Anti-Semitism: Past And Present | 2025 History Symposium

>> Condoleezza Rice: Thank you very much. The first thing I wanna say is a very note of gratefulness to the Applied History Program, the Applied History Lab, for doing this. I can't think of a more important subject than to look at the issues of antisemitism. We always think of the historical circumstances of anti Semitism, but of course, unfortunately, we are experiencing the fact that these human frailties never go away.

And so I know that this will be, has been and will continue to be a really excellent conversation about the issues of antisemitism, how to confront it, what to learn from history and how to move forward. And so I'm really very grateful to the Applied History Working Group in the History Lab for putting this together.

And that means that I'm especially grateful to Niall Ferguson, who is the Millbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Chairman of the Hoover Applied History Program and a part of our History Lab. He is going to be in conversation with our guest, Professor Lipstadt welcome.

Deborah Lipstadt is a distinguished historian and diplomat who is renowned for her scholarship on the Holocaust and on modern antisemitism. Deborah currently holds the title of University Distinguished Professor and is the Dorrit professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University, where she has taught since 1993, which where clearly they must have brought her on at the age of 11.

I think it will be a wonderful conversation. I will say that in addition to historical scholarship and her advisory roles, she's answered the noble call of public service. From May 2022 until January 2025, she served as the US Special Envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism. And so in fact, it is knowledge in practice that we celebrate today.

And so let me invite to the stage Niall and Deborah for the conversation. And thank you very much for your attendance at this important symposium.

>> Niall Ferguson: We're delighted to have had Secretary Rice come and introduce this session. I'm extremely excited to have a chance to have a conversation with you, Deborah.

You've been doing an extraordinarily important and difficult job. As Secretary Rice just mentioned, as US Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Antisemitism, I wanted to begin by asking you what you've learned in the course of performing that role. You've just finished more or less unpacked or cleared your desk and come straight here, for which we're enormously grateful.

But it couldn't be fresher in your mind. So let's begin with what you learned doing this job.

>> Deborah Lipstadt: I learned that living in the world of diplomacy and living in the word I used last night with some of the members of this session, in the rarefied world of the university are two separate worlds, two very different worlds.

And I learned It took me a while, but I had a very good team that I built up. When I came in, there were about three and a half people, not a half a person, part time person on our team. When I left, we had 21 people, which also speaks to the gravity of the situation.

I learned that there is, to borrow a phrase from Ecclesiastes, popularized by Bob Dylan, a time to speak and a time to be silent. A lot of what we did was done quietly. We did not see ourselves as another, what's called, in State Department parlance, stakeholder organization, organization.

In this case, it would be Jewish organizations. If it's women's issues, women's organizations, but we didn't see ourselves as replicating stakeholder organizations. But if we move properly and figured out how the State Department worked, and I had some senior foreign service officers on my team, so that was very helpful.

We could use the levers of government. Our objective was to use the levers of government to combat this issue, to make it more broadly understood. So that's one thing I learned. I also learned on the third day I was in office. In fact, I had just been sworn in administratively.

I was ceremoniously sworn into the White House a few weeks later. But I had to get into the building, I had to do the administrative swearing. I woke up and I heard on, I guess must have been Morning Edition, that a group of Jews had been ejected from a flight by Lufthansa from JFK to Frankfurt.

A group of Hasidic Jews, I don't think they specify. That can't be right, that must be wrong. Of course, as I got to my office, I found out it was indeed correct. A group of. They weren't a group, 126 Hasidic Jews on this flight. Some had bought tickets through travel agents.

Some were going on points, some had bought, they weren't a group. The only thing that made them a group is that they were all identifiable as Jews, either with kibout having ordered kosher food, Tzitzit or whatever it might have been. Had been denied permission to continue from Frankfurt to Budapest, where they were going for the yard site for the anniversary of the death of a famous Hasidic rabbi, because some had been, quote, unquote, unruly.

It turns out that some of the people on the plane, had Lufthansa then still had a mask mandate, refused to wear their mask. Or when they put on their mask, they put them under their nose, which is sort of a, you know, you kind of, you know, you can fill in the blank to the flight attendants.

Then some had gathered in the aisle, I guess I supposed to pray or whatever. And they weren't listening to orders. So the commander of the plane, as the captain is called in Lufthansa parlance, I learned lots of interesting tidbits. Radio. To head to Frankfurt. There is a group of Orthodox Jews who are being unruly, unruly in IATA terminology.

Again, something I never thought I would know, triggers all sorts of responses. And Frankfurt airport has its own. When it gets a message like that, a group, if it's one person, maybe it's different. But when they hear a group. The plane was met by 20 armed gendarmes at the doorway as they walked off the plane.

So here you are, probably a descendant of Hungarian Jews, and you walk, you land in Germany, and you're met by armed guards, you know, and it's not a good look for any airline. It's a very bad look for the German national airline. And then they were denied. They were not told.

They just were told, go to this gate and you will get on your flight to Budapest. The plane left without them, stranding them there. They couldn't get kosher food. The airline wouldn't help them. It was a mess.

>> Niall Ferguson: This is day three of the job.

>> Deborah Lipstadt: Day three of my job because I said to someone, get me the information.

When you say that at ambassadorial level, a lot of people get you the information. So I got a lot of details. And then I'm walking to the office and I get. Get a message that the CEO of Lufthansa is coming to see me in about an hour, an hour and a half.

Then I get a phone call. Deborah, we have Secretary Buttigieg, then Secretary of Transportation Deputy on the phone. He's going to brief you. And he said, these are American citizens. So we are tracking this very closely and you can speak in our name. So sitting opposite the CEO of Lufthansa with their 105,000 employees and other piece of useless information that is better in my head, and I said, I just got off the phone with the Department of Transportation and we are very concerned about this.

And his eyes opened up wide and I suddenly realized he doesn't hear Deborah Lipstadt, author of so many books or professor. He hears the United States government speaking. And that's day three, I said, I have different levers that I can use and use responsibly. And I have to figure out how to do that.

It's an interesting. I'll tell you two other anecdotes to sort of. So that was day three. A few weeks later, I go to Saudi Arabia for my first trip. I purposely made that my first foreign trip.

>> Niall Ferguson: Can I interrupt? What happened with the Lufthansa-

>> Deborah Lipstadt: With Lufthansa, they were very concerned.

They apologized. There was a lawsuit. There was both the Department of Transportation levied the biggest fine ever levied on an airline. There was a civil agreement. They had put out this terrible statement right after it happened. We're sorry, we are training our employees to be more sensitive. So I was interviewed at NBC and I said, I think they need more than sensitivity training, you know.

And that got the attention of Lufthansa. And they adopted the IHRA definition, the much debated IHRA definition. And they instituted different training programs for their team. It was just in Arab, a screw up, it never went up to the higher ranks of the offices, but they took it very seriously.

Fast forward about three weeks later having come from Saudi Arabia to Jerusalem, I'm in my hotel and I hear that a group of four or five American families who are having bar and bat mitzvahs at the southern end of the Kotel. There's an area where, according to the Israeli government, non-traditional bar and bat mitzvahs and celebrations can be held were accosted by young, I don't wanna call them hooligans cuz that lessons.

They spit on them. They tore up the Siddur Sim their prayer books. And the police were nowhere to be found. So together with my deputy, I got on the phone right away to make sure what he had heard. We tweeted out, had this happened in any other country, we would have no trouble describing it as antisemitism, which was.

When he was in Israel about two months later, the Chief Rabbi of the Wall, Rabbi Rabinowitz, said, your boss, Ambassador Lipstadt, called it anti-Semitism. No, he didn't. No, she didn't, she said. Then a month later, I'm in Belgium at a conference convened by the EU with our very strong support because the Finns were considering an Animal Welfare Bill.

1200 pages. I did not read the whole thing. But in the bill, every aspect of animal welfare was that before slaughtering animals had to be stunned, which would, of course, make them ineligible according to kashrut, and for many, halal. There were certain interpretation of halal which would accept it.

But as we went through the bill, we discovered it allowed for fishing, hunting, and cooking of lobster and crawfish, where you sort of boil them alive. And we said, well, if you can make an exception for those, you can make an exception for this. We worked very closely with our embassy in Finland that took this very seriously, and they began to investigate, etc.

And with my counterpart at the EU, terrific woman, Katharina von Schnurbein, we convened this conference on religious slaughter, and it was attended by representative of every EU country and Jewish groups from around the European continent and many Muslim leaders as well. And eventually Finland dropped that clause from the bill.

Finland does not do kashrut. Does not do shechita, does not do religious slaughter. But we were afraid of the domino effect. And so the point I'm making is that in the first less than three months of my tenure, I attended to discrimination against Hasidic Jews, discrimination against non traditional Jews, and discrimination against any Jew who cares about Kashrut, and Muslims who care about Halal.

And it gave me a sense that it didn't matter where it came from, if there was something that reflected either conscious anti-Semitism or inadvertent anti-Semitism, I had to be attentive to.

>> Niall Ferguson: I can imagine a history in which you carried on doing that kind of work, dealing with cases, as you say, of unintentional cases of intentional hostility towards Jews or Jewish practices.

But then October 7, 2023 happens, and I assume that radically changed the nature of the role that you were playing. Talk a bit about that. I want to get a little autobiographical here to talk about your own personal experience of learning, hearing the news, seeing the video, and then talk about how it impacted this job that you were doing.

>> Deborah Lipstadt: I was raised in a modern Orthodox home where you lived in both worlds. The Jewish theater on Saturday night and synagogue Saturday morning. It wasn't that we're gonna do Friday night, Friday night was Friday night. You were home for dinner or at friends' or with company or whatever.

But a family that very much valued Jewish learning, Jewish life very. Rebecca Coburn, sitting here, we come from the same kind of community. And then I went. I decided to spend a year of my junior year in Israel. And it was, to date myself, 1966, 67. And I had just.

That was the war. The war was in June, in April, I flew to Greece, met my sister in Greece, who had been studying LSC, and we went Greece and Turkey. Then I got on a plane in Turkey and flew to Damascus and went through Syria, Jordan, across the Allenby Bridge, through the Mandelbaum Gate, into Israel.

And it was the first time I had to be afraid as a Jew. I had a new passport, etc. I was more afraid as a woman, actually, as it turned out. And then this happened, and it was a cataclysmic event cuz none of us knew what would happen, etc.

So that was a turning point in my life. Another turning point was in 1972. I was asked by the Israeli government to go to the Soviet Union. Israelis then couldn't go to the Soviet Union. So people with what they called strong passports, American, Canadian, British, French, etc, Jews who could either teach something.

I was then a graduate student at Brandeis, or who could speak Hebrew, could maybe teach a Hebrew lesson to meet with refusenik. And that was a life changing experience, meeting people who had every reason to be afraid of their Jewishness. It's very early in the refusenik movement and their bravery, their innate bravery was just so overwhelming.

We're in the Schulz building. About four or five years ago, I was at a conference in Oakland and George Schultz came and Nathan Sharansky was there, and the two of them were in conversation reminiscing over those events. And then we were supposed to. We were in Moscow, Kyiv and Chernowitz or Chernovitzi, Bukovina, and we're supposed to go to Kishinev.

Steve Sipperstein's here someplace. And the KGB detained us for a day and then kicked us out. So I suddenly felt personally afraid as a Jew. So all those things were markers. And then did those experiences.

>> Niall Ferguson: Sorry to interrupt. Make you a Zionist? What was your relationship to Zionism at that stage?

>> Deborah Lipstadt: I had grown up in a home. My father had come from Germany. He came in the 20s. He wasn't a refugee from Hitler, but very strong Israel connection. And then being in Israel during the Six Day War, you know, the, the, the. I was, I sort of was on the cusp.

There's so many students on this campus and every place else who only know a very strong, powerful Israel. We didn't feel that way when we're sitting in Jerusalem during those days. That then seeing these brave Russian Soviet Jews who were, some had been scientists and mathematicians and now were night watchmen and women in cold, damp, dark lobbies of office buildings and things like that, or their children being harassed at school.

It gave me a sense of the people who, how easy I have it as an American, and this is a real thing. And it was then that I switched to studying about the Shoah. And I started by studying about American responses to the Shoah and the silence. In fact, fast forward to May of 23, rather, when the White House released the National Strategy on Combating Antisemitism.

There were four of us who spoke at the White House. At the podium, it was the Deputy Director of National Security, Ambassador Susan Rice, then Head of Domestic Policy Council, Doug Emhoff, second gentleman, and myself. And I was the last one. And I had, in my speech, which of course was cleared because it was in the White House podium, was cleared all the way up.

I said, I'm very conscious of the fact. And I had had the State Department and White House historian check. I said, how many, how many feet I was standing from where the State Department, because State Department offices used to be in the executive office building from where people were turned down for visas in the 40s.

That was a powerful moment. I'm getting far clemped, not very diplomatic. But to stand there and know that 100 yards was 100 yards from where I was standing. There were the offices where people were turned down, and we were issuing a national strategy on fighting the anti-Semitism. That was really something.

Then back to your question of October 7th. October 7th, I was in Rome. There was a conference at the Gregorian Institute, the Jesuit university associated with the Vatican and the Holocaust Museum, on the opening of the archives which Pope Francis had opened. I was standing in my room getting ready.

It was a Saturday morning with Shabbat. It was hag to go to Synagogue. I was going to a synagogue of Jews whose origins were in Libya, who had come to Italy. And I heard this. I said, another attack. But by the time I got to synagogue, suddenly I noticed that in the morning, the day before, I just had a driver.

Now I had a driver in the car behind me, etc., etc., cuz the embassy had upped the security. And it was a sobering experience. We had tried to get a meeting with the Pope for me, an audience for me with the Pope, and we hadn't been able to arrange it.

And Monday we got a call, the Pope, we'll see Ambassador Lipstadt. And I sat with him, and then we were just learning about the hostages, and I talked a lot about that, and he made some positive statements at then. Then he's made some more equivocal statements, but it changed.

It changed dramatically.

>> Niall Ferguson: Just talk for a moment about your immediate reactions to the events of October 7th. As an historian, you can't have missed the echoes of the Holocaust in the behavior of the perpetrators, particularly the use of sexual violence, as well as a woman. I'd love to get your thoughts on that, because my reaction, having, you know, for years taught the Third Reich special subject at Oxford, having written about the Holocaust in the book called War of the World, was they're deliberately reenacting a Holocaust scene.

This is a conscious design. This is a designed allusion to the Holocaust.

>> Deborah Lipstadt: I'm very reluctant. Just as background, and there are enough people here who know me know this that I'm very reluctant to make Holocaust analogies. I think that it's made too often, too cheaply, too glibly, etc.

And in fact, even today, when people ask me, is this 1939? Or I say, no, there's something Very different. I had an office at the State Department at the ambassadorial level, meaning presidentially nominated, Senate confirmed to deal with this issue, and had colleagues all around the world, so governments are taking it seriously.

But this, of course, threw all my intellectual calculations out the window when you saw. And listening to the tape, I'm sure many have heard it of one of the murderers, the Hamas murderers, calling his mother and saying, I just killed ten yahudim yehudim. She didn't say, you know, okay, you're fighting our behalf, but don't rejoice, you know, with.

The Prophet says, when your enemy falls, don't rejoice. I think that's Book of Proverbs is that. I'm not sure. But she's yelling, Allah Akbar. I killed ten Jews. Allah. And I watched and I watched as a woman and I watched a woman who, many of us have spent time down there in that area.

There's beautiful kibbutzim and places to visit, etc. And it was just, it was, it was stunning. And the other thing that, from a diplomatic point of view, one of the foci of my work up until that point was working on the Abraham Accord. So my first trip was to Saudi Arabia, where when I walked into the office of the Deputy Foreign Minister, he put out his hands and said to me, I come from a city of Jews, Medina.

Very pleased that I knew exactly what he meant. And where I sat with the. The Minister of Islamic affairs for Saudi Arabia for 40 minutes, talking about the dangers of anti-Semitism. I had made very good contacts in the UAE, including with Abdul bin Zayed, otherwise known as ABC, the foreign minister in Bahrain, etc.

So we were really working because. And that was what attracted me to the job, cuz it was a chance not just to put out Fires, but to build. And of course, October 7th, I was supposed to go to Saudi Arabia in November and of course that got shut down.

But what struck me was the glee, the glee of the murderers and then bringing it back to, you know, outside of Israel, whether it's London, whether it's New York, whether Berkeley, the glee with which you would see people tearing down the pictures of the hostages, which also happened on this campus.

Yeah, I'm sure with glee, with glee. And then I read an article by Eve Garrard, I think it is, in Fathom called The Pleasures of Antisemitism. And it clicked for me that there's a certain, there was a certain pleasure. I'm sort of paraphrasing and adapting what she says, but that A, I'm part of a tradition of antisemitism.

But more, you've always told me that I did my traditional tradition, Christian, Muslim, whatever did wrong. Now we know it was like a moral, a moral superiority, a moral gotcha. And then watching the normalization of antisemitism, I told some people here last night, being in France a few weeks after the attack and I was at a Jewish communal building and leaving lots of gendarmes outside.

The French had 17,000 police and gendarmes and military people at Jewish institutions in the weeks after October 7th. And then of course, the community had its own guards and some women pushed her way through, which made everyone nervous. But she was clearly harmless. But she said, I know who you are and I need your help.

I said, what? And she said, my children go to a French public school and they are being harassed. They're, I don't know, 10 and 12 or something like that. They're being harassed and hassled. There are a lot of Muslims in the class, and non-Muslims in there. And they don't wanna go to school and I wanna put them in the French school.

But I'm afraid because Jewish institutions get attacked. What should I do? And it wasn't something that I could answer. Or just six weeks ago, I was in Canada and meeting with a woman, meeting with a group of leaders of the Toronto Jewish community. And one very sober minded woman said to me, my daughter is 18 months away from going to university and she's interested in some aspect of stem.

I don't remember which one. And the conversation in our home is not which university will be best for her intellectual interests, but where will she be safest as a Jew?

>> Niall Ferguson: So this was the real revelation of October 7th and its aftermath. It was not a revelation that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad were terrorist organizations that wanted to kill Israelis.

They'd never done it on that scale before. But that wasn't really news. The news was the response in London, in New York, on the campuses of California-

>> Deborah Lipstadt: Geneva and-

>> Niall Ferguson: All over Europe. And this. Talk a little bit about this revelation and what it taught you about the nature of antisemitism in the 2000s.

Because to me, part of the point of this symposium that we're participating in is to think analytically about this phenomenon. And it's clear that many different strains of hostility to Jews came together in 2023, 24. And I'd love you to help us think about these different strains and also tell us which the most dangerous of these.

>> Deborah Lipstadt: Well, I don't want to say because you can be wrong in a nanosecond. But first of all, I saw coming from what is called in the American intellectual community, malign actors, other countries or NGOs, ideological antisemitism and utilitarian antisemitism. We saw significant, and you can read about this, so I'm not disclosing anything classified.

Significant Protocols of the Elders of Zion kind of antisemitism coming from the PRC, China, and being allowed on lots of Chinese platforms. Now, Chinese officials had engaged in this before on a personal level. If you went to China and told someone you were a Jew, you usually got a very positive response to, but from the government.

We had heard this before, but this was a wave that caught everyone's attention in the American intelligence community. And they asked me, I went into some of the intelligence agencies because they asked me to sort of help them unpack it. And I said, I see this more as utilitarian.

This is an attempt for the PRC to establish its bona fides with what we now call the Global South. With, we're with you, they're with them. Then we saw ideological antisemitism coming from Iran. And in fact, Iran had a direct hand in organizing some of the student demonstrations.

We know that, if you wanna see former Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, very respected and very competent director, issued a statement on July 9th indicating that. And there was other evidence as well. And from Russia, lots of the misinformation coming from Russia, I would say, both ideological and utilitarian to draw that difference.

So I saw that, and I saw it very distinctly, but I saw something else as well. And some of the people who are here, we've discussed this and we discussed this earlier today. This wasn't just about Israel. For some people this started about being about Israel and then it grew to being an attack on Western society.

I'm going to use very glib terms, I know that they are easily unpackable, but we only have an hour. So I'll write my book and I'll be more discreet in my book and nuanced in my book. Western civilization, Western values, democracy. And who is the epitome of the client state of the most horrific element of Western democracy?

The United States is Israel. And what group appears to have best succeeded at the hands of capitalism? Whether true or not, that was there. So it started from that and it moved. Then Israel became, and Jews became in loco, in the place of just instead of railing against everyone, more focused.

And for some it was the other way, it started with Jews and then it moved outward. But this is, this is more than solely an attack on Jews. And in fact in my travels and I've, I think in the end my staff told me I visited 33 different countries and some of them multiple times.

I lived on a plane, but no time to use all the frequent flower miles now. But what the message I tried to give and the message I imparted and I think to some degree it was heard because I now hear foreign ministers and heads of various countries saying what I said to them without crediting me.

And someone in my team said, well how come they didn't credit. I said that's better because they think it's their own. And what I told them, I said is you have to think of the threat of antisemitism in a multi tiered fashion, bottom level attack on Jews, Jewish institutions and those associated with them.

When I went to Buenos Aires for the anniversary of the bombing of the Jewish Community center during the ceremony. It's very powerful everybody's given a picture of one of the victims. And when the siren goes off, you raise the picture so the people become the memorial. And when the sirens go off, the memorial disappears.

I held up a picture of a young man who was not Jewish, who was in the building because his mother was taking a course on being a home health care aide and he was with her. So that's the bottom line, that's the cornerstone. And if antisemitism were solely.

I don't say just because, just suggests diminutive that's a nice jacket. It's just an old thing. We're solely that it would be something worth fighting for governments to fight and to address. But it's more than solely that. It's a threat to democracy. And often we say this is a threat to them but think about it.

If you buy into the anti Semitic conspiracy theory myth, the Jews control the banks, media, government, judiciary. You've given up on democracy and the colliery of that or the mirror image of that is for the victims or the people or the objects of the animus. They look here and there for someone to represent them and they don't see it.

I think of the students at UCLA who are barred from getting into the library unless they are you Jewish? Yes denounce Israel and they look where was, use that as a very robust police force. Nowhere to be seen so they also gave. So that the threat to democracy, third level, the threat to national stability and security.

The anti Semitism becomes in the Yiddish term Kochleffel. The way to stir up the pot. I'll give you an example from history. Late 1959, there's an outbreak of antisemitism in the Federal Republic of Germany, West Germany. And it was unexpected and it's very benign by today's standards. Tombstones are knocked over, freshly rebuilt synagogues have swastikas painted on them.

And then it spreads to New York, to London. And no, they weren't quite sure where it came from. And after, some investigation, and then later into the 80s and 90s with the 80s rather, with the defection of Soviet KGB people. It was the KGB working with the Stasi and working with communist sympathizers in these different countries.

>> Niall Ferguson: They tried to give the impression that there were neo Nazis.

>> Deborah Lipstadt: Exactly, well, and they had a problem because they stopped it because it was so successful that it made the neo Nazis are back. They didn't call them Neo then it was only 14 years after the war.

The Nazis are back, so here they were. They're sworn enemies. But to show that but the initial initiative was Thomas Frid does this in his book on active measures on Soviet and Russian disinformation. The initiative was to paint Federal Republic of Germany as a not reliable ally, wasn't to spread antisemitism, but to say, you think the west is so great, you can't trust them.

And we see that today with PRC and others, that it's a way of destabilizing, of creating doubts about the stability of the West. That's why I think the idea that many of the encampments and many of the worst things we've seen have been on elite universities. That's not by chance.

So I had those three levels. And then in November of this past year, I was at the Paris Peace Forum, and in a side event, I was in conversation with Manuel Valve, who was Prime Minister of France during the 2014 Charlie Hebdo hypercasher tragedies. And at that point, many French Jews were considering leaving France.

I think the then Prime Minister of Israel, the current Prime Minister of Israel, the orphan Prime Minister of Israel, came and told them they should leave, etc. And Valve said, France without Jews will not be France. And I said to him, I said, you weren't talking to the Jews at that point and saying, stay with us, sit with us here, you'll be safe.

You were talking to the French society. And we talked about it. And one of the things he said, he said, first of all, Jews are part of the warp and woof of French society. You take them out, it changes. But also, if one minority group doesn't feel secure, other minority groups don't feel secure.

So that's another level of the destabilization to societies. So that when you see antisemitism, I said this to the mayor of Amsterdam four or five days after the attack on the soccer fans. And I said it just to some of our leading intelligence agencies, that when you see antisemitism, think of it as the yellow, not the canary in the coal mine.

That canary is so dead. I hate that analogy, but think of it as the flashing amber light before the light turns red. That red light may not be more antisemitism, but antisemitism as the harbinger of a destabilized society. And that was part of what we did.

>> Niall Ferguson: One of the things that I find fascinating is that today's antisemitism, wherever one looks, doesn't include an enormous amount of old-style national socialism, fascist antisemitism, the sort of remnants of that.

And you can find it if you kind of know where to look. But I would say it played almost zero part in the pro Palestinian or even pro Hamas demonstrations on campuses. The legacy of the Soviet propaganda that you just talked about. One can detect that in sections of the left in Europe and indeed on the campus left.

But I still don't think that's a particularly powerful force anymore. What seems to be driving today's antisemitism, particularly in this kind of realm we're talking about of American or British campuses, is a strange alliance between a new kind of radical left that is focused on identity politics. They call themselves progressives, but I'm not sure that's a great designation.

And on the other side, Islamists, or maybe put it more broadly, Muslim student groups. This seems like the most unlikely combination, summed up with that poster that everybody remembers, Queers for Palestine.

>> Deborah Lipstadt: Outside the State Department. I'm going in on the 21st street side and there's a small demonstration and one trans woman was standing there, Queers for Palestine.

And I had on my State Department badge and I was about to go into the building. People knew who I was, the guards knew who I was, etCC. But if I had been an anonymity, I would have said, go right, I'll fund you on a one way ticket.

You will not need a return ticket. I'm happy to get you a return ticket, but it will not be used. It was such a weird kind of.

>> Niall Ferguson: How would you explain, how do you explain that apparent cognitive dissonance? Because I can't it's the one thing that I'm baffled by, why you would make comment why people on the radical left, the woke left, as they're sometimes called.

Would end up making common cause with Islamists who seem entirely committed to the destruction of this.

>> Deborah Lipstadt: I think, it would be easy to say, it's simply they all hate Jews. And I think there's part of that the antisemitism is. I don't know whether it's something that has continued.

And we went, we talked about this a little bit this morning over the centuries or the modern is something dramatically different, but there is a strain of continuity. It is what Professor Robert Wistrich used to call the oldest, longest continuous hatred. And it is. There have been others that have been worse at times, but.

And it is so built into so many different societies. It is like a mutating virus. I got pushed back at the State Department when I referred to that in one of my talks and someone said, well, this is insulting to people who have a virus.

>> Niall Ferguson: Tells you a lot about the State Department.

>> Deborah Lipstadt: Well, not everyone I know, not everyone. There's some very good people there, very, very good people there, but that was a killer. But it's what some people are calling a shape shifter. It's a mouthful, but it takes different. It fills that need. And I don't want to make it sound like it's this metaphysical kind of thing, but it has emerged in so many different categories and capacities and definitions and compositions that it serves that purpose.

I also think that Jews can be annoying, they can be noisy, they talk about themselves as victims. And when you think about prejudice, most prejudices certainly, let's say racism, you're punching down that person is okay as long as they know their place. I'm in Atlanta city, surrounded on four sides by Georgia.

They say in Atlanta, the further north you go, the more in the south you are. But what was the great thing that a black person shouldn't be uppity? A 50 year old black man was boy. So as long as you knew your place, because we need you, we need you to clean our houses, we need you to whatever work in the fields, whatever it might be, etc.

And there's some of that pushing down in Jews, certainly Haredi Jews, ostensibly orthodox Jews. If you go to Brooklyn, you know, you'll see some of that as well. But there's another element to antisemitism and it's the punching up that Jews. Going back to the conspiracy theory, Jews are engaged in this conspiracy.

They're small in number, punching above their weight. And their objective is to harm me as a non Jew. And they must be stopped by any means necessary. So you get that combination together with this enduring hatred, together with what Han Arendt used to tell the joke, the bicycle riders, it's the Jews, the Jews, the Jews, the Nazis saying, someone yells out and the bicycle riders.

And the man says, why the bicycle riders? And he says, why the Jews? But if you have there someone who's a familiar enemy, it works much better.

>> Niall Ferguson: Got one more question, then I'm going to open it up to questions from the floor. What is the trend is?

If you look ahead over the next five or ten years, do you think this is a problem that is going to get worse globally and in the United States, or do you have any reason to think that we might see it diminish?

>> Deborah Lipstadt: First of all, you and I are historians and we sociologists talk about trends to the future.

I didn't want to because you're always wrong. You know, the only thing you have saving grace is most people don't remember what you said. But I hate predictions, I think the Talmud says that with the close of the Hebrew scriptures, prophecy was left to children and fools. I'm not a child and I don't want to, so I don't like to prophesize.

But having said all that, on one hand I find it very depressing and very pessimistic. Olga Litvak is here, our resident pessimist. But on the other hand, I've seen some positive signs. First of all, my conversations in the Gulf countries. True, I'm meeting with the leadership, I'm meeting with the governmental leadership and there's a division, and I'll use a shorthand term with that and the street without meaning any degradation of that.

But still there's a recognition that this is not good, this antisemitism is not good, that multi tiered threat. When I would talk to them, I wouldn't talk that second tier, I wouldn't say a threat to democracy, I'd say a threat to democracy and rule of law. So because most of them are hardly democracies, but there's a recognition.

I'll give you another thing which could be a meaningless moment or could turn into something real in about a year. I guess January last year, I think it was. I got to my office, I noticed on my calendar the Attorney General of one of our major democratic allies was coming to see me in my office.

Now, when I go to countries, I'd very often meet with the Minister of Justice, Attorney General. But when they came to Washington, I knew he was only going to be there for a day because it was reported in the paper. They don't usually seek me out and come to my office.

So I said, does he know he's supposed to be seeing Merrick Garland? They said, yes, he's coming directly from Attorney General Garland's office to you. He comes in, he says, we have an anti Semitism problem and we don't know what to do about it. How should we address it?

So I began to talk about some of the things I have seen, none of them rocket science. And after he left, I began to think about it and I assembled my team and I said, we have to come out with some sort of convention, guidelines, best practices. And we did, we worked on it.

I said, it must be short, I don't want a long tome that comes out of the State Department. Break your back carrying it, but nobody ever reads it. And we came up with the 700 word, what we call Global Guidelines to Combat Antisemitism. Now, we worked with our colleagues in Germany and eu, South America, Argentina, some of the other countries, and Israel.

Of course, we could have just issued it, as this is our experience, but we didn't want to do that. We wanted it to be a multilateral organization. So we began to seek out other countries to sign. And we decided this was happening January 24th. I was going to Buenos Aires in July 24th for the 30th anniversary of the AMIA bombing, a bombing by Hezbollah with the support of Iran.

Some things never change. And we decided we wanted to issue with there, and we composed these 700 words, 10, 12, 12 paragraphs. First and foremost, leaders have to speak out. Secondly, don't weaponize antisemitism. Doesn't matter if it comes to the right, the left, wherever it's wrong, you know, enforce your laws, protect.

We talk about the IHRA definition as a useful tool and enhance Jewish life because we also know that the more you demystify Jewish life and demystify the Jew, that also helps. And right before we left for Buenos Aires, about a week before, I was interviewed by a newspaper.

My deputy, who comes from the communications world, or pd, as we call it, Public Diplomacy world, as they call it in the State Department, she said to me, well, how many countries have signed on? I said, well, we have 26, I'm hoping by the time we get the Buenos aires, we'll have 30.

And I could see he got very tense. And afterwards I said, what's wrong? He said, under promise, over perform. P.S by the time we got to Buenos Aires, we had 32. We now have 39 former EU, OAS, OSCE and Council of Europe have all signed on and others are in the offing.

Very moving experience. I went up to talk to the Deputy Secretary of State bank about 10 days before I was leaving. Of course, it was cleared through multiple offices in the State Department, and certain offices demarched other countries, saying, this is a priority for every embassy was working on this.

Every embassy that we asked was working on this. And I went in to see John Bass, who was then Deputy Secretary of State. And he looked at the list, and he said, well, where's Ukraine? I said, well, John, we started with working through the EU. Those are our EU colleagues.

He said, no, no, Ukraine must be on the first. That was the mid, it was July, early in July, and NATO was meeting in Washington. Washington became an armed camp. And I said, well, I know the Ukrainian ambassador. We've met, we've talked, and we spent time together. He said, write her a note.

And he said, I'm gonna see her tonight. Zelensky was present. Zelensky was also gonna be there. And he said, I'm going to mention it or whatever. So I wrote her a letter. I said, I think you may have other concerns because you're, but we, I wanted you to know.

And Deputy Secretary John Bass wanted you to know about this. And I sent it off. I was leaving for Buenos Aires three days later. I never expected to hear from them. And we didn't get to Buenos Aires. I'm there, and there's a congressional delegation that's also come to mark the anniversary of the bombing.

And we're invited to dinner at the residence of the ambassador. And I'm in my car with my team, three members of my team, and I hear my deputy. Yes, yes, I'll tell her. And he says, that's the ambassador, Mark Stanley. He said, there's going to be a phone call for you when you get to the residence.

I said, okay. We get to the residence and I walk in and he's got his phone and he's talking. Yes, here she is. Here she is. A strange face. Hello, I'm the Ukrainian ambassador to Argentina, and I've just informed by a foreign ministry. We wanna be in the first group of signatories.

We don't wanna be an add-on. So now, they stand as a testimony to our multilateral approach and what we thought best practices. And now the challenge, the challenge to this administration, the challenge to stakeholder organizations to those I know some of you come from universities where there's institutes for antisemitism to hold these countries feet to the fire.

Are you really abiding by this? And that gives me hope because it went to the highest levels of most countries, their foreign ministries.

>> Niall Ferguson: And I'm glad you mentioned Ukraine because we've talked a lot about the attack on Israel. But one of the stranger quirks of recent years has been the insistence on the Russian government's part that the Ukrainian government is a Nazi government and the president is himself Jewish.

So it's a crazy world.

>> Deborah Lipstadt: There's the GEC. I forget what the initial stood for because I was doing, but a recently disbanded office in the State Department. But they put out a study showing Kremlin use of antisemitism and disinformation, both the Soviet Union and contemporary Russia. It's a tool.

It's that stirring up the pot.

>> Niall Ferguson: So we have time, 15 minutes. Just a little under 50 minutes for questions. Lord Roberts was quick. A microphone is coming your way, Andrew.

>> Speaker 4: Hello, I'm the chairman of the British Parliamentary 7th of October Commission and there's been a survey recently of a large number of British Muslims, over a thousand 28% of whom said that no massacres or rapes took place on the 7th of October.

28%. Is this because they get their news from, from their own sources? Is it because it's a straightforward anti Semitic remark that they don't mind making? Why could it be anything like that number of people who would respond to a public survey in that way?

>> Deborah Lipstadt: My short answer to your question is yes, it's all of the above.

I co-authored an op-ed with Ambassador, then Ambassador Michelle Taylor, who was the US ambassador to the Human Rights Council and on the gender based violence GBV of October 7th. And we said, you know, when it was the Hasidims, there was an immediate response and no one denied when it was the Iranian women taking off their hat, their headscarves, it was immediate.

No one denied it. We've seen that over Boko Haram, Bring Back Our Girls. There was a silence. There was a silence. And now that silence has morphed into it didn't happen. I think there's a lecture going on even as we speak at Berkeley making the same argument. You can talk to Professor Katz, to whom you're sitting one seat away.

It's a horrific thing. It's a horrific thing. So much of the evidence comes from the murderers and the rapists themselves. It is Holocaust denial writ large. I've had pretty personal experiences with Holocaust denials, having sat in the trial and sat 10 weeks, 10ft from the world's then leading Holocaust denier.

It is hardcore denial writ large. There have been some, like some feminist scholars who said, well, it was legitimate, they didn't deny that it happened, but it's legit. That's even more disgusting, especially coming from so-called feminists. But it is quite striking, it is quite striking. Look, you're speaking to something that I hesitate to say this because I don't have time to really go into it in depth, but a reluctance to acknowledge that there's a problem in many of our democratic, European, democratic countries with portions of the Muslim community.

Portions of whether they be recent arrivals or they be multi generational, whether it's where they're getting their news, where they connect, I don't know, but it is a very disturbing trend.

>> Niall Ferguson: Thanks, Deborah. Other questions will go to Professor Katz.

>> Speaker 5: Thanks. First of all, just wanna thank you so much for your extraordinary service, Deborah.

Your courage and your determination are really inspiring. We all benefit from them. So to go back to something you said at the very beginning, which was that you felt right away when you entered the ambassadorship that, wow, there's this chasm between academic work on anti-Semitism. And what it is to be here on the ground doing this, which makes a lot of sense, of course, and I just wondered if you could expand on that a little bit.

And maybe, I mean, I guess sort of two-sided question which is are there, were there moments where you really saw kind of conceptual ideas about anti-Semitism at play in front of your eyes in ways that made you feel like, I wouldn't have understood this if I hadn't been a scholar.

And on the other hand, were there moments where you saw things on the ground that you said, I wish people who are studying anti-Semitism could see this because we don't have. But we don't think about this. We don't understand this the way that we think about anti-Semitism, academics.

>> Deborah Lipstadt: That's such a good question. Not surprisingly, coming from you. It's hard to pinpoint moments. But my team, at one point, two very experienced foreign service officers on my team came into my office, and they said, what's special about you? I said, well, if you ask my sister, she'll tell you, but they said no.

They had been in this office on, they different tours of duties, but they had watched some of my predecessors. They say, you get it right away. Is this anti-Semitism, isn't there? I said, well, I got 30 years of looking at this. There were moments where my academic training was the most powerful tool that I had.

And to put someone. It was a gutsy thing for the president to nominate me someone because they're afraid of professors. Professors think they know everything. But being able to draw on this reminds me of this is, I just told Steve Zipperstein that after I met with the mayor of Amsterdam.

There was a whole debate whether what to call what happened in Amsterdam pogrom or not. So I was home that the day of the debate, and I walked into my study at home in Washington, my apartment in Washington, and I pulled his book on Kishinev off the shelf just to.

I've read it many times, I've underlined it, I've taught it, but I wanted to get that. And I don't know how many other of my predecessors would have had that access or had known that. I also learned that, you know, it's very easy as a professor, you make.

You're an independent operator, and once again, remembering, I just got a call today from someone, a reporter on Kanye West's latest adventures. And normally, I would call my media person and say, get this cleared, that I can talk now. But there was also times when I learned to be quiet, that we did things quietly, that we pushed back, that there was one incident in South America where the head of the country had said horrific things.

I wanted to speak out, and I got a call from the secretary's office. He's on his way there now, and, no, he's at a meeting where this guy will be anyway, and he's going to talk to him personally. So if he's going to do it at that level, you don't do it at my level.

But why didn't you speak out? Well, Eitla da Baerva, Eitla Stok is a time to speak and a time to be silent. And I lost some back. I didn't win all the battles. I fought on some statements, how they were phrased, what was included, what was not included.

And sometimes I had to make a choice. There was one statement which the secretary was issuing, which of course we had prepared some of the language and what was being considered was troublesome to me. There was one line in there and I was told, well, Deborah, it's your choice.

Either this is the statement or no statement. And I said, we go with the statement. So you're working as part of a very large team with different perspectives, especially after October 7th. But one of the things we did was, and this, I credit my team and the experience people had on my team for show for teaching me this.

But we stayed in our lane, so at one point, there was consideration of sanctions on arms going to an unnamed country, which we can all figure out was. And we were asked, you know, the question came up, we're not experts on arms and how arms are used in human rights abuses.

We're not experts on Middle East affairs, I mean, I know a lot members of my team, but that's not our expertise. But where they turn to us, because we had worked with us earlier, this arms office in the State Department. The sanctioning of arms was we asked the question, is this a double standard and what other countries have gotten these weapons from us?

There were seven, and how many of them are living up to the standards that are being imposed? So we focused, we stayed focused, wasn't the attempt to be experts on everything. But we said, you want us, we want to know if this is the double standard. And that was how we often worked.

>> Niall Ferguson: We're running out of time, and we've got more questions than we've got time for. There's a gentleman on the second row who's been patient, and he might have to be the last question, very briefly, what is the relationship between antisemitism and anti Zionism?

>> Deborah Lipstadt: We have a whole conference going on.

>> Niall Ferguson: How long have you got? We spent much of the morning debating that, not to mention anti Israelism, which was introduced. This is a great question.

>> Deborah Lipstadt: Let me say this, that much of the anti Zionism we've seen over the past, certainly, over the past 15 or 16 months now.

Has veered into overt antisemitism or has begun as antisemitism and has been couched in anti-Israel positions. Criticism of Israeli policy is not anti Semitism, that were the case, all those Israeli who are on the streets every Saturday night, you know, protesting would be. You too would be anti-Semitic.

And of course, that's ridiculous. But too often, it veers into that, or plants and veers may be too kind a word. It is firmly in that, when you're firebombing a synagogue in Montreal, when you're attacking a Jew wearing yarmulke in Times Square. When you're painting Jewish stars on apartment houses in Paris, some of which may have been Russian, Moldovans did that.

But in other places, that's not being pro Gaza, that's not being pro Palestinian, that's not even being pro Hamas. That's being anti-Semitic, plain and simple. And I think it has to be called out.

>> Niall Ferguson: Well, Deborah, it's been a great pleasure to spend this hour with you and thank you for speaking so frankly now that you don't have to have your every statement cleared.

>> Deborah Lipstadt: I spoke frankly even then, I caused a lot of discomfort.

>> Niall Ferguson: But I can imagine elements in the State Department that would have been made quite nervous by some of the things that you've said this afternoon. I didn't want it to get lost in the conversation that you actually had entered the public sphere and left the academic sphere before you took this job as special envoy.

I first became aware of your courage during the libel trial when David Irving sued you. I hadn't realized because I'd forgotten how long that process took. An incredibly protracted four years, harrowing four year more than four year trial, which you won when you won that case. The Times of London wrote, history has had its day in court and scored a crushing victory.

We who are historians don't get many victories as big as that one. But that taught us all, particularly, historians working in Britain who'd had to contend with Irving's increasingly false accounts of German history. What a courageous person you are. So, thank you so much for your time.

>> Deborah Lipstadt: Thank you.

>> Niall Ferguson: Please, join me in giving a big hand.