Hoover Institution (Stanford, CA) — As an academic, Deborah Lipstadt has studied anti-Semitism for her entire adult life.
As a Jew, she knew of its pervasiveness even earlier.
So, when just three days into her role as the United States’s special envoy for monitoring and combating anti-Semitism, a group of 126 Hasidic Jews, only identifiable by their traditional garb and appearance, were kicked off a flight from New York to Budapest, she knew the reported reasons for the incident might not hold water upon closer scrutiny.
The group, traveling through Frankfurt Airport to Budapest in May 2022, were denied onward travel for the supposed offenses of being “unruly” and “refusing to wear masks.”
“Despite many of the passengers not knowing each other nor traveling together, passengers interviewed by US Department of Transportation investigators stated that Lufthansa treated them all as if they were a single group and denied them boarding for the alleged misbehavior of a few,” a statement from the Department of Transportation said in 2024 about the incident.
Once the group got to Frankfurt, it was met by up to twenty armed German federal police officers.
“Here you are, a descendent of Hungarian Jews, and you land in Germany and are met by armed guards,” Lipstadt said of the incident in a conversation with Milbank Family Senior Fellow Niall Ferguson. The conversation was the keynote of the History Symposium, presented by Hoover’s Applied History Working Group, which Ferguson leads.
As Lipstadt told an invited audience, the Jewish passengers’ plane later left for Budapest without them. Lipstadt was able to meet with Lufthansa’s CEO later and raise her concerns with him.
“His eyes opened wide,” she recalled.
It was at that moment that Lipstadt, a professor of history and founder of the Institute for Jewish Studies at Emory University, realized, “He doesn’t hear me as Deborah the author; he hears ‘the United States government is very concerned about this incident.’”
It was an illuminating moment that showed the power of her office to protect a people who have been recurrently mistreated and persecuted throughout history.
“I have different levers that I can use responsibly,” she remembers thinking.
Lufthansa was eventually fined $4 million by the US Department of Transportation for its handling of the incident. The airline entered into a new agreement with US regulators to avoid such an action again. It also put staff members through new training programs.
Lipstadt spoke of the many ways in which anti-Semitism manifests itself in contemporary societies, some but not all of which bear the hallmarks of prejudice seen in centuries past.
In one instance during her tenure as special envoy, Lipstadt confronted a proposed Finnish law that would have rendered all meat in the country non-kosher, by requiring all livestock to be stunned before death. But the proposed law still allowed for recreational hunting and the practice of boiling certain shellfish alive.
Thanks to her efforts, the Finns eventually dropped all provisions in the bill that would have impacted Jewish communities. She said it demonstrated to her that anti-Semitism can emerge from anything, even a food-handling bill drafted innocuously in terms of animal rights.
“It’s a shape shifter,” Lipstadt said of anti-Semitism. “It fills that need [to hate], and I don’t want to make it sound like it’s metaphysical or anything, but it has emerged in so many different categories. It serves that purpose.”
An illustration of that point came later on during Lipstadt’s tenure as special envoy, in the days after October 7, 2023, when she could no longer travel in a foreign country without security vehicles escorting hers.
Then she witnessed the pictures of Israeli hostages who had been taken by Hamas being ripped down in countless western cities.
“What struck me was the glee of the murderers, and then bringing it back outside of Israel, the glee with which you would see people ripping down the pictures of the hostages,” she said.
“We always think of the historical circumstances of anti-Semitism, but unfortunately we are experiencing the fact that these human frailties never go away,” Hoover Institution director Condoleezza Rice said in her introduction to the lunchtime discussion between Lipstadt and Ferguson. “I know it has been and will continue to be an excellent conversation about the issues of anti-Semitism: how to confront it, what to learn from its history, and how to move forward.”
The symposium saw a variety of presentations, which traced and illustrated how some elements of anti-Semitism have remained constant for centuries while other aspects have evolved to take different forms.
Describing the recent surge in anti-Semitic activity on US college and university campuses, presenters discussed how some colleges have been criticized for failing to keep Jewish students safe during protests arising from (and in some cases even preceding) the Israeli response to the October 7 attacks.
Presenters also talked about the particular features of encampments on campuses, noting that they were most prevalent at the most expensive and elite US universities. Some speakers contended outside forces funded and encouraged some of the encampments.
One scholar said that no nation on earth had an impeccable human rights record. Therefore allegations against Israel do not merit sanctions such as those proposed by the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement, which depicts Israel as a modern “apartheid” state.
Another presentation dealt with the centuries when Jews faced sudden deadly attacks known as pogroms in Europe, where dozens to hundreds of Jews were slaughtered, often by their gentile neighbors. In almost every case, the perpetrators faced little if any punishment.
In one pogrom, in Kishinev (today’s Chișinău), in what is now Moldova, 49 Jews were killed and 92 others seriously injured between April 19 and 21, 1903.
Because of the advent of photography at that time and the arrival of a correspondent from the Hearst Newspapers chain, the pogrom attracted widespread attention in America, and the public sympathy generated would go on to inspire American support for the idea of a Jewish homeland.
During the Kishinev pogrom, the few perpetrators often knew their victims. The few aggressors of the Kishinev pogrom claimed they had been provoked by Jews in the area, who they alleged had defaced a church. Scholars pointed out how those who initiate violence against Jews always blame them for their own aggression, a truism that persists today.
One scholar asked if there was a valid comparison between the historical practice of pogroms and the barbarity of Hamas terrorists on October 7, 2023. Others cautioned against that comparison: On October 7, Hamas’s victims included Thai farmworkers and other non-Jews. And, unlike during the Russian Empire, when pogroms were common, Jews in Israel today have the protection of police, military, and intelligence services.
One speaker said comparing October 7 to a pogrom absolved the military and intelligence services of their failure to protect Israelis that day.
The symposium included many of the leading US authorities on the history of anti-Semitism, as well as scholars who have been involved in more recent developments. Although the event was held under the Chatham House Rule, it is hoped papers discussed at the symposium can be published sometime in the next year.
