Betrayal: Lipstadt’s silence about the Biden administration’s failure on antisemitism Jonathan Tobin
It turns out that what the country needed most was an antisemitism envoy to the United States and not to the rest of the world. And when the plague of Jew-hatred surged in the streets of American cities and on college campuses, what was also needed was for that envoy not to stand by in silence while the administration she served chose to be neutral about the issue for partisan reasons.
Sadly, that failure will constitute a major part of the legacy of Deborah Lipstadt.
Lipstadt is an eminent Jewish historian whose groundbreaking work on Holocaust denial earned her acclaim in her field. It also led to an important court case in Great Britain where Holocaust denier David Irving unsuccessfully sued her for libel, an ordeal that not only inspired her own book on the subject but also the 2015 movie “Denial” (she was portrayed by Jewish actress Rachel Weisz).
She deserves to be remembered for her scholarship and for writing some excellent books like her 1985 Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933–1945 and the 1993 Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, as well as the 2005 History on Trial: My Day in Court With a Holocaust Denier.
Her recent acknowledgment of the failure of the Biden administration to adequately respond to the explosion of antisemitism under her watch, however, should not be overlooked.
Denouncing Columbia
It was just one sentence in an article she recently wrote in The Free Press that was devoted to explaining why she refused to consider an offer to teach at Columbia University. But in so doing, she buried what should have been the lead.
In it, she does a thorough job of denouncing Columbia’s failures to deal with the outbreak of pro-Hamas antisemitic demonstrations on its campus. She was right to refuse the offer. The three reasons she stated for that decision serve as a rebuke not just to Columbia but to all the many other colleges and universities that have tolerated and even encouraged the Jew-hatred that has become commonplace in the academy in recent years, especially since the Hamas assault on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
She noted that she was unconvinced that the university took the issue seriously and that were she—one of the nation’s leading authorities on Jew-hatred—to teach there, her arrival would be used “to provide cover for a completely unacceptable situation.” Just as important, she didn’t feel that she “would be safe or even able to teach there.”
That was underlined not just by the way the school dealt with the antisemitic harassment of students and faculty, as well as the occupations of parts of the campus and buildings during the height of pro-Hamas activism during the 2023-24 academic year. It was also demonstrated by its feeble response to the events of the past week in which a group likely composed of students, employees and outside activists took over a library sending those who wished to study fleeing.
The conclusion of her article was an eloquent summation of the current situation not only at Columbia but throughout the American education system:
“On too many university campuses, the inmates—and these may include administrators, student disrupters and off-campus agitators as well as faculty members—are running the asylum. They are turning universities into parodies of true academic inquiry. We are at a crisis point. Unless this situation is addressed forcefully and unequivocally, one of America’s great institutions, its system of higher education, could well collapse.”
Unfortunately, she didn’t end it there but added the following:
“There are many in this country—including those in significant positions of power—who would delight in seeing that happen. The failure to stand up to disruptors who are preventing other students from learning gives the opponents of higher education the very tools they need.”
Worried about Trump
You don’t need a Ph.D. to know who she’s talking about there, though she lacks the courage to say so openly. The “opponents of higher education” she is referring to are obviously President Donald Trump and his appointees, who are prepared to severely punish the schools that have behaved in this manner.
The Trump administration is seeking to hold educational institutions accountable for their tolerance of antisemitism, which is rooted in their embrace of toxic left-wing ideologies like critical race theory, intersectionality and the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). It’s clear the president means what he says when he declares that he will not just deport foreign students who engage in such activity. He’s also prepared to strip them of their federal funding if they persist in embracing these divisive, racist concepts that have played a decisive role in making Jews, like Lipstadt and her students, feel unsafe. But the professor seems just as worried by the fact that the pro-Hamas crowd is providing Trump with a rationale for action that could end the left’s stranglehold on American higher education.
And that leads us back to that one line in her article that is more important than the rest of it.
The administration’s ‘silence’
In it, she spoke of how after Oct. 7 while she was at the State Department, antisemitism became just as great a problem in the United States as it was abroad. She noted that her boss, President Joe Biden, “did condemn the violence, often unequivocally.” Then she added that there were also “too many moments that were met with silence.”
That is quite an understatement.
Biden and his would-be successor, Vice President Kamala Harris, spent the 15 months after Oct. 7 talking out of both sides of their mouths about the Hamas war on Israel and American antisemitism. Under pressure from the left wing of the Democratic Party—where hostility to Israel, Zionism and Jews has become endemic—the two went to great lengths to try to appear sympathetic to Palestinians seeking Israel’s destruction and their American cheerleaders.
Over and over again, Biden and Harris tried to position themselves as opposing Hamas, but at the same time, treating campus antisemites as “very fine people” in much the same way that Trump was falsely accused of saying the same about neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville, Va., in the summer of 2017.
Their failure to take a clear stand on the issue she had devoted her life’s work to put Lipstadt in a difficult position. Though she says that she was “enjoined from involving herself in domestic issues” due to her ambassadorial duties, that’s a copout. As the government’s point person on antisemitism, Lipstadt was looked to by the Jewish community, as well as the whole country, to say something about a crisis directly related to her official responsibilities.
We don’t know—and Lipstadt doesn’t say—whether she privately tried to persuade Biden and Harris to do the right thing and stop equivocating about what was happening as hatred of Jews surged. But we do know that it led to her being silent about an issue on which she could have helped shape the debate in a way that might have had a serious impact on the administration and the country.
If she felt she could not speak out while serving at the State Department, then she should have resigned and used both her prestige as a historian and the fact that she was a supporter of Biden to change the conversation in liberal circles at a moment when antisemitism was being mainstreamed in elite institutions and in media outlets that leaned left.
Why didn’t she do that?
Perhaps she really felt that her role as antisemitism envoy was making a difference. One would like to think that was the case but even by her own account in a farewell briefing at the State Department, it was clear she hadn’t accomplished much. She boasted of helping to write policy guidelines about antisemitism for a “non-binding” framework for the State Department. She also went to many diplomatic conferences around the world, justifying her junkets by asserting that her “presence showing up” at various events was “a big deal.”
I don’t doubt that she meant well and might have done some good. But whatever she might have done in what is, despite its important-sounding title, a rather low-profile diplomatic post, it did little to stem the rising tide of antisemitism spreading around the globe and nothing at all about what was happening in the United States.
It’s now obvious that the best thing she could have done was to resign at a moment when doing so would have shined a spotlight on the issue and perhaps embarrassed Biden and Harris into taking a clear stand.
Smearing Republicans
That she didn’t is no surprise given how hard she worked to get a job that means she will be referred to as “Ambassador Lipstadt” for the rest of her life, rather than just an ordinary professor.
The competition for jobs with titles like that is always fierce in any administration and that was certainly true for the one that Lipstadt got when Biden named her to the post in 2021. Among those vying for the post was Abe Foxman, the former head of the Anti-Defamation League. To get it, they dropped their former stances as nonpartisan figures and pitched in to help the Democrats beat Trump in 2020.
Both had long denounced Nazi analogies as inappropriate and language that diminished the importance and unique nature of the Holocaust. Yet they endorsed a scurrilous campaign ad produced by the Jewish Democratic Council that compared Trump and the Republicans to Nazis, even though liberal groups like the ADL and the American Jewish Committee denounced it. It was not only wrong but a depressing example of what otherwise decent people will do to secure a job or an honor they want to add to their résumé.
Lipstadt subsequently followed that up by co-writing an op-ed in The Washington Post in which she compared those who raised questions about the outcome of the 2020 presidential election to Holocaust deniers and then accused Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) of being a white supremacist for comparing the U.S. Capitol riots on Jan. 6, 2021, to the Black Lives Matter riots the previous summer.
That may have clinched the nomination for her but it also led to trouble since the post had, for the first time, been elevated to ambassadorial rank and therefore required Senate confirmation. Understandably irritated Senate Republicans who took this partisan smear of one of their colleagues personally put a hold on her nomination and she wasn’t confirmed until March of the following year after she finally issued a weasel-worded non-apology to Johnson.
If she was willing to sink that low to get that job, there was little chance that she would leave a post that she—and most other observers—probably thought of as much as a reward for her past accomplishments as anything else.
The woke roots of Jew-hatred
Though she will earn some applause for her refusal to consider working at Columbia, whether she ends her career there or back at Emory University in Atlanta where she taught for 28 years before leaving to take the State Department post, is of little interest to anyone but herself.
That she is now using her clout as a historian and former ambassador to speak out about campus antisemitism is commendable. But her coded warning to the pro-Hamas crowd that they are helping Trump take a much-needed blow at a higher education system that has been fatally compromised by its surrender to woke ideology not only lessens the impact of her condemnation. It also shows that she doesn’t really understand the issue of campus antisemitism or the stakes involved in this battle.
Contrary to Lipstadt, American higher education’s antisemitism problem isn’t solely a function of spineless administrators and university presidents who have either been bullied by the protesters and/or enabled them.
It’s the fact that their institutions have been largely taken over by intolerant ideologues who have made their toxic leftist myths into a new orthodoxy from which no dissent is tolerated. Unless and until the toxic influence of DEI, settler-colonial and critical race theory are bounced out of the academy, the system will collapse. More to the point, and contrary to her warnings, they will deserve to implode and eventually be replaced by schools that have returned to a devotion to the Western canon, and the values and beliefs that created the American republic.
We needed Lipstadt to speak out when she chose silence, and we need her now to side—as Trump has done—with those working to deal with the root cause of antisemitism. Alas, before, during and now after her service at the State Department, she is too much of a partisan to do that. Though she will deserve to be remembered for her distinguished scholarship about the Holocaust and bravery in standing up to Irving, by enabling rather than confronting Biden and Harris’ post-Oct. 7 failures, she failed the Jewish community and the cause for which she had fought so hard.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow her: @jonathans_tobin.
Comments are closed.
