Deborah Lipstadt’s Taxonomy of the Anti-Semite

Among American Jewish academics, the historian Deborah Lipstadt is one of a handful of genuine celebrities. The celebrity owes to her book Denying the Holocaust (1993), in which—writing on a topic that until then had received relatively scant scholarly attention—Lipstadt took to task the British historian David Irving for his assertion that the Nazi gas chambers were a “myth.” Irving, who at the time still enjoyed the status of a more or less reputable historian, dragged Lipstadt into London’s High Court in April 2000 brandishing a libel suit.

By the time the trial was over, Lipstadt and her legal team had exposed Irving as an unvarnished liar and Hitler apologist. So compelling was the drama of her victory that it was eventually made into a movie: Denial (2016), with Rachel Weisz playing Lipstadt and Timothy Spall stealing the show with his portrayal of Irving.

In that same book, Lipstadt drew attention to the “confluence [of] anti-Israel, anti-Semitic, and Holocaust-denial forces” among which Irving was a key player—along with Hamas, Hizballah, the Nation of Islam, and others. That coalition, which remains very much alive today, is the subject of her most recent book, Anti-Semitism Here and Now. An informative, efficiently constructed volume crafted for a general audience, the new book takes the form of an email correspondence between the author and two fictitious characters: “Joe,” a non-Jewish professor, and “Abigail,” a student of Lipstadt’s who is about to begin her PhD studies.