A prominent Holocaust historian wrestles with a rising revisionism

by Mark Weber

Defenders of the crumbling Holocaust story are confused and frustrated about how best to respond to the increasingly "sophisticated" arguments of Revisionists, a leading Holocaust historian says. Writing in the April 1991 issue of Dimensions, the Zionist Anti-Defamation League's "Journal of Holocaust Studies, " Deborah Lipstadt declares that Revisionist historians must be relentlessly "exposed" and denounced, while carefully avoiding any discussion of what they actually write and say.

Lipstadt teaches history at Occidental College in Los Angeles. She is the author of Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933-1945, and is currently working on a book about Holocaust Revisionism. If it is anything like this essay, her forthcoming work will be little more than a polemical smear job.

Holocaust revisionism can no longer simply be "brushed off, " she writes in her essay, "Resisting History," because Revisionists have adopted a much more serious and scholarly approach in recent years: More