Hundreds to hear from Deborah Lipstadt at HET’s annual conference

Hundreds of students from across the UK are set to hear from the professor who took on and beat Holocaust denier David Irving in a famous ten-week trial in London 18 years ago.

Dr Deborah E. Lipstadt, who teaches in Atlanta in the United States, became a household name when she successfully defended a libel lawsuit brought against her Irving, and will now address the Holocaust Educational Trust’s 5th annual Ambassador Conference in Westminster on Monday.

The event will include more than 300 young people who have been on the HET’s trips and who have since decided to act as ‘ambassadors,’ to ensure that Holocaust learning filters through the country’s education system.

They will have the opportunity to hear from Holocaust survivors and participate in workshops and talks led by experts in the field of Holocaust research and commemoration.

This year’s line-up of speakers includes Berlin-born Judith Kerr and Oxford lecturer Dr Zoë Waxman, together with Lipstadt, whose TED talk about her trial has been viewed 1.1 million times.

She has published and taught on the Holocaust for almost 40 years, while Kerr, who was born in 1923, has also published an autobiographical account of her experiences, which involved escaping from Germany with her brother.

Having worked as an artist and scriptwriter, she received an OBE for services to literature and Holocaust education in 2013 and was awarded the Book Trust Lifetime Achievement Award in 2016.