WASHINGTON — Anti-Semitism is often not taken seriously until it becomes deadly, said Deborah Lipstadt at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum on May 12, her first talk since her Senate confirmation in March.
Deborah Lipstadt speaking at the Feb. 8, 2022 hearing. (Ron Kampeas)
She made good on her pledges to skeptical Republicans in the body that she would identify and target anti-Semitism on all sides.
“Anti-Semitism does not come from one end of the political spectrum,” Lipstadt said. “It is ubiquitous and is espoused by people who agree on nothing else or, better put, disagree on everything else.”
She spoke of the threat from the far-right, mentioning the 2017 neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville that convinced President Joe Biden, who named her to the post, to run for the presidency. She also alluded to her frustrations with the left.
“Too often, when there is an act of anti-Semitism, those who condemn it cannot bring themselves to focus specifically on this particular prejudice,” she said. In 2019, Jewish groups, Republicans and some Jewish Democrats were unhappy when a resolution condemning anti-Semitism was amended to include condemnations of other forms of bigotry, including Islamophobia.
In her remarks and later in a conversation with Sara Bloomfield, the museum’s director, Lipstadt said that anti-Semitism is often not taken seriously until it is too late.
“Too many people, organizations and institutions do not take anti-Semitism seriously,” she said.
“They fail to include it in their litany of legitimate prejudicial hatreds. They wonder what is it that Jews are complaining about? After all, they are wealthy and powerful.”
Talking to Bloomfield, she said people tend not to take anti-Semitism seriously until it turns deadly, citing attacks on Jews in Pittsburgh in 2018, in New Jersey in 2019 and in Paris in 2015.
The post of anti-Semitism monitor was established in 2004 to track anti-Semitism overseas and make representations to foreign governments to address it, but Lipstadt said those lines are now blurred.
She noted the hostage-taking crisis at a synagogue in Colleyville, Tex. in January, carried out by a radicalized British Muslim. “It is increasingly hard to differentiate between anti-Semitism that is foreign and that which is domestic,” she said.
That was a view adopted by her Trump administration predecessor, Elan Carr, who was in the audience and whom Lipstadt acknowledged in her remarks.
In another nod to continuity with the Trump administration, Lipstadt praised the Abraham Accords, normalizing relations between Israel and four Arab countries, brokered by the Trump administration in its final months.
“Working together with the countries that have signed on to the Accords and the normalization agreements, we can address some of the violent extremist anti-Semitism which often has had lethal consequences,” she said.
A number of Republicans had opposed and delayed Lipsdtadt’s nomination because while campaigning for Biden, she lacerated the Trump administration as showing fascist tendencies and described a statement by Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson as white supremacism.
The Jewish community rallied behind her and she reached out to Republicans assuring them she would be nonpartisan in her ambassadorial role. In the end, she was confirmed in a bipartisan vote.
In her talk, Lipstadt singled out Russian officials for “soft” Holocaust denial because of their claims that Russia’s war against Ukraine is aimed at “denazifying” the country.
Lipstadt said she was “outraged by this exploitation of the history and suffering of the Holocaust and WW II for a coldblooded war of choice.”