeches he made in 1989, where he claimed there had been no gas chambers at Auschwitz. In Austria, minimizing the atrocities of theThird Reich is a crime punishable with up to 10 years' imprisonment. Speaking of Irving, Lipstadt said, "I am uncomfortable with imprisoning people for speech. Let him go and let him fade from everyone's radar screens ... Generally, I don't think Holocaust denial should be a crime. I am a free speech person, I am against censorship."[23][24]
In February 2007, Lipstadt warned of "soft-core denial" at the Zionist Federation's annual fundraising dinner in London. Referring to groups such as theMuslim Council of Britain, reportedly she stated: "When groups of people refuse to commemorateHolocaust Memorial Day unless equal time is given to anti-Muslim prejudice, this is soft-core denial."[25] According to Jonny Paul, "She received huge applause when she asked how former United States PresidentJimmy Carter could omit the years 1939–1947 from a chronology in his book"; referring to his recently published and controversial bookPalestine: Peace Not Apartheid, she said: "When a former president of the United States writes a book on theIsraeli–Palestinian crisis and writes a chronology at the beginning of the book in order to help them understand the emergence of the situation and in that chronology lists nothing of importance between 1939 and 1947, that is soft-core denial."[25]
Along the same lines, Lipstadt has criticized the German philosopher and historianErnst Nolte for engaging in what she calls "soft-core denial" of the Holocaust, arguing that Nolte practices an even more dangerous form ofnegationism than the Holocaust deniers. Speaking of Nolte in a 2003 interview, Lipstadt stated:
Historians such as the German Ernst Nolte are, in some ways, even more, dangerous than the deniers. Nolte is ananti-Semite of the first order, who attempts to rehabilitateHitler by saying that he was no worse thanStalin; but he is careful not to deny the Holocaust. Holocaust-deniers make Nolte's life more comfortable. They have, with their radical argumentation, pulled the center a little more to their side. Consequently, a less radical extremist, such as Nolte, finds himself closer to the middle ground, which makes him more dangerous.[26]
In late 2011, Lipstadt attacked American and Israeli politicians for what she called their invocation of the Holocaust for contemporary political purposes, something she thought mangled history. She rebukedRepublican Party presidential candidates for speeches that 'pandered' to theEvangelical constituency, as much as it did to theRepublican Jewish Coalition. She also judgedHoward Gutman's remarks on causal links between Muslim antisemitism and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict as "stupid". According toHaaretz, "She decried the 'hysteria' and 'neuroses' of many Jews and Israelis who compare the current situation in Europe and in the Middle East to the Holocaust-era":[27]
People go nuts here, they go nuts. There's no nuance, there's no middle ground, it's taking any shade of grey and stomping on it. There are no voices of calm, there are no voices of reason, not in this country, not in Israel.[28]
In the same interview, she argued that "If anti-Semitism becomes the reason through which your Jewish view of the world is refracted, if it becomes your prism, then it is very unhealthy. Jewish tradition never wanted that."[28] She said "You listen toNewt Gingrich talking about the Palestinians as an 'invented people'—it's out-AipackingAIPAC, it's out-Israeling Israel".[27] On a visit to London in September 2014, Lipstadt criticized the Israeli government and said that the government had "cheapened" the memory of the Holocaust by using it to justify war.[29] She has also rejected the view that Israeli military actions during the2014 Israel–Gaza conflict constituted a genocide.[30]
Lipstadt returned to the theme of soft-core Holocaust denial inThe Atlantic when responding to theTrump administration's statement onInternational Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27, 2017, which was condemned for the absence of a specific mention of Jews, as the principal victims of the Holocaust or of antisemitism itself.[31][32] "The Holocaust was de-Judaized. It is possible that it all began with a mistake. Someone simply did not realize what they were doing. It is also possible that someone did this deliberately."[33]
In February 2019, Lipstadt resigned her membership in theYoung Israel synagogue movement because its national council president defendedIsraeli Prime MinisterBenjamin Netanyahu's facilitation of a merger between theBayit Yehudi party and the extremistOtzma Yehudit party.[34]
In October 2019, Lipstadt had a letter to the editor published inThe New York Times, prompted by the awarding of theNobel Prize in Literature toPeter Handke, in which she wrote that the Nobel Committee awarded Handke a platform "he does not deserve" and that "the public does not need him to have", adding that such a platform could convince some that his "false claims must have some legitimacy".[35]
In September 2024, she came under criticism byCAIR over a joke made about the2024 Lebanon pager explosions.[36]
In January 2025, Lipstadt said inBrussels: "We are at an inflection point. Antisemitism is becoming increasinglynormalized...[antisemitic comments] are freely heard on streets of some of our leading Western democracies in many countries, including this country."[37]
After the publication ofDenying the Holocaust in June 1993, Lipstadt received the 1994National Jewish Book Award. Already a consultant to theUnited States Holocaust Memorial Museum, President Bill Clinton appointed her in 1994 to theUnited States Holocaust Memorial Council.[12] In 1997, Lipstadt received theEmory Williams teaching award for excellence in teaching.[38] She is also a recipient of the Albert D. Chernin Award from the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, which is given to "an American Jew whose work best exemplifies the social justice imperatives of Judaism, Jewish history and the protection of the Bill of Rights, particularly the First Amendment." Previous recipients of the Award includeRuth Bader Ginsburg andAlan Dershowitz.[39] Lipstadt was awarded the 2005 National Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category forHistory on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier[40]and the 2019 National Jewish Book Award in Education and Jewish Identity forAntisemitism: Here and Now.[41][42]
Lipstadt has received honorary doctorates from a number of institutions, includingOhio Wesleyan University,John Jay College of Criminal Justice of theCity University of New York,Yeshiva University, and theJewish Theological Seminary of America, among others.[39]
Dissenting, Mr. Stephens contends that art and politics are separate realms. Decry the artist's politics but treasure his artistry. Mr. Stephens ignores the immense platform or megaphone the Nobel committee has awarded Mr. Handke. There will be those who will be convinced that his false claims must have some legitimacy, simply because he is a Nobel winner.
