Deborah Lipstadt
Image by Getty
Holocaust Historian Reaches the Red Carpet
Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt finally got to walk the red carpet this year. The painstaking scholarship on Holocaust denial that she’s pursued from her perch at Emory University for decades has garnered headlines in the past. Now, she’s being played by an Academy Award-winning actress (Rachel Weisz) in a feature film and attending premieres in Toronto and L.A. The movie, “Denial,” is a courtroom drama that recounts Lipstadt’s successful defense against British revisionist historian David Irving, who sued her for libel 20 years ago.
Nothing less than the Holocaust was on trial, and the outcome was uncertain, but Lipstadt, 69, is accustomed to taking on difficult and heroic causes. Her groundbreaking work to document and explain Holocaust denial proved to be prescient — and necessary as those tropes have emerged from white nationalists in America and Europe with increasing frequency. Her steadfast writing and lecturing about anti-Semitism, including in columns published in the Forward, have held leaders to account while defending the necessity of free speech and thought.
Weisz told the Forward that she was drawn to playing the scholar because Lipstadt is a complicated, courageous woman. “You know, she’s difficult, she’s tough and she’s charming and she’s passionate and she’s tenacious and she’s funny and she’s bawdy. And brilliant, you know, clearly.”
At the heart of the film, and Lipstadt’s work, is a stubborn respect for facts and context. “In the fight against anti-Semitism, in the fight against Holocaust denial, I hope this film will have an impact,” she told the Forward. “But more, I hope it will remind people that certain things are true. And they’re facts.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
