She aired her criticisms in a recent op-ed in The Guardian with her colleague Ambassador Michèle Taylor, America’s permanent representative to the UN’s Human Rights Council.
“Ignoring or delaying a response to credible reports of such horrific acts inadvertently validates the acts. It not only denies justice to the victims, but also emboldens the perpetrators,” the pair wrote.
Lipstadt reveals editors at other newspapers have since asked her why she chose to make her case in The Guardian, rather than in their own outlets. “I said, ‘because if I published it in The Wall Street Journal, I would have been preaching to the choir’.”
Does she feel liberal, Left-wing thinking has lost its way on the issue? Lipstadt says she prefers to think of the issue as a “horseshoe”; at their most extreme points, the two ends of the ideological spectrum meet.
But she is perturbed by the rise of anti-Semitism on the campuses of elite universities, and the prevailing attitude among some academics. The issue has ignited a firestorm in the US. In December, the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and MIT were hauled before Congress to answer for their institutions’ conduct in high-profile, televised hearings.
All three failed to categorically state that calling for the genocide of Jews violated their univeristies’ codes of conduct.
“It was terrible,” says Lipstadt. “What’s become quite clear is that education is not a magic bullet for stopping hatred and prejudice.”
“As I like to say, you can be a PhD and an SOB, son of a b—-, at the same time. You can quote me on that,” she quips, with evident enjoyment.
She is more equipped than most to pronounce on academics. Before joining the Biden administration, she spent her career teaching modern Jewish history and Holocaust studies in American universities, including three decades at Atlanta’s Emory University, where she helped establish the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies.
Prior to finding a global stage with the publication of her 1993 book Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, and the ensuing legal battle with Irving, her career was not dissimilar to that of many successful academics.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/03/31/deborah-lipstadt-us-envoy-to-biden-anti-semitism-israel/
