Deborah E. Lipstadt was born March 18, 1947 in New York City to Erwin Lipstadt, a German immigrant salesman, and his wife, Miriam Peiman, whom he met at their neighborhood synagogue. Deborah Lipstadt studied at the Hebrew Institute of Long Island and with Rabbi Emanuel Rackman at Temple Shaarei Tefillah. She was an exchange student at Hebrew University of Jerusalem during the 1967 Six Day War, two years later receiving a bachelor’s degree in history from City College of New York. She received a master’s degree and a doctorate from Brandeis University , respectively in 1972 and 1976.
Lipstadt taught from 1974 to 1979 at the University of Washington in Seattle. She became an assistant professor at UCLA but after being denied tenure there, she moved to the Brandeis-Bardin Institute as its director for two years. She then received a research fellowship at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and taught at Occidental College part time. She moved on to Emory University in 1993, helping to establish the Institute for Jewish Studies there. She wrote Denying the Holocaust in 1994, later defending herself successfully against a libel suit by author David Irving that brought her name to public attention. She won the 1994 National Jewish Book Award and an appointment by President Bill Clinton to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. She wrote History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier in 2005 and Antisemitism Here and Now in 2019.
In public controversies, Lipstadt criticized former U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid as soft-core Holocaust denial because it omitted from its chronology anything of importance between 1939 and 1947. She also criticized Newt Gingrich for describing the Palestinians as an “invented people,” accusing him of trying to out-Israel Israel. She also said Israel cheapens the Holocaust when it invokes it to justify war. In 2019 she resigned from the Young Israel movement when its national council’s president defended Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s incorporation of extremists into his coalition.
In 2021, President Joe Biden nominated Lipstadt to serve with the rank of ambassador in the White House Office to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism. Republican Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, whom Lipstadt had described as an advocate of white supremacy/ nationalism retaliated by holding up her nomination for many months. In March 2022, the Senate confirmed the appointment by a voice vote and Lipstadt was sworn in on May 3, 2022. In the year that followed she worked on the U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism, which was launched on May 25, 2023.
Tomorrow, March 19: Phillip Roth
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SDJW condensation of a Wikipedia article.