Deborah Lipstadt, who recently ended her tenure as Biden’s antisemitism envoy, has had the great fortune of being sued by the right person.
Back in 2000, British agit-historian David Irving sued Lipstadt for libel after she accurately identified him as a Holocaust denier. The London trial ended up being a media sensation — Lipstadt’s sizable defense bill was paid by many benefactors, including famed director Steven Spielberg; the affair was dramatized in the 2016 film “Denial” — and a great boost to Lipstadt’s otherwise ordinary academic career.
Suddenly, Lipstadt was the foremost expert on antisemitism, despite the fact that she is “generally known among scholars more for her ability to translate historical concepts into an accessible idiom than for her archival research,” as Jewish Currents reported.
To understand Lipstadt’s worldview, you have to appreciate that she exceptionalizes antisemitism as an ancient, deeply embedded hatred that, in her words, is “always lurking beneath the surface ready to emerge at a time of stress. “
Thus, antisemitism is not circumstantial, but a latent feature in every society. Moreover, a byproduct of this view, Lipstadt comes awfully close to arguing that the Holocaust is a unique event in history, incomparable to other genocides.
There are several problems with this take. Rather than an interrogative investigation of the persistence of antisemitism, Lipstadt uses the persistence of a prejudice as sufficient evidence that it is immutable. But anti-Black racism is also centuries old, and Europe has had an antagonistic relationship with Islam that predates the Crusades, in fact, from the very beginning of the faith. Anti-Black and anti-Islam prejudice, akin to antisemitism, are not just “out there,” but products of unique forces that are not continuously present across every society.
As Lipstadt has correctly noted, however, antisemitism is unique in one way: It functions not solely as a prejudice but as a conspiracy.
In the Arab world (and the United States, for that matter), for example, a fixation on Jewish conspiracy is currently, sadly, not uncommon, but it is not something that has always lurked beneath the surface, but contingent on the clash with expansionist Zionism and repeated wars with Israel. Lipstatd’s explanation serves more to point out something than explain why it exists in the first place.
More troublingly, the opinion that the world is inherently hostile to Jews is not harmless. As one Jewish scholar has noted, “If one accepts antisemitism to be eternal, and not a consequence of social or historical factors, then it is a fact of life that will forever push Jewish people into defensive postures. It will make us more nationalist, more reactionary, more militaristic, and more closed off from the rest of the world.”
And such a worldview makes Jewish solidarity with non-Jews in a common front against hatred harder to achieve if antisemitism is seen as exceptional, and thus dissimilar, from other bigotries.
Lipstadt’s definition of antisemitism, naturally, encompasses a very tendentious application of the term in relation to criticism of Israel.
A young liberal from the Northeast, Lipstadt was in Israel in the lead-up to and during the 1967 War. She witnessed Israelis preparing mass graves for a war they thought could reach Tel Aviv’s neighborhoods. In the end, of course, Israel’s so-called preemptive attack left the Jewish State roundly victorious. The mix of Jewish precariousness and Israeli triumph left a lasting impression on Lipstadt: Only the Jewish nation-state could protect Jews.
From this conclusion, it is a short step toward interpreting opposition to Israel and Zionism, and even mild criticism, as an attack on Jews as Jews.
Lipstadt has repeatedly stated that she does not believe all criticism of Israel is antisemitic, but her disclaimer is not very convincing, given her more robust attempts to brand said criticism as antisemitism.
It is common practice for Zionists to state “of course, you can criticize Israel” and then proceed to find every criticism as alleged evidence of antisemitism. More concretely, Lipstadt is a supporter of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism, which was crafted in recent years to shield Israel from criticism by falsely conflating it with antisemitism.
Moreover, Lipstadt has a history of bad-faith accusations of antisemitism, using her newfound fame to tarnish the reputation of others.
Back in the mid-2000s, after the late President Jimmy Carter published “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,” Lipstadt took to the Washington Post to decry Carter for failing to emphasize Israeli suffering, failing to mention the Holocaust, and “facing a storm of criticism, he has relied on anti-Semitic stereotypes in defense.” For Lipstadt, Carter’s centering of Palestinian suffering, without equal time for Israelis and even Jews outside of Israel, was objectionable.
Recently, Lipstadt has come out in support of the Trump Administration’s deportation of foreign students for their pro-Palestinian activism, risibly presenting it as a centrist position: “I’m coming down right smack dab in the middle.”
Elsewhere, Lipstadt has dismissed Jewish critics of Israel as “Jews of convenience,” based her opposition to a one-state solution in Palestine/Israel on the asseration that Muslims do not respect equal rights for others (this point was made without irony while affirming support for Israel), joked about Israel’s beeber attack in Lebanon, and has spent plenty of oxygen blaming the chant “globalize the intifada” for everything from the Bondi Beach massacre to an arson attack on a Mississippi synogague. In neither case did Lipstadt bother to demonstrate how the liberation chant motivated the perpetrators — and in the case of the arson, the arrested suspect is a white nationalist who does not fit the bill as a pro-Palestinian radical.
One of Lipstadt’s most tiresome lines, however, is her “antisemitism on the right” and “antisemitism on the left” approach. Most infamously, Lipstadt engaged in this myopic banter on the day of the Jan. 6 insurrection:
In response to a man celebrating the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Lipstadt’s tweet effectively positions alleged left-wing antisemitism as the main problem and the right-wing variant as almost incidental. In reality, the greatest threat to Jewish safety in America is from the far-right.
Lipstadt, like many a Zionist, is fixated on the left ’cause of their pro-Palestinian sympathies — and Lipstadt was very attuned to it even when pro-Palestine views were not yet all that common back in early 2021. The right-wing, however, is still mainly staunchly pro-Israel, even if cracks are emerging. In other words, the left is philosemitic and leans towards anti-Zionism; the right is antisemitic and leans towards pro-Zionism. Navigating this space is difficult for Lipstadt, for whom views on Israel are inseparable from antisemitism.
Needless to say, Lipstadt is a militarist, tweeting after Oct. 7, “No one has the right to tell Israel how to defend itself.”
The double standard is glaring: Palestinians have endured decades of ethnic cleansing, land theft, massacres, apartheid, arbitrary detention, humiliation, and a brutal military occupation, but only Israelis have the right to take whatever actions they deem necessary to enforce their occupation. Palestinians have no similar beyond-reproach right to rid themselves of an occupier.
Lipstadt believes in a hierarchy of human beings: No one can lecture Israelis, no matter how genocidal, but Palestinians should constantly be told how and when they may even register a mild protest over their subjugation.
Moreover, it is the duty of the Palestinians to make their oppressors feel safe. For Lipstadt to even come close to saying Palestinians have a right to defend themselves against, say, settler pogroms would require her to first notice Jewish violence, which she never publicly acknowledges.
For her, nothing Israel did before Oct. 7 justifies the attack, but everything Israel has done since is justified by Oct. 7.
***
