Author Urges Vigilance Against Anti-Semitism

On a day when some Southern Californians paused to remember the Nazi Holocaust and vow, “never again,” a Jewish author and professor who waged a successful four-year battle to discredit a leading Holocaust denier, warned that the fight against anti-Semitism never ends.

Sixty years after the extermination of 6 million Jews during World War II, Deborah Lipstadt said history had been vindicated when a British court ruled against Hitler biographer David Irving, who sued her for libel after she wrote that he had deliberately falsified history to fit his extremist views.

Among other things, Irving contended that Hitler did not order the extermination of Jews and that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz.

Speaking of the trial, Lipstadt said: “It exposed to the world in a British court that bent-over-backward to be fair to David Irving that a basic tenet of Holocaust denial is a complete and total sham . . . and that racism and anti-Semitism are an extrinsic part of Holocaust denial.”

Lipstadt told a sold-out audience of 1,500 at Temple Beth Am in Los Angeles on Sunday night that Irving “lied and perverted” World War II history.

“This is a man whose sources cannot be trusted,” she said. “This man is not an historian.”

At times the audience seemed deeply moved by her remarks, especially when she read excerpts of letters from Holocaust survivors or their relatives who thanked her for exposing Irving.

One daughter of a victim wrote: “Had [Irving] won, my mother would have been a victim a second time.”

The Irving case attracted international attention and was closely followed by Jewish leaders around the world, particularly in Israel and the United States. Indeed, at one point Israel released a 1,300-page prison memoir of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann for use by Lipstadt’s attorneys.

“This was not just a battle about anti-Semitism,” Lipstadt said earlier in an interview. “This was a battle against racism, against fascism. This was not just a victory for Jews, for Jewish history, for the history of the Holocaust.”

Her remarks during her first visit to Los Angeles since she won the libel suit last month in London came on a day when the state’s leading political figures and community leaders gathered to remember the Shoah, Hebrew for Holocaust. Gov. Gray Davis and Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and others addressed a crowd of more than 2,000 at Pan Pacific Park in what was billed as the largest Holocaust Remembrance Day in the state.

Recalling the horrors of the Nazis against the Jews during World War II, speaker after speaker called upon Americans to never forget the Holocaust.

Kirkpatrick vividly recounted the fate of those murdered by the Nazis.

“They were machine-gunned, butchered, shot in the head on the edges of trenches, burned alive, gassed, starved, frozen to death, worked to death in camps, beaten to death, tortured to death because of their religion and their ethnic identity--because they were Jews,” she told the hushed audience.

Others were killed because they were physically or mentally handicapped or were homosexuals, she said.

“It is an onerous duty to remember mass murder, men, women and children by the millions. It is an onerous responsibility to remember because by remembering we can safeguard ourselves, our families, our friends, and our countries for the future,” she said.

Davis told the crowd they had one simple mission: to never forget.

“For all those who lived through the Holocaust and survived it, for those who came after, the Holocaust has redefined our understanding of man’s capacity for evil,” the governor said.

It is especially important to remember, Davis and other speakers said, because the world is entering a new century and eyewitnesses to the Holocaust are dying.

One speaker referred to Lipstadt’s court case in England.

“While we should all feel grateful for the English court decision, it will certainly not put an end to the Holocaust denial,” said Jona Goldrich, chairman of the Los Angeles Holocaust Monument.

One Holocaust survivor, Leon Stabinsky, said he had one reaction when Irving made his allegations.

“Anger. Anger because it’s a direct insult to the memory of not only the direct members of my family who perished and others who died, but to those who survived,” said Stabinsky, president of the California Assn. of Holocaust Child Survivors.

Although the day’s focus during public observances was on the events of the Nazi era, Lipstadt’s appearance was a reminder for many to remain vigilant against Holocaust deniers and neo-Nazis.

“This man came after me,” said Lipstadt, director of the Institute for Jewish Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, and a professor of modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies. “I didn’t give as good as I got. I gave better than I got, and that feels real good. That it had to happen is terrible,” she said.

Irving sued, arguing that his reputation had been damaged by her book, “Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory.” British High Court Judge Charles Gray declared in a 334-page ruling, “Irving has for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence.” The judge called him a “right-wing, pro-Nazi polemicist.”

Lipstadt’s appearance Sunday was a homecoming for her. She lived in Los Angeles for 15 years when was a professor at UCLA and was a congregant at the synagogue. She has been at Emory since 1993.