|
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.#
