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JUNE 2005

President Gregory Williams
& Dr. Deborah Lipstadt

The Triumph of Truth & Justice:
CCNY Sponsors Talk by
Dr. Deborah Lipstadt

By Joan Baum, Ph.D.

Calling her stunning victory in the British courts (the case in 2000 plus four appeals in 2001) over Holocaust denier David Irving who had sued her and her British publisher, Penguin Books, UK, for libel for what she wrote about him in Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (Free Press /MacMillan, 1993) “a significant triumph for Truth and History, “Dr. Deborah Lipstadt spoke to an overflow crowd of City College administrators, faculty and alums last month at The Sky Club at the Met Life Building about why she felt compelled to write a book on the trial: History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving (Ecco/HarperCollins). Irving, a not insignificant military historian had challenged Lipstadt’s assertions (100 words in her book) that he was a Hitler apologist (particularly evident in his 1977 book, Hitler’s War) and had falsified facts about the Holocaust when he claimed that it never happened and that arguments to the contrary were the work of Jewish conspirators out to make money and generate support for international Jewish hegemony. The British judge, Charles Grey, who ruled against Irving spent two hours on the verdict that held that Irving was not only a Holocaust denier but an anti-Semite, a racist, a falsifier of history, a Hitler apologist and a liar.

In effect, Dr. Lipstadt said, she had no choice but to rise to the challenge, though she believes that Irving was surprised by her decision. He probably thought that because she was a woman, an American, a Jew, she would simply ignore him. But British libel law puts the burden of proof on the defendant: had she not fought back, she would have been perceived as acquiescing in his version of history and also been responsible for his legal costs. She was fortunate, she said, she got a dream team to represent her that included Anthony Julius, a legal scholar who is also the author of a book on T.S. Eliot’s anti-Semitism, Richard Rapton and a host of stellar assistants and expert witnesses., who studied Irving’s writings and found evidence of misleading research, date shifts, made up conversations, vague footnote references. Feisty, focused, she was never not convinced of the rightness of the cause, which was not hers so much as history’s. And survivors’ cause. Their frailty was a prime reason she held her tongue during the trial and refused innumerable media requests to debate Irving. “What’s to debate?”

A political science and history major at The City College from which she was graduated in 1969, Phi Beta Kappa, after taking off two years to study at Hebrew University (during the time of the six-day war), Deborah Lipstadt, who was brought up in Modern Orthodoxy,went on to get a Masters and Ph.D. from Brandeis University in Judaic Studies. Now 58 and the director of the Rabbi Donald A. Tam Institute for Jewish Studies and Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, she became an ardent advocate of civil rights and of her academic discipline. “We must use our scholarship to support historical truth. It is our responsibility,” she has written and continues to say. “If the history of the Holocaust isn’t safe, then no history is safe.” If she didn’t fight back, Irving’s version of history, of the Holocaust, of Dresden, of Hitler, would stand

In introducing Dr. Lipstadt, City College President Gregory H. Williams (his 1996 autobiography, Life on the Color Line, is a stunner), spoke of the extended “critical victory” that Dr. Lipstadt’s trial has wrought at CCNY—a surge of interest in Jewish Studies, the recent visit of a small contingent of students to Israel (90 percent of whom were not Jewish), and of his own plans for the summer to visit. History on Trial will be out in July. Meanwhile, lest reasonable people think that Lipstadt’s victory has won the war—this writer offers a personal observation: Type in her name on the Internet. See what comes up and who is behind it. As they used to scrawl on maps of old about unknown territory, hic sunt dracones—here lie dragons, only here they are very real.#

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