Anti-Semitism: Past And Present | 2025 History Symposium | Hoover Institution - Talks from the Hoover Institution

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(00:00):
[MUSIC]

>> Condoleezza Rice (00:03):
Thank you very much.
The first thing I wanna say isa very note of gratefulness to
the Applied History Program,the Applied History Lab, for doing this.
I can't think of a more importantsubject than to look at
the issues of antisemitism.
We always think of the historicalcircumstances of anti Semitism, but

(00:28):
of course, unfortunately,
we are experiencing the fact thatthese human frailties never go away.
And so I know that this will be,has been and will continue to be
a really excellent conversationabout the issues of antisemitism,
how to confront it, what to learnfrom history and how to move forward.

(00:51):
And so I'm really very grateful tothe Applied History Working Group in
the History Lab for putting this together.
And that means that I'm especiallygrateful to Niall Ferguson,
who is the Millbank Family Senior Fellowat the Hoover Institution and
the Chairman of the Hoover Applied HistoryProgram and a part of our History Lab.

(01:15):
He is going to be in conversation withour guest, Professor Lipstadt welcome.
Deborah Lipstadt isa distinguished historian and
diplomat who is renowned forher scholarship on
the Holocaust and on modern antisemitism.

(01:35):
Deborah currently holds the title ofUniversity Distinguished Professor and
is the Dorrit professorof Modern Jewish and
Holocaust Studies at Emory University,where she has taught since 1993,
which where clearly they must havebrought her on at the age of 11.

(01:56):
I think it will bea wonderful conversation.
I will say that in additionto historical scholarship and
her advisory roles, she's answeredthe noble call of public service.
From May 2022 until January 2025,
she served as the US Special Envoyto monitor and combat antisemitism.

(02:20):
And so in fact, it is knowledge inpractice that we celebrate today.
And so let me invite to the stage Nialland Deborah for the conversation.
And thank you very much for yourattendance at this important symposium.

>> Niall Ferguson (02:37):
We're delighted to have had Secretary Rice come and
introduce this session.
I'm extremely excited to have a chance tohave a conversation with you, Deborah.
You've been doing an extraordinarilyimportant and difficult job.
As Secretary Rice just mentioned,as US Special Envoy for

(02:58):
Monitoring and Combating Antisemitism,I wanted to begin
by asking you what you've learned inthe course of performing that role.
You've just finished more orless unpacked or cleared your desk and
come straight here, forwhich we're enormously grateful.

(03:18):
But it couldn't be fresher in your mind.
So let's begin with whatyou learned doing this job.

>> Deborah Lipstadt (03:24):
I learned that living in the world of diplomacy and
living in the word I used last night withsome of the members of this session,
in the rarefied world of the universityare two separate worlds,
two very different worlds.
And I learned It took me a while, butI had a very good team that I built up.

(03:44):
When I came in, there were about three anda half people, not a half a person,
part time person on our team.
When I left, we had 21 people, which alsospeaks 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.

(04:05):
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 replicatingstakeholder organizations.

(04:28):
But if we move properly and figured outhow the State Department worked, and
I had some senior foreign service officerson my team, so that was very helpful.
We could use the levers of government.
Our objective was to usethe levers of government to

(04:49):
combat this issue,to make it more broadly understood.
So that's one thing I learned.
I also learned on the thirdday I was in office.
In fact,I had just been sworn in administratively.
I was ceremoniously sworn intothe White House a few weeks later.
But I had to get into the building,I had to do the administrative swearing.

(05:09):
I woke up and I heard on,I guess must have been Morning Edition,
that a group of Jews hadbeen 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.

(05:34):
A group of.
They weren't a group,126 Hasidic Jews on this flight.
Some had bought ticketsthrough travel agents.
Some were going on points,some had bought, they weren't a group.
The only thing that made them a group isthat they were all identifiable as Jews,
either with kibout havingordered kosher food, Tzitzit or

(05:57):
whatever it might have been.
Had been denied permission tocontinue from Frankfurt to Budapest,
where they were going for the yard sitefor the anniversary of the death of
a famous Hasidic rabbi, because somehad been, quote, unquote, unruly.
It turns out that some ofthe people on the plane,
had Lufthansa then still had a maskmandate, refused to wear their mask.

(06:22):
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 blankto 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 thecaptain is called in Lufthansa parlance,

(06:45):
I learned lots of interesting tidbits.
Radio.
To head to Frankfurt.
There is a group of Orthodox Jews who arebeing unruly, unruly in IATA terminology.
Again, something I never thought I wouldknow, 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.

(07:07):
But when they hear a group.
The plane was met by 20 armed gendarmes atthe doorway as they walked off the plane.
So here you are, probably a descendantof Hungarian Jews, and you walk,
you land in Germany, andyou're met by armed guards, you know, and
it's not a good look for any airline.

(07:28):
It's a very bad look forthe German national airline.
And then they were denied.
They were not told.
They just were told, go to this gate andyou 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.

This is day three of the job.

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 andI get.
Get a message that the CEO of Lufthansais coming to see me in about an hour,
an hour and a half.

(08:05):
Then I get a phone call.
Deborah, we have Secretary Buttigieg,
then Secretary ofTransportation Deputy on the phone.
He's going to brief you.
And he said, these are American citizens.
So we are tracking this very closely andyou can speak in our name.
So sitting opposite the CEO of Lufthansawith their 105,000 employees and

(08:27):
other piece of useless informationthat is better in my head, and I said,
I just got off the phone withthe Department of Transportation and
we are very concerned about this.
And his eyes opened up wide and I suddenlyrealized he doesn't hear Deborah Lipstadt,
author of so many books or professor.
He hears the United Statesgovernment speaking.

(08:48):
And that's day three, I said,
I have different levers that I can use anduse responsibly.
And I have to figure out how to do that.
It's an interesting.
I'll tell you two otheranecdotes to sort of.
So that was day three.
A few weeks later,I go to Saudi Arabia for my first trip.

(09:08):
I purposely made thatmy first foreign trip.

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 ofTransportation levied the biggest fine
ever levied on an airline.

(09:32):
There was a civil agreement.
They had put out this terriblestatement right after it happened.
We're sorry, we are training ouremployees to be more sensitive.
So I was interviewed at NBC and I said,
I think they need more thansensitivity training, you know.
And that got the attention of Lufthansa.

(09:54):
And they adopted the IHRA definition,the much debated IHRA definition.
And they instituted differenttraining programs for their team.
It was just in Arab, a screw up,it never went up to the higher
ranks of the offices, butthey took it very seriously.

(10:16):
Fast forward about three weeks laterhaving come from Saudi Arabia to
Jerusalem, I'm in my hotel and I hearthat a group of four or five American
families who are having bar and batmitzvahs at the southern end of the Kotel.
There's an area where,according to the Israeli government,
non-traditional bar and bat mitzvahs andcelebrations can be held

(10:39):
were accosted by young, I don't wannacall them hooligans cuz that lessons.
They spit on them.
They tore up the Siddur Simtheir prayer books.
And the police were nowhere to be found.
So together with my deputy,
I got on the phone right awayto make sure what he had heard.
We tweeted out,had this happened in any other country,

(11:01):
we would have no trouble describingit as antisemitism, which was.
When he was in Israel about two monthslater, 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 ata conference convened by the EU with our

(11:25):
very strong support because the Finnswere considering an Animal Welfare Bill.
1200 pages.
I did not read the whole thing.
But in the bill, every aspect ofanimal welfare was that before
slaughtering animals had to be stunned,which would, of course,
make them ineligible according to kashrut,and for many, halal.

(11:48):
There were certain interpretationof halal which would accept it.
But as we went through the bill,we discovered it allowed for fishing,
hunting, andcooking 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 embassyin Finland that took this very seriously,

(12:12):
and they began to investigate, etc.
And with my counterpart at the EU,terrific woman, Katharina von Schnurbein,
we convened this conferenceon religious slaughter, and
it was attended by representativeof every EU country and
Jewish groups from around the Europeancontinent and many Muslim leaders as well.

(12:36):
And eventually Finland droppedthat 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 thefirst less than three months of my tenure,

(12:57):
I attended to discriminationagainst Hasidic Jews,
discrimination against nontraditional Jews, and discrimination
against any Jew who cares about Kashrut,and Muslims who care about Halal.
And it gave me a sense that itdidn't matter where it came from,
if there was something that reflectedeither conscious anti-Semitism or

(13:20):
inadvertent anti-Semitism,I had to be attentive to.
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 hostilitytowards Jews or Jewish practices.

(13:42):
But then October 7, 2023 happens, and
I assume that radically changed the natureof the role that you were playing.
Talk a bit about that.
I want to get a little autobiographicalhere to talk about your own personal
experience of learning,hearing the news, seeing the video, and

(14:03):
then talk about how it impactedthis job that you were doing.

I was raised in a modern Orthodox home where
you lived in both worlds.
The Jewish theater on Saturday night andsynagogue Saturday morning.
It wasn't that we're gonna do Fridaynight, Friday night was Friday night.
You were home for dinner orat friends' or with company or whatever.
But a family that very much valuedJewish learning, Jewish life very.

(14:32):
Rebecca Coburn, sitting here,we come from the same kind of community.
And then I went.
I decided to spend a year ofmy junior year in Israel.
And it was, to date myself, 1966, 67.
And I had just.
That was the war.

(14:53):
The war was in June, in April,I flew to Greece, met my sister in Greece,
who had been studying LSC, andwe went Greece and Turkey.
Then I got on a plane in Turkey andflew to Damascus and went through Syria,
Jordan, across the Allenby Bridge,through the Mandelbaum Gate, into Israel.
And it was the first time Ihad to be afraid as a Jew.

(15:14):
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 noneof us knew what would happen, etc.
So that was a turning point in my life.
Another turning point was in 1972.

(15:34):
I was asked by the Israeli governmentto go to the Soviet Union.
Israelis then couldn'tgo to the Soviet Union.
So people with what they calledstrong 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,

(15:56):
could maybe teach a Hebrewlesson to meet with refusenik.
And that was a life changing experience,
meeting people who had every reasonto be afraid of their Jewishness.
It's very early in the refusenikmovement and their bravery,
their innate bravery was just sooverwhelming.

(16:21):
We're in the Schulz building.
About four or five years ago,I was at a conference in Oakland and
George Schultz came andNathan Sharansky was there, and
the two of them were in conversationreminiscing over those events.
And then we were supposed to.
We were in Moscow, Kyiv andChernowitz or Chernovitzi,

(16:41):
Bukovina, andwe're supposed to go to Kishinev.
Steve Sipperstein's here someplace.
And the KGB detained us fora day and then kicked us out.
So I suddenly feltpersonally afraid as a Jew.
So all those things were markers.
And then did those experiences.

Sorry to interrupt.
Make you a Zionist?
What was your relationshipto Zionism at that stage?

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 duringthe Six Day War, you know, the, the, the.
I was, I sort of was on the cusp.

(17:25):
There's somany students on this campus and
every place else who only knowa very strong, powerful Israel.
We didn't feel that way when we'resitting in Jerusalem during those days.
That then seeing these braveRussian Soviet Jews who were, some
had been scientists and mathematicians andnow were night watchmen and

(17:46):
women in cold, damp,dark lobbies of office buildings and
things like that, ortheir 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.

(18:07):
And it was then that I switchedto studying about the Shoah.
And I started by studying about Americanresponses to the Shoah and the silence.
In fact,fast forward to May of 23, rather,
when the White House released the NationalStrategy on Combating Antisemitism.

(18:29):
There were four of us whospoke at the White House.
At the podium, it was the Deputy Directorof 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 ofcourse was cleared because it was in
the White House podium,was cleared all the way up.

(18:52):
I said, I'm very conscious of the fact.
And I had had the State Department andWhite House historian check.
I said, how many, how many feet I wasstanding from where the State Department,
because State Department offices usedto be in the executive office building
from where people were turned down forvisas in the 40s.

(19:13):
That was a powerful moment.
I'm getting far clemped,not very diplomatic.
But to stand there and know that 100 yardswas 100 yards from where I was standing.
There were the offices wherepeople were turned down, and
we were issuing a national strategyon fighting the anti-Semitism.
That was really something.

(19:34):
Then back to your question of October 7th.
October 7th, I was in Rome.
There was a conference atthe Gregorian Institute,
the Jesuit university associated withthe Vatican and the Holocaust Museum,
on the opening of the archiveswhich Pope Francis had opened.
I was standing in my room getting ready.

(19:56):
It was a Saturday morning with Shabbat.
It was hag to go to Synagogue.
I was going to a synagogue ofJews 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.,

(20:19):
etc., cuz the embassyhad upped the security.
And it was a sobering experience.
We had tried to get a meeting withthe Pope for me, an audience for
me with the Pope, andwe 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 werejust learning about the hostages,

(20:42):
and I talked a lot about that, andhe made some positive statements at then.
Then he's made some more equivocalstatements, but it changed.
It changed dramatically.

Just talk for
a moment about your immediate reactionsto the events of October 7th.
As an historian,you can't have missed the echoes of
the Holocaust in the behaviorof the perpetrators,
particularly the use of sexual violence,as well as a woman.

(21:19):
I'd love to get your thoughts on that,because my reaction, having, you know, for
years taught the Third Reichspecial subject at Oxford,
having written about the Holocaustin the book called War of the World,
was they're deliberatelyreenacting a Holocaust scene.
This is a conscious design.
This is a designedallusion to the Holocaust.

I'm very reluctant.
Just as background, and there are enoughpeople here who know me know this that I'm
very reluctant to makeHolocaust 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.

(22:01):
I had an office at the State Departmentat the ambassadorial level,
meaning presidentially nominated, Senateconfirmed to deal with this issue, and
had colleagues all around the world, sogovernments are taking it seriously.
But this, of course,
threw all my intellectual calculationsout the window when you saw.

(22:21):
And listening to the tape, I'm sure manyhave 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'refighting our behalf, but don't rejoice,
you know, with.
The Prophet says,when your enemy falls, don't rejoice.

(22:43):
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 andI watched a woman who,
many of us have spent timedown there in that area.
There's beautiful kibbutzim andplaces to visit, etc.

(23:05):
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 thatpoint was working on the Abraham Accord.
So my first trip was to Saudi Arabia,
where when I walked into the officeof the Deputy Foreign Minister,
he put out his hands and said to me,I come from a city of Jews, Medina.

(23:29):
Very pleased that I knewexactly what he meant.
And where I sat with the.
The Minister of Islamic affairs forSaudi Arabia for 40 minutes,
talking about the dangersof 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.

(23:54):
So we were really working because.
And that was what attracted me to the job,
cuz it was a chance not just toput out Fires, but to build.
And of course, October 7th, I was supposedto 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,

(24:14):
whether it's London,whether it's New York, whether Berkeley,
the glee with which you would seepeople 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,

(24:35):
in Fathom called The Pleasuresof Antisemitism.
And it clicked for me that there'sa certain, there was a certain pleasure.
I'm sort of paraphrasing andadapting what she says, but
that A,I'm part of a tradition of antisemitism.
But more, you've always told me thatI did my traditional tradition,

(24:58):
Christian, Muslim, whatever did wrong.
Now we know it was like a moral,a moral superiority, a moral gotcha.
And then watchingthe normalization of antisemitism,
I told some people here last night, beingin France a few weeks after the attack and
I was at a Jewish communal building andleaving lots of gendarmes outside.

(25:22):
The French had 17,000 police andgendarmes and
military people at Jewish institutionsin 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 andI need your help.

(25:45):
I said, what?
And she said, my children go to a Frenchpublic school and they are being harassed.
They're, I don't know, 10 and12 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 andI wanna put them in the French school.

(26:07):
But I'm afraid because Jewishinstitutions get attacked.
What should I do?
And it wasn't somethingthat I could answer.
Or just six weeks ago,I was in Canada and meeting with a woman,
meeting with a group of leadersof the Toronto Jewish community.
And one very sober minded woman saidto me, my daughter is 18 months away

(26:31):
from going to university andshe's interested in some aspect of stem.
I don't remember which one.
And the conversation in our home isnot which university will be best for
her intellectual interests, butwhere will she be safest as a Jew?

So this was the real revelation of October 7th and
its aftermath.
It was not a revelation that Hamas andPalestinian Islamic Jihad
were terrorist organizationsthat 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,

(27:08):
on the campuses of California->> Deborah Lipstadt: Geneva and-
All over Europe.
And this.
Talk a little bit aboutthis revelation and
what it taught you about the natureof antisemitism in the 2000s.
Because to me, part of the pointof this symposium that we're
participating in is to thinkanalytically about this phenomenon.

(27:33):
And it's clear that manydifferent strains of
hostility to Jews came together in 2023,24.
And I'd love you to help us thinkabout these different strains and
also tell us which the mostdangerous of these.

Well, I don't want to say because you can be wrong in
a nanosecond.
But first of all, I saw coming fromwhat is called in the American
intellectual community,malign actors, other countries or
NGOs, ideological antisemitism andutilitarian antisemitism.

(28:09):
We saw significant, andyou can read about this, so
I'm not disclosing anything classified.
Significant Protocols of the Eldersof Zion kind of antisemitism coming
from the PRC, China, and beingallowed on lots of Chinese platforms.

(28:30):
Now, Chinese officials had engagedin this before on a personal level.
If you went to China andtold someone you were a Jew,
you usually got a very positiveresponse to, but from the government.
We had heard this before, butthis was a wave that caught
everyone's attention in the Americanintelligence community.
And they asked me,I went into some of the intelligence

(28:51):
agencies because they asked meto 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 fideswith what we now call the Global South.
With, we're with you, they're with them.
Then we saw ideologicalantisemitism coming from Iran.

(29:13):
And in fact,
Iran had a direct hand in organizingsome of the student demonstrations.
We know that,if you wanna see former Director of
National Intelligence Avril Haines,very respected and
very competent director, issueda statement on July 9th indicating that.

(29:34):
And there was other evidence as well.
And from Russia, lots ofthe misinformation coming from Russia,
I would say, both ideological andutilitarian to draw that difference.
So I saw that, andI 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.

(29:56):
This wasn't just about Israel.
For some people this startedabout being about Israel and
then it grew to beingan attack on Western society.
I'm going to use very glib terms, I knowthat they are easily unpackable, but
we only have an hour.
So I'll write my book andI'll be more discreet in my book and
nuanced in my book.

(30:16):
Western civilization,Western values, democracy.
And who is the epitomeof the client state of
the most horrific elementof Western democracy?
The United States is Israel.
And what group appears to have bestsucceeded at the hands of capitalism?

(30:39):
Whether true or not, that was there.
So it started from that and it moved.
Then Israel became, andJews became in loco,
in the place of just instead of railingagainst 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 thansolely an attack on Jews.

(31:03):
And in fact in my travels and I've,
I think in the end mystaff told me I visited 33
different countries andsome of them multiple times.
I lived on a plane, but no time to useall the frequent flower miles now.

(31:23):
But what the message I tried to give andthe message I imparted and
I think to some degree it was heardbecause I now hear foreign ministers and
heads of various countries saying whatI said to them without crediting me.
And someone in my team said,well how come they didn't credit.
I said that's better becausethey think it's their own.
And what I told them, I said isyou have to think of the threat of

(31:46):
antisemitism in a multi tiered fashion,bottom level attack on Jews,
Jewish institutions andthose associated with them.
When I went to Buenos Aires forthe anniversary of the bombing of
the Jewish Community centerduring the ceremony.
It's very powerful everybody's givena picture of one of the victims.

(32:06):
And when the siren goes off, you raise thepicture so the people become the memorial.
And when the sirens go off,the memorial disappears.
I held up a picture of a young man whowas not Jewish, who was in the building
because his mother was taking a courseon being a home health care aide and
he was with her.
So that's the bottom line,that's the cornerstone.

(32:27):
And if antisemitism were solely.
I don't say just because, just suggestsdiminutive that's a nice jacket.
It's just an old thing.
We're solely that it would besomething 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 threatto them but think about it.

(32:49):
If you buy into the antiSemitic conspiracy theory myth,
the Jews control the banks,media, government, judiciary.
You've given up on democracy andthe colliery of that or the mirror
image of that is for the victims orthe people or the objects of the animus.

(33:12):
They look here and there for someone torepresent them and they don't see it.
I think of the students at UCLA whoare barred from getting into the library
unless they are you Jewish?
Yes denounce Israel andthey look where was,
use that as a very robust police force.
Nowhere to be seen so they also gave.

(33:32):
So that the threat to democracy,third level,
the threat to national stability andsecurity.
The anti Semitism becomes inthe Yiddish term Kochleffel.
The way to stir up the pot.
I'll give you an example from history.

(33:54):
Late 1959,
there's an outbreak of antisemitism in theFederal Republic of Germany, West Germany.
And it was unexpected andit's very benign by today's standards.
Tombstones are knocked over,
freshly rebuilt synagogues haveswastikas painted on them.
And then it spreads to New York,to London.

(34:14):
And no, they weren't quitesure 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 sympathizersin these different countries.

They tried to give the impression that there were neo Nazis.

Exactly, well, and they had a problem because they stopped it
because it was so successful thatit made the neo Nazis are back.
They didn't call them Neo then itwas only 14 years after the war.
The Nazis are back, so here they were.
They're sworn enemies.
But to show that but the initialinitiative was Thomas Frid does

(34:58):
this in his book on active measureson Soviet and Russian disinformation.
The initiative was to paintFederal Republic of Germany as a not
reliable ally,wasn't to spread antisemitism, but to say,
you think the west is sogreat, you can't trust them.
And we see that today with PRC andothers, that it's a way of destabilizing,

(35:24):
of creating doubts aboutthe stability of the West.
That's why I think the idea thatmany of the encampments and
many of the worst things we've seenhave 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

(35:45):
in a side event, I was in conversationwith Manuel Valve, who was Prime Minister
of France during the 2014Charlie Hebdo hypercasher tragedies.
And at that point, many French Jewswere 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.

(36:07):
And Valve said,France without Jews will not be France.
And I said to him, I said, you weren'ttalking 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,

(36:27):
Jews are part of the warp andwoof 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 ofthe destabilization to societies.
So that when you see antisemitism, I saidthis to the mayor of Amsterdam four or

(36:48):
five days after the attackon the soccer fans.
And I said it just to some of ourleading 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, butthink of it as the flashing

(37:10):
amber light before the light turns red.
That red light may not bemore antisemitism, but
antisemitism as the harbingerof a destabilized society.
And that was part of what we did.

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

(37:49):
And you can find it if youkind of know where to look.
But I would say it played almostzero part in the pro Palestinian or
even pro Hamas demonstrations on campuses.
The legacy of the Soviet propagandathat you just talked about.
One can detect that in sectionsof the left in Europe and

(38:11):
indeed on the campus left.
But I still don't think that'sa particularly powerful force anymore.
What seems to be drivingtoday's antisemitism,
particularly in this kind of realmwe're talking about of American or
British campuses,is a strange alliance between a new kind

(38:33):
of radical left that isfocused on identity politics.
They call themselves progressives, butI'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 mostunlikely combination,

(38:53):
summed up with that poster that everybodyremembers, Queers for Palestine.

Outside the State Department.
I'm going in on the 21st street side andthere's a small demonstration and
one trans woman was standing there,Queers for Palestine.
And I had on my State Department badge andI was about to go into the building.
People knew who I was,the guards knew who I was, etCC.

(39:20):
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.

How would you explain,
how do you explain thatapparent cognitive dissonance?
Because I can't it's the one thing thatI'm baffled by, why you would make comment
why people on the radical left, the wokeleft, as they're sometimes called.
Would end up making common cause withIslamists who seem entirely committed to
the destruction of this.

I think, it would be easy to say,
it's simply they all hate Jews.
And I think there's part ofthat the antisemitism is.
I don't know whether it'ssomething that has continued.
And we went, we talked about this a littlebit this morning over the centuries or
the modern is somethingdramatically different,

(40:16):
but there is a strain of continuity.
It is what Professor Robert Wistrichused to call the oldest,
longest continuous hatred.
And it is.
There have been others thathave been worse at times, but.
And it is so built into somany different societies.
It is like a mutating virus.
I got pushed back at the State Departmentwhen I referred to that in one of my talks

(40:38):
and someone said, well, this isinsulting to people who have a virus.

Tells you a lot about the State Department.

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 peopleare calling a shape shifter.
It's a mouthful, but it takes different.
It fills that need.

(41:04):
And I don't want to make it sound likeit's this metaphysical kind of thing,
but it has emerged in so many differentcategories and capacities and
definitions andcompositions that it serves that purpose.
I also think that Jews can be annoying,they can be noisy,

(41:25):
they talk about themselves as victims.
And when you think about prejudice, mostprejudices certainly, let's say racism,
you're punching down that person isokay as long as they know their place.
I'm in Atlanta city,surrounded on four sides by Georgia.

(41:46):
They say in Atlanta, the further northyou go, the more in the south you are.
But what was the great thing thata black person shouldn't be uppity?
A 50 year old black man was boy.
So as long as you knew your place, becausewe need you, we need you to clean our
houses, we need you to whatever work inthe fields, whatever it might be, etc.

(42:08):
And there's some of thatpushing 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 elementto antisemitism and
it's the punching up that Jews.
Going back to the conspiracy theory,Jews are engaged in this conspiracy.

(42:30):
They're small in number,punching above their weight.
And their objective isto harm me as a non Jew.
And they must be stoppedby any means necessary.
So you get that combinationtogether with this enduring hatred,
together with what Han Arendtused to tell the joke,
the bicycle riders, it's the Jews,the Jews, the Jews,

(42:52):
the Nazis saying, someone yells out andthe bicycle riders.
And the man says, why the bicycle riders?
And he says, why the Jews?
But if you have there someone who'sa familiar enemy, it works much better.

Got one more question,
then I'm going to open it upto questions from the floor.
What is the trend is?
If you look ahead over the next five orten years,
do you think this isa problem that is going to
get worse globally andin the United States, or

(43:31):
do you have any reason to thinkthat we might see it diminish?

First of all, you and I are historians and
we sociologists talk abouttrends to the future.
I didn't want to becauseyou're always wrong.
You know,
the only thing you have saving grace ismost people don't remember what you said.
But I hate predictions, I thinkthe Talmud says that with the close
of the Hebrew scriptures,prophecy was left to children and fools.

(44:00):
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.

(44:23):
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, andI'll use a shorthand term with that and
the street without meaningany degradation of that.
But still there's a recognitionthat this is not good,

(44:45):
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'dsay a threat to democracy and rule of law.
So because most of themare hardly democracies,
but there's a recognition.
I'll give you another thing whichcould be a meaningless moment or

(45:07):
could turn into somethingreal in about a year.
I guess January last year, I think it was.
I got to my office, I noticed on mycalendar the Attorney General of one of
our major democratic allies wascoming to see me in my office.
Now, when I go to countries, I'd veryoften meet with the Minister of Justice,
Attorney General.
But when they came to Washington,I knew he was only going to be there for

(45:31):
a day because it wasreported in the paper.
They don't usually seek me out andcome to my office.
So I said, does he know he's supposedto be seeing Merrick Garland?
They said, yes, he's coming directly fromAttorney 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 someof the things I have seen,

(45:52):
none of them rocket science.
And after he left, I began to think aboutit and I assembled my team and I said,
we have to come out with some sort ofconvention, guidelines, best practices.
And we did, we worked on it.
I said, it must be short,
I don't want a long tome thatcomes out of the State Department.
Break your back carrying it,but nobody ever reads it.

(46:15):
And we came up with the 700 word,
what we call Global Guidelinesto Combat Antisemitism.
Now, we worked with our colleaguesin 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

(46:36):
we didn't want to do that.
We wanted it to bea multilateral organization.
So we began to seek outother countries to sign.
And we decided this washappening January 24th.
I was going to Buenos Aires in July 24thfor the 30th anniversary of the AMIA
bombing, a bombing by Hezbollahwith the support of Iran.

(46:57):
Some things never change.
And we decided we wantedto 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.

(47:18):
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 IHRAdefinition as a useful tool and
enhance Jewish life because we alsoknow that the more you demystify
Jewish life and demystify the Jew,that also helps.

(47:39):
And right before we left forBuenos Aires, about a week before,
I was interviewed by a newspaper.
My deputy, who comes fromthe 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 hopingby the time we get the Buenos aires,
we'll have 30.

(47:59):
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 andothers are in the offing.
Very moving experience.

(48:19):
I went up to talk tothe Deputy Secretary of State bank about
10 days before I was leaving.
Of course, it was cleared through multipleoffices 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 weasked was working on this.

(48:40):
And I went in to see John Bass,who was then Deputy Secretary of State.
And he looked at the list, andhe 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 inJuly, and NATO was meeting in Washington.

(49:02):
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 otherconcerns because you're, but

(49:25):
we, I wanted you to know.
And Deputy Secretary John Basswanted you to know about this.
And I sent it off.
I was leaving forBuenos 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 congressionaldelegation that's also come to mark
the anniversary of the bombing.
And we're invited to dinner atthe residence of the ambassador.

(49:47):
And I'm in my car with my team, threemembers 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 callfor you when you get to the residence.
I said, okay.
We get to the residence and I walk in andhe's got his phone and he's talking.
Yes, here she is.
Here she is.
A strange face.
Hello, I'm the Ukrainianambassador to Argentina, and

(50:10):
I've just informed by a foreign ministry.
We wanna be in the firstgroup of signatories.
We don't wanna be an add-on.
So now, they stand asa testimony to our multilateral
approach andwhat we thought best practices.
And now the challenge, the challenge tothis administration, the challenge to

(50:33):
stakeholder organizations to those I knowsome of you come from universities where
there's institutes for antisemitism tohold these countries feet to the fire.
Are you really abiding by this?
And that gives me hope because it wentto the highest levels of most countries,
their foreign ministries.

And I'm glad you mentioned Ukraine because we've
talked a lot about the attack on Israel.
But one of the stranger quirks ofrecent years has been the insistence
on the Russian government's partthat the Ukrainian government
is a Nazi government andthe president is himself Jewish.

(51:12):
So it's a crazy world.

There's the GEC.
I forget what the initial stood forbecause I was doing, but
a recently disbanded officein the State Department.
But they put out a study showingKremlin use of antisemitism and
disinformation, both the Soviet Union andcontemporary Russia.

(51:35):
It's a tool.
It's that stirring up the pot.

So we have time, 15 minutes.
Just a little under 50 minutes forquestions.
Lord Roberts was quick.
A microphone is coming your way, Andrew.

>> Speaker 4 (51:47):
Hello, I'm the chairman of the British Parliamentary 7th
of October Commission andthere's been a survey recently of a large
number of British Muslims,over a thousand 28% of whom said
that no massacres orrapes took place on the 7th of October.

(52:08):
28%.
Is this because they get their news from,from their own sources?
Is it because it's a straightforwardanti Semitic remark that they don't
mind making?
Why could it be anything like thatnumber of people who would respond to
a public survey in that way?

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 tothe Human Rights Council and
on the gender based violenceGBV of October 7th.

(52:49):
And we said, you know,when it was the Hasidims,
there was an immediate response andno 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.

(53:09):
And now that silence hasmorphed into it didn't happen.
I think there's a lecture goingon 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 fromthe murderers and the rapists themselves.

(53:33):
It is Holocaust denial writ large.
I've had pretty personalexperiences with Holocaust denials,
having sat in the trial and sat 10 weeks,
10ft from the world's thenleading Holocaust denier.
It is hardcore denial writ large.

(53:54):
There have been some, like somefeminist scholars who said, well,
it was legitimate, they didn't denythat it happened, but it's legit.
That's even more disgusting, especiallycoming from so-called feminists.
But it is quite striking,it is quite striking.
Look, you're speaking tosomething that I hesitate to

(54:16):
say this because I don't have timeto really go into it in depth,
but a reluctance toacknowledge that there's
a problem in many of our democratic,European,
democratic countries withportions of the Muslim community.

(54:37):
Portions of whether they be recentarrivals or they be multi generational,
whether it's where they'regetting their news,
where they connect, I don't know,but it is a very disturbing trend.

Thanks, Deborah.
Other questions will go to Professor Katz.

>> Speaker 5 (55:00):
Thanks.
First of all, just wanna thank you so muchfor your extraordinary service, Deborah.
Your courage andyour determination are really inspiring.
We all benefit from them.
So to go back to something yousaid at the very beginning,
which was that you felt right away whenyou entered the ambassadorship that,

(55:21):
wow, there's this chasm betweenacademic work on anti-Semitism.
And what it is to be here on the grounddoing this, which makes a lot of sense,
of course, and I just wondered if youcould expand on that a little bit.
And maybe, I mean, I guess sort oftwo-sided question which is are there,
were there moments where you reallysaw kind of conceptual ideas about

(55:43):
anti-Semitism at play in front of youreyes in ways that made you feel like,
I wouldn't have understood thisif I hadn't been a scholar.
And on the other hand,
were there moments where you saw things onthe ground that you said, I wish people
who are studying anti-Semitism couldsee this because we don't have.
But we don't think about this.
We don't understand this the way that wethink about anti-Semitism, academics.

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

(56:29):
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 myacademic training was the most

(56:49):
powerful tool that I had.
And to put someone.
It was a gutsy thing for
the president to nominate me someonebecause they're afraid of professors.
Professors think they know everything.
But being able to draw onthis reminds me of this is,
I just told Steve Zipperstein that afterI met with the mayor of Amsterdam.

(57:11):
There was a whole debate whetherwhat 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 inWashington, my apartment in Washington,
and I pulled his book onKishinev off the shelf just to.
I've read it many times,I've underlined it, I've taught it,

(57:33):
but I wanted to get that.
And I don't know how many other of mypredecessors 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, andonce again, remembering, I just got
a call today from someone, a reporteron Kanye West's latest adventures.

(57:55):
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 learnedto be quiet, that we did things quietly,
that we pushed back, that therewas one incident in South America

(58:17):
where the head of the countryhad said horrific things.
I wanted to speak out, andI 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, andhe'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.

(58:39):
But why didn't you speak out?
Well, Eitla da Baerva, Eitla Stok isa 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 whichthe secretary was issuing,

(59:01):
which of course we had preparedsome of the language and
what was being consideredwas troublesome to me.
There was one line in there and I wastold, well, Deborah, it's your choice.
Either this is the statement orno statement.
And I said, we go with the statement.
So you're working as part ofa very large team with different
perspectives, especiallyafter October 7th.

(59:25):
But one of the things we did was,and this, I credit my team and
the experience people had on my team forshow for teaching me this.
But we stayed in our lane, soat one point, there was consideration
of sanctions on arms going to an unnamedcountry, which we can all figure out was.

(59:47):
And we were asked, you know,the question came up,
we're not experts on arms andhow 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,

(01:00:08):
this arms office in the State Department.
The sanctioning of arms was we asked thequestion, is this a double standard and
what other countries havegotten these weapons from us?
There were seven, and
how many of them are living up tothe standards that are being imposed?
So we focused, we stayed focused, wasn'tthe attempt to be experts on everything.

(01:00:34):
But we said, you want us, we want toknow if this is the double standard.
And that was how we often worked.

>> Niall Ferguson (01:00:40):
We're running out of time, and
we've got more questionsthan we've got time for.
There's a gentleman on the secondrow who's been patient, and
he might have to be the last question,very briefly,
what is the relationship betweenantisemitism and anti Zionism?

>> Deborah Lipstadt (01:00:58):
We have a whole conference going on.

How long have you got?
We spent much ofthe morning debating that,
not to mention anti Israelism,which was introduced.
This is a great question.

Let me say this,
that much of the anti Zionismwe've seen over the past,
certainly, over the past 15 or16 months now.
Has veered into overt antisemitism orhas begun as antisemitism and
has been couched in anti-Israel positions.

(01:01:36):
Criticism of Israeli policy is notanti Semitism, that were the case,
all those Israeli who are on the streetsevery 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, orplants and veers may be too kind a word.

(01:01:56):
It is firmly in that, when you'refirebombing a synagogue in Montreal,
when you're attacking a Jewwearing yarmulke in Times Square.
When you're painting Jewish starson apartment houses in Paris,
some of which may have been Russian,Moldovans did that.
But in other places,that's not being pro Gaza,

(01:02:19):
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.

Well, Deborah,
it's been a great pleasure to spendthis hour with you and thank you for
speaking so frankly now that you don'thave to have your every statement cleared.

I spoke frankly even then, I caused a lot of discomfort.

But I can imagine elements in the State Department that
would have been made quite nervous bysome of the things that you've said this
afternoon.
I didn't want it to get lost inthe conversation that you actually had
entered the public sphere and
left the academic sphere before youtook this job as special envoy.
I first became awareof your courage during

(01:03:06):
the libel trial whenDavid Irving sued you.
I hadn't realized because I'dforgotten 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,

(01:03:27):
history has had its day in court andscored a crushing victory.
We who are historians don't getmany victories as big as that one.
But that taught us all, particularly,
historians working in Britainwho'd had to contend with
Irving's increasingly falseaccounts of German history.

(01:03:53):
What a courageous person you are.
So, thank you so much for your time.

Thank you. >> Niall Ferguson
join me in giving a big hand.
>> [APPLAUSE]
[MUSIC]

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