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A plot so lost it may never be found
Jonathan M. Katz
April 25, 2025
“What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?” — Allen Ginsberg, “Howl”
This week the New Yorker published an interview with Deborah Lipstadt, perhaps the most eminent living Holocaust scholar in America and Biden’s former special envoy on combatting antisemitism. Lipstadt had recently been quoted saying she was partially in support of the Trump administration’s policy of abducting and disappearing international students accused of participating in pro-Palestine or anti-genocide activism. “To depict some of these people as martyrs and heroes is ludicrous,” Lipstadt had said. “We have laws. Apply those laws.” “But,” she added, “I just think it should be done properly, according to the laws of the country.”
Interviewer Isaac Chotiner wanted to know if Lipstadt had been quoted accurately. It seems she had been. She goes on to say:
Lipstadt: Look, when you take someone off the street who’s not supposed to be taken off the street, and you deport them, you make a mistake. I come from a tradition and a personal belief that when you make a mistake, you say, I made a mistake, and we’re gonna fix it. And that’s disturbing.
Chotiner: They [the Trump administration] may not care that they made a mistake. That’s the issue.
Lipstadt: Off the record and not for quotation: [Goes off record.]
Chotiner: Is there a reason you don’t want to say that on the record?
Lipstadt: Yeah, I don’t, because I’m still, you know . . . I don’t want to give people the chance. You know, there’s some people I know, including good friends of mine, who suffer from what the Republicans would call, what is it, “Trump Derangement Syndrome”? You know, anything he does is bad. Look, he moved the Embassy to Jerusalem. So I give him credit for that. I do give him credit for that. I’m not gonna say just because it’s the Trump Administration it’s bad.
Yesterday, Trump’s FBI did this to the home of pro-Palestine activists in Michigan, apparently as part of a vandalism investigation:
Today, the same FBI arrested a county judge in Wisconsin because she allegedly let a defendant leave her courtroom through a side door instead of delivering him to federal agents carrying a non-judicial warrant for his deportation. (Masked, unidentified men believed to be federal agents have been abducting people from similar non-immigration-related court appearances all over the country.)
There used to be a common phrase used to describe tactics that fell far short of this level.1
Now I’m not an eminent scholar of the Holocaust. But I am in the middle of researching and writing a book that deals in large part with the memory and legacy of the Nazi genocide of the European Jews, an event that involved the murder of much of my family. As it happens, I was visiting the Holocaust museum in Skokie, Illinois, when I first saw the video of the state abduction of Rümeysa Öztürk — the Tufts University graduate student who has spent nearly a month in federal prison and is in danger of being deported for co-writing an op-ed in her student paper. And as I’ve written here before, the resonance of that video with the images in exhibit around me was uncanny.
Why can’t Lipstadt see that? The hint is in the block quote above …
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