Kamala Harris swears in envoy to combat antisemitism

WASHINGTON — Nearly a year after she was nominated for the position, historian Deborah Lipstadt was confirmed on Tuesday as the State Department’s special envoy to combat antisemitism.

The ceremony came at a time of rising antisemitism across the world. The shooter who earlier this month killed 10 people at a Buffalo, N.Y., supermarket expressed a hatred of Jews in his writings, though the victims of his attack were mostly Black.

Lipstadt addressed the Buffalo attack in a recent interview with NPR, days after the incident. “The rising threat of antisemitism, the rising threat of racism, the rising degree of conspiratorial thinking, it's not just a threat to the welfare of specific groups in this country — we saw it against the African American community in a tragic, tragic way this past week — but it’s a national security threat,” she said. “It's a threat to our communal welfare.”

As she took the oath of office, Lipstadt placed her hand on a prayer book that belonged to her mother and on another book known as the Survivor’s Talmud, which was printed by the U.S. government after World War II for survivors of the Nazi concentration camps. The latter tome was loaned for the occasion by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where in 2009 a white supremacist shot and killed a security guard.

There were deadly attacks against synagogues in Pittsburgh and Poway, Calif., in recent years, as well as a hostage situation at a Colleyville, Texas, synagogue, that ended without the loss of life.

Lipstadt was sworn in by Vice President Kamala Harris. Present was Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, as well as Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., and Sen. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., all of whom are Jewish.

It was Rosen who successfully pushed to elevate the role of antisemitism envoy to the level of ambassador at large.

A report issued last month by the Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry, based at Tel Aviv University in Israel, found that in 2021, “the largest Jewish populations outside Israel witnessed sharp increases in the number of recorded antisemitic incidents” as compared with 2020.

In the United States, a spike in anti-Jewish violence has been accompanied by a surge in crimes against Black and Asian Americans. In her remarks to the Senate committee considering her nomination, delivered in February, Lipstadt pointed to her role as an expert witness in a civil suit concerning the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, which resulted in three deaths.

“For those extremists who came to Charlottesville ready to do battle, neo-Nazism, racism and antisemitism are intimately intertwined,” Lipstadt said at the time.

A professor of history at Emory University in Atlanta, the native New Yorker became internationally known after the Holocaust denier David Irving sued her in 1996 in a British court for alleging that she misrepresented his views on the extermination of Jews by the Nazis, which he had consistently downplayed in his writings.

Although libel standards in Great Britain are far more favorable to plaintiffs than they are in the American legal system, Lipstadt ultimately prevailed. She was later portrayed by the actress Rachel Weisz in a feature film about the case.

Nominated by President Biden in 2021, Lipstadt faced criticism from Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., who objected to her having described his views as “white supremacy/nationalism.”

It was also notable for Harris to preside over the ceremony. Last month, Harris and Emhoff held the first Passover seder at the Naval Observatory, the residence of the vice president. They’ve also installed a mezuzah there, thus marking the home as Jewish.

Harris spoke last year at the annual summit of the Anti-Defamation League, which was created to fight antisemitism, racism and other forms of intolerance.

“Sadly, we know that antisemitism is not a relic of the past,” the vice president said, calling the rise in anti-Jewish crimes “alarming.”