Some people might argue that Deborah Lipstadt has given us the book we desperately need from the author best equipped to write it. After all, in just the past few weeks the dumpster fire over the Labour party’s hand-ling of anti-Semitism burst into acrid flame again over general secretary Jenny Formby’s release of Labour’s record in responding to the problem — 673 complaints, 96 members suspended, 12 expelled. Labour’s failure to act decisively against anti-Semitism was also cited by most of the nine MPs who left the party.
Meanwhile, in Lipstadt’s own country, Ilhan Omar, one of two Muslim-American women recently elected to congress, was condemned by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the entire Democratic leadership after she tweeted that congressional support for Israel was ‘all about the Benjamins’ — a reference to a song by the rapper Puff Daddy. But it was also, according to her critics, a suggestion, by way of a historic anti-Semitic trope, that US congressional devotion to the Zionist cause owed more to Jewish money and power than to any deeper attachment to the Jewish state or an authentic sense of the American national interest.
These are indeed murky waters, but unlike David Hare and Anthony Julius, whose endorsements adorn the book’s cover, I’m not sure Lipstadt is a reliable guide. A competent scholar whose first book, Beyond Belief, traced American resistance to news of the Holocaust, Lipstadt was catapulted to fame by her heroic defence against David Irving, who sued her for libel over his depiction in her second book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. (Julius was the architect of that defence, while Lipstadt’s account of her ordeal was brought to the screen in Denial, written by Hare.) However, no one who has read either book would call Lipstadt a subtle thinker.
In Denying the Holocaust she argued that while literary deconstruction, as championed by the critic Stanley Fish and the post-modernism of the philosopher Richard Rorty, may have had ‘something to recommend’ them as ‘an approach to texts’, such relativism ‘created an atmosphere of permissiveness toward questioning the meaning of historical events’, making Holocaust denial harder to refute.
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