Deborah Lipstadt vs. “The Oldest Hatred”
JVL Introduction
Deborah Lipstadt was eventually appointed as the US State Department special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism after the Republicans delayed her approval for many months.
We publish here extracts from Mari Cohen’s detailed exploration of her background and worldview.
Cohen describes how Lipstadt moved from a liberal attitude to becoming a proponent of an ‘eternalist’ view of antisemitism seeing many movements as a threat to Jews and thus placing a high priority on defence of Israel.
Her public reputation rests mainly on her determined denunciation of David Irving as a Holocaust denier but scholar of antisemitism Barry Trachtenberg says her work “reinforce[s] popular conceptions [of antisemitism] rather than challenging them or giving us new ways to understand them.”
This article was originally published by Jewish Currents on Mon 18 Apr 2022. Read the original here.
Deborah Lipstadt vs. “The Oldest Hatred”
In her new role as antisemitism envoy, Deborah Lipstadt will attempt to fight a scourge of antisemitism that she seems to regard as incurable.
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Despite having written 5 books on the Holocaust Deborah Lipstadt has added nothing to our understanding of the Holocaust or why it took place. Although her main life achievement was the victory over David Irving in a libel trial she did not participate in the trial leaving that to expert historians like Christopher Browning and Richard Evans.
The suggestion that Jews, in fact the Israeli state, is entitled to ‘moral capital’ because of the Holocaust is nothing less than a disgusting political trade in the deaths of millions of Jews, very few of whom were Zionists.
It is particularly disgusting because the Zionist movement played no part in the rescue of Jewish refugees, quite the contrary. When Gerhard Riegner, declared that ‘Auschwitz was not only a national memory belonging to the Jewish people… it was also an important political asset.’ we see how Zionism profits from this tragedy.
The argument about ‘eternal’ antisemitism poses the question, why the Jews? What it does is prevent us understanding the different forms that antisemitism took and in particular the racial version in Germany and Eastern Europe. Thus Lipstadt and the Zionists historians add nothing to our understanding of antisemitism.
To Lipstadt and others ‘antisemitism’ is a weapon to be wielded against Zionism’s detractors and Israel’s critics.
I note that Lipstadt was motivated by the struggle of Soviet Jewry. I also note that she had nothing to say about the murder of 3,000 Argentinian Jews under the Junta between 1976-83, at the same time as Israel was a major arms supplier to that regime and when the Zionist movement had nothing to say about this neo-Nazi Junta. That historically is the true record of Zionism when it comes to antisemitism.
How has Lipstadt responded to the anti Semitism of one Sergie Lavrov?
@yairlapid sent out a Tweet worldwide in response which says:
“Foreign Minister Lavrov’s remarks are both an unforgivable and outrageous statement as well as a terrible historical error. Jews did not murder themselves in the Holocaust. The lowest level of racism against Jews is to accuse Jews themselves of antisemitism.”
Note the final comment -and we know how the Labour Party in this country with friends like Nick Cohen on the Observer and the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland have picked off and attacked Jewish Labour Party members and accused them of antisemitism on no evidence in order to attack Jeremy Corbyn. Starmer and David Evans joined in the purge. “The lowest level of racism.”
A useful set of evidences against eternalism (do we need ‘evidence’ to be sceptical about claims that any specific social trait is inherent in human nature?) is to be found in the earlier pages of Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism. On pp 50ff, for example, she draws fine and pertinent distinctions between and amongst French antisemitisms and German ones. A genuinely open-minded and inquisitive (yes, she was Jewish!) intellectual, unlike Lipstadt’s heavy-handed axe-grinding. Don’t forget her.