Learning Tools

Christopher Wolf is widely recognized as one of the leading American practitioners of privacy and data security law. He is a partner at the Washington D.C. law firm Hogan & Hartson.

Wolf also has extensive experience combating online hate speech and Holocaust denial. He chaired the Washington board of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and is a national ADL leader, serving on their Internet task force. He is also chairman emeritus of the International Network Against Cyber-Hate, an NGO that coordinates national efforts to fights online hate speech. Wolf has represented the ADL and INACH at conferences in London, Paris, Warsaw, Stockholm, Berlin, Jerusalem, and Herzliya [Hertzeliyah].

He is interviewed by Dan Leshem, program manager of the Holocaust Denial On Trial website. For more information please visit us at www.hdot.org. This podcast is underwritten by the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco, the Peninsula, Marin and Sonoma Counties.

Dr. Saul Friedlander, Professor of History at UCLA, is an internationally renowned scholar of the Holocaust. He just completed second volume of his examination of Nazi Germany and the Jews. The book, The Years of Extermination, 1939-1945, which won the Leipzig Book Fair Prize for Non-fiction as well as the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. His other seminal historical texts include Reflections of Nazism and Pius XII and the Third Reich.

He is here in conversation with Emory University's Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies Deborah Lipstadt.

We join the conversation with Friedlander reflecting on the process of writing his Holocaust memoir, When Memory Comes, published in 1979.

Deborah E. Lipstadt is the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University’s Tam Institute for Jewish Studies. Her 1993 book Denying The Holocaust: The Growing Assault On Truth And Memory was the first full-length study of those who deny the Holocaust. Her characterization of British author David Irving as a Holocaust denier led him to sue Dr. Lipstadt for libel in a British court.

Ultimately, the judge found David Irving to be a Holocaust denier, a falsifier of history, a racist, an anti-Semite, and a liar. Her legal battle with Irving lasted nearly six years. According to the New York Times, the trial "put an end to the pretense that Mr. Irving is anything but a self-promoting apologist for Hitler." In July 2001 the Court of Appeal resoundingly rejected Irving’s attempt to appeal the judgment against him. Her profound victory in that case is recorded in her book History On Trial: My Day In Court With David Irving published in 2005.

This recording captures her in front of an audience at Loyola University in New Orleans.

Ken Waltzer is the Madison Professor and director of Michigan State University's Jewish Studies program. He was a key member of a team of that disproved a Holocaust memoir, Angel at the Fence set for publication in February, 2009. Waltzer began raising questions to the agent and publisher in November, suggesting that the story was fabricated.

In May 2008 Ken Waltzer delivered the Mona and Otto Weinman lecture at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum on "The Rescue of Children and Youth at Buchenwald." He was one of 15 international scholars supported by the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the Museum to explore the newly opened Red Cross International Tracing Service archive in Bad Arolsen.

He is interviewed by Dan Leshem, program manager of the HDOT website.

Dr. Michael Shermer is, among other things, the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, the Executive Director of the Skeptics Society, a monthly columnist for Scientific American and Adjunct Professor of Economics at Claremont Graduate University.

Dr. Shermer’s most recent book is The Mind of the Market, on evolutionary economics. He is also the author of Denying History, on Holocaust denial and other forms of pseudohistory.

Since his creation of the Skeptics Society, Skeptic magazine, and the Skeptics Distinguished Science Lecture Series at Caltech, he has appeared on such shows as The Colbert Report, 20/20, Dateline, Charlie Rose, Oprah Winfrey, and other shows as a skeptic of weird and extraordinary claims, as well as interviews in countless documentaries aired on PBS, A&E, Discovery, The History Channel, The Science Channel, and The Learning Channel.

He is interviewed by Dan Leshem, program manager of the HDOT website.

Father John Pawlikowski is a Professor of Ethics and Director of the Catholic-Jewish Studies Program at the Catholic Theological Union. Dr. Pawlikowski’s extensive study of the Nazi Holocaust has enabled him to appreciate the ethical challenges facing the human community as it struggles with power and responsibility.

His scholarly interests include the theological and ethical aspects of the Christian-Jewish relationship and public ethics. Dr. Pawlikowski is also president of the International Council of Christians and Jews and author of Christ in the Light of the Christian Jewish Dialogue and co-editor of Ethics in the Shadow of the Holocaust.

For more than forty years, Father John Pawlikowski has urged Catholics and others to confront the long history of Christian anti-Semitism.

He is interviewed by Dan Leshem, program manager of the HDOT website.

Harry Mazal is the founder and director of The Holocaust History Project, a collaborative educational website that provides technically accurate and vetted responses to Holocaust denier claims and user questions. He has been actively combating online Holocaust denial since before the birth of the modern Internet.

The Holocaust History Project website is available at www.holocaust-history.org.

Mazal is also the creator and curator of the Mazal Library, one of the largest private collections in the world of Holocaust related materials. His collection includes over 20,000 books, ephemera, microfilms, video-films and photographs.

In 1983 he was awarded the Order of the British Empire by HM Queen Elizabeth for "Services to the Crown."

He is interviewed by Dan Leshem, program manager of the Holocaust Denial On Trial website. For more information please visit us at www.hdot.org. This podcast is underwritten by the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco, the Peninsula, Marin and Sonoma Counties.

Mark Potok is the editor of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s investigative journal, The Intelligence Report and its Hatewatch blog. Both publish researched and nuanced resources that monitor hate and extremist groups.

Potok has also testified before the U.S. Senate and the United Nations High Commission on Human Rights. Before joining the Southern Poverty Law Center, he spent 20 years as a journalist covering transformative historical events such as the 1993 siege in Waco and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

He is interviewed by Dan Leshem, program manager of the Holocaust Denial on Trial web resource. For more information or for a transcription of this recording, please visit www.hdot.org.

This podcast is underwritten by the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco, the Peninsula, Marin and Sonoma Counties.

Matthew Johnson is Media Education Specialist with Media Awareness Network, a Canadian non-profit that has been pioneering the development of media and digital literacy programs. You can find them on the web at www.media-awareness.ca.

As education specialist, Matthew creates resources for educators, parents and community groups. He is the designer of Passport to the Internet, Media Network’s comprehensive digital literacy tutorial and the writer of their Talk Media blog. He has presented on topics as varied as the effect of media violence on children, video game addiction, alcohol advertising, children's use of new media and the moral dimensions of computer games.

He is interviewed by Dan Leshem, program manager of the Holocaust Denial On Trial website. For more information please visit us at www.hdot.org. This podcast is underwritten by the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco, the Peninsula, Marin and Sonoma Counties.