Deborah Lipstadt is the principal English-language scholar of Holocaust denial. Her 1993 book Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory was the first systematic academic study of the denial movement. The 1996 libel writ that David Irving served on her in response to a passage in the book produced the 2000 Royal Courts of Justice trial that established Irving’s standing as a deliberate falsifier of the historical record.
The earlier career
Lipstadt was born in 1947 in New York. She took her doctorate in modern Jewish history at Brandeis University in 1976 and held teaching posts at the University of Washington, the University of California Los Angeles, and Occidental College before joining Emory University in Atlanta in 1993, where she has held the Dorot Chair in Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies. Her first book, Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust 1933-1945 (1986), examined the failure of the American press to report on the Nazi persecution of European Jewry during the war. The book established her as a serious scholar of Holocaust historiography and the history of memory.
Denying the Holocaust
Lipstadt published Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory with the Free Press in 1993. The book was the first comprehensive academic study of the international Holocaust denial movement. It traced the movement’s origins to the immediate post-war period (Maurice Bardèche, Paul Rassinier), through the founding of the Institute for Historical Review in California in 1978, to the Faurisson affair in France in 1979 and the Zundel trials in Toronto in 1985 and 1988. It documented the personal networks, the publishing infrastructure, and the rhetorical techniques of the movement. It described David Irving as “one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial”.
The book was widely reviewed in the academic and mainstream press. It became, and has remained, the standard work on the subject in English.
The Irving libel writ
Irving sued Lipstadt and her British publisher, Penguin Books, for libel in the High Court in London in September 1996. The British jurisdiction was Irving’s deliberate choice. English libel law as it then stood placed the burden of proof on the defendant. Lipstadt and Penguin would have to prove that what Lipstadt had written about Irving was substantially true. Irving did not have to prove it was false.
The defence was led by Anthony Julius (Lipstadt’s solicitor) and Richard Rampton QC (lead counsel). The principal expert witnesses on the historical questions were Robert Jan van Pelt and Richard Evans, supported by Christopher Browning, Peter Longerich and Hajo Funke. The defence strategy was settled early. They would not litigate whether the Holocaust had happened. They would litigate whether Irving’s specific historical claims were the work of an honest historian or a deliberate falsifier. The strategy required the defence to take Irving’s books apart paragraph by paragraph, source by source, against the original German archives.
The trial ran from 11 January to 11 March 2000 in Court 73 of the Royal Courts of Justice. Justice Charles Gray sat alone. Lipstadt did not give evidence at the trial. The defence had decided early that the case was about Irving’s historiography and not about Lipstadt’s, and that putting her on the stand would only allow Irving to redirect the case toward her. She sat in court for the duration of the trial in silence.
The judgment
Justice Gray handed down judgment on 11 April 2000. It ran to 333 pages. It found that the Holocaust had happened, that the gas chambers at Auschwitz had been used for the homicidal gassing of approximately 1.1 million people, and that Irving had deliberately falsified the historical record. The detailed findings on Irving’s historiography ran to nearly 200 pages. Irving was ordered to pay the defendants’ costs, estimated at approximately £2 million.
Lipstadt’s account of the trial, History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving, was published by Ecco in 2005 and is the principal first-person account of the proceedings from the defence side. The 2016 film Denial, directed by Mick Jackson and adapted by David Hare from Lipstadt’s book, dramatised the trial with Rachel Weisz playing Lipstadt and Timothy Spall playing Irving.
Subsequent work
Lipstadt published The Eichmann Trial with Schocken in 2011, a study of the 1961 Jerusalem trial of Adolf Eichmann that included a sustained engagement with Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) and the “banality of evil” thesis. Her Antisemitism: Here and Now (Schocken, 2019) addressed the resurgence of antisemitism in the 21st century in both right-wing and left-wing politics.
President Joseph R. Biden nominated her in July 2021 to the position of United States Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, with the rank of ambassador. The Senate confirmed her in March 2022. She held the position until January 2025. The role involved coordinating the State Department’s response to antisemitic incidents abroad and engaging with international counterparts on Holocaust education and remembrance.
Afterwards
Lipstadt’s significance to the field of Holocaust denial scholarship is that she produced the first systematic academic account of the denial movement, and that her courtroom defence of that account, against a libel suit brought by the most prominent English-language denier, produced the 2000 Gray judgment. The judgment is the document the historical profession holds against Irving. Without Lipstadt’s book, the libel writ would not have been served; without the libel writ, the judgment would not exist; without the judgment, the standard scholarly assessment of Irving’s work would still rest on the academic-press literature alone, without the authority of a 333-page High Court ruling.
She is still active. She is the principal living English-language authority on the history and historiography of Holocaust denial.
See also
Sources
- Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, Free Press, 1993
- Deborah Lipstadt, History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving, Ecco, 2005
- Deborah Lipstadt, Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust 1933-1945, Free Press, 1986
- Deborah Lipstadt, The Eichmann Trial, Schocken, 2011
- Deborah Lipstadt, Antisemitism: Here and Now, Schocken, 2019
- Justice Charles Gray, Judgment in Irving v. Penguin Books and Lipstadt, Royal Courts of Justice, 11 April 2000, [2000] EWHC QB 115
- Richard J. Evans, Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial, Basic Books, 2001
- Robert Jan van Pelt, The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial, Indiana University Press, 2002
- D. D. Guttenplan, The Holocaust on Trial, W. W. Norton, 2001
- Mick Jackson (dir.) and David Hare (writer), Denial, Bleecker Street and BBC Films, 2016
- United States Department of State, “Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism”, https://www.state.gov