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US envoy Deborah Lipstadt has spent her life fighting anti-Semitism. Now 77, she explains why a rise in Jewish hatred has wider implications
Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt has made fighting hatred against Jews her life’s work. And since October 7, as Joe Biden’s special envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism is fond of putting it, she has been working in a “growth industry”.
Lipstadt has found herself reckoning with a record wave of attacks on Jews globally in light of Hamas’s attack and Israel’s subsequent response. “Business is booming,” she joked recently of her office’s portfolio, “I’m the only one in the Biden-Harris administration hoping for a recession.”
Dark humour is one of the most powerful tools in Lipstadt’s arsenal – a useful quality when the scale of the crisis confronting her has never been more grave. She has travelled to more than 20 countries since she took on the post in 2022 at the US president’s behest.
When we meet in her office, several floors up in the State Department’s quaint wood and marble Harry S Truman building in Washington DC, she has just returned from a trip to London.
Tiny, at just 5ft, but with a commanding presence, she is dressed all in black with a brightly coloured scarf around her shoulders, similar to the scarves she lent Rachel Weisz to wear when the actor portrayed her in Denial.
The film depicts the infamous libel suit the Holocaust denier David Irving, played by Timothy Spall, brought against Lipstadt, at the time a little-known but respected historian.
Her pride is palpable as she enthusiastically points to a Japanese poster of the 2016 film featuring Weisz hanging on her office wall as she enters.
Years after the protracted legal battle in the Royal Courts of Justice, where Lipstadt ultimately prevailed against Irving, she still considers Britain to be something of a second home. She visits regularly, to see friends and accept invitations to lectures, and now on US government business, but the scenes playing out on the capital’s streets on this most recent trip have left her troubled.
It is not just the sound of “anti-Semitic” chants reverberating through London in recent weeks that she finds “disturbing”, but the thousands of marching protesters who have remained...