The latest guest on my Q&A podcast is Deborah Lipstadt — go here. Professor Lipstadt is an eminent scholar of modern Jewish history, antisemitism, and Holocaust denial. Today, she is an official at the State Department — an ambassador-at-large. Her formal title is: “special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism.”
At the beginning of our podcast, I relate a memory. After 9/11, everyone was interested in the Middle East and Middle Eastern history. Many people wanted to hear from Bernard Lewis, the venerable historian. I said to him, “Did you ever think that so many would be interested in your field?” He said, “No, I didn’t.” But they were, intensely.
We are in an antisemitic moment, if you will. Then again, you could say that we’ve been in an antisemitic moment for hundreds or thousands of years. Nevertheless, antisemitism is presently ferocious.
Listen to Ambassador Lipstadt, who tells me the following (and I paraphrase slightly):
In the little over a year and a half since I’ve been in office, the issue has escalated in a way that, even though I have spent my whole life studying antisemitism and its impact, I never would have imagined. I say, not even half in jest but just a quarter in jest: “I work in a growth industry. And sadly, business is booming.”
It seems to me that Professor Lipstadt has trained for 50, 60 years for this moment. She allows that she has a framed Bible verse in her office. It comes from the Book of Esther: “Perhaps you were born for such a time as this.”
(Here is the King James version: “and who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this?”)
Deborah Lipstadt was born in New York in 1947. In our podcast, I ask how she was drawn to her field. It is a complicated question. But she cites a couple of things. She was a student in Israel at the time of the ’67 war. (That would have concentrated the mind.) Five years later, she went to the Soviet Union — “the late, unlamented Soviet Union,” as she says — to meet refuseniks.
(In this same period, Lipstadt notes, Israeli athletes were massacred at the Munich Olympics.)
Every day, someone says — or many people say — “I’m not antisemitic, I’m anti-Zionist.” This is one of the questions Ambassador Lipstadt and I take up in our podcast. As she notes, the distinction between antisemitism and anti-Zionism is blurrier than ever — or more spurious than ever — after October 7.
When you firebomb a synagogue in Montreal, are you making an “anti-Zionist” statement?
With Holocaust denial, Lipstadt has been grappling her whole career. In the 1990s, there was a famous trial pitting her against David Irving, the notorious English Holocaust-denier. She won. I remember reading David Pryce-Jones on the subject of the trial. Marvelous writing, of course. In 2016, a movie was made about the case: Denial, starring Rachel Weisz (who played Professor Lipstadt).
Will Holocaust denial increase or decrease over time? I put this question to Lipstadt — who votes, increase. For one thing, the survivors will be gone. Professor Lipstadt has taught the Holocaust for years, as she tells me, and she teaches it well — but nothing is so effective as having a survivor come and speak to the class. Soon, that will be impossible.
The Holocaust ended in 1945. Today, there are people who deny October 7 — which occurred a few months ago. This, despite the fact that the perpetrators filmed it and then celebrated it. Bragged about it.
Toward the end of our conversation, I ask a big question: Even if people devote a life to studying antisemitism, can they ever really understand it? In her answer, Ambassador Lipstadt makes an important point: Antisemitism is, at bottom, irrational.
By the way, she prefers the term “Jew-hatred” (Judenhass) to “antisemitism.” So do I (for what it’s worth). “Jew-hatred” is more direct. And “antisemitism” has a whiff of the scientific, or scientistic. A whiff of the clinical.
There is a lot more to say, and I will write further about Deborah Lipstadt and the questions we have explored — but I have said enough for a blogpost. Again, to hear from the ambassador, professor, herself, go here.