Eliot reviews the week’s jackassery and offers his thoughts on Juneteenth and the upcoming 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. He then welcomes Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, distinguished professor at Emory University and prolific author. She explains her background as a historian of the Holocaust, her work documenting Holocaust denial, and her experience being sued by British Holocaust denier David Irving. They discuss her work as Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Antisemitism from 2022 to 2025, which included efforts to bring Saudi Arabia into the Abraham Accords and creating the Global Guidelines for Countering Antisemitism. They explore the political and ideological forces behind the current global rise in antisemitism before pivoting to the threat it poses to democracy and the state actors exploiting it to sow division in the United States.
David Irving v. Penguin Books Ltd. and Deborah Lipstadt:
hdot.org
INSS Report on China’s online campaign to sow division in America:
https://www.inss.org.il/publication/china-usa-influence/
George Washington to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island:
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-06-02-0135
Letter from the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island to President George Washington:
https://www.gwirf.org/files/moses_seixas_letter.pdf
Shield of the Republic is a Bulwark podcast co-sponsored by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.
