On November 11, 2013, over 500 guests attended a special lecture to mark the 75th Anniversary of Kristallnacht, by Professor Deborah Lipstadt, titled “Holocaust Denial: A New Form of Anti-Semitism”.  A packed auditorium and additional overflow room by live broadcast enjoyed over an hour of lecture and open discussion with Dr Lipstadt.  Dr Lipstadt is an Internationally Recognized Scholar, and Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University, and  is the author of numerous books and scholarly articles and is an internationally respected historian of the Holocaust. She has been at the forefront of efforts to confront and respond to revisionist accounts of the Nazi genocides. Professor Lipstadt first came to wider public attention when she and the publisher of her book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (1993), were sued for libel by the British historian David Irving. In a celebrated court case, Lipstadt’s attorneys brought forth irrefutable evidence of the atrocities of the Shoah, soundly defeating Irving’s accusations that Lipstadt’s depiction of him as a Holocaust-denier was false and libelous. Lipstadt went on to write a riveting memoir of the trial, History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving (2005).  In 2011 she published the award-winning The Eichmann Trial.

This lecture was made possible through the generous contributions of The Dodd Center, the Office of Global Affairs at UConn, the Konover Chair, the Center for Judaic Studies and the Doris and Simon Konover Chair, and the Alumni Association.  The program was also supported by the Archdiocese of Hartford, the Jewish Community Foundation of Greater Hartford, the Greater Hartford Rabbinic Association, the Development Corporation for Israel, the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Hartford, the University of Hartford’s Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies, and the Greater Hartford Jewish Federation.

The Center for Judaic Studies is extremely pleased with the interest from the public and community organizations, and thanks all of our participants for attending this event.  For further information about the programs and events sponsored by the Center for Judaic Studies, please call 860-486-2271 or by email:judaicstudies@uconn.edu.