Denial’s real-life scholar is a born leader

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This article was published 22/10/2016 (3626 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

NEW YORK — The historian Deborah Lipstadt was walking through the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Lower Manhattan on a recent afternoon when she came across a magnificent vista of the Hudson River outside one window.

Lipstadt, 69, a Holocaust scholar who teaches at Atlanta’s Emory University, had just finished looking through an exhibit on the murdered American innocent Leo Frank — “they pulled him right out and lynched him” — but is suddenly taken with the view.

“It’s so beautiful. Look at the water,” she said. Then, motioning to some of the difficult exhibits behind her and the neighbourhood of the 9/11 attacks in which the museum sits, added: “Right near all this. It’s poignant. Really poignant.”

In a film season that has seen the unlikely hero take forms as varied as Nat Turner and Sully Sullenbeger — and in an election period filled with charged discussions about tolerance and hate speech — Lipstadt offers a view of justice from another angle.

In 2000, the author took on David Irving in Britain after the infamous Holocaust denier accused her of libel. Eschewing the path-of-less-resistance option of settling out of court, Lipstadt raised funds for a high-end defence team and then battled it out with Irving at a trial, suppressing a desire that she or survivors testify.

Mick Jackson’s new fact-based drama, Denial, offers a retelling of the story. Audiences can come to understand Lipstadt in the form of Rachel Weisz, who plays the scholar with outer-borough brio — true to her spirit, if not her accent.

“I remember talking to Deborah and immediately getting the sense of someone who opens her own doors without waiting for someone else,” Jackson said in an interview. “According to her parents, her first words were ‘me do it.’ This is someone… who was born with the desire to lead.”

Lipstadt was initially conflicted about a movie. But she decided to co-operate for the same reason she had decided to battle it out with Irving in court: It would send a message.

“No movie is going to change the David Irvings of the world,” she says. “What this can do is confront the people who think it’s OK to change facts as long as you call them ‘opinions.’ ”

— Los Angeles Times