Deborah Lipstadt

Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism (2022-2025)

Current: Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies, Emory University

Deborah Lipstadt was appointed Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Antisemitism after decades of prominent scholarship on the Holocaust. Lipstadt used her position within the administration to push back internally against concerns about mass death under the auspices of “combatting antisemitism".  

Publicly, Lipstadt dismissed the displacement of Palestinians in January 2024, at which point nearly 1.4 million displaced people had been sheltering in installations provided by the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). During an interview with the Council on Foreign Relations, Lipstadt stated that ”someone said Israel doesn’t have a right to exist because it displaced an indigenous people. So I could have gotten into a debate: Did it really displace an indigenous people? Well, you know, and all those boring details that people’s eyes glaze over.”

Lipstadt would go on to explicitly deny the Gaza genocide. In an interview with Time magazine in October 2024, after multiple groups and legal institutions had defined Israel’s actions as genocidal, Lipstadt was asked, “Is hearing what’s happening in Gaza described as a genocide triggering in any way?” 

She replied, “There’s a definition of genocide. You can say this is a tragedy; many people in Gaza are not supporters of Hamas. You can say the suffering is immense and without a seeming end. But that’s not a genocide.”