Deborah Lipstadt came to her job as U.S. Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism with a boatload of credentials and a lifetime of experience. Her authority as a historian of the Holocaust had won not only awards, but also a historic judgment by a U.K. court against David Irving, the Holocaust denier who sued Lipstadt for defamation after she called him one.
But on Oct. 7, 2023, the world’s focus lurched to a fresh horror, answered by a war that requires, as Lipstadt put it in a recent interview, “that you hold more than one idea in your head at a time.” Lipstadt spoke to TIME about how her job is changed and how she sees the reaction to the Israel-Hamas War. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You are the President’s special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism. How’s it going? Business is booming, and I’m the only one in the Administration who wants a recession [in my field].
Does that mean your job has gotten easier or harder in the past year? When I came into office, my very first speech talked about the need to get people to take antisemitism seriously. “The Jews have it made! What’s the problem?”—I have less of that now. I hear from people telling their 12-year-old grandson who wears a kippah, “Put on a baseball cap. For safety’s sake.” On the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
You grew up when Israel was the underdog. Whole generations have known it first as an occupier. I was there during the Six-Day War. I was a kid, but, you know, we didn’t know what was going to happen. That profile has changed dramatically. At the same time, there is still an intense hatred among many entities surrounding Israel that want to see its demise.
How can one distinguish between criticizing Israel and being antisemitic? To hold Jews everywhere responsible for what goes on in Israel is antisemitism. But if criticism of Israel’s policies was antisemitism, the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who are protesting in the streets on a Saturday night would be antisemites.
Your academic work is centered on the Holocaust. Is hearing what’s happening in Gaza described as a genocide triggering in any way? There’s a definition of genocide. You can say this is a tragedy; many people in Gaza are not supporters of Hamas. You can say the suffering is immense and without a seeming end. But that’s not a genocide.
Read more: The New Antisemitism
Between what happened in Israel on Oct. 7 and in Gaza afterward, sometimes it can seem like the traumas are in competition. There certainly are competing traumas. I don’t get into competitive suffering. Your two compacted molars doesn’t make my one feel better. I don’t think it takes you anywhere. We are talking about responding to an attack. The 1,200 dead on Oct. 7 is [as a proportion of the population] like 48,000 Americans. If anybody had said we should sit silently by after 9/11, not respond? If someone hits, you’ve got to hit them back.
Did you just say we? That’s right. That’s a good point. I was speaking both as an envoy for Joe Biden—who flew there after the attack—and, yes, I speak also as a Jew.
Do you think Jewish people in general feel as if their fate is attached to Israel’s? I think some Jews do. Some Jews feel that if anything would happen to Israel they would be less safe in the world. There are many Jews who feel that way.
Does it work the other way? If Israel is delegitimized—a big word inside Israel—are Jews more vulnerable? I think so. I think in many places, yes. And we also have to think about it. You want to talk about a genocide? Talk about the genocide of the Uighurs.
That’s not happening on camera though, is it? The Chinese have made sure of that. But if someone were to find a group of Chinese nationals and beat them up [in retaliation], we’d be appalled.
Rachel Weisz played you in Denial, the movie about your being sued for libel by a Holocaust denier. Are you still in touch? We email. After I got appointed, she told the producers they have to call her ambassador. She took the part really seriously. Her father escaped from Hungary, and her mother was born in Vienna to a Jewish father, and they had to get out. So she came to this quite personally.
