Deborah E. Lipstadt, Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies (1993), Tam Institute for Jewish Studies and the Department of Religion. Lipstadt was an historical consultant to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and helped design the section of the Museum dedicated to the American Response to the Holocaust.

At Emory she created the Institute for Jewish Studies and was its first director from 1998-2008. She directs the website known as HDOT [Holocaust Denial on Trial/ www.hdot.org] which, in addition to cataloging legal and evidentiary materials from David Irving v. Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt, contains answers to frequent claims made by deniers. This section, Myths and Facts, received a grant from the Conference for Material Claims against Germany for the translation of the site into Arabic, Farsi, Russian, and Turkish. The site is frequently accessed in cities throughout Iran. Its seventh most visited country is Saudi Arabia.

Her book History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2006) is the story of her libel trial in London against David Irving who sued her for calling him a Holocaust denier and right wing extremist. The book won the 2006 National Jewish Book Award and was first runner up for the Koret Award. It received starred reviews from both Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews. The latter called it a “fascinating and meritorious work of legal-and moral-history.” The editors at Amazon.com listed it as the fourth best non-fiction history book of 2005. The book has been optioned for a movie by Participant Pictures and BBC Films and is currently in active development.

Her book Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (Free Press/Macmillan, 1993) is the first full length study of those who attempt to deny the Holocaust. It was the subject of simultaneous front page reviews in The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Lipstadt also opposes intermarriage between Jews and Gentiles; Ellen Jaffe McClain, in her Embracing the Stranger: Intermarriage and the Future of the American Jewish Community (Basic Books, 1995), p.18, writes: “Although people like Deborah Lipstadt, the Emory University professor who has written and lectured widely on Holocaust denial, have exhorted Jewish parents to just say no to intermarriage, much the way they expect their children not to take drugs, a large majority of parents (and more than a few rabbis) are unable to lay down opposition to intermarriage as a strict operating principle.”