After President Joe Biden named Deborah Lipstadt as his administration’s special envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism in 2021, the Emory University professor saw her nomination blocked — not unusual in a partisan Washington, but surprising in the case of the highly respected Holocaust Historian who has long denounced anti-Semitism on both sides of the party.

Three years ago, some of his old tweets were in question. She ultimately received bipartisan support, but several Republicans still voted against her in protest of her past social media posts criticizing Republicans.

In this context, Lipstadt’s recent insistence that the new Trump administration will be well equipped to combat anti-Semitism is a strong, if surprising, marker of the goodwill that President-elect Donald Trump has generated in the fight against anti-Semitism.

“I don’t know what the next administration’s policy will be. No one does, and I certainly can’t talk about it. But I am confident that they will take this issue very seriously. All signs point to it,” Lipstadt said. Jewish insider in an interview last month at the International Security Forum in Halifax, Nova Scotia. At the conference, bringing together representatives from more than 60 countries, she was frequently asked what she expected from the new Trump administration.

“I am asked in several places, by the Dutch, by the French, the Canadians, etc., what do I think about it? » continued Lipstadt. “I don’t know. But if I was a betting man, I’d be happy to bet that this will be taken very, very seriously.

Lipstadt was the first special envoy on anti-Semitism to face the Senate confirmation challenge, after Congress pupil from the position – which was created during the George W. Bush administration – to an ambassador-level position in 2021. Since taking office in spring 2022, she has visited more than 30 countries, with the simple mission of communicating to other nations that the fight against anti-Semitism is an American priority.

“A lot of this was done in silence. Quiet conversations with foreign ministers, quiet conversations with justice ministers, with the police, the authorities, saying: ‘We are really worried about this,'” Lipstadt said, looking back on his mandate. In these conversations, she relied on relativity: America doesn’t have it all figured out either. “I didn’t say, ‘You I have a problem. I said, ‘We I have a problem.’

In July, the State Department published a document dubbed “Global Guidelines for Combating Anti-Semitism,” which Lipstadt considers the crowning achievement of his tenure. Thirty-eight countries and four international organizations, including the European Commission and the Organization of American States, signed the guidelines, which include 12 steps governments should take to combat anti-Semitism. Congress voted overwhelmingly in favor of a resolution approving the guidelines earlier this month.

“I don’t know of any country, any democracy, that is not facing this problem at some level and not wondering how to respond to it, including ours,” she said. “I was entrusted with the opportunity to use the levers of government to fight this horrible scourge. How can I do this? Sometimes it’s not by making headlines, but by asking my team to go and put pressure on each of these countries to sign.”

With a decades-long career educating about anti-Semitism, Lipstadt rose to his position knowing how to speak out against hate. But she didn’t yet know much about diplomacy.

“I didn’t really realize during the confirmation process that this would be a tool in my hands,” she said.

Two days after his swearing in, more than 100 Orthodox Jews were kicked off a Lufthansa flight, due to what the plane claimed to be masking violations. Many were American citizens.

“Within 48 hours, the CEO of Lufthansa, which had 105,000 employees, was sitting across from me in my office,” Lipstadt recalls. Earlier in the day, a senior Transport Ministry official had asked him to speak on their behalf as well. “When I said that, you could see there was (paid) attention.” Last month, the Ministry of Transport fined Lufthansa $4 millionthe largest fine ever imposed by the DOT on an airline for civil rights violations.

Since then, she has learned to adopt the touch of a diplomat, quickly picking up a characteristic of the profession: knowing when to keep quiet. When asked to name which countries have done the best or worst job in combating anti-Semitism, she declined: “I’m too smart to answer,” she joked. (The famously outspoken Lipstadt is excited to return to her tenured professorship at Emory.)

As a State Department official, Lipstadt’s mission is combating global anti-Semitism, so she has largely stayed out of the more vitriolic and internecine anti-Semitic struggles in the United States in recent years. But she did not hide her concern about the anti-Semitism which is brewing in American universities and which, according to her, has reached its peak since the Hamas attacks of October 7.

“I think one of the things that university presidents, both outside and inside the United States, have learned from the experience of the last year is that it we must react, and react with force. That doesn’t mean we have to intervene with a militia or anything like that, but it has to be an unequivocal response. And if you don’t, the situation just escalates,” Lipstadt said. And when anti-Semitic rhetoric escalates on campus, it often becomes clear that activists’ anti-Semitism is a sign of a larger problem.

“University leaders are beginning to recognize that these protests ostensibly about Gaza, about Israel, about Israel-Palestine are in reality a foil or an entry point for a much larger problem of anti-democracy, anti- -capitalism and anti-Western values. which we often see campuses clinging to. But it has bigger implications,” Lipstadt explained.

While speaking to JI in Halifax, she highlighted a recent headline from Montreal about anti-NATO and pro-Palestinian protests that turned violent.

“There’s a connection there, and it’s really important for people to see it,” Lipstadt said. “I think people are starting to understand that this is not a group that’s screaming, ‘Poor me and take care of us, and we’re so oppressed’ or ‘We’re so in danger,’ like many people think so. It’s something bigger and more meaningful.

Sometimes, of course, anti-Semitism matters, regardless of its relevance to democracy or any other general theme. Sometimes it’s important simply because Jews don’t feel safe. “I know people are afraid. People are afraid,” Lipstadt said.

She visited Amsterdam last month after the recent wave of violence against Israeli soccer fans, which she describe as “terribly reminiscent of a classic pogrom”. She told JI she worries about “copycat syndrome,” in which people think, Lipstadt suggested, “’They chased people on scooters. We will chase people on scooters.’”

“It’s too inviting because it’s too easy. And that worries me a lot,” Lipstadt said. The biggest challenge facing his successor, Lipstadt noted, is “the normalization of anti-Semitism, the fact that certain things can be said, certain things can be chanted that were unacceptable before.”

His last professional trip, however, was not to Europe. This is not a response to a major incident of anti-Semitism, nor a solidarity visit to a Jewish community living with a lot of hatred. This is the first place she visited as special envoy: Saudi Arabia. (She will also visit Egypt and Bahrain.)

Lipstadt, 77, almost didn’t run for the job four years ago. She held the kind of prestigious position that all academics aspire to.

“Someone said to me, ‘You have to do this.’ I said, “Why?” “They said, ‘Because of the Abraham Accords,'” Lipstadt recalls.

Its first trip to the Gulf in 2022 included meetings with Saudi and Emirati officials on anti-Semitism in local school textbooks and how to combat deep-rooted anti-Semitism in the population stemming from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. At the time, there was great excitement in the UAE over the Abraham Accords, which normalized ties between Israel and several Arab countries.

Today, after more than a year of fighting in Gaza, relations between Israel and its Abraham Accords partners have cooled, although the Accords remain in force. Last month, a Chabad rabbi from the United Arab Emirates was kidnapped and murderedthat Israeli officials describe as an “act of anti-Semitic terror”. She met this week in Washington with the Ambassador of the United Arab Emirates Yousef Al-Otaiba, praising his government’s “decisive actions” to apprehend the killers.

Lipstadt knows she will return to a region transformed by the consequences of the Hamas attacks of October 7. But she is not prepared to abandon the momentum of the Accords.

“I didn’t give up,” Lipstadt said.