Transcript
Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra
Bonus Episode: Combating Antisemitism Today
Rachel Maddow discusses season two of her award-winning podcast with U.S. Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, President Biden’s Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism. They delve into the roots of antisemitism and Holocaust denial, and the U.S. government’s ongoing global efforts to combat antisemitism.
Rachel Maddow: Hey, everybody, this is Rachel Maddow. If you’ve listened to all eight episodes of season two of “Ultra,” first of all, thank you very much. Thank you for listening. Second of all, for all of your efforts, you now get a thing. You now get a prize.
If you told me I could only talk to one person in the whole world about the events and the history that we described in this season of “Ultra,” if I could only talk to one person, this is the person I would most want to talk to.
May 24, 2022, a little more than two years ago, she officially started the job that she currently has right now with the U.S. government. And that job that she took that day required swearing an oath.
(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)
Kamala Harris: I, Deborah Lipstadt.
Deborah Lipstadt: I, Deborah Lipstadt.
Harris: Do solemnly affirm.
Lipstadt: Do solemnly affirm.
Harris: That I will support and defend.
Lipstadt: That I will support and defend.
Harris: The Constitution of the United States.
Lipstadt: The Constitution of the United States.
Harris: Against all enemies.
Lipstadt: Against all enemies.
Harris: Foreign and domestic.
Lipstadt: Foreign and domestic.
Harris: That I bear true faith and allegiance.
Lipstadt: That I bear true faith and allegiance.
Harris: To the same.
Lipstadt: To the same.
Harris: That I took this obligation.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
Maddow: I could hear, I think, her choke up a little bit.
Lipstadt: Verklempt, verklempt.
Maddow: She is a little verklempt and I got a little verklempt listening to you do that. The person administering that oath is Vice President Kamala Harris, and the person being sworn in is Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt. Ambassador Lipstadt is the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism. Technically, in the State Department that makes her kind of the equivalent of a four-star general. Is that fair?
Lipstadt: That’s right.
Maddow: And Ambassador Lipstadt, I have to tell you that I have read, I think, everything you’ve ever written. I have been reading about you for years. You are one of my heroes. Your own research in this field is part of what led me to do these now several years of projects in this topic. And I can’t tell you how honored I am to talk to you today.
Lipstadt: Well, I have to tell you that I’m getting verklempt to feel that I have influenced you and raised up, if I might, a student such as you without even knowing it, makes me feel that this work has been worth it. Thank you.
Maddow: Thank you for saying so. Well, as my teacher, I now have to ask you if I got anything wrong.
Lipstadt: No, no, not at all. The clip you played of Vice President Harris swearing me in, what I was reflecting on at that moment, I’m a child of two immigrants, both of whom, my mother came here from Canada, Polish parents who had come from Poland, the beginning of the 20th century. My father left Germany not during the Nazis but during the Weimar Republic, because there was no hope for a young man in Germany. And the fact that their daughter was being sworn in by the Vice President of the United States, I mean there are many jobs and they’re all important, but on an issue that was so important to them was overwhelming. I’m getting verklempt now and I’m annoyed with myself for doing so.
Maddow: Well, I mean it’s a job that existed before you had it. This is a job that was created a couple decades ago, but it’s never been at the U.S. Ambassador at Large level that you have it, which means an elevation of the role because Congress and the president recognize that this is something that now needs to be a whole of government effort, that needs a high-profile person with a lot of status running this effort. It’s not an award that you’ve been given. It’s a huge responsibility for this country.
Lipstadt: It’s a job. It’s a responsibility. I was recently in the White House and talking to one of the executive staff there, one of the advisors to the President. And she was commenting on the load I carried and I said, you know, I work in a growth industry. Business is booming and I’m the only one in government, in the administration that wants a recession in my area, you know. And we laughed but it’s true. And Congress created this position at the end of Bush 2 and there have been many good people in it. I’ve had excellent predecessors. I’ve spoken with them all. I’ve learned from them.
But I’m the first person to have the job who comes to it with 30 years of writing about it, of books, of studying it, of teaching it, films, you know, lawsuits, and with the ambassadorial status. And then on top of all that, the tsunami of antisemitism that we’ve seen in recent years, particularly in the past 10 months, makes it a heavy burden, a great responsibility and a privilege, because there are many people in the world, many, many people in the United States, who wake up every morning, worrying about this issue and wonder what they can do about it. And I wake up every morning getting to do something about it. So, I feel, in some way, strangely lucky.
Maddow: I also feel like we are lucky that you bring not just experience in writing about and thinking about this topic, but you bring a historian’s perspective to it. I feel like understanding the progression of antisemitism over the eons, the experience of it in the United States and around the world — the way that the Holocaust and your seminal scholarship on Holocaust denial inflects it, that knowing where it came from and how it has evolved and how it has carried forward and the continuity with what we think of as a distant, terrible past, to me is the only way to make sense of it and make rational decisions about how to combat it. And I feel like your historian’s heart on this issue is really what we need. So much of our — even our own national history with this topic is forgotten, is lost, is easy to lose track of.
Lipstadt: Thank you and I believe that, too. And I think that was one of the things that attracted President Biden to appoint me, to select me and it does, it helps. Sometimes I see something and I’ll say to my team, this is new, this is different. And sometimes I’ll see something and I’ll say, this is same old, same old, just new characters, you know. I will give you an example, and maybe I’m getting ahead of you, but we know that there are foreign actors, countries — Iran amongst them — other countries as well that have been ginning up and amplifying some of the antisemitism, both online, on campus, et cetera.
The Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, released a statement to that effect a few weeks ago. And I’ve seen the evidence and it’s clear, and they use it. They use antisemitism to create disharmony. Now in late 1959, there was an outbreak of antisemitism in the Federal Republic of Germany, West Germany. And today, if we look back on it, it was swastikas being painted on buildings, newly rebuilt synagogues, cemeteries being desecrated. And people, you know, it spread, it spread to other countries as well, but mainly concentrated in Germany. And people began to wonder, was Germany really a democratic country? Were the Nazis back?
No one said “neo-Nazis.” This is 15 years after the end of the war, 14 years after the end of the war, the Nazis back. Later — and there were suspicions this was coming from possibly the USSR but later after defections of KGB officials, it was clear, they said it, the KGB and the Stasi. Why were they doing this? Because it was a way of stirring up the pot. Antisemitism becomes, amongst other things, a tool to create disharmony, to create debate, to create Americans or other people in democracies yelling at each other. It’s a useful tool and we see that today as well.
Maddow: And that kind of disharmony and the kind of social friction that you’re talking about, you’ve been really specific about why exactly that’s corrosive, why foreign adversaries would want that for us. And it’s related, as I understand the way that you’ve taught it and the way that you’ve explained it, it’s related to the conspiracy myth at the heart of antisemitism, this idea that Jewish people are some sort of all powerful cabal that controls everything. Why is that myth, that central tenet of antisemitism, so corrosive to a democratic society?
Lipstadt: Yes, I used to talk about a pitchfork, three-prong pitchfork approach to antisemitism, and I’ve sort of adapted that. I now talk about a multi-tiered, multi-level because one flows into the other. The basic level is antisemitism, of course, as a threat to Jews, Jewish institutions, Jewish community, and those associated with them. I think about a decade ago, there was an attack on a Jewish community center in Kansas City I believe. And all the people who were killed were non-Jews, you know, and a secretary who worked there, a grandfather bringing his son to a play because a kid was going to be in a play, being sponsored by the JCC.
So, you can be associated and be impacted and that alone would make it worth a government addressing. When, you know, if you think of government as acting, and this is very rough, but in loco parentis, the job of a government is to take care of its citizens, particularly its vulnerable citizens. So if a group is being attacked, that’s government’s job, but antisemitism is more than that. And to get to your point on the democracy, the cornerstone of antisemitism is this secret cabal of Jews, of Jews controlling, you know, goes back to “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and before that. That Jews, small in number, but very — not as smart — “clever,” “canny,” “conniving,” — know how to control.
And that is why “the” Jews control “the” media, “the” Jews control “the” banks. You know, now you have people talking about the Zionist Occupation Government, ZOG, which is an old right-wing canard that the Jews really control the government. Well, if you believe in that, you don’t believe in democracy. If I believe “the” control, “the” whatever you fill in “the Jews control” and you fill in the blanks, then I’ve given up on democracy because why vote? Why think this is a fair government? And the corresponding or flip side of that, the mirror image of that is the people who are being attacked begin to wonder, can or will government, whether it be federal government, state government, local government, or the guards on campus, the campus police, will they protect me? Will they come to my aid?
So, both sides have lost faith in democracy. And the third level would be, and the one I just referred to with the example from Federal Republic of Germany in this ginned up antisemitism, antisemitic campaign by the USSR and East Germany, it becomes a threat to national security and national stability. If I can get people yelling at each other, if I can get people distrusting, if I can get people thinking, oh, there’s some group here that is controlled, it’s a real factor for national security and stability. And I’ve talked, I’ve spent time, I never thought I would, I’ve spent time talking with Secretary Mayorkas, some people in Homeland Security.
I’ve been out to the CIA a couple of times to meet, just to educate, to educate what’s going on. I’ll tell you a funny story. I was giving a public lecture there and explaining, educating, putting on my teacher’s hat. And there was a large crowd of personnel and I said, look, I was explaining what is antisemitism. And I said, if you come across it and you’re not sure, call my office, contact us. We want to be assets to you. We can be an asset and the room got very quiet. And then I said, no, no, not that kind of asset.
Maddow: Teach me how to do dead drops and brush passes and hide stuff under fake rocks.
Lipstadt: No, no.
Maddow: Not that kind of an asset. You know, what you’re describing in terms of the destabilizing nature of antisemitism, I feel like there’s an additional and even more aggravating factor, which is that if you believe or if you teach people, you try to convince people that Jewish people are a cabal, that they’re the real power. That what appears to be the power, what appears to be government is a farce, and there’s no point in voting. There’s no point in — because there’s this power behind the throne, as it were. The other thing that you’re doing is that you’re creating the idea of an almost invincible powerful, evil minority, right?
And so it’s not just that Jews are despised and we’re taught that they’re bad or that they’ve got malign interests, but that they are almost a supranational, super powerful force against whom, therefore, extraordinary measures are necessary. You can’t suppress them the way you would normally. You need to go to some other level of inhumanity in order to destroy them because they’ll resist any normal opposition. And I feel like that’s where you get from antisemitism being sort of like some other kinds of prejudice to being the thing that it is, which is uniquely murderous —
Lipstadt: Right.
Maddow: — in the way that it teaches potential solutions to this made up problem.
Lipstadt: You know, if this broadcasting gig doesn’t work out for you, you can come work for me because you hit the nail on the head but I think it’s working out well and you do it very well. Exactly. Look, antisemitism is a prejudice like any other prejudice, you know. If a Jew does something wrong, “Oh, that’s how they all are.” If you put a Black in there, if a Black — if they do something right, “Oh, that’s one of the good ones.” You know, I remember once being in the store with my father when I was quite young and he was buying something, the synagogue needed something to build it. And he was explaining what they were doing at the synagogue.
And the man said, “Oh, Mr. Lipstadt, some of my best friends are Jews.” When we got out, I said, “Isn’t that exciting, Daddy, some of his best friends are Jews?” My father said, “You’ll never hear anybody boasting some of my best friends are white Anglo-Saxon Protestants.” If you’re boasting some of my best friends are Jews, gays, Blacks, Muslims, whatever it might be, you’re thinking, I’m so terrific, I’m friendly with — or I’m friendly with “the good ones.” So in that sense, antisemitism is a prejudice no different from all the others, but it has unique characteristics.
Most ethnic racial prejudices punch down. Let’s take racism. Blacks — I’ve lived in Atlanta now 34 years, of course I’ve been in Washington the past couple of years, but that was the heart of the Old South, you know, and the New South. Blacks are good as long as they knew their place. In the Jim Crow days, that place was “get off the sidewalk” when a white person walked by. “Boy,” you know, a grown man would be called “boy” because “that’s your place.” “Your place is working for us.” “Your place” is knowing where you stand and that is lesser than us. You are not, you know, whether three-fifths or whatever, you are not, so you punch down.
And there’s a part of antisemitism that does that. We saw it very dramatically during COVID. “Jews are dirty,” especially towards Ultra-Orthodox, “Jews spread disease,” et cetera. So in that sense, it’s similar. But to your point, it goes beyond that. Antisemitism also punches up. “Jews are more powerful.” “Jews control things.” “Jews are richer than we are.” “Jews are conniving” and Jews, ultimately, as the antisemitic conspiracy myth would say, “Jews are out to control us.”
So, I have to protect myself by any means necessary. And so it makes my fight against this existential. It’s not just keeping the other minority in place, but these people pose an existential, unfathomable threat to my well-being and they must be stopped, and this phrase will ring familiar to you, “by any means necessary.” So, that’s where antisemitism, I’m not saying worse, better, different from these other prejudices.
Maddow: That leads to one of the concepts that you’ve articulated that I found hardest to understand at first and then most profoundly true, once I spent some time with it and finally got it. And that was the idea of genocide inversion, the idea in which the role of the perpetrator and the victim are reversed. And so in “Ultra,” in the podcast that I just did, we saw a version of this in Joseph McCarthy’s first big national splash in 1949 and 1950. He purveyed this myth that the Nazis that massacred unarmed U.S. POWs in the Malmedy massacre, at the Battle of the Bulge, the Nazis were not just innocent, they were the real victims of evil Jews in the U.S. Army who had tortured them and framed them.
We saw other versions of that around that same time with a lot of people in the United States articulating that the Nuremberg major war crimes trial was somehow victimizing the Nazis. We saw essentially American fan clubs emerge for Nazis like Otto Ernst Remer or Admiral Donitz, who was the successor to Hitler, Americans advocating that they had been terribly victimized and that they were the ones who we all needed to rally around. This idea that Jews are victimizing their own murderers, the architects of the Holocaust themselves are victims because the Jews, even as victims of the Holocaust, are so conniving and powerful and dangerous. That they are still able to manipulate nations. It’s insanity on the surface, but profoundly, deeply scary when you see it in action, even in the United States, even in the United States Senate.
Lipstadt: Yes. No, absolutely. You’re absolutely correct that this is, it’s an existential fight. That the Jews — you know, talk about Holocaust denial which, of course, I’ve written about and was sued about and et cetera, et cetera. You have to ask, you know, if someone is saying to you this didn’t happen and the Jews made it up, you have to ask the logical question to ask is, well, why would the Jews go to this effort to make up this myth? What’s in it for them? And the denier will say, well, what did the Jews get out of — and if this were not radio but were visual, I would be putting quotation marks around, “get out of the” — what did they obtain? What did they benefit from the Holocaust?
And the standard answer would be two things, reparations, which is a fancy word for money. And of course, anytime Jews are involved, money comes into it. And then, the person would say the state of Israel and the state of Israel, it’s much more complicated. It’s not a direct result of the Holocaust. Of course, the Holocaust has an impact on its founding, but it’s much more complicated than that. But what it’s saying is you see, the Jews will do anything. They will even force the Germans. Because you might say, well, why would Germany acknowledge it did such a thing? Oh, because the Jews said to the Germans, if you want to be accepted back into the family of nations, you must acknowledge that you committed this terrible crime and only then will you be allowed back in.
So it is this, if you think about it, it’s this ridiculous assumptions about Jewish power. “The Jew is boogeyman.” “The Jew is devil.” “The Jew is demon.” This small group of Jews is capable of anything. And it’s main objective is to destroy Christian identity, destroy white, even beyond Christian identity, other religions as well. You’ve talked about on your shows and in your podcast, I believe as well, the great replacement theory. The great replacement theory, which is getting traction sometimes under that name and sometimes — what does it mean? It says “the” Jews, there is now “an influx,” “a swarm” using their language, not mine, of Black people, of brown people, of Muslims, trying to get into and getting and gaining access to Christian Europe, gaining access to our country.
Now remember if you go back to the punching down, “those people” aren’t smart enough. “Those people” aren’t capable enough to be thwarting white Christian democracies of — whether in Europe or in this country. They’re the puppets, there’s got to be a puppeteer behind them who is making all this possible. Who could that puppeteer be? Well, it has to be someone who will benefit from the destruction of white Christian hegemony, white Christian control, white Christian culture. Who has the power? Who has the malicious intent? Who is conniving enough? Who is rich enough to do it? “The Jew.” And so whether people talk about George Soros or they talk about Rothschild, or they just talk about “the Jew,” “the Jew” becomes this mythic, all powerful boogeyman, I wish there were a more serious word. But who can cause tremendous harm and more, who is intent on causing lethal harm to the rest of society.
Maddow: And it seems to me like, you know, when we think about Charlottesville, right, “Jews will not replace us” and we think about the Tree of Life Synagogue Massacre, which was motivated explicitly by the great replacement theory that you’re describing. For me, I mean those things are so shocking and so terrible on their surface. I don’t know if it’s comforting or grounding or more unsettling to recognize precedent there as well. I mean it seems to me, and I don’t know that I have ever seen you write about this, explicitly, but it seems to me like there’s a sort of scarily, smooth segue in the early 1950s from elements that were pro-Nazi that were, you know, early Holocaust denial, antisemitic extremism in the early 1950s, those entities, it seems to me like they segued very smoothly into the segregationist movement at the time.
People like Willis Carto working to try to, you know, deport Black Americans to Africa, people like Henry Garrett, who was an expert witness for the segregation side in landmark civil rights cases. He’s also working with Holocaust deniers and antisemites like Carto. It seems to me like there was, you know, you’re talking about the swastika epidemic in 1959 into 1960, we also had the Atlanta synagogue bombing around the same time.
Lipstadt: That’s right, the temple bombing.
Maddow: The temple bombing. It seems to me like there is kind of a knitted together history of those two issues from decades past as well as what we’re experiencing today.
Lipstadt: You’re absolutely correct. You know, going after one, you go after the other. They become melded. You see that in the South, you see it all over — that the groups that are, for instance, the KKK. The KKK, first and foremost, was hostile to anyone who was Black or sympathized with Blacks, or helped Blacks. Hostile, more than that, wanted to eliminate them. But their antisemitism is just a step behind that. And they see both “the Jew” as aiding “the Black,” using “the Black” to destroy white society, using the Black person to threaten white society, which is one of the reasons why in the past decade in America, when there’s been such often been tensions, not always, but not every place between the Black community and the Jewish community, I want to say the only people who rejoiced when those two groups are fighting are the white nationalist supremacists. You bring joy to them when you fight with one another.
Maddow: Yes, wow. You mentioned the trial that you were very famously sued in Britain for libel by one of the world’s most, to my mind, most infuriating Holocaust deniers, David Irving. And it was a sort of trial of the century on the issue of Holocaust denial. Weeks in court, resulted in a, you know, 300-plus page judgment, essentially explaining what was false and insane about Holocaust denial and what was true about the history of that moment. And if anybody doesn’t know exactly what I’m talking about, there’s a pretty good movie that came out in 2016 called “Denial,” where Rachel Weisz portrays Deborah Lipstadt. I recommend you watch it.
But I was — one of the things that I keep coming up against is the question of the law and the role of the courts and how much the civil justice system or the criminal courts ought to be employed against antisemitic fascist, pro-Nazi authoritarian forces. And I don’t know, I’m still quite interested in it. I was interested in it with the Great Sedition Trial in 1944 and the Christian Front trial in 1940, and I have been interested in your cases. I know you were an expert witness in the Charlottesville civil case. You’ve also written about the Nuremberg trials and the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem.
And I feel like I’m still learning and I’m still trying to figure this out, but the one thing that I feel like I have learned is that whether or not people go to jail or are sued into bankruptcy, whatever the legal outcome is of a trial, the one thing it can do is tell the truth. That it can, through an adversarial, rational process, sort out false things from true things. And that’s worth something for these fights, whether or not you get the satisfaction of sort of smiting your enemies through these confrontational processes. But I wanted to ask what you think about that.
Lipstadt: I think, I think — once again, I think you’re onto something and it’s very true and it’s something with which I had long conversations with my lawyer, Anthony Julius, in England in anticipation of the trial. While in the beginning, you know, people were pushing me to settle. “Deborah, you know, if you go to trial, he’ll get publicity. Even if he loses, he wins.” And at one point I said to them, “What would you like me to settle for?” This is depicted in the movie, I think, in fact. “Four million Jews? Three million Jews? Two camps? One camp?” [INAUDIBLE] You cannot settle — certainly, you settle with many things. But with pure evil and distortion of history, you can’t settle. There’s no middle road in that sense.
And one of the things the trial did do is bring out the absurdities and the lack of evidence of those who claimed the Holocaust didn’t happen. We followed Irving’s footnotes. Our dream team was made up of historians, terrific historians. And they followed his footnotes back to the sources. And they found in virtually every case where he talked about the Holocaust or something related, there was a distortion, there was a change of date. There was a reversal of sequence, which had a direct impact on his findings.
Now, some people would say, but look, Holocaust denial is back. You know, you see it now. And I would say what isn’t back — and what my trial addressed — was hardcore Holocaust denial. You know, I differentiate between hardcore Holocaust denial and softcore. And usually when we talk hardcore, softcore, we’re talking about pornography. And I choose that distinction on purpose because I think Holocaust denial is the pornographication, if there is such a word, of history.
So, hardcore denial would say there were no gas chambers, Jews weren’t killed. And of course we showed that to be ludicrous and of much of it with German documents, with German sources, German documents, German evidence.
Softcore denial is something we’re seeing today: Oh, it wasn’t so bad, why are you always talking about it? Enough with the Holocaust already. And, you know, people seem to ignore the fact that as a result of the Holocaust, one out of every three Jews on the face of the Earth was murdered. One out of two in Europe, one out of three in the entire face of the Earth.
Well, from which Jews have never recovered in terms of numbers, slowly, slowly, but really mainly not. But there’s this sense of, oh, it wasn’t so important, it wasn’t so bad. And you know, I’ve been to Rwanda a couple of times, I’ve worked with the Armenian people in the Armenian community. Of course, the Armenian genocide preceded the Holocaust, then Hitler made his favorite statement, “Who today speaks of the Armenians?” he apparently said.
Maddow: Wow.
Lipstadt: Well, you know, if you forget, there goes back to your original statement claiming about history. If you forget the history, yes, it can be repeated. It doesn’t mean if you remember it, it won’t be repeated. Remembrance is not an automatic antidote to repetition, but forgetting is opening the door to repetition. But it also becomes, you know, “Oh, you Jews were always whiny.” Turning the victim into the illegitimate victim, denying their rights to say this was something that was a traumatic experience. Now, does that mean that should color Jewish life and shape Jewish life altogether? No, of course not.
And not as a diplomat but as an active member and a committed member of the Jewish community, I say a Jew should never become stronger in their Judaism because of antisemitism or because of tragedies, such as the Holocaust. It should be despite, despite the best efforts of the world to destroy this culture, to destroy this religion, to destroy this people, one remains identified. And because of the great things about it, the good things, the wonderful culture, the ethical standings, what it’s given to the world. And so it should never become the reason for one’s identity, but it certainly is a warning about what others can do to you. And, you know, when people say they want to destroy you, people say they want to harm you, one of the things the Holocaust teaches not only to Jews, but to all vulnerable groups, take them seriously, because the failure to do so is catastrophic.
Maddow: One of the things that was revelatory to me and that got me most interested in this field, and I learned it from you, was how early Holocaust denial began. That to me — I don’t know if I ever thought that Holocaust deniers were operating in good faith, I can’t believe that I would’ve ever been that naive — but this idea that there might have been some true belief that it didn’t happen. That there might have been some like honest misunderstanding, that there might have been something other than an overt and deliberate lie for a political purpose behind it, to me was destroyed by the revelation that arguably the first American articulating Holocaust denial in print was doing so in 1948 when, you know, the ashes of Europe are still smoldering, when he, himself, had been at Wiesbaden, had been as part of the trials — the war crimes trials — and had seen that evidence.
That, to me, sort of settled the issue and again, I’m embarrassed to say that it needed to be settled for me, but settled for me the idea that, oh, this was never a good faith misunderstanding or belief. This was always something that was known to be untrue from the very beginning and was done for a purpose. And then the next thing becomes, well, what is the purpose of it? Why did we have Holocaust denial, even from Americans as early as the 1940s? How does it function to undermine democracy, to undermine national security and to advance the other causes that antisemitism advances as a political project?
Lipstadt: You know, if someone does something, when you look back on World War II, you can say, oh, there was discrimination in America, Jim Crow laws, the lynching. The ‘30s,’ 40s, I mean not only, but certainly that time when we are complaining, we’re looking at Hitler, you’re having these terrible things in the United States. So, you can say, “Oh, you did that, we did this.” “You had camps,” as often people say we had camps with the Japanese, I often correct people. We had camps and I think over half the people in there were Americans of Japanese descent. But we had camps, so you could say their concept, you can do immoral equivalencies, not moral equivalencies, immoral equivalencies, but there’s nothing to compare to the Holocaust.
And you got to deny it in order to build on what the Nazis were saying, in order to wipe from them this terrible stain of a genocide. And you can do it because anti-Judaism, antisemitism as it comes to be called and we write it without a hyphen, one word, you know, and I can explain that, if you’d like, has such an ancient history. It is so malleable. It’s like a virus. It’s like a virus, you know, we now — this morning I was listening to a report, “New COVID vaccines will be available in September. We should all get them, da, da, da.” And someone said, “Think about the COVID shot now as the flu shot.” You get a different flu shot each year. It’s not like I had it last year because the flu has adapted.
Well, antisemitism has this adaptability. And if you go back, you can look and see it, you know, in ancient Jerusalem, the Judean Jerusalem, if you want to start a little later. Some people start as ancient Egypt, we won’t go in, I’m not sure that’s right. But in any case, certainly early Rome, second, third century Rome, it moves out into the church, goes beyond that, goes into Islam. Islam had very mixed relations with Jews. So in many cases, it protected them, but many cases spoke with them quite evilly, goes into the Protestant— Martin Luther. It goes out of the church, unless one think this is only in the church, someone like Voltaire.
Voltaire who was a tremendous critic of the Catholic Church. When he writes about Jews, he could have been the most antisemitic preacher that existed. And then it moves away from religious connections to a Karl Marx, “the Jews and their money.” It moves into pseudoscience of race, eugenics. It moves into the Nazis, it moves into communism. You don’t have any other hatred which is so malleable.
Maddow: I saw that you described recently in an interview that the best predictors, psychological predictors of antisemitism are not ideological markers at all. It’s a conspiratorial mindset and it is a preference for an authoritarian form of government. And that’s neither left nor right, nor center. Those are just simply traits that extremism — those are the valleys that extremism flows through.
Lipstadt: Right. And I think it’s absolutely correct and that’s one of the reasons, as you know, the State Department has been part of a grouping, a multilateral group, 42 nations and international organizations that recently issued global guidelines to counter antisemitism. And they are short, less than 700 words. The twelve of them, one of my team members who was working on it and said, he wanted 10 paragraphs to be 10 commandments, and he came up with 12. He was a little disappointed. And a colleague in the State Department said, “Oh, it’s like 12 tribes,” so you know.
But think about it, I mean, what we’re trying to say here is that leaders have to speak out. And that’s the first thing we say, and they’re adaptable, whether it’s on the federal level, state level, you know, campus level. And I was recently overseas and talking to a provost of a big university and he looked at them, he said, “I could use these.”
But the second thing, and this is the reason I mentioned them, is to avoid politicization. I have friends on the left who see antisemitism on the right. They are pitch perfect, they know it exactly, they see it, they analyze it. They’re not exaggerating by an iota. And I have friends on the right who see it on the left and they, too, have it pitch perfect. The problem is they don’t see it right next to them. They don’t see it coming from those with whom they agree on everything else. So if you can only see it on the other side of the political transom, then I don’t know if you’re really against antisemitism or you’re using it as a political weapon.
And I think also part of the things we call for — and this is as I say, 42 nations, signing an international organization signing on — is if you’ve got laws against it, enforce them. Don’t say, oh, it’s not so important, oh, it will go away. There’s got to be consequences. Just like there’s got to be consequences for other forms of discrimination, prejudice. Don’t explain this away. And one of the things that prompted me to take this job was that I saw so many people who hate other forms of prejudice with a genuine passion, with a genuine passion who sort of make light of this. “Oh, this isn’t, oh, come on, what are Jews complaining about?”
“Jews are all rich,” another antisemitic canard, you know, “Oh, they’re all powerful,” another antisemitic can — “What are you complaining about? Come on, stop it,” you know. And what antisemitism shows is that lethal threats can come in many shapes and the victims don’t always look the same. You can’t compare the status of the Jewish community, certainly in the United States, other countries, let’s say the United States with many sectors of the Black community, certainly not all the Black community at all. But to dismiss antisemitism as a serious thing, and this is coming from people who have made their life’s work fighting prejudice and discrimination.
You know, I saw it, and speaking now as a woman, after October 7, and again, irrespective of how you feel about the Middle East and what position you take, and we saw the evidence of the rapes and the gender-based violence. The silence, that was horrific in and of itself, but what was so disconcerting to me and so many others was the silence of women’s groups, the silence of human rights groups on this issue. When it comes to rape, there is no “but.” When it comes to gender-based violence, “but you have to consider,” it’s wrong. When it comes to antisemitism, there is no “but.” When it comes to racism, there is no “but.”
And anybody who engages in that “but” is sort of trying to justify it, you know. And it has become this work. I mean, I’ve done many things. I have had many opportunities in my life, but I think what I have been working on these past couple of years and will be doing for the foreseeable future, who knows, you know I will be going back to the university eventually. But it has shown me the depth of the problem in a way I didn’t really see it and has given me an opportunity to address it.
And one of the reasons I was so pleased by our role in formulating these global guidelines is that we’re trying to be proactive. So much of what I do consists of trying to put out fires or see a fire brewing and say to a country, you have a problem here, you got to address it. You know, we spoke earlier on of my predecessors. I’m not the first person in this job, but many of my predecessors could go to other countries and say, “You have a problem. We are concerned about it. Are you addressing it?”
I can’t do that. I have to say, “We have a problem. We are worried about it,” because it’s in this country as well. But to try to be proactive, to understand, take it seriously. Take it seriously, because the way I described antisemitism to many of my colleagues in the United States government, and I’ve been gratified by how many agencies have asked me to come in and educate them on this, many, many. Consider it like the flashing — some people used to talk about the canary in the coal mine. That canary is so dead and buried that I don’t talk about it anymore.
Maddow: Oh, poor bird.
Lipstadt: I say, use it, think of it as the flashing amber light before the light turns red. And, you know, if you’re trying to get through that yellow light, you sort of imagine that it’s getting stronger and faster as you get closer. Now, the red light that will follow in this analogy may be more antisemitism, but it also could be instability, going back to my multi-tiered approach. It could be anti-democracy. It could be destabilization of society. Antisemitism is a harbinger of nothing good and everything bad.
Maddow: As we are thinking about the sort of rise of authoritarianism around the world in this generation, you know, we have our fights with it here at home as well. But as we think about that, one of the things that you have articulated and I think that has sunk in because of your work, is that authoritarianism is often signaled by what would otherwise seem to be an unrelated surge in antisemitism, Holocaust denial, and other forms of scapegoating of Jews specifically, anti-Judaism, as you say, in a way that signals more clearly, almost than anything else that something bad is happening.
That we can’t as fellow citizens make collective decisions about our future, because some of our fellow citizens are part of an evil, all powerful cabal. And we can’t count on the functions of government to keep us safe and to advance our interests because that cabal is secretly controlling everything and extreme measures are needed against them. I just feel like that seeing what is otherwise inexplicable, the absurd irrational case for Holocaust denial and the absurd conspiracy myths and theories about Jews that undermine antisemitism both online and everywhere. The one way that you can make sense of them is to realize that people are telling you that there are people among us who are not humans, and we need to start behaving that way.
Lipstadt: That’s right.
Maddow: Chilling.
Lipstadt: Look, in the recent election in Venezuela, the candidate who lost by all right, by all accounts, blamed the uprising and the votes against him on a Zionist conspiracy.
Maddow: Wow.
Lipstadt: You know, South America, you know, but it becomes a code word. Even for people who don’t consider themselves antisemites, if you say to them, “Well, the Jews.” And they say, “Well, I’m not an antisemite, but you know, maybe there’s something to what you say.” And it’s this ubiquitous, useful tool. And I would urge people, I don’t care what your political views are. I don’t care where you lean left, lean right, you know, wherever, if you see this, if you value democracy, if you value international stability, first, you should be against it just because it’s a hateful thing and it’s a lethal threat to Jews, Jewish community, those associated with them.
But if that is not going to move you to act, if that is not going to move you to open your mouth and say that’s wrong, then think about the threat to democracy, think about the threat to national stability.
You know, the State Department has a wonderful internship program, many internship programs. And we had an intern last year who is from a South American background. His parents came here, undocumented, eventually became citizens.
He and his brother are the first ones to go to college. And he became part of a very prestigious program here at the State Department. And he came in. It was his last day and I said, come in, you know, for sort of an exit interview. I want to know what it was like. And he got emotional as he told me, he said, well, just last night, first, he said, when I was assigned to this office, I thought, what do I know or care about antisemitism? And there are probably other interns who would want this position. I’m taking somebody’s position.
And he said, but I’m so glad I was here. And he said, last night I was playing video games with a friend and the friend made some sort of antisemitic comment. And he said, “Hey dude, you can’t say that. That’s antisemitism.” I felt, at that point, I had done my job.
So, speak up. I would say to people, if you don’t know what you can do, you know, come Thanksgiving, come that family barbecue, whatever it is and uncle X, Y, Z, or aunt A, B, C make some sort of antisemitic remark, speak out. You may not change their mind, but for all the other people around the table, especially the young people, they’ve got to know that that’s unacceptable, that that’s wrong. There’s small things people can do. It starts with small thing. It starts with words and it grows beyond that.
Maddow: Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt is the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism. Under her leadership, there is now a U.S. National Strategy to Combat Antisemitism. The U.S. government has spearheaded global guidelines for countering antisemitism, which she was just describing there, 12 points, less than 700 words. It all fits on a page. She’s just held recently a big symposium with tech companies about countering antisemitism online.
If it sounds like she’s doing 10 jobs at once, she is. Ambassador Lipstadt, you’re a hero of mine. There’s portions of your books that I have marked up so much I have had to buy second copies. And I’ve really learned so much from you and it’s such a privilege to talk to you today.
Lipstadt: You’re making me feel that it’s worth it, what I’m doing is worth it. So, thank you very much.
Maddow: Thank you so much. Thank you for your service. Thanks.
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Thanks for listening to this special bonus episode of “Ultra.” Huge thanks to Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt for joining us for this episode. Thanks to her team for helping make it possible and thanks to all of you, MSNBC Premium subscribers for joining and listening and thereby giving me the chance to do this. This was a real thrill for me.
“Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra” is a production of MSNBC. This episode was written by myself, Mike Yarvitz and Jen Mulreany Donovan. The series is executive produced by myself and Mike Yarvitz. It’s produced by Jen Mulreany Donovan and Kelsey Desiderio. Our associate producer is Vasilios Karsaliakos. Archival support from Holly Klopchin. Audio engineering and sound design by Bob Mallory and Catherine Anderson. Our head of audio production is Bryson Barnes. Our senior executive producers are Cory Gnazzo and Laura Conaway. Our web producer is Will Femia. Aisha Turner is the executive producer for MSNBC Audio. Rebecca Kutler is the senior vice president for content strategy at MSNBC. And you can find out much more about this series at our website, MSNBC.com/Ultra.