Deborah Lipstadt

Deborah Esther Lipstadt (born March 18, 1947) is an American historian and diplomat, best known as author of the books Denying the Holocaust (1993), History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier (2005), The Eichmann Trial (2011), and Antisemitism: Here and Now (2019). She served as the United States special envoy for monitoring and combating anti-semitism from 2022 to 2025. Since 1993 she has been the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.

Lipstadt was a consultant to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. In 1994, President Bill Clinton appointed her to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, and she served two terms. On July 30, 2021, President Joe Biden nominated her to be the special envoy for monitoring and combating anti-semitism. She was confirmed by voice-vote on March 30, 2022, and sworn in on May 3, 2022. She served in that position until January 2025. Lipstadt was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2023.

Lipstadt was born in New York City to a Jewish family, the daughter of Miriam (née Peiman) and Erwin Lipstadt. Her mother was born in Canada, and her father, a salesman, was born in Germany. Her parents met at their neighborhood synagogue. She has an older sister, Helene, a historian, and a younger brother, Nathaniel, an investor on Wall Street.

In her youth, she studied at the Hebrew Institute of Long Island, and grew up in Far Rockaway, Queens. She studied with Rabbi Emanuel Rackman at Temple Shaarei Tefillah. Lipstadt spent summers at Camp Massad.

She spent her junior year of college — which turned out to include the Six-Day War — in Israel, where she stayed as an exchange student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She completed a Bachelor of Arts in American history at the City College of New York in 1969. She then enrolled at Brandeis University where she completed her master's degree in 1972 and then her Ph.D. in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies in 1976. Her doctoral dissertation was entitled "The Zionist Career of Louis Lipsky, 1900–1921".

After receiving her Ph.D., Lipstadt began teaching, first at the University of Washington in Seattle from 1974 to 1979, then as an assistant professor at UCLA. When she was denied tenure there, she left in 1985 to be the director of the independent Brandeis-Bardin Institute for two years, during which time she also wrote a monthly column for The Jewish Spectator. Lipstadt then received a research fellowship from the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, during which she studied Holocaust denial, and taught at Occidental College part time.

Lipstadt then became an assistant professor of religion at Emory University in Atlanta in January 1993, becoming the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies that fall. She helped to create the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies there. She considered teaching as a visiting professor at Columbia University but didn't take the post as she felt at risk and Columbia would use her as a sop to show it was fighting antisemitism when that was not true.

In May 2021, Lipstadt was considered for an ambassadorship position at the Office to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism in the Biden administration.