ANTISEMITISM

Here and Now

By Deborah E. Lipstadt

As recently as the turn of this century, it was just about plausible to hope that anti-Semitism might soon go the way of fear of witches — not extinct, but too manifestly absurd for all but the dumbest of bigots to avow. In the United States, there was hardly an institution where Jews weren’t welcomed and fully (if not over-) represented. In Europe, taboos against anti-Semitism continued to hold firm two generations after the end of World War II. In the Middle East, it seemed possible that the peace process would lead at least to a softening of hatred toward the Jewish state.

And in London, Deborah E. Lipstadt, a professor of Jewish history at Emory, was fighting a defamation suit brought against her by the Holocaust denier David Irving. When the 349-page verdict against Irving was handed down in April 2000, it felt as if a concluding chapter in the history of an infamous lie had been written.

Lipstadt’s new book, “Antisemitism: Here and Now” — completed long before the massacre at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, but made all the more timely in its wake — underscores how vain that millennial hope was. Written as a series of letters to two composite characters, a “whip smart” Jewish college student and a well-meaning gentile law professor, Lipstadt’s book aims not to break new scholarly ground but to awaken her audience to the nature, persistence and scale of the threat, along with the insidious ways in which it seeks to disguise itself.

Image White nationalists at the University of Virginia, August 11, 2017. Credit... Stephanie Keith/Reuters

She succeeds. Even readers who try to keep current with the subject may have missed the story of Ken Loach, the acclaimed British filmmaker and Labour Party activist, slyly refusing in 2016 to condemn Holocaust denial because “history is for us all to discuss.” Or a 2013 survey by German researchers of thousands of anti-Semitic messages received by the Israeli Embassy in Berlin and the Central Council of Jews in Germany, 60 percent of which “came from educated, middle-class Germans, including lawyers, scholars, doctors, priests, professors and university and secondary school students.” Or a 2015 protest by Students for Justice in Palestine at the City University of New York, in which activists blamed planned tuition hikes on the “Zionist administration [that] invests in Israeli companies.”