Lipstadt’s interest in antisemitism was awakened during a college year abroad at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. At the end of her exchange year in 1967, as Israel prepared for a possible invasion by Arab armies, she witnessed the preparation of mass graves and heard whispers about the coming of another Holocaust. When Israel won an overwhelming victory in the Six Day War—taking control of East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank—Lipstadt signed on for another year abroad to witness a buoyant new era in Israeli society. When she returned home, it was with a changed understanding of the “imprint of both the Holocaust and Israel on the psyche of the Jewish people,” she wrote in her 2005 memoir, History on Trial. She decided to begin a graduate degree in Jewish history at Brandeis University.
Back in the US, Lipstadt, who once drew ire at her parents’ Upper West Side synagogue because she showed up sporting a SNCC button, became disillusioned by the 1968 Ocean Hill–Brownsville teachers’ strike in Brooklyn, which arose from a conflict between Black parents seeking community control of schools and the majority-Jewish teachers union. Many Jewish observers believed the activists’ opposition to the union had antisemitic undertones, though new historical accounts have argued that the union itself strategically played up perceptions of “Black antisemitism.” More than 30 years later, Lipstadt told the journalist D.D. Guttenplan that the strike had opened her eyes to “overt anti-Semitism coming from people whose struggle you had always thought . . . cut to the core of America,” forcing her to re-evaluate her relationship to the left. Four years after the strike, Lipstadt’s turn toward a politics of Jewish particularism accelerated when she visited the Soviet Union and was detained and interrogated by the KGB for lending a prayer book to a woman at a synagogue in Ukraine.
Lipstadt’s personal story could be a synecdoche for the American Jewish postwar trajectory: Entering the ’60s as a committed liberal supporter of civil rights, she was electrified by Israel’s victory in the Six Day War, alienated by tendencies in the Black Power movement that many perceived as anti-Jewish, and moved by the struggles of Soviet Jewry—all of which made her more attached to a politicized Jewish identity. For some Jews, like the staff of the once-liberal magazine Commentary, the same historical events prompted a full political heel-turn away from the left to create the neoconservative movement. Lipstadt’s transformation wasn’t quite so dramatic: “I never went as far as Commentary and [Norman] Podhoretz,” she would later tell Guttenplan. She remained a staunch liberal, but one who now saw Jewish causes as central, rather than incidental, to her politics.