Facts and format floor expert
An eagerly awaited book disappoints Stephen Pollard. Angela Kiverstein speaks to two Book Week entertainers Antisemitism: Here and Now
Scribe, £14.99
Reviewed by Stephen Pollard
THERE ARE few academics who can accurately be described as heroic, but such a label is justified for Deborah Lipstadt. Her successful defence of the libel action brought by David Irving became legendary even before it was the subject of a (rather good) film — in which she was portrayed by Rachel Weisz.
Professor Lipstadt’s academic credentials are impeccable. Her prose style — unlike that of so many of her peers — is easy and clear. Her intellectual sweep is broad and deep. So the news that she was writing a book on contemporary antisemitism was greeted with eager anticipation. But, alas, Antisemitism Here and Now is not the book many of us hoped it would be.
The single most important requirement for anyone engaged in analysing and exposing antisemitism is accuracy. That accuracy was a key reason she was able to defeat Irving, who was exposed as fabricating his supposed evidence.
As editor of the JC, I know that the best way to dismiss the repeated accusation by those who defend antisemites who say the issue of Labour antisemitism is a “smear”, is to ensure that every dot and comma of what we report on the topic is accurate. Just one mistake would open our entire body of work to attack.
But Lipstadt’s fabled accuracy has deserted her in this book. For instance, she writes of the film director Ken Loach that he “dismissed the charges of antisemitism as ‘mood music’ designed to create hostility toward Corbyn.” Mr Loach has said many foul things about the issue of Labour antisemitism, but he did not say that; it was Len McCluskey.
Writing of the antisemitic comments directed at Anthony Julius, Diana, Princess of Wales’s lawyer in her divorce from Prince Charles, Prof Lipstadt points to a Telegraph piece which contrasted the “conciliatory approach” of Prince Charles’s solicitor, Fiona Shackleton, with that of Mr Julius, whose “background could not be further from the upper-class world inhabited by his opposite number. He is a Jewish intellectual… less likely to feel constrained by considerations of fair play. ‘I’d be very worried if I were the royal family,’ says a Cambridge don who taught him. ‘He’ll get lots of money out of them.’”
Prof Lipstadt’s coverage of this is simply wrong. She says that the paper’s legal director, “hastened to add that the editor of the Telegraph was herself Jewish”. The editor at the time was Charles Moore, who is both a man and not Jewish. More to the point, Fiona Shackleton is herself Jewish. Certainly the original mistake was made by the writer of the Telegraph piece but it is embarrassing that Prof Lipstadt should cite a piece and not bother to check anything in it.
Aside from the inaccuracies, however, there is a more fundamental problem. It is understandable that Prof Lipstadt has tried to find a mechanism through which she could discuss the many and varied strands of Jew hatred. But the method she has chosen is so arch that it renders her book more or less unreadable. The book is framed as a series of questions posed to Prof Lipstadt by two fictional characters: “Abigail”, a
Jewish student, and “Joe”, a non-Jewish academic colleague. She replies to them in letters.
It might have worked for Socrates but it doesn’t work for Lipstadt, not least because Socrates didn’t take the opportunity to praise his own brilliance, as she does. “Dear Professor Lipstadt, thank you so much for that explanation. Things are beginning to fall into place”, she writes, along with “Dear Professor Lipstadt, thank you for that sobering and thought-provoking series of letters”. You get the picture.
All this might be forgiven if she produced any original insights but she does not. This is a pedestrian book, which might conceivably be useful to someone who has never heard of antisemitism before but which offers nothing new to anyone who has had even a cursory encounter with the subject.
There are magazine and newspaper pieces aplenty that say far more in far fewer words. Many are by Deborah Lipstadt, whose other writings on antisemitism remain the gold standard. Deborah Lipstadt acknowledges her victory in the Irving libel case in 2000
Lipstadt’s fabled accuracy has deserted her