Review: Deborah Lipstadt’s *Antisemitism Here and Now*
Interrogating how understandings of the past reveal and conceal present challenges
How does the respected Emory University historian and Holocaust-denial debater Deborah Lipstadt understand antisemitism?
This question has taken on special relevance in light of Lipstadt’s nomination to serve as Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, an ambassador level position in the US State Department. Lipstadt’s nomination, widely hailed across American Jewish communities, will likely be confirmed by the US Senate.
Her most recent book, Antisemitism Here and Now (2019) undoubtedly helped place her on the radar of Biden officials as someone suitable for the position. It is a learned yet accessible catalog of animosities that have percolated in recent years across the political spectrum in both the US as well as abroad. Readers seeking a guided tour of hatred, prejudice, and other kinds of things that many Jews perceive as threatening will gain much from it.
However, the book also suffers from some wider misconceptions about the history of Jews and antisemitism. Jews today aren’t just afflicted by discreet forms of Jew-hatred, which Lipstadt amply documents, but also by a crisis of how to talk about and understand that hatred. A close reading of Lipstadt’s book and a sober examination of some of its difficulties is what this review attempts to do.
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As the title implies, Lipstadt’s book is not a work of history. That’s too bad, because the history of “antisemitism” is one that Jewish and non-Jewish publics tend to get wrong in ways that have consequences for how we talk about antisemitism nowadays. Focused mostly on the present and oriented primarily for a popular audience, Lipstadt’s book tends to reinforce rather than correct some of those widespread errors.
Lipstadt, for one, argues that antisemitism is eternal, akin to a disease. “It doesn’t go away; it’s not a onetime event. Though it’s outer form may evolve over time, its essence remains the same. It’s not unlike a stubborn infection” (16). She then goes on in a page or two to reveal the various hatreds Jews faced throughout the centuries, and how the conspiratorial portrayal of Jews as the “ultimate enemy” is the strand that connects all of them. This is a popular view, but it’s also one that a number of Jewish historians have questioned as ahistorical. There are key differences between the hatreds Jews have encountered in various eras, and collapsing them into a unifying theory risks missing that. Sadly, Lipstadt neglects to address the relevant literature here.
This isn’t just a matter of historiographic depth, however. Lipstadt’s chosen method for understanding antisemitism in the past cuts against the possibility that the tools of liberal politics can ameliorate it now. For if antisemitism is truly eternal and irradicable, what hope do American Jews have to deploy the means of liberal politics, education, and culture to make Jews safer? Now, it is certainly true that one could hold both that antisemitism is eternal and that there are ways to ameliorate it, but then one would need to address in greater detail whether and how that’s truly possible. The question becomes all the more befuddling when the book reveals that Lipstadt herself believes antisemitism flourishes in climates where liberalism is in recession, on which more below.
Highlighting just how difficult it is to combat a putatively eternal antisemitism, Lipstadt construes antisemitism as to some extent irrational. Relying on John Paul Sartre’s work, she argues that antisemitism manifests as a “passion” rather than an idea, meaning it is an emotional impulse lacking in any sort of intellectual coherence. “But whatever form it takes,” Lipstadt argues, “We must always insist that antisemitism has never made sense and never will” (20–1) It isn’t entirely clear what she means here — is she arguing that, try as we might, we cannot truly understand the historical circumstances that produce Jew-hatred in a given era, or that we can understand this but that the views antisemites adopt are nonsensical regardless?
No matter the implication, here again Lipstadt missed an opportunity to engage in a key dissenting view, that of Hannah Arendt’s. Arendt argued largely in response to Sartre’s work that we (a) in fact can and should understand Jew-hatred as a historical phenomenon, and (b) that the decisions Jews make can have some effect on the hatred they face. True, Arendt’s views provoked bitter controversy among Jewish intellectuals in her day, but recovering them in an empathic and thoughtful way could’ve added much to the current antisemitism discussion.
Later in the book, as it happens, Lipstadt proffers a critique which validates Arendt’s very point and undermines Sartre’s. Addressing the aggressive monitoring and censoring tactics some American Jewish organizations have adopted to counter anti-Zionist activism on college campuses, Lipstadt writes, “[T]hese kinds of actions play right into the hands of BDS’s proponents…Banning anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian groups from campus will only increase this toxification [of Israel] and buttress the narrative propounded by many groups” (206). This all to say that, yes, how Jews respond in the face of vitriol indeed has some effect on that vitriol. Construing antisemitism as a mystical force that spans history and generates incoherent spasms of emotion irrespective of Jewish-non-Jewish relations in a specific time and place obscures this point.
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Lipstadt’s take on responses to BDS highlights one of the book’s thematic contentions. Jews, Lipstadt maintains, tend to flourish in countries committed to the fundamentals of political liberalism, and antisemitism tends to swell in countries that lack it. “Throughout history,” Lipstadt explains, “Jews have thrived in societies with robust freedom of expression and strong democratic institutions. They have faced far less felicitous conditions in societies that curtailed free speech” (189–190).
It is for this reason that Lipstadt devotes so much attention in her book to developments that are not on their face immediately relevant to Jews and antisemitism. She features chapters on the fatwa leveled against Salman Rushdie, controversies in Europe surrounding the printing of cartoons that depict the Prophet’s visage, and the fevered politics of speech on American college campuses. Lipstadt fears this rising tide of anti-speech not only because in her mind it reflects a broader encroaching illiberalism but also because it is “in the free exchange of ideas that extremists are revealed to be what they are” (191).
Of course, Lipstadt speaks from personal experience here. It was Britain’s capacious libel laws that allowed for David Irving to file a suit against her for her book on Holocaust denial. And it was Lipstadt’s victory against Irving in court, in which her defense documented in painstaking detail Irving’s long record of distorting Holocaust history, that reinforces Lipstadt claim that reasoned, informed speech is the best weapon against extremism.
But here again Lipstadt could have benefited from deeper engagement with older and more recent histories of Jewish politics. To what extent is Lipstadt correct that Jews have thrived in liberal countries, and, by implication, have suffered in countries that are not? Many Jews likely believe this to be true, but it is an American-centric and largely presentist view.
Consider for instance the scholarship of Salo Baron, the first Jewish historian to receive a chair at an American university and a towering figure of Jewish historiography ever since. Baron argued that, despite popular views to the contrary, Jews actually fared quite well in a medieval-feudal world where they parlayed the needs of nobles and monarchs to secure corporate autonomy and pride of place in a lucrative economic niche. The security and prosperity Jews derived from this system was shattered, not ensured, by the onset of political liberalism, which did away with Jewish autonomy in favor of construing Jews and all other males as citizens. In this post-medieval world of liberal states it fell on Jews to convince broader publics, not just an isolated noble or monarch, of their good citizenship and their right to have rights. Sometimes they succeeded in this endeavor, but other times they did not.
This point too isn’t merely academic, however. In ignoring the possibility that Jews can benefit from kinds of politics other than a strictly American-style civil libertarianism, Lipstadt misses a more recent history of American Jews toying with the idea, implicit in Baron’s scholarship, that full-blown free speech is in fact counterproductive for combatting antisemitism.
As James Loeffler has documented in a piece that appeared in the same year as Lipstadt’s book, there’s actually a significant history of prominent Jewish attorneys and defense agency professionals deploying civil rights law arguments to penalize hate speech against Jews and forefend antisemitic violence. At both the state and national level, they pushed legislatures to pass laws that criminalized “group libel,” or speech that injured the standing or assets of members of a minority group. In 1952, in fact, in the case Beauharnais v. Illinois, the US Supreme Court even ruled that one of those state-based laws was constitutional, with the sole Jewish justice Felix Frankfurter writing for the majority.
Loeffler thus concludes, “[E]veryone needs to think again about the proper balance between free speech and hate speech in American civil-rights law.”
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These problems notwithstanding, the book distinguishes itself from a crowded and largely hyperbolic field of contemporary antisemitism writing in its willingness to express critical views about how Jews respond to antisemitism.
Lipstadt, for example, reminds her readers that for all the things her book details, blacks in the United States face a far more perilous world of state-sponsored violence. “Fears of violence at the hands of the police or being declared “out of place” because one wore a kippah or some other Jewish accoutrement is not a current reality for Jewish Americans” (99). She calls on her Jewish readers to speak up against all forms of discrimination, knowing as they do what it is like to be on the receiving end. The idea that antisemitism is a variety of bigotry often gets lost in Jewish punditry today that would rather see antisemitism as sui generis, on the one hand, but that views contentions of structural racism against blacks with deep skepticism, on the other (see here).
Elsewhere, Lipstadt rejects the idea that what Jews face nowadays, whether in Europe or elsewhere, approaches the climate of Jew-hatred that engulfed Jews in the 1930s. “I firmly eschew comparisons to Germany in the 1930s, which was state-sponsored antisemitism in which national and local governmental bodies as well as academic institutions enthusiastically participated. Nothing that we are witnessing today compares…” (109). To be sure, this is something that Lipstadt has sometimes honored in the breach, but these comments are still welcome given how exaggerated, and distorted, Jewish commentary can sometimes be on this issue.
Then there’s the most surprising element of the book, Lipstadt’s unafraid condemnation of the aggressive tactics some Jewish organizations and Israel officials have adopted to counter BDS. Take, for instance, her remarks regarding the miniature brouhaha over Natalie Portman’s refusal to travel to Jerusalem to receive the 2018 Genesis Prize in large part because the prime minister at the time, Benjamin Netanyahu, would be speaking at the ceremony. In regards to accusations voiced by some cabinet officials that Portman was a BDS partisan or a veiled antisemite, Lipstadt writes, “Not only did this accusation bear no relationship to reality, it also buttressed the arguments of those who claim any criticism of Israel is unfairly categorized as antisemitism” (208).
These critiques reflect the meditations of a careful scholar who understands the dangers of antisemitism but also the political and moral risks in how Jews may respond to antisemitism. Unfortunately, these quotes represent passing commentary in a book that is largely focused on the former rather than the latter. But Jewish and wider reading publics need critical yet fair-minded commentary on both.
Part of the reason antisemitism has become such a fraught topic today is because people of good faith struggle to talk about and understand it in clear terms. Internecine disagreements have emerged among Jews regarding how to define it, and a set of responses that wide swaths of Jews in the United States and abroad can agree on still appear elusive. We need more veteran scholars like Lipstadt who can bring their judicious expertise to bear on this topic by writing, as Lipstadt did, for popular audiences. We could benefit from more works that elaborate the implications of thinking about antisemitism in one way versus another, on how Jews have a suite of potential responses they may choose from, and how those choices and roads not taken have histories that reveal specific strengths and weaknesses.
And we could profit from more meditation on how some of the current tactics Jews have come to embrace are on the one hand understandable but on the other regrettable. Hopefully, Lipstadt, who will likely encounter much more of the same political squabbles in her future position in the State Department, will return to this in a future publication.
