A Real-Life Courtroom Drama

That doesn’t mean that I recommend every book from which I have gained. Each of us has specialized interests, and I would not expect, for instance, most readers to be interested in the structure of the American government created by the Constitution. So, I’m more likely to highlight some of the key ideas in Yuval Levin’s new American Covenant than to recommend it to every reader.

But there are times when I feel confident that nearly every reader will enjoy a particular book and be inspired by it. Frieda Bassman’s memoir Miracles is a recent example (“Her Life Was a Miracle,” Issue 1026). And I’m almost equally certain that Deborah Lipstadt’s History on Trial (2005, Ecco), her account of her defense of a libel action brought in England by Holocaust denier David Irving, fits into the same category. It is as taut and tension-packed as any great courtroom drama — e.g., To Kill a Mockingbird — with the additional benefit that it describes an actual trial and one in which every Jew worldwide had a stake.

Though I was vaguely familiar with the trial, I only decided to read Professor Lipstadt’s book after writing about Tucker Carlson’s promotion of “popular historian” Darryl Cooper in a lengthy interview (“Tucker’s Problem and Ours,” Issue 1029). Cooper, I learned, had rewarmed a number of Irving’s favorite themes: downplaying or ignoring Hitler’s role in the Holocaust; demonizing Churchill, not Hitler, as a warmonger responsible for the carnage of World War II; and the drawing of false equivalences between Allied actions — in particular, the 1945 firebombing of Dresden, the subject of Irving’s first book — and Nazi atrocities.

In her 1993 book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on History and Memory, Lipstadt described Irving as a “Hitler partisan wearing blinkers” who “distort[ed] evidence… manipulate[ed] documents [and] skew[ed]… and misrepresent[ed] data in order to reach historically untenable conclusions.” She considered her characterization harsh but incontrovertible, as Irving had already testified in a Canadian court case involving Ernst Zundel, another Holocaust denier, that there was no “overall Reich policy to kill the Jews.”