Lipstadt Serves as Expert Witness in Civil Trial Against Organizers of Charlottesville Rally

Dr. Deborah E. Lipstadt, Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department, is serving as an expert witness in a civil lawsuit against the organizers of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Counterprotesters charge that the rally organizers promoted violence against them based on racial and religious hatred. That violence led to the death of one counterprotester, Heather Heyer, who was killed when white supremacist James Alex Fields Jr. drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters. In her expert testimony (published here), Lipstadt concludes that “the ideology, symbols, and rhetoric that were on display at the Unite the Right rally fit comfortably within a long tradition of antisemitism and share in the tradition that led to the violent murder of millions of Jews in the Holocaust.” Read more about the case in The New York Times article: “For Holocaust Scholar, Another Confrontation With Neo-Nazi Hate.”