Publishers Weekly
January 10, 2005
In Defense of History;
PW Talks with Deborah E. Lipstadt
by by Sarah F. Gold
PW talked with Deborah Lipstadt by phone while she was in Israel to
speak about Jewish education and the danger of fighting “the
so-called new anti-Semitism” by teaching the young to see the
Holocaust as a motivation for Jewish identity.
PW: Your case received much media coverage, and books have been
written about it. Why did you feel a need to write your own book,
History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving [reviewed above]?
Deborah E. Lipstadt: First of all, nobody except me has been able to
tell the whole story from the inside… the fund-raising effort, the
assembling of the legal team, how we built our legal strategy,
because we very carefully never talked about that.
But even more importantly, [I wrote it] to give the perspective of
what it was like to be the defendant in a case like this: what it was
like to go from being a relatively obscure… professor to being on
the world stage.
And probably the third reason was that I had these powerful
interactions with [Holocaust] survivors and with children of
survivors and various people in the course of the trial, and I felt
that was a story I also wanted to tell.
PW: What has been the long-term impact of the trial on your life and
career?
DEL: On the one hand, I’ve gone back to being a professor [at Emory
University] and to doing what I love most: teaching and writing and
doing research. On the other hand, to be honest, on some level,
people listen more when I speak out in terms of the new
anti-Semitism, as it’s called. I’ll tell you another place where I’ve
been able to use my voice in a new kind of way. I’ve worked with a
number of people who have been fighting in terms of increased
recognition of the Armenian genocide. Whereas people listened before
because of my work on Holocaust denial, when I work in [the Armenian]
area, I’ve been able to get more of a hearing, and that’s been very
gratifying.
I didn’t choose this area of study to be called to the bar to defend
history, but… even though it took a lot out of me… I feel on some
level gratified to have been the one, as Irving said, “pulled out of
the line” not, as he meant, to be shot but to defend history.
PW: In the book, you’re quite harsh about a New York Times article
that appeared before the trial. In general, how did you feel about
media coverage of the case?
DEL: I think at first they bent over backward to make sure that
Irving got a fair hearing. And it annoyed me, but I understood why
they did it. But if you watched the press coverage over the course of
time, you saw the shift, from reporters who sat in that courtroom day
in, day out, how they began to see the measure of the man in terms of
David Irving, that he lied, that he distorted, that he invented, that
he misquoted, all the things that the judge said that he did, and
that was very gratifying to watch. I’m not one of those who beat up
on the media.
PW: I heard at some point that a movie was being made about the case.
DEL: There was supposed to be a movie. It wasn’t being done based on
the book, because the whole thing was in the works before the book
was done. Ridley Scott’s production company had hired Ronald Harwood
(who did The Pianist for Polanski), and he wrote a screenplay, and
HBO was going to put it on. HBO asked Harwood to put in some
fictional elements… and Harwood refused to do that. He said… on a
case that’s about truth, for you to ask me to put in fictional
elements just doesn’t cut it. So the movie died.