Deborah Lipstadt, a historian and former U.S. special envoy for monitoring and combating anti-semitism in the Biden administration, told JNS that a University of Washington misrepresented her beliefs in a letter to the student paper, the Daily.
Sasha Senderovich, assistant professor of Slavic languages and literatures at the public school in Seattle and an affiliated Jewish studies faculty member, wrote in the paper that it was “troubling” that the school hosted Lipstadt’s March 10 talk on “fighting antisemitism around the globe.”
The talk, which the professor said was a Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle request, was inappropriate since Lipstadt “has publicly supported the deportation of student protesters under policies advanced by Donald Trump,” Senderovich wrote.
Canary Mission posted a screen capture of a letter accusing the Jewish state of “genocide” that Senderovich appeared to have signed.
“It’s not true,” Lipstadt told JNS, of the professor;s letter. “To call me a Trumpist is to completely distort who I am, what I stand for and what I’ve said.”
Although Lipstadt, Dorot professor of modern Jewish history and Holocaust studies at Emory University, believes some students “crossed the line,” she told JNS that she “never said anybody should be deported for political speech.”
A Turkish national studying at Tufts University, whose removal proceedings ended last month after she spent a year in federal detention was, Lipstadt said, “picked up for an op-ed she wrote in the student newspaper.”
“It’s critical, but not unbalanced and certainly not antisemitic,” she told JNS.
Overly broad accusations of antisemitism can dilute the issue, the scholar cautioned, quoting from the Talmud.
“If you grab too much, you don’t grab anything at all,” she told JNS.
Senderovich told JNS that he had a word limit for his letter and claimed that he meant to describe Lipstadt’s “lack of opposition” to deportation actions in 2025. He also told JNS that he didn’t think that a university campus is “the right platform” for the scholar and former U.S. official to speak.
