WASHINGTON — In her last week in office, Deborah Lipstadt, whom President Joe Biden charged with fighting antisemitism around the world, expressed doubt as to whether the incoming Trump administration will be up to the challenge.
“I certainly hope so — I don’t know,” said Lipstadt, during her final roundtable with the Jewish press at the State Department after 15 months of spiking bigotry against Jews globally.
While President-elect Donald Trump has not yet named a successor to Lipstadt, one of the world’s foremost scholars of the Holocaust and antisemitism, she added that she has faith in Marco Rubio, the Florida senator and Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, who oversees the role. She has in the past criticized Trump’s team. But on antisemitism, she said Tuesday, Rubio “gets it — 100%.”
Whoever succeeds Lipstadt will take the helm of an office that was elevated to an ambassadorship and saw its budget quadruple to $2 million under her leadership.
Ticking off her accomplishments in three years in the role, Lipstadt cited bringing antisemitism to the fore in high-level meetings around the world, securing 42 signatories on new international guidelines to combat antisemitism, and expanding the office — whose full description is special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism — to include a core of experts set up to continue their work under Trump.
“You can’t have a functioning state department office if every time there’s a change of administration, the entire office goes away and has to be rebuilt from scratch,” Lipstadt said.
But she acknowledged the size of the problem she was tasked to address — one that data released Tuesday by the Anti-Defamation League suggests has only grown in recent years. “I’m too much of a historian to think that someone can solve it,” she said.
Lipstadt, 77, lamented how normal it has become in recent years for Jews to face antisemitism in their daily lives. She mentioned a conversation with a Canadian family trying to pick a university at which their daughter would feel safe as a Jew, and another with an Upper East Side mother afraid to send her adolescent child to synagogue without a baseball cap covering his kippah.
“That’s pretty sobering,” she said.
She also recalled how, as a tenured professor — she taught history for more than 30 years at Emory University, where she is set to return — she feared she would feel stifled in government, where she was not nearly as free to speak her mind.
“I had to put up with not getting my way,” she said, but added that the frustrations were worth a job she called “the honor of a lifetime.”
Critics — on the far left and in some Arab American groups — take issue with her strong support of Israel and say she too often conflated anti-Zionism with antisemitism.
But leaders of mainstream American Jewish organizations say Lipstadt excelled at the job, drawing on her scholarship and traveling the world indefatigably to call out antisemitism as it spiked on almost every continent, especially after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
She “brought expertise, gravitas, and determination” to the role “during one of the most challenging periods for the Jewish people in decades,” said ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt in a statement.
Deborah Lipstadt outside a courthouse during her trial against Holocaust denier David Irving in London, April 11, 2000. (Peter Jordan/PA Images via Getty Images)
In speeches and op-eds, Lipstadt also addressed homegrown antisemitism during her tenure, although the ambassador’s portfolio is international.
“It is rare for somebody who lives in the foreign policy realm of an administration to also have a significant impact and influence on the domestic side,” said Rabbi David Saperstein, former ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom. He pointed to her role in crafting the first U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism, released in May 2023.
Ted Deutch, CEO of the American Jewish Committee, noted her work on the national antisemitism strategy and also on the 12 Global Guidelines for Countering Antisemitism, released in July, on the 30th anniversary of the deadly bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires.
After Oct. 7, Deutch continued, she traveled to Europe, Latin America and the Middle East to confront surging antisemitism, explaining how it is rooted in a “long, sordid, dangerous history.” Through it all, he said, she drew strength by communicating in a “clear and unequivocal way” no matter her audience.
Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel dramatically changed her job, Lipstadt said, bringing her work “into sharper focus.”
No one, she said, was prepared for what she called the “tsunami” of antisemitism that followed the Hamas attack. And while she said she recognizes that some protest of Israel’s retaliatory actions in Gaza came from heartfelt sympathy for Palestinians, she said Oct. 7 also unleashed a flood of antisemitism disguised behind criticism of Israel.
She said she was taken aback by the failure of others to stand up for Jews. “The silence of their allies was very striking, particularly for women,” she said, referring to sexual assaults perpetrated by Hamas militants.
Lipstadt during the roundtable singled out one person for particular criticism: Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories, who according to the ADL “has long coopted antisemitic tropes and legitimized support of terrorism in her critiques of Israel.” She described Albanese as a person who has “most distressed this office.”
On the social network X, Lipstadt documented her travels but was less vocal about the protests roiling American university campuses against Israel’s military campaign in Gaza — demonstrations many American Jews decried as antisemitic. She has stood firm in her support for free speech — opposing laws that criminalize the Holocaust denial she has tried to root out with her scholarship. But on CNN she said she was “heartbroken” over threats to Jewish students.
Lipstadt first drew international attention for her defeat of a libel suit filed by British author David Irving, whom she accused of Holocaust denial in her 1996 book, “Denying the Holocaust.” The case was the basis for a 2016 film in which actor Rachel Weisz portrayed Lipstadt (and received accent coaching from her).
Rachel Weisz as writer and historian Deborah E. Lipstadt in “Denial.” (Laurie Sparham/Bleecker Street)
She was in the limelight again after her nomination as ambassador when she testified at the trial of organizers of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. And the more than six-month battle to confirm her generated more press than her work post-confirmation. Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who objected to a tweet in which she described his remarks about the Jan. 6, 2021, pro-Trump U.S. Capitol riot as “white supremacy/nationalism,” blocked the vote.
In her extended period as a nominee, she seemed to take on the unofficial mantle of a domestic antisemitism czar. After a gunman in January 2022 held a Texas rabbi and his congregants hostage, Lipstadt, who was raised in an observant New York household, described going to synagogue as an act of courage in a New York Times guest essay.
“We are shaken. We are not OK. But we will bounce back,” she wrote. “We are resilient because we cannot afford not to be. That resiliency is part of the Jewish DNA. Without it, we would have disappeared centuries ago.”
Lipstadt as a diplomat often spoke about the need to condemn antisemitism from both the right and left. But along with the criticism she drew before her confirmation from conservatives in Congress, she also faced vocal critics from the left who accused her of apologizing for Israeli suppression of Palestinian rights.
The Jewish columnist Peter Beinart, in The New York Times in 2022, wrote that Lipstadt contradicted herself when she called Israel’s occupation of the West Bank “problematic” but also dismissed an Amnesty International report charging Israel with apartheid.
Barry Trachtenberg, a Jewish studies professor at Wake Forest University and adviser to the anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace, called Lipstadt’s record in office an “abject failure” for her conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism. In an interview, he also noted how Arab rights groups have criticized her for “deeply offensive comments,” including a glib remark about last year’s pager attack on Hezbollah militants.
Trump in his first term took heat from Congress for taking two years to appoint Elan Carr as antisemitism envoy, a job which at the time did not require Senate confirmation.
Several names have been floated for Lipstadt’s successor, including Harvard University law professor Alan Dershowitz, social media influencer Lizzy Savetsky, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, an author and former Republican candidate, and Dov Hikind, a radio talk show host and former conservative New York State assemblyman.
Whoever it is, Lipstadt said, “I hope it’s someone who will be a barn builder and not a barn burner.”
