By Lydia O'Neal
Asst. News Editor
During a flight from Atlanta to Houston for an Emory alumnus's wedding in early November, Dorot Professor of Jewish History and Holocaust Studies Deborah Lipstadt received a call from the White House, asking her to join five other delegates – including U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, who led the group – at a conference on anti-Semitism in Berlin.
The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) conference, which took place on Nov. 12 and 13 at the German government's Federal Foreign Office, served as a review of the frequency and nature of anti-Semitism since the convening of a similar meeting in 2004.
"The findings, I have to say, were rather bleak," Lipstadt said of the assessment, adding that fewer countries sent delegations to the 10th anniversary OSCE Berlin Conference this year. Those who did send delegations sent smaller ones this year, she said.
Power, in her opening remarks at the conference, called the decrease in delegations and delegation sizes – down to a third of the number of countries represented at the previous conference – "deeply concerning."
"Doesn't this issue, at the very least, merit the same show of solidarity and commitment from governments today as it did a decade ago?" Power asked at the conference as part of her prepared statement.
The 2004 OSCE meeting produced the so-called "Berlin Declaration." Countries signing onto the three-page document agreed to combat hate crimes against the Jewish population, educate citizens on the Holocaust and ways to prevent anti-Semitic crimes and report on such crimes to their best of their abilities.
"The Berlin Declaration was a success," Lipstadt said. "In the future, [other nations' governments] can turn around [to diplomats] and say 'You, on behalf of the German government, or the Swiss government, or the U.S. government, said you would monitor what's going on.'"
Despite the triumph of the Berlin Declaration, however, Lipstadt reported a recent surge of violence against Jewish people – a trend that doesn't simply reflect this past summer's conflict between Israel and Gaza, she said.
"I think it's much broader," Lipstadt said. "Even if we say it's correlated to the [conflicts in the] Middle East, what's the connection?"
She asked, if there were some conflict between the U.S. and, say, Turkey, "do you go into a Turkish restaurant in Atlanta and just beat somebody up?"
In an Aug. 20 op-ed for The New York Times, Lipstadt referenced attacks on a Parisian synagogue, often-violent anti-Semitic protests in Germany and posters in Rome advertising Jewish stores to be boycotted as examples of this rise in hostility.
At the conference, Power remarked that, though Jews account for less than one percent of the French population, Jews accounted for 40 percent of hate crime victims in the country in 2013. In the eight countries where 90 percent of the world's Jewish population lives, she said, one in four surveyed by the European Union Fundamental Rights Agency reported that they had been a victim of some anti-Semitic harassment or attack in the past year.
Lipstadt said the most significant things she took away from this year's conference were anecdotal examples of such anti-Semitism from younger Germans. One man in his twenties, she said, described a birthday party where discussions of the Holocaust and hate crimes against Jews soured the celebration. A young woman described to Lipstadt a time when her daughter had pointed out a man in traditional Jewish garb and said, "He can't walk around like that – it's not safe."
Some of these stories may be included in Lipstadt's upcoming book on anti-Semitism, which is still in the stages of early development, she said.
This book would be her fifth, following Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933-1945 (1986), Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (1993), History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving (2005) and most recently, The Eichmann Trial (2011).
Lipstadt, who is serving her third term on U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, was one of the two members of the delegation who were not federal officials, along with National Director of the Anti-Defamation League Abraham Foxman. The other delegates, along with Power, were U.S. Ambassador to Germany John B. Emerson, U.S. Representative to the OSCE Daniel Baer and Melissa Rogers, the executive director of the White House Office of Faith-Based Partnerships.
Aside from her writing and diplomacy, Lipstadt is a highly regarded and popular professor at Emory, according to Josh Jacobs, a College senior, Jewish Studies major and former President of the Emory Jewish student group Hillel.
"If anyone could do this job, it's her," Jacobs said in reference to Lipstadt being chosen for the delegation. He added that the prevalence of the anti-Semitism Lipstadt and others addressed at the conference revealed the eternal nature of discrimination against Jewish people.
"After taking her class [History of the Holocaust], I'm more able to see the roots of [anti-Semitism]," he said. "I can definitely look at the events going on now from more of a scholarly lens."
– By Lydia O'Neal, Asst. News Editor
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