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Deborah Lipstadt

Deborah Esther Lipstadt (born March 18, 1947, New York City) is an American historian and author of the book Denying the Holocaust. She is the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University. She received her BA from City College of New York and her MA and PhD from Brandeis University.

Lipstadt was a consultant to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. In 1994, she was appointed by Bill Clinton to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, on which she served two terms.

Irving sues for libel

David Irving sued her and her publisher, Penguin Books, for libel in a British court, after she characterized some of his writings and public statements as Holocaust denial in her book Denying the Holocaust. The legal defense team was led by Anthony Julius, and the defense was presented in court by Richard Rampton QC in early 2000. The expert witness for the defense was Cambridge historian Richard J. Evans.

Although English libel law puts the burden of proof on the defendant rather than the plaintiff, David Irving v. Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt using the justification defense, viz. by demonstrating in court that Lipstadt's accusations against Irving were substantially true and therefore not libelous. The case was argued as a bench trial before Mister Justice Gray, who produced a written judgment 334 pages long detailing Irving's systematic distortion of the historical record of World War II. The Times (April 14, 2000, p. 23) said of Lipstadt's victory, "History has had its day in court and scored a crushing victory.

Free speech

Despite her acrimonious history with Holocaust denier David Irving (and in keeping with herself being sued by him for her writing), she has stated that she is personally opposed to the Austrian court's decision

in 2005 to sentence Irving to three years in prison for his speech (Holocaust denial is punishable in Austria by a maximum 20-year sentence). "I am uncomfortable with imprisoning people for speech. Let him go and let him fade from everyone's radar screens.

"Soft-core denial" of the Holocaust

In February 2007, Lipstadt used the neologism "soft-core denial" at the Zionist Federation's annual fundraising dinner in London. Referring to groups such as the Muslim Council of Britain, reportedly she stated: "'When groups of people refuse to commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day unless equal time is given to anti-Muslim prejudice, this is soft-core denial.'" According to Paul, "She received huge applause when she asked how former US President Jimmy Carter could omit the years 1939-1947 from a chronology in his book"; referring to his recently-published and controversial book Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, she said: "'When a former president of the United States writes a book on the Israeli-Palestinian crisis and writes a chronology at the beginning of the book in order to help them understand the emergence of the situation and in that chronology lists nothing of importance between 1939 and 1947, that is soft-core denial.'"

Along the same lines, Lipstadt has criticized the German philosopher and historian Ernst Nolte for engaging in what she calls “soft-core denial” of the Holocaust, and has argued that Nolte practises an even more dangerous form of revisionism than the Holocaust-deniers. Speaking of Nolte in a 2003 interview, Lipstadt stated: "Historians such as the German Ernst Nolte are, in some ways, even more dangerous than the deniers. Nolte is an anti-Semite of the first order, who attempts to rehabilitate Hitler by saying that he was no worse than Stalin; but he is careful not to deny the Holocaust. Holocaust-deniers make Nolte's life more comfortable. They have, with their radical argumentation, pulled the center a little more to their side. Consequently, a less radical extremist, such as Nolte, finds himself closer to the middle ground, which makes him more dangerous"

Bibliography

Lipstadt, Deborah E. (1986). Beyond belief: the American press and the coming of the Holocaust, 1933-1945. New York: Free Press.
Lipstadt, Deborah E. (1994). Denying the Holocaust: the growing assault on truth and memory. New York: Plume.
Lipstadt, Deborah E. (2005). History on trial: my day in court with David Irving. New York, N.Y: ECCO.