Minnesota State Representative Frank Hornstein is inviting students and community members to a guest lecture with Dr. Gavriel Rosenfeld, Professor of History at Fairfield University. Dr. Rosenfeld’s presentation, titled The Use of the Holocaust and Nazi Comparisons in Contemporary American Politics, will discuss the implications of comparisons between the Holocaust and the current political climate. Rep. Hornstein writes:

“For the past year, I have been researching the use of Holocaust and Nazi comparisons in the contemporary American political scene as a fellow with the Sabo Center for Democracy & Citizenship at Augsburg College. The use of these comparisons is quite common; for example, Donald Trump is compared to Adolf Hitler on an almost daily basis. The Iranian regime was routinely compared to Nazi Germany during last summer’s debate on the Iran nuclear agreement, while some in the gun lobby blame the Holocaust on gun control measures. Nazi comparisons are often made in a variety of issue debates ranging from abortion to climate change. The phenomenon has significant implications for how the Holocaust is remembered, and how history is interpreted. It also has profound and complex impacts on American civil discourse.”

The lecture will be Tuesday, November 29^th at 2:00pm. Those interested in attending the lecture are invited to attend in person at Augsburg College in the Riverside Room in Christensen Center, or participate online. For more information or to register, log onto the lecture’s Eventbrite page.

In addition to Rep. Hornstein, the event is sponsored by the Sabo Center.

Early this week Frank Navarro, a United States Holocaust Memorial Museum trained teacher who has taught at Mountain View High School in California for 40 years, was put on leave after a parent complained about the parallels he was drawing in his world studies class. He was accused of comparing Trump to Hitler, but in actuality he had only pointed out the connections between Trump’s presidential campaign and Hitler’s rise to power.

On September 1 of this year, Holocaust scholar Michael Berenbaum wrote in the article With gratitude toward Donald Trump, how as an educator, he was grateful to Trump for making it easier for him to explain to his students, how it was possible for the Nazis and Hitler to come to power. In my own classroom, it is my students who have made the connections, as I certainly did not have to spell it out for them.  We all agree that Trump is not Hitler, but certainly the rhetoric and unabashed racism, antisemitism and xenophobia unleashed by his campaign reminds us of the tactics used by Hitler, the Nazis and his followers.

We all spent an enormously long election season shaking our heads in response to the rhetoric used by the Trump campaign and worried about the reappearance of hate groups such as the Klan and White Supremacists who felt emboldened enough to endorse a major presidential candidate and to insert themselves into the mainstream. Many of us ultimately believed we would get to November 9, breathe a sigh a relief and celebrate a return to normal, but instead the very thing we shook off and feared came true.

I am not condemning those who voted for our President elect nor am I assigning all of the world’s evils upon him. What I and so many others are concerned with is the releasing of the hatred, the appointment of Steve Bannon, a known White Supremacist and Antisemite as his chief White House strategist and senior counselor, as well as others who subscribe to the same ideology.  These actions have further empowered the once fringe hate groups and their followers to feel comfortable to spread their hatred and prejudice with a freedom we have not seen in a very long time.

I teach a Holocaust class at a Community College in Phoenix, Arizona that has a diverse population of students of various ethnic groups. The majority of my students are non-white, indigenous or immigrants, Hispanic, Mexican and Muslim and understandably they are concerned about their and their family’s future. Seeing the parallels does not ease their fear, nor mine for that matter, but as an educator it is my job to help them to also see that they can play an active role in preventing and fighting prejudice.

On the day after the election, we discussed how the US government is structured. We then looked at a film clip from the Nuremberg Trials showing the organizational chart of the government of the Third Reich. The size of the chart is quite large and it is remarked it could be larger still, but it would be too hard to read. What was largely noticeable was who sat at the top of the chart: Hitler, and only Hitler, as everyone answered to him. That is a dictatorship, which of course the United States is not. People may not like the results of the election, and those who did like the results are angered by those who did not, for taking their displeasure to the streets. But it is this ability to disagree, and to be able to protest, that makes us America and not Nazi Germany.

Today we started discussing Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, and my students spent a lot of time discussing Levi’s warning:

“Many people-many nations-can find themselves holding, more or less wittingly, that every stranger is an enemy. For the most part this conviction lies deep down like some latent infection; it betrays itself only in random, disconnected acts, and does not lie at the base of a system of reason. But when it does come about, when unspoken dogma becomes the major premise in a syllogism, then, at the end of the chain, there is the Lager. … The story of the death camps should be understood by everyone as a sinister alarm signal.”

Every generation has created the enemy of the stranger-the “other.” For years, hatred and prejudice has laid dormant, in the US and around the world, and now it is out in the open for all to see.  We, as educators, need to help our students understand the similarities and the differences of historic events to our current lives. Historical parallelisms should help us to be more civic minded, to get involved, as we all must band together to fight this epidemic so that it does not end in the result that Levi and so many million others were forced to endure.

Jodi Elowitz is an adjunct professor of the Humanities at Gateway Community College in Phoenix, Arizona, and former Program Coordinator for the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

Paper presented by Francisco Ferrandiz (CSIC, Madrid), Alejandro Baer (U.Minnesota) and Natan Sznaider (Academic College of Tel Aviv Jaffo) at the 115th meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Minneapolis.

The advent of forensic discourses and practices for the search for truth in human rights violations and its increasing prestige in popularity has created a new corpocentric epistemology in which the human body has become a crucial agent in the (re)interpretation of violent pasts. In this process, alternative and previously dominant ways of knowing are losing preeminence and give way to forensic protocols and reports, DNA technologies, and other technocratic processes. This has already been characterized as part of a broader forensic or even genetic turn. In this paper, coauthored with Natan Sznaider (Tel Aviv Academic College), we attempt to expand the notion of forensics and challenge commonsensical notions of evidence by comparing different evidentiary regimes of ashes, texts and bones in relation to the Holocaust. Ashes signify the stubborn resistance of corpses to the attempt to throw them into oblivion. The burial and exhumation of texts buried in ghettos testify to the reality of a vanished presence. The recent advent of the Archaeology of the Holocaust and its associated mass graves adds a new twist to the epistemological debates on the physical evidences of the Holocaust. Constituted by the current forensic turn and human remains as major evidence of atrocity, this technique has been confronted by Jewish sacred law, which resists the manipulation of already buried bodies challenging the primacy of historical truth over other regimes of justification. Analyzing these three different forms of materiality, our paper explores crucial transformations in the epistemological status of evidence of the Holocaust.

Panel on: FOSTERING CROSS SUB-DISCIPLINARY CONVERSATION ON THE POLITICS OF FORENSIC PRACTICES. Thursday, November 17, 2016 1:45 PM – 3:30 PM Room 200. Minneapolis Convention Center.

Last month marked the 5^th anniversary of the 2011 Maspero Massacre. During the first Egyptian revolution, almost 10,000 Copts and allies gathered in Cairo to peacefully protest the demolition of a Coptic Church in Upper Egypt. The army responded to these protests and initial clashes resulted in the death of three soldiers. TV show host, Rasha Magdy, reported that Copts were attacking the army, and that “patriotic people” should take to the streets to protect the military from the “violent crowd of Copts”. Eyewitness accounts claim that alongside mobs, the Egyptian army and security forces used riot gear, batons, live ammunition and armored vehicles to attack the protesters. However, the extent of the involvement of the Egyptian army is still contested. These clashes resulted in nearly 30 deaths, mostly Copts, and almost 300 injuries, marking this incident as the Maspero Massacre. Five years later, only three soldiers were punished with a maximum sentence of three years, and the massacre is not even recognized as one, let alone commemorated.

However, Coptic Solidarity, an organization that runs out of the US, is pushing for the anniversary of the Maspero Massacre to be officially and nationally commemorated by the Egyptian government on October 9^th. One of their tactics is asking supporters to encourage their local and national media outlets to publish articles and draw international attention to the conditions of Copts in Egypt. During my conversations with Copts, many dismissed the notion that Egypt would ever commemorate violence against Copts, and declared it unimaginable and impossible.

The Coptic Orthodox Church, however, actively remembers martyrs and saints by mentioning them during liturgy or documenting them in the Coptic Synaxarium, further promoting the narrative of the Church as one of Martyrs. The 21 Copts who were beheaded by ISIS in Libya have been canonized and included in the Synaxarium as martyrs and saints, although the victims of the Maspero Massacre have not. The distinction, is rooted in the idea of will and sacrifice, where those beheaded by ISIS made an intentional decision of dying in the name of religion, whereas the victims of the Massacre were merely political protesters.

Five years later, the burden of remembering the Maspero Massacre is on the people of Egypt. Commemorations serve many functions: they honor the victims, they acknowledge past violence, and they pave the way for reconciliation between perpetrators and victims. Amidst ongoing sectarian violence in Egypt and lack of justice for past violence, the memory of the victims of the Maspero Massacre is yet to be settled. What would it mean for Egypt to acknowledge and commemorate this incident, while also promoting a spirit of unity between Christians and Muslims? Whom does the State and/or the Church label a martyr and why? What are the possibilities and limitations of healing through commemoration?

Miray Philips is a Ph.D. graduate student in Sociology with a focus on violence, collective memory, and the Middle East and North Africa. Miray’s current research is focused on how Copts in Kuwait, Egypt and the US make sense of their present-day experiences and historical memory. She is also the 2016-17 Badzin Fellow. 

CHGS Director Alejandro Baer has written about the analogies drawn between refugees fleeing Nazi Germany in 1938 and the current global refugee crisis. The ease in which comparisons are made between those who fled World War II and those fleeing the atrocities committed by ISIS and other groups is made stronger by the widely circulated images of refugees we see on a near-daily basis.

The ways displaced people are presented through visual media can bring awareness to the situations of victims of atrocities. As discussed on this blog recently, picturing a victim in a photograph carries with it a host of important considerations, including whether and how the voice of the subject is taken into account in distributing their image. The voice, as it were, of the photographer may not be apparent when one glimpses a photograph. Photography can mask the intent of the photographer by creating what is a seemingly objective snapshot of real events (unlike the hand of a painter whose brush strokes reveal their subjectivity).

CHGS has in its collections a series of photographs taken in 1945-1946 by Maxine Rude, photographer for the US Army and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). These photos were part of an extensive collection organized by Stephen Feinstein, the Center’s founder, entitled, “Displaced: Europe 1945-1946,” which is available as a catalogue from a previous exhibition.

CHGS is pleased to present a newly curated exhibition, entitled “Displaced: Photos and Remembrances of Maxine Rude, 1945-1946,” selected from this larger series. On display in the Eiger-Zaidenweber Holocaust Resource Center at the Sabes JCC, this exhibition is open and available for visitors.

The more than forty photographs currently on display have been grouped by apparent theme and photographic subject, including photos of politicians visiting DP camps, the camps’ structure and function, and evidence of daily life lived by displaced persons, all as captured by Maxine Rude.

As curators of another person’s body of work, we are intentionally aware that our decisions affect the viewer’s experience. By choosing to arrange works according to the subjects within the images, we are like any visitor to the exhibition, acutely aware that we don’t have the curatorial input of Maxine Rude herself. We are fortunate to have some commentary written by her, and this important contextualizing information is presented online (in the description field of associated photos), as well as being included in exhibition materials onsite in the Eiger-Zaidenweber Holocaust Resource Center.

In related upcoming posts, we’ll delve deeper into some of the subjects in the photos, as well as learn more about the experience of displaced persons following World War II and the Holocaust.

Demetrios Vital is Outreach Coordinator for the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.  In this role he is responsible for the care and promotion of CHGS art and object collections, as well as working with the community in the development of programs, activities, and events.

When I checked my departmental mailbox this week there was a postcard from the UMN administration that couldn’t be more timely: it showed two students wearing maroon and gold, hugging — one blonde and Caucasian and the other black and Somali — and a very simple phrase: “You are here. We like that.”

One might wonder why such an obvious message would be at all necessary at a major American public University. The political reality that has unfolded in this country over the last months — reaching its culmination on Tuesday — has sadly shown that this reminder is more necessary than ever. Basic democratic norms, pluralism and willingness to coexist peacefully with people of different religions, languages and origins, has proven not to be a given for millions of Americans.

This chilling eye-opener comes on a fateful date. The night of November 9th marks the 78th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s state-sponsored riots known as Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass), a turning point in Hitler’s anti-Jewish policy. Before I read about Kristallnacht in books I had heard about that infamous night from my father, who remembers to this day how the police came to his home in Pirmasens, a small town in the Palatinate region, and arrested his father. By fortune, and unlike so many other Jewish families, they were able to leave Germany in time.

The Kristallnacht commemoration teaches that democratic institutions and values are not automatically sustained and that a modern society can become numbed to the fate of its minorities. This day reminds us what occurs when a community based on mutual acceptance has been destroyed. This day urges us to be mindful that the path that leads from verbal incitement to discriminatory policy and murderous action can be very short.

The Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies November/December newsletter is devoted to this historical event and features a number of educational resources (bibliographies, testimonies, artwork, newspaper articles). In this newsletter we ask our readers to teach the lessons of the past to wind back the divisive rhetoric that has been unleashed.

 Alejandro Baer is the Stephen C. Feinstein Chair and Director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

“Be as humble as you are curious.”

Few statements could speak so directly to the dynamic of the room as these, when President Paul Kagame addressed the crowd in a talk last month at Yale University. The leader was invited to speak at the university to present the Coca-Cola World Fund Lecture, and the reaction to his arrival was incredibly mixed across the campus. He encouraged the audience to have an open and empathetic perspective on global affairs, one which leaves room for cultural divergence in opinion and policy. During this speech, a group of faculty and students lead a “teach-in” outside of the event, echoing critiques from Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International about human rights concerns within the country. The commentary continued through extensive coverage in various media outlets, both positive and negative. The nation of Rwanda and Kagame’s RPF party are no stranger to controversy, with the academic and policy conversation often taking on quite the polarized tone.

In these conversations, the voice of the population is often overshadowed by powerful leaders, both from within and outside of the nation’s borders. This couldn’t be clearer than in an example provided in one of the aforementioned pieces, when writer Adam Kyamatare tells of a conversation he had with a rural Rwandan farmer. This man conveyed a sense of pride for how far Rwanda had come in peace and safety throughout his 89-years. Of course, this is only one perspective. But these voices – those of individuals living on the ground, in nations that become muddled down to mere headlines across the globe – these are the perspectives that are absolutely essential to capture. It is key to be aware that Rwanda is still in the infancy of its post-genocide reconstruction, and there are still many more questions than answers about the best way to ensure long-lasting stability in a post-violence region. But the voice of the people living there should be absolutely central in finding those difficult answers.

This dynamic comes to the forefront at an incredibly relevant moment; this difficult balance between internal and external political power is also present in a building controversy around the International Criminal Court. In recent weeks, South Africa, Burundi, and Gambia have begun processes to leave the ICC, citing a disparity in prosecutions. The balance between international legal assistance and the transmission of Western ideology has been a challenging one to establish. While almost every African being prosecuted at the ICC was brought to trial by their own governments, no charges targeting a nation outside of Africa have yet been brought forward.

Whether the case be Kagame and Rwanda, or the nations choosing to leave the ICC, the role of the international and Western communities in the affairs of many African nations is often controversial. It is tempting for outsiders to assess nations, particularly in the Global South, and declare that they know the best path for these nations to take politically, legally, and culturally. Although global dialogue can be incredibly beneficial in developing viable solutions in an increasingly globalized world, that global dialogue must also be genuinely inclusive. The farmer quoted above knows his country more intimately than a foreign scholar or policy maker ever could. In creating a safe and representative future, it’s voices like his that should play a central role in the conversation.

Brooke Chambers is a PhD candidate in the University of Minnesota’s Sociology Department. She is broadly interested in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, bystander dynamics, and understandings of policy and transitional justice in response to genocide and mass atrocity.

On the 6^th of October this year, the New York Times published an image of dead African migrants on its front page. Not only was this image on the front page, it was above the fold, meaning that it was the most prominent part of that day’s coverage. The faces of the dead migrants were not blurred out, nor were their semi-nude bodies covered.

The use of images like this to represent human suffering is a topic that I hold near and dear, both through my research,* and also on a much more visceral level.

When viewing an image like this, I ask why such a stark representation of others’ pain need to be displayed? Some have argued that images of pain and suffering act as a mirror through which we can ask ourselves whether we are allies, or bystanders to the suffering of others. Though this may be true, I suggest here that this is a very simplistic approach to understanding images of pain and suffering.

What are the possible reasons to use of this image in a journalistic context? The migrant crisis is a complex issue, but the photo used by the New York Times did not add anything to our understanding of the situation. It did not, for example, tell us why these migrants risk their lives to make such a dangerous journey. It did not tell us why the island of Lampedusa has become a beacon of hope for those fleeing violence in countries such as Libya and Eritrea. It also did nothing towards helping the reader understand other aspects of the crisis, such as the current debates about whether or not we should call them “refugees” or “migrants,” labels which often have very real consequences on people’s life chances wherever they end up settling. Moreover, the use of that image could easily lead the reader to assume that Africans are all running from Africa to go to Europe, ignoring the fact that one of the largest destinations for those leaving the Horn of Africa is not Europe but South Africa.

What images such as those used by the New York Times do is reaffirm several stereotypes about Africa and Africans. It represents Europe as the last best hope for Africans, thus making it worthwhile—even necessary—for them to risk their lives to get to Europe. Just as the coverage of Ebola in 2014, this image is meant to scare readers of Africans showing on European shores. The migrant crisis represents the ever-reliable fourth horseman of the apocalypse, just as the Ebola crisis did in 2014. At the same time, this image is not actually about the living or dead migrants pictured in it, as much as it about Western guilt. The photographs and article, implicitly and explicitly, present this issue as a European problem and ask what we have done to push for some sort of solution. Even in their suffering and death, these African bodies are only useful in as much as they make us want to ‘do something.’

Though some may argue that this is not the case, I pose these questions to you: When was the last time you saw images of dead Westerners on the front page of the New York Times? This is not an argument for moral equivalence, but rather a request for us to think about how we consume images of pain and suffering. Whose pain are we consuming from the comfort of our homes? Why do we need to see images of dead Africans for us to know that there is a crisis unfolding in the Mediterranean? Perhaps most importantly, what if one of those dead migrants had a relative in the U.S. reading the New York Times on the 6^th of October?

* Find Siguru’s recent article on the research on and history of the use of images of the suffering of others here.

Wahutu Siguru is a PhD candidate in the Sociology department at the University of Minnesota. Siguru’s research interests are in the Sociology of Media, Genocide, Mass Violence and Atrocities (specifically on issues of representation of conflicts in Africa such as Darfur and Rwanda), Collective Memory, and perhaps somewhat tangentially Democracy and Development in Africa.

This year, Dr. Hollie Nyseth Brehm (Ohio State)* and Dr. Chris Uggen (UMN) received a Sociology research grant from the National Science Foundation for their project “Enhancing Public Access: Archiving Court Cases to Study Genocide and Transitional Justice.” Wahutu Siguru recently conducted an interview with Professor Nyseth Brehm.

Dr. Hollie Nyseth Brehm, Department of Sociology, Ohio State University

What project/questions led to you applying for the grant?

Dr. Nyseth Brehm: Our project asks three interrelated questions: 1) Who participates in mass violence? 2) What influences legal responses to this participation? And 3) How do legal responses to mass violence impact individuals and societies? To answer these questions, we decided to focus on the case of Rwanda. The 1994 genocide left Rwanda with up to a million people dead, millions more displaced, and societal institutions in shambles. Violence had been orchestrated by a group of political leaders who encouraged civilians to participate by forming self-defense groups, spreading propaganda, and instilling fear. In the aftermath of this horror, the government of Rwanda launched an alternative court system known as the gacaca courts to respond to mass public participation in the violence. The case of Rwanda consequently provides an important case study of who participates in genocide, the legal response to genocide, and the impacts of this legal response.

What do you hope to achieve now that you have gotten the grant?

Dr. Nyseth Brehm: The grant will allow us to put resources toward data collection and analysis. First, we are creating databases of all gacaca court trials. Approximately one million people suspected of participating in the genocide were tried, and we can use the information from their trials to better understand who participates in genocide. The databases we are creating from gacaca court records will also allow us to analyze how the courts functioned, as we can analyze the punishments meted out by the courts and the factors that drove patterns in punishments. Finally, we are also interviewing approximately 250 people who participated in the gacaca court system as defendants, witnesses, and judges. These interviews will allow us to gain a different perspective of the court system—one from those who participated within their communities. We are conducting these interviews in Rwanda, and we are discussing how the gacaca courts functioned and the impacts of the courts on the lives of participants as well as on Rwanda today.

What has been the most surprising thing during the course of preparing for the grant application, or while working on this particular project?

Dr. Nyseth Brehm: I’ve been personally surprised by some of the unintended consequences of the gacaca courts. For example, as the gacaca courts were instituted in local communities, each community elected lay judges known as inyangamugayo to preside over them. These lay jurists did not need legal training but rather were elected because they were seen as people of integrity. The interviews we have conducted with these individuals thus far reveal a high degree of professional commitment among inyangamugayo, illustrating that many saw their main duties as promoting reconciliation and accountability. These duties exacted a heavy personal toll, however, due to the demanding nature of the uncompensated work. Unlike judges in many other parts of the world, the inyangamugayo continued to live and work in extremely close proximity to those they sentenced—and almost every one of those neighbors had been deeply touched by the genocide, the justice system response, and their work as judges. This fact, alongside their often marginal economic circumstances, placed the inyangamugayo in an especially vulnerable position, raising questions that must be considered when local courts are used to hold perpetrators of genocide accountable.

* Dr. Nyseth Brehm has recently published an article on how genocide survivors remember and talk about the genocide in Rwanda.

Interview conducted by Wahutu Siguru, PhD candidate in the Sociology department at the University of Minnesota. Siguru’s research interests are in the Sociology of Media, Genocide, Mass Violence and Atrocities (specifically on issues of representation of conflicts in Africa such as Darfur and Rwanda), Collective Memory, and perhaps somewhat tangentially Democracy and Development in Africa.

A competent accomplished woman goes up against a populist outsider who has created a reputation built on lies.  Sound familiar? Maybe, but this is not about the 2016 US election: it is the plot of the film Denial (2016), based on the true story of the trial between Jewish Studies and Holocaust scholar Deborah E. Lipstadt and British Holocaust denier David Irving.

There is no denying that Denial is a film for our times. Conceived nine years ago, and filmed in 2015, the parallels between the trial and the President election is not lost on viewers. Frustratingly, we do seem to live in a time in which history is ignored, facts seem like an inconvenience and there is a prevailing ideology – that one’s opinion is more important, regardless if you can back it up with facts or not.  What happens in this scenario is that there can be no debate between anyone because those espousing opinion, cannot rationally articulate their argument against those who cite facts.

How to handle someone who bends the truth for their own purposes and how one needs to combat these individuals is what lies at the heart of the film, which is based on Lipstadt’s book, History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier (2005) about her experience of being sued by the British author, David Irving for libel under English law.  Irving sued in reaction to what Lipstadt wrote about him her 1993 work, Denying the Holocaust, where she referred to him as a dangerous denier of the Holocaust based on his popularity with the public and several prominent historians through his books about the Third Reich and World War II.

Irving (played by Timothy Spall) proudly plays upon of his self-made historian persona, which makes him very popular with right wing and neo-Nazi audiences, who embraced his assertions that equated the allies’ crimes to the crimes of the Third Reich and that Hitler was either unaware of the murder of millions of Jews or was their friend in halting the murders, done by his underlings.

The film portrays Deborah Lipstadt (Rachel Weisz) and her lawyer Richard Rampton (Tom Wilkinson) not so much as who they are as people, but more as tropes in dealing with the approach to the trial.  Rampton is portrayed symbolically as someone who is able to separate law from history, he silences his emotions to gather the evidence he needs to prove that Irving is a fraud under English law. On the other side is Lipstadt, (representing both her conscience and ours) who is more vocal in regards to the emotional impact that the history of the Holocaust has on the survivors and on us to remember the six million in a respectful way.  Lipstadt wants to testify, and include survivors to be sure they get justice, Rampton and the rest of the team repudiate this strategy, instead insisting she and the survivors remain silent.

By doing this the filmmakers create a tension between the two that drives the film, and is best illustrated by the scenes in Auschwitz.  Once there, we accompany Rampton as he visits the camp’s museum. He is alone, quietly taking photos of the mounds of eye glasses and luggage. As he enters the room with the shoes, the camera tracks around the display cases, disorientating us. It is overwhelming and nauseating, allowing us to sense how Rampton is feeling, giving us his point of view. Next we see him, as if we are looking out of the case, his face is tight, his jaw clenched, as he tries to separate what he feels from the information he must gather.

In the next scene we are introduced to an annoyed Lipstadt as she voices her displeasure at Rampton’s tardiness as they wait for him at Birkenau. Later in the scene she will also have a very emotional reaction to what she perceives as his lack of respect for the sanctity of Auschwitz as memorial, to honor those who were murdered there.  What is discovered and perceived at Auschwitz is central to the narrative of the film over the debate of how the case is being fought.

Once in court Lipstadt is forced to sit silently, as Irving spins his revisionist narrative. Anyone (myself included) who has ever had to sit through a presentation given by a denier or has been attacked by one at a lecture, knows the frustration of having to remain quiet as they ramble off their lies. The real life Lipstadt recently remarked at a discussion about the film, that for her remaining silent is an “unnatural act.” (USHMM September 28, 2016) Even in silence, Lipstadt was still defending history, the survivors and the six million.

The filmmakers reinforce her bravery in accepting the case by linking her to other women who have stood up in the face of adversity.  The first being the Hebrew heroine and prophetess Deborah who leads the Israelites to defeat Canaanites (who Lipstadt is named for), and second, Queen Boudicea of the British tribe the Iceni, who led a revolt against the Romans in 60-61BCE, much to her own personal peril and loss.  The film brings this symbol to the forefront by having Lipstadt run by Boudicea’s statue on her many outings to relieve stress during the trial.  I did wonder if indeed Lipstadt was a jogger, and discovered she was, but the film uses it to remind us that Lipstadt is someone who runs towards a fight not away from it.

In the end the trial is Irving’s downfall, defeated by his own assertions. At a lecture she gave at the Jerusalem Center in June of 2004, Lipstadt recounted that at some points in the trial they were able to expose Irving not only as a falsifier of history but as an irrational and foolish figure. “Defeating him was important. The battle against people like this is to defeat them in a way that does not make them important. One must dress or let them dress themselves in the Jester’s costume, in that way it is he, who survives to give witness to his own powerlessness.”

Jodi Elowitz is an adjunct professor of the Humanities at Gateway Community College in Phoenix, Arizona, and former Program Coordinator for the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.