Why I'm reading Deborah Lipstadt

Antisemitism used to be something I could joke about. The family who said they experienced it everywhere they went was bizarre; we laughed and attributed to their oddities the prejudice they believed they encountered. Growing up, I’d heard plenty of stories from my grandparents about their encounters with it and a few isolated ones from my parents. I never thought that in 2019 a book about antisemitism in America would be vital reading.         

Antisemitism: Here and Now is by Deborah Lipstadt, a Holocaust historian at Emory University best known for the libel suit against her brought by British Holocaust denier David Irving. Lipstadt won the case in 2000 and was played by Rachel Weisz in the 2016 movie Denial. As historian Jamil Zainaldin wrote about the case, what was on trial was “the profession of history, the methods and standards of scholarship, and scholarship's main objective: to find and reveal the truth.” This is also Lipstadt’s objective.

The book is written as a series of friendly letters to two figures: a young Jewish former student who encounters antisemitism in various guises and a sympathetic non-Jewish colleague who wants to understand the strange persistence of antisemitism through history. The framing device works well as a way of organizing the material and making the tone of the writing personal. The epistolary form also allows Lipstadt to record and respond to multiple views.