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After President Joe Biden nominated Deborah Lipstadt to be his administration’s special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism in 2021, the Emory University professor found her nomination stalled — not an unusual occurrence in partisan Washington, but a surprising one in the case of the well-respected Holocaust historian who has long called out antisemitism on both sides of the aisle.

At issue three years ago were some of her old tweets. She eventually received bipartisan support, but several Republicans still voted against her to protest her past social media posts criticizing Republicans.

Against that backdrop, Lipstadt’s recent insistence that the incoming Trump administration will be well-equipped to handle antisemitism is a strong, if surprising, marker of the goodwill that President-elect Donald Trump has generated on combating antisemitism.

“I don’t know what the next administration’s policies will be. Nobody does, and I certainly can’t speak to that. But I have no doubt that they will take this issue very seriously. All the signs point to that,” Lipstadt told Jewish Insider in an interview last month at the Halifax International Security Forum in Nova Scotia. At the conference, with representatives from more than 60 nations, she was frequently asked what she expects to see from the incoming Trump administration.

“A lot of it was done quietly. Quiet conversations with foreign ministers, quiet conversations with justice ministers, with police, authorities, saying, ‘We’re really worried about this,’” Lipstadt said, looking back on her time in the position. In those conversations, she leaned on relatability: America doesn’t have it all figured out, either. “I didn’t say, ‘You have a problem.’ I said, ‘We have a problem.’”

“I’m asked by many places, by the Dutch, by the French, Canadians, etc., what do I think?” Lipstadt continued. “I don’t know. But if I were a betting person, I would be happy to place the bet that this will be taken very, very seriously.”

Lipstadt was the first antisemitism special envoy to face the gauntlet of Senate confirmation, after Congress elevated the position — which was created during the George W. Bush administration — to an ambassador-level post in 2021. Since taking office in the spring of 2022, she has visited more than 30 countries, with the simple mission of communicating to other nations that combating antisemitism is an American priority.

“A lot of it was done quietly. Quiet conversations with foreign ministers, quiet conversations with justice ministers, with police, authorities, saying, ‘We’re really worried about this,’” Lipstadt said, looking back on her time in the position. In those conversations, she leaned on relatability: America doesn’t have it all figured out, either. “I didn’t say, ‘You have a problem.’ I said, ‘We have a problem.’”

In July, the State Department published a document dubbed the “Global Guidelines for Countering Antisemitism,” which Lipstadt views as the crowning achievement of her time in office. Thirty-eight nations and four international organizations, including the European Commission and the Organization of American States, have signed on to the guidelines, which include 12 steps for governments to take to address antisemitism. Congress overwhelmingly voted to approve a resolution endorsing the guidelines earlier this month.

“I don’t know of a country, a democracy, that is not facing this issue on some level and struggling with how to respond, including our own,” she said. “I’ve been entrusted with an opportunity to use the levers of government to fight this horrible scourge. How can I do that? Sometimes it’s not by getting blazing headlines, but it’s by having my team go and lobby each of these countries to sign on.”

With a decades-long career in educating about antisemitism, Lipstadt came into her position knowing how to call out hate. But she didn’t yet know much about diplomacy.

“I didn’t quite understand, when I was going through the confirmation process, that that would be a tool in my hand,” she said.

Two days after she was sworn in, more than 100 Orthodox Jews were kicked off a Lufthansa flight, due to what the airplane alleged were masking violations. Many were American citizens.

“I think one of the things that university presidents outside the United States and inside the United States have learned from last year’s experience is that you’ve got to respond, and respond strongly. That doesn’t mean coming in with a militia or something, but it’s got to be an unequivocal response. And if you don’t, it just escalates,” Lipstadt said.

“Within 48 hours, the CEO of Lufthansa, which had 105,000 employees, was sitting across from me in my office,” Lipstadt recalled. Earlier that day, a senior Department of Transportation official had told her to speak in their name, too. “When I said that, you could see that there was attention [paid].” Last month, the Transportation Department fined Lufthansa $4 million, the largest fine ever levied by the DOT against an airline for a civil-rights violation.

She has since learned to adopt a diplomat’s touch, quickly picking up on a hallmark of the job: knowing when to keep your mouth shut. When asked to name which countries have done the best or the worst job at countering antisemitism, she declined: “I’m too smart to answer,” she quipped. (The famously outspoken Lipstadt is excited about returning to her tenured-faculty gig at Emory.)

As a State Department official, Lipstadt’s remit is global antisemitism, so she’s largely stayed away from the more vitriolic, internecine antisemitism fights in the U.S. in recent years. But she has made no secret of her concern about the antisemitism simmering at U.S. universities, which she argues has now reached a boil since the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks.

“I think one of the things that university presidents outside the United States and inside the United States have learned from last year’s experience is that you’ve got to respond, and respond strongly. That doesn’t mean coming in with a militia or something, but it’s got to be an unequivocal response. And if you don’t, it just escalates,” Lipstadt said. And when antisemitic rhetoric on campuses does escalate, it often becomes clear that activists’ antisemitism is a signal of a larger problem.

“Leadership at universities are beginning to recognize that these protests that are ostensibly about Gaza, about Israel, about Israel-Palestine really are a foil or an entry point for a much bigger issue of anti-democracy, anti-capitalism, anti-Western values that we often see campuses latching on to. But it’s got bigger implications,” Lipstadt explained.

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

“There’s a linkage there, and it’s really important that people see it,” said Lipstadt. “I think people are beginning to recognize that this is not one group crying out, ‘Poor me and take care of us and we’re so oppressed,’ or ‘We’re so in danger,’ which many people feel. This is something bigger and more significant.”

Sometimes, of course, antisemitism matters irrespective of its relevance to democracy, or to any other big-picture themes. Sometimes it matters simply because Jews feel unsafe. “I know that people are frightened. People are scared,” Lipstadt said.

She traveled to Amsterdam last month after the recent wave of violence against Israeli soccer fans, which she described as “terribly reminiscent of a classic pogrom.” She told JI she worries about “copycat syndrome,” wherein people think, Lipstadt suggested, “‘They chased people down on scooters. We’ll chase people down on scooters.’”

“It’s too inviting because it’s too easy. And I worry a lot about that,” Lipstadt said. The biggest challenge facing her successor, Lipstadt noted, is “the normalization of antisemitism, that certain things can be said, certain things can be chanted that were unacceptable before.”

Her final trip in the job is not to Europe, though. It’s not a response to some major incident of antisemitism, or a solidarity visit to a Jewish community living with a great deal of hatred. It’s to the first place she traveled as special envoy: Saudi Arabia. (She will also visit Egypt and Bahrain.)

Lipstadt, who is 77, almost didn’t put herself forward for the position four years ago. She had the kind of plum tenure position to which all academics aspire.

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

Her first trip to the Gulf in 2022 included meetings with Saudi and Emirati officials about antisemitism in local textbooks and how to address deep-rooted antisemitism in the population that stemmed from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. At the time, enthusiasm was high in the United Arab Emirates about the Abraham Accords, which normalized ties between Israel and several Arab nations.

Now, after more than a year of fighting in Gaza, relations between Israel and its Abraham Accords partners have cooled, although the Accords remain in place. Last month, a Chabad rabbi in the UAE was abducted and murdered, which Israeli officials described as an “antisemitic act of terror.” She met in Washington this week with UAE Ambassador Yousef Al-Otaiba, praising his government’s “decisive actions” in apprehending the killers.

Lipstadt knows she’ll be returning to a region transformed by the aftermath of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks. But she isn’t willing to write off the momentum of the Accords.

“I haven’t given up,” said Lipstadt.