Deborah Lipstadt, Antisemitism: here and now

Summary

Professor Deborah Lipstadt is a renowned scholar on the subject of the Shoah. The US government recently appointed her as its Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combatting Anti-Semitism (sic).

This book, written for a broad audience, presents numerous examples of antisemitism in public, private, and institutional life (often at universities). She gives us information on the multiple facets of contemporary antisemitism and shows their conceptual roots. Finally, she offers suggestions of responses that go to those roots

Context

Lipstadt was motivated to write her book by increasing antisemitic rhetoric in the public square and violence against Jews.

Style

Readers may have mixed reactions to Lipstadt’s chosen format. She writes with great clarity, but her book takes the form of a year-long correspondence with a professor colleague from her university’s law school and a senior year undergraduate student. It is reminiscent of the rabbinical literature known in Hebrew as sheélot uteshuvot. (Literally: ”Questions and Answers.”) In Jewish culture, Jews will write to rabbis to query how they may best fulfill their religious obligations in line with Jewish law. Lipstadt’s fictional interlocutors (composites of real people she knows) write her with questions. She gives them answers.

Classroom

While versions of this “questions and answers format” are a well-established genre of educational literature, the book may not work for everyone. More problematically, if an educator’s goal is to reach outside intellectual and academic circles, her writing tends toward the analytic higher tones of academia.

Bibliographic Information

Lipstadt, D.E., 2019. Antisemitism: here and now, First edition. ed. Schocken
Books, New York. ISBN: 978-0-8052-4337-6