Deborah Lipstadt

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Deborah Esther Lipstadt (born March 18, 1947, New York City) is an American historian and author of the book Denying the Holocaust. She is the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University. She received her BA from City College of New York and her MA and PhD from Brandeis University.

David Irving sued her and her publisher, Penguin Books, for libel in a British court, after she characterized some of his writings and public statements as Holocaust denial in her book Denying the Holocaust. The legal defense team was led by Anthony Julius, and the defense was presented in court by Richard Rampton QC in early 2000. Although UK libel law puts the burden of proof on the defendant rather than the plaintiff, Lipstadt and Penguin won the case using the justification defense -- that is, by demonstrating in court that Lipstadt's accusations against Irving were substantially true and therefore not libelous. The case was argued as a bench trial before Justice Charles Gray, who produced a written judgment hundreds of pages long, detailing Irving's systematic distortion of the historical record of World War II. The Times (April 14, 2000, page 23) said of Lipstadt's victory, "History has had its day in court and scored a crushing victory." [1]

Lipstadt was a consultant to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. In 1994 she was appointed by Bill Clinton to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council.

[edit] Free Speech

Despite her acrimonious history with Holocaust denier David Irving (and in keeping with herself being sued by him for her writing), she has stated that she is personally opposed to the Austrian court's decision[2] in 2005 to sentence Irving to three years in prison for his speech (Holocaust denial is punishable in Austria by a maximum 20-year sentence). "I am uncomfortable with imprisoning people for speech. Let him go and let him fade from everyone's radar screens." BBC news

[edit] Bibliography

• Beyond Belief : The American Press And The Coming Of The Holocaust, 1933- 1945 (1993) [ISBN 0-02-919161-0]
• Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (1994) [ISBN 0-452-27274-2]
• History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving (2005) [ISBN 0-06-059376-8]

[edit] External links

• Wikisource:David Irving v. Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt
• Emory University biography
• David Irving vs. Deborah Lipstadt
• Deborah Lipstadt's blog