President Joe Biden’s choice of Emory Professor Deborah Lipstadt as America’s Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism has not been greeted with the unqualified approval that might have been expected for such an appointment.
Lipstadt has a stellar academic record as a justly admired scholar of the Holocaust and antisemitism. In 2000, she won a celebrated victory against the Holocaust denier David Irving, who had sued her for libel in a British court.
Yet last September, she defended someone for comparing former President Donald Trump to the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.
Her reasoning was specious. She tweeted that if Trump had been compared to “what Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich or Eichmann did, she/he would have been wrong. But a comparison to the master of the big lie, Josef Goebbels? That’s historically apt. It’s all about historical nuance.”
But it wasn’t apt at all. The comparison was indefensible. Not only was it an egregiously unjustified smear against Trump; more importantly, it downplayed the evil of Goebbels and grossly disrespected the memory of those who were slaughtered in the Holocaust.
For it wasn’t simply that Goebbels was a lying propagandist. It was that he was a Nazi committed to the extermination of the Jews. To compare Trump to such an individual was ridiculous and shameful, and should have been robustly condemned.
And just who was the individual that Lipstadt defended for making this comparison? Why, none other than one Joe Biden, who was then running for the U.S. presidency.
So a president who has himself downgraded and trivialized the Nazi regime in order to make a partisan political smear appoints as his anti-Semitism envoy the person who defended him in making this repugnant comment.
Moreover, Lipstadt has made other dubious observations. In 2019, she linked Trump to Britain’s hard-left Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn—who presided over an explosion of Jew-hatred in his party—when she told an Australian audience that both Trump and Corbyn “have shown themselves to be absolute anti-Semitic enablers.” This was true of Corbyn but untrue about Trump.
Such jarring double standards and partisan judgments have provoked concern that despite her acknowledgment that “some people on the progressive left” indulge “the anti-Semitism of others,” Lipstadt is afflicted by the myopia through which anti-Semitism is viewed as overwhelmingly associated with Nazi supporters and white supremacists.