[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yH7ktvUWaYo]

The Los Angeles Times recently profiled Dr. Deborah Lipstadt, Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies, following a weekend where the showing of film Denial was expanded throughout the United States. Based on Lipdstadt’s 2005 History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier, Denial tracks her 1996 libel case in a British court for accusing author David Irving of denying the Holocaust. Read the full piece here: “Denial’s’ real-life scholar who fought Holocaust revisionists says movie confronts those ‘who think it’s OK to change facts.”

“In a sense Lipstadt sees herself as similarly carrying on the legacy — speaking, via her scholarship, for a generation that can’t speak for itself. As depicted in the film, survivors would come up to her outside the trial and ask why none of them could testify; she had the difficult task of explaining to them, and herself, why the unimaginable possibility of silence was actually the wiser course and that allowing Irving to harangue them or twist their words in a cross-examination setting would do neither them nor the case any good.

“Lipstadt in this regard walks a fine line, feeling the emotion of the tragedy but practicing the rigor of its study.”