There are times when I feel confident that nearly every reader will enjoy a particular book and be inspired by it

Like most people who read a lot — by definition a solitary pursuit — I’m always eager to spread news of a great read with others just to have someone with whom to share the pleasure.

That doesn’t mean that I recommend every book from which I have gained. Each of us has specialized interests, and I would not expect, for instance, most readers to be interested in the structure of the American government created by the Constitution. So, I’m more likely to highlight some of the key ideas in Yuval Levin’s new American Covenant than to recommend it to every reader.

But there are times when I feel confident that nearly every reader will enjoy a particular book and be inspired by it. Frieda Bassman’s memoir Miracles is a recent example (“Her Life Was a Miracle,” Issue 1026). And I’m almost equally certain that Deborah Lipstadt’s History on Trial (2005, Ecco), her account of her defense of a libel action brought in England by Holocaust denier David Irving, fits into the same category. It is as taut and tension-packed as any great courtroom drama — e.g., To Kill a Mockingbird — with the additional benefit that it describes an actual trial and one in which every Jew worldwide had a stake.

Though I was vaguely familiar with the trial, I only decided to read Professor Lipstadt’s book after writing about Tucker Carlson’s promotion of “popular historian” Darryl Cooper in a lengthy interview (“Tucker’s Problem and Ours,” Issue 1029). Cooper, I learned, had rewarmed a number of Irving’s favorite themes: downplaying or ignoring Hitler’s role in the Holocaust; demonizing Churchill, not Hitler, as a warmonger responsible for the carnage of World War II; and the drawing of false equivalences between Allied actions — in particular, the 1945 firebombing of Dresden, the subject of Irving’s first book — and Nazi atrocities.

In her 1993 book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on History and Memory, Lipstadt described Irving as a “Hitler partisan wearing blinkers” who “distort[ed] evidence... manipulate[ed] documents [and] skew[ed]... and misrepresent[ed] data in order to reach historically untenable conclusions.” She considered her characterization harsh but incontrovertible, as Irving had already testified in a Canadian court case involving Ernst Zundel, another Holocaust denier, that there was no “overall Reich policy to kill the Jews.”

Irving instituted a libel action against Lipstadt and her British publisher, Penguin Books, in Britain. While the suit would likely have been dismissed early on in America, where the burden of proof is on the plaintiff, and public figures like Irving must prove “actual malice,” in Britain, the burden of proof is on the defendants. For that reason, many publishers will quickly settle any libel suit. Fortunately for Lipstadt and the Jewish People, Penguin did not do that, and bore a significant part of the more than $3 million in costs over nearly six years of litigation. Supporters of Lipstadt, including philanthropist Leslie Wexner, covered her expenses.

She considered Irving the most dangerous of the deniers, as his command of the German military archives had been praised by a number of prominent historians and his books had been reviewed in prominent venues, like the New York Times and the Times Literary Supplement.

The defense team decided not to call any Holocaust survivors, to spare them the trauma of being cross-examined on topics about which they knew little or nothing. But survivors crowded the gallery and followed the trial from around the world. A verdict in favor of Irving would have been another nightmare for them, in addition to those they already carried. In his speeches to neo-Nazi groups, Irving had characterized survivors as “liars, psychiatric cases, and extortionists.” Once, when Irving was confronted by a survivor at one of his speeches, he asked her, “How much money have you made from that piece of ink on your arm?”

Defendants assembled an impressive team of experts to expose Irving’s historical research as a sham, shaped by his anti-Semitism and racism: Professor Christopher Browning, an expert on the Einsatzgruppen, the SS killing squads in Eastern Europe and Russia; Professor Robert Jan van Pelt, an architectural historian and the leading authority on the construction and operation of the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau; Professor Peter Longerich, an authority on the organization of the Nazi bureaucracy; and Professor Hajo Funke, an expert on German far-right and neo-Nazi movements. In discovery, Professor Lipstadt’s team, led by Anthony Julius, gained access to all of Irving’s private diaries and speeches, which proved invaluable in establishing his anti-Semitism.

Richard Evans, professor of modern history at Cambridge, was hired to survey the entire body of Irving’s historical writing to assess his standing as a historian. The conclusion of his massive report was devastating to Irving:

Not one of [Irving’s] books, speeches or articles, not one paragraph, not one sentence in any of them, can be taken on trust as an accurate representation of its historical subject. All of them are completely worthless as history, because Irving cannot be trusted anywhere, in any of them, to give a reliable account of what he is talking or writing about... If we mean by a historian, someone who is concerned to discover the truth about the past, and to give as accurate a representation of it as possible, then Irving is not a historian.

In his 349-page opinion, considered one of the most devastating ever delivered against a British litigant, Judge Charles Gray could find no reason to quibble with Evans’s findings. He found for the defendants on every historical issue, and stated unambiguously that Irving was an anti-Semite and a racist, and that that ideology had tainted all his writings. The judgment against Irving was the lead story in every British paper the next day, and news of the closely watched trial was broadcast around the world.

After six years of preparation and a lengthy trial, defendants delivered what Irving’s fellow “revisionist” Bradley R. Smith called “the most serious single blow that revisionism [i.e., Holocaust denial] has ever received.” The reports by defendants’ experts of many hundreds of pages compiled in preparation for trial constitute an irrefutable record that will be available long after the last survivor has passed.

For his part, Irving joined a long list of English plaintiffs in libel actions, beginning with Oscar Wilde, destroyed by their arrogance. He was left bankrupt and even served time in an Austrian prison for Holocaust denial.

A tremendous debt is owed by the Jewish world to Professor Lipstadt and her publisher for fighting Irving’s suit so fiercely and with every resource at their disposal. And no one should be put off reading History on Trial because the happy ending is known in advance. It is important that we all know the slimy ways of Holocaust deniers and the refutations of their “evidence.” And watching Irving trapped over and over again by his own words and internal contradictions is an incalculable pleasure.

Pay It Forward

Something really nice happened to me a few nights back. I arrived half a minute or so late for Maariv, and took a place on a bench at the side of the shul, without any shtenders nearby. No sooner had I started Birchos Krias Shema than a boy below bar mitzvah age came over with a shtender for me.

True, my hair is white. But I had not arrived at my seat panting from walking up the stairs, and I don’t feel too enfeebled to hold up my siddur. Nevertheless, I had aroused his concern, and he had hurried over to help me.

Admittedly, the expenditure of energy was not great, but that small gesture left me feeling uplifted and happy for the rest of the evening. As they say, big people are revealed by their smallest actions, and I have no doubt this boy’s future is bright. After learning his name, I contacted his parents the next day to tell them how moved I was by their son’s sensitivity and the alacrity with which he had acted upon it.

The good mood with which I was left reminded me of a cartoon on courteous driving I was forced to watch in Chicago Municipal Traffic Court more than 50 years ago, as the price for avoiding a fine. The theme of the cartoon was that if everyone is just a little bit nicer, we’ll all have a more pleasant driving experience. If one lets in someone trying to switch lanes, that person is more likely to allow someone to pull in from a side street, and so on. And at least in the cartoon, everyone has smiles on their faces as they “pass forward” the small kindness done for them.

Speaking of smiling, it too has that effect of setting off a chain reaction. Smiling releases a whole slew of hormones associated with happiness — serotonin, dopamine, endorphins, and oxytocin. When you smile at someone, he or she is likely to smile back, creating an instant feedback loop. But he is also likely to smile at the next person he passes.

Each little act of kindness creates its own ripples. Those who produce even a momentary uplift for another, no matter how fleeting, join George Eliot’s legion of those “who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs,” but whose impact on those around them is “incalculably diffusive” and “upon whom the growing good of the world... and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing.”

Eliot was saying, I believe, that our general experience of life as positive is dependent on the countless smiles, small gestures, compliments, and acts of chesed that we receive and give. (That is why I took her description of Dorothea, the heroine of Middlemarch, as a sort of epigram for my collection Ordinary Greatness.)

Noted family therapist Terrence Real strikes a similar chord at the end of his 1998 classic, I Don’t Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression. He advises males to stop focusing on winning and losing and being stronger or weaker, and more on their role as fathers. Being a father, however, does not only mean producing children, but engaging in any generative activity — i.e., any activity in service of others that fosters their growth or happiness.

I’d say that boy in shul is off to a good start.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1038. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)