In praise of Deborah Lipstadt

The United States Senate is not a body commonly associated with alacrity but its sluggishness in considering the nomination of Deborah Lipstadt has been noticeable. On Tuesday, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee finally heard from Dr Lipstadt, who has been nominated by President Biden to serve as the United States’ special envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism. If confirmed Dr Lipstadt will be the first to hold the title since it was elevated to an ambassadorial position, a reflection of growing concern in Washington DC about rising levels of Jew-hatred within the United States and overseas.

The ‘if’ hanging over Dr Lipstadt — and the slow pace of her confirmation — is down to Republican concerns about the non-partisan role going to an outspoken Democrat who has been critical of a Republican member of the committee. On the charge of outspokenness, there can be no plea in mitigation. Dr Lipstadt grew up in Queens. Outspoken is her indoor voice. As for her politics, she is indeed a liberal but one who has never shied away from assailing the liberal (and not-so-liberal) left for its ‘progressive’ form of anti-Semitism. Her primary difficulty has been a tweet she posted about Ron Johnson, a GOP senator from Wisconsin who said he would have been more troubled by the 6 January riot if it had been carried out by Black Lives Matter activists rather than Maga-hatters. Dr Lipstadt opined on Twitter that this was ‘white supremacy/nationalism’ — ‘pure and simple’. It was not her most nuanced contribution but it was a tweet, not a scholarly analysis, and she apologised to Senator Johnson on Tuesday. (That did not win him over and he walked out of the hearing after telling the academic she was ‘simply not qualified’ for the post.)

Deborah Lipstadt is abundantly qualified for the job of combating anti-Semitism. She is the Dorot professor of modern Jewish history and Holocaust studies at Emory University, the founder of the Institute for Jewish Studies, and an expert consultant to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. She served on the Holocaust Memorial Council, sat on the State Department Advisory Committee on Religious Freedom Abroad, was previously the Burton Resnick invitational scholar in anti-Semitism at the Centre for Advanced Holocaust Studies, and represented President George W. Bush at the 60th anniversary commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz.

Most famously, she defeated David Irving in a libel action in which he attempted to use Britain’s censorious libel laws to silence her criticisms of his Holocaust denial and professional malpractice as a historian. The trial ended in a damning judgment in which the High Court determined Irving was ‘an active Holocaust denier’, ‘anti-Semitic and racist’ and someone who ‘persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence’ for his own ‘ideological reasons’. Dr Lipstadt has authored seven books and numerous articles, including the landmark Denying the Holocaust and Antisemitism: Here and Now. In her documenting of anti-Semitism, her name merits mention alongside the likes of Professor Robert Wistrich and Anthony Julius for her lively, rigorous scholarship.

Deborah Lipstadt is therefore more than qualified for the special envoy post but to say so addresses the wrong question. It is not a matter of Dr Lipstadt's credentials but of the sufficiency of the role to which she has been nominated. The special envoy 'develops and implements policies and projects to support efforts to combat anti-Semitism'. She could have been nominated a decade ago and would still be working her way through her day one caseload. In the United States and overseas, anti-Semitism has an almighty wind in its sails. Last year marked a ten-year high for anti-Semitic incidents worldwide. New York City, which saw a pitifully-reported epidemic of anti-Semitic attacks in 2019, appears to be heading for another big year of crimes against Jews, with the latest NYPD statistics showing anti-Jewish incidents up 275 per cent on this time last year.

In the United States, where Jews make up 1.9 per cent of the population, they are the victims of 60.2 per cent of all religiously-motivated hate crimes. In progressive Canada, the 1 per cent of citizens who are Jewish suffer 15 per cent of the religious hate crimes, and in even more progressive Sweden, where Jews amount to 0.1 per cent of residents, 27 per cent of hate crimes are anti-Semitic in nature. In 2021, Britain’s Community Security Trust reported the greatest volume of anti-Semitic incidents it has ever recorded in a single year, an increase of 34 per cent on 2020. Research by the Woolf Institute found that British users of Twitter see twice as many anti-Semitic tweets in a year than there are Jews living in the UK.

That is a far-from-exhaustive run-through of the statistics but it illustrates the scale of the problem facing Deborah Lipstadt. Of course the Senate should confirm her — it should have confirmed her long before now — but one need not be a pessimist to wonder how much of a dent one woman can put in all this. There may be one cause for hope, to be found in the origin of her name. Deborah was a judge and prophetess in Biblical times, during the Canaanite oppression of the Israelites, and Sefer Shoftim recounts that ‘the rulers ceased in Israel’ until God ‘didst arise a mother in Israel’. Deborah raised an army against the Canaanites and, after their defeat, the Land of Israel knew peace for 40 years. Forty years of peace from anti-Semitism seems too much to hope for but Deborah Lipstadt would give it one hell of a shot.