When Deborah Lipstadt was appointed the Biden administration’s special envoy to fight antisemitism abroad, she started by visiting Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates for what she described as encouraging exchanges with leaders of the two Muslim nations.
Her hope was that Gulf leaders could use their voices to help stem antisemitism among Muslims around the world.
“It was all very promising,” said Dr. Lipstadt, who was a historian and scholar of antisemitism and genocide before she took on the role, with the rank of ambassador in 2022. “I think there was a real conversation going on.”
Then came the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
It was the deadliest single day for Jews since the Nazi genocide of World War II. Israel’s devastating response that unfolded over the next 15 months, a war that killed tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, internally displaced nearly the entire population of more than two million and left the territory in ruins.
“Oct. 7 of course changed everything,” Dr. Lipstadt said in Jerusalem in January just before her term ended.
Now, Dr. Lipstadt is back teaching at Emory University as a Distinguished Professor and is writing a memoir about her experiences serving the former president. She turned down an offer to teach a course next year at Columbia University.
In an opinion piece published on Monday in The Free Press, Dr. Lipstadt said she did not want to “serve as a prop or a fig leaf,” or put herself or her students at risk, after what she described as the campus administration’s weak response to anti-Israel protesters who broke regulations and harassed other students. Columbia, in a statement, said that Dr. Lipstadt had been “informally” invited to consider teaching a course and that when she signaled her intent “not to continue the conversation,” interim Columbia President Katrina Armstrong “reached out to personally engage her and share her personal commitment to combating antisemitism.”
In Dr. Lipstadt’s interview in January, reflecting on her two years as Mr. Biden’s envoy, she said the 2023 attack on Israel unleashed a chain of events that brought what she called “a tsunami of antisemitism.”
She said people were accusing Israel of genocide online as rescue workers were still gathering the bodies of Oct. 7 victims from Israeli communities near the Gaza border. And there were immediate displays of support and defenses of Hamas as soon as Israel launched its military campaign in Gaza.
In the months that followed, as death, distress and destruction mounted in Gaza, pro-Palestinian demonstrations swept through American university campuses and cities around the world, sometimes with antisemitic overtones.
The number of antisemitic episodes in the United States surged to the highest level ever recorded, according to the Anti-Defamation League, a rights organization, with about triple the number of cases reported to the group in the year after the Oct. 7 attack compared with a year earlier.
A survey of Jews in the European Union carried out in the months before the attack found that 90 percent of respondents had encountered antisemitism online in the previous year, 56 percent had encountered offline antisemitism from people they knew and 37 percent were harassed for being Jewish during the year before. Some European Jewish organizations reported an increase of more than fourfold in antisemitic incidents after the attack.
Antisemitism, an age-old curse, was always simmering, said Dr. Lipstadt, 77, who is herself Jewish. But after Oct. 7, “it suddenly became OK, almost normalized,” she added.
The Trump White House has accused the Biden administration of turning a blind eye to a “campaign of intimidation, vandalism and violence on the campuses and streets of America” by “pro-Hamas aliens and left-wing radicals.”
Dr. Lipstadt wrote in The Free Press that President Biden did condemn the violence on campus, often unequivocally, “But there were too many moments that were met with silence.”
The Biden administration in 2023 released the first U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism calling for a bipartisan effort to get government, law enforcement and schools to stanch the spread of hate online. And in 2024, the United States led 38 countries and four international bodies in outlining best practices for tackling Jew hatred known as the Global Guidelines for Countering Antisemitism.
In January, President Trump signed an executive order vowing to more strongly protect American Jews from antisemitism. It allows for the cancellation of visas and deportation of foreign students who sympathize with Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that has governed Gaza for most of the past two decades.
Israel has leveled accusations of antisemitism against countries, foreign leaders and institutions over issues including the International Criminal Court’s issuing of arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, and a genocide case against Israel in the International Court of Justice. They were accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.
Dr. Lipstadt described antisemitism as the oldest continuous hatred, so deeply rooted that it is almost impossible to eradicate. She saw her job as a chance to call it out and use diplomacy and the levers of government to quell the ancient prejudice.
Dani Dayan, the chairman of Yad Vashem, World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, said Dr. Lipstadt provided global resonance to the issue. But unfortunately her assignment “did not encompass domestic U.S. antisemitism at a time when it was much needed,” he said.
In the summer of 2022, shortly after taking up her role, Dr. Lipstadt made a counterintuitive choice for her first trip abroad by heading to Saudi Arabia.
The wealthy Gulf kingdom has no formal diplomatic relations with Israel. But less than two years before, two of its Gulf neighbors, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, established full ties with Israel. And there was talk of Saudi Arabia soon following suit — a possibility that Mr. Trump is again pursuing in his second term.
“I went there to make a statement,” she said.
Her pitch was that regardless of their position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, “antisemitism is something that is wrong and unacceptable.”
After her Saudi visit, she went on to the United Arab Emirates, where her first meeting with the president, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed, ran long, lasting 95 minutes.
Toward the end of her term, Dr. Lipstadt returned to the two Gulf Arab nations. But the Gaza war and its ripples around the region had engendered a new hesitancy around the subject of antisemitism, she said, with Gulf leaders highly conscious of the anti-Israel sentiment among their people.
And an already fraught debate about the line between legitimate criticism of Israeli policies and antisemitism had sharpened.
At the same time, the atmosphere on American college campuses was charged.
Many Jewish students were saying they felt unsafe. At the same time, other students complained of anti-Muslim bias and the stifling of free speech among pro-Palestinian students and faculty.
But Dr. Lipstadt said she had no trouble distinguishing between legitimate criticism of Israel and antisemitism.
A working definition of antisemitism, adopted in 2016 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance and endorsed by more than 40 countries, includes manifestations of “the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity,” but not criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country.
If all such criticism were deemed antisemitic, Dr. Lipstadt said, then many Israelis would be considered antisemites.
“The national sport of Israel is not football,” she said. “It’s criticism of the government.”
Criticism becomes antisemitic when one questions the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state or singles out Israel and applies a double standard compared to other countries, she said.
Now, people are either engaging in overt antisemitism while claiming they are only criticizing Israeli policy, or conversely, calling normal criticism of Israel antisemitic, she added.
“Both are illegitimate,” said Dr. Lipstadt.
She said she considered the genocide case in The Hague to be antisemitic.
A special U.N. committee concluded last year that Israel’s military campaign in Gaza was “consistent with the characteristics of genocide,” citing the high death toll and accusations of Israel’s use of starvation as a weapon of war. Amnesty International has also concluded that Israel committed genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza.
Several countries, including Belgium, Ireland, Mexico and Spain, joined the genocide case initiated by South Africa against Israel in the world’s top court.
There is no debate that the suffering of civilians in Gaza and the level of destruction there has been horrible, Dr. Lipstadt said.
“But is it genocide?” she said. “It doesn’t fit the definition of genocide,” she added. “I mean, there’s got to be an intent to wipe out a culture or people.”
