D. D. Guttenplan | |
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| Born | Don David Guttenplan Portsmouth, Virginia, U.S. |
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| Known for | Editor of The Nation (2019–present) |
| Spouse | Maria Margaronis |
| Children | 3, including Alexander |
Don David Guttenplan is an American writer who serves as editor of The Nation . A former London correspondent of the magazine, [1] [2] he wrote The Holocaust on Trial, [3] a book about the Irving v Penguin Books and Lipstadt libel case while based in the UK's capital.
Guttenplan is of U.S. Jewish origin. He was born in Portsmouth, Virginia [4] and was educated in the Philadelphia and Memphis public school systems before graduating with a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Columbia University in 1978, a degree in English literature from Cambridge University, and a doctorate in history from the University of London. [5]
During the 1980s, he worked in New York City politics and in publishing, where his proudest achievements were drafting the bill to name a portion of Central Park "Strawberry Fields", commissioning of a biography of the anarchist Emma Goldman, and the reissue of the WPA Guide to New York City. He was also briefly lead singer for a punk band, The Editors, before leaving the group to study in Britain. However, the experience was invaluable background for writing pop music reviews in Vanity Fair .
After working as a senior editor at the Village Voice , editing the paper's political and news coverage and writing a cover story exposing the corrupt politics behind the proposed redevelopment of Times Square, his enthusiasm for lost causes led him to New York Newsday , where he wrote a weekly media column and covered the 1988 presidential campaign. His reporting on the 1990 Happy Land Social Club fire in the Bronx won a Page One award from the New York Newspaper Guild and his investigative reporting on New York City's ineffectual fire code was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Following a year as a research fellow at the Freedom Forum Media Studies centre at Columbia, Guttenplan moved to London in 1994. He has taught American History at University College and at Birkbeck College, and is a frequent commentator on American culture and politics for the BBC.
Guttenplan worked for The Nation's London bureau from around 1996 until the 2016 United States presidential election. [2] In 2001, Guttenplan's interest in the uses of British libel laws to silence criticism led him to write about the suit brought by British author David Irving, who claimed no Jews were killed in gas chambers at Auschwitz, against American academic Deborah Lipstadt, who had called Irving "one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial." Guttenplan's account of the case, The Holocaust on Trial, was described by Ian Buruma in The New Yorker as "a mixture of superb reportage and serious reflection—about the role of Jewish identity politics in the United States, antisemitism in Britain, the historiography of the Cold War, and so on." Neal Ascherson wrote: "Guttenplan sat through every day of the trial, and no wiser, more honest, or more melancholy book will ever be written about it." The Holocaust on Trial has been translated into German, Italian and Swedish.
When his friend and former teacher Edward Said became too ill to continue lecturing, Guttenplan arranged to film a series of lengthy conversations which, after Said died in 2003, became Edward Said: The Last Interview. [6] The British journal Sight and Sound described the film as "the kind of portrait of an intellectual which is very rare," while The Times of London called it "enthralling, touching, melancholic and fierce." The New York Times pronounced it "riveting", adding "Edward Said: The Last Interview proves that a couch, a camera and a great mind can be all the inspiration a filmmaker needs." [7]
In June 2009, Guttenplan completed a biography of I. F. Stone, the American journalist, titled American Radical: The Life and Times of I.F. Stone, which was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. [8]
In 2018, Guttenplan's profile of nine progressive activists in the United States, The Next Republic, was published by Seven Stories Press. [9]
Guttenplan replaced Publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel as Editor of The Nation on June 15, 2019. [10]
Guttenplan was married to Maria Margaronis but they have since divorced; the couple had three children, including Alexander Guttenplan.[ citation needed ] Their son Alexander was the captain of Emmanuel College, Cambridge's 2010 winning University Challenge team. [11]
Holocaust denial is an antisemitic conspiracy theory that asserts that the Nazi genocide of Jews, known as the Holocaust, is a fabrication or exaggeration. Holocaust denial includes making one or more of the following false claims:
David John Cawdell Irving is an English author who has written on the military and political history of World War II, especially Nazi Germany. He was found to be a Holocaust denier in a UK court in 2000 as a result of a failed libel case.
Kevin B. MacDonald is an American antisemitic conspiracy theorist, white supremacist, and retired professor of evolutionary psychology at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB). In 2008, the CSULB academic senate voted to disassociate itself from MacDonald's work.
Isidor Feinstein Stone was an American investigative journalist, writer, and author.
Deborah Esther Lipstadt is an American historian and diplomat, best known as author of the books Denying the Holocaust (1993), History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier (2005), The Eichmann Trial (2011), and Antisemitism: Here and Now (2019). She has served as the United States Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Anti-Semitism since May 3, 2022. Since 1993 she has been the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, US.
The Holocaust—the murder of about six million Jews by Nazi Germany from 1941 to 1945—is the most-documented genocide in history. Although there is no single document which lists the names of all Jewish victims of Nazi persecution, there is conclusive evidence that about six million Jews were murdered. There is also conclusive evidence that Jews were gassed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Operation Reinhard extermination camps, and in gas vans, and that there was a systematic plan by the Nazi leadership to murder them.
Katrina vanden Heuvel is an American editor and publisher. She is the publisher, part-owner, and former editor of the progressive magazine The Nation. She was the magazine's editor from 1995 to 2019, when she was succeeded by D. D. Guttenplan. She has frequently appeared as a commentator on political television programs. Vanden Heuvel is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a US nonprofit think tank. She is a recipient of the Norman Mailer Prize.
Sir Richard John Evans is a British historian of 19th- and 20th-century Europe with a focus on Germany. He is the author of eighteen books, including his three-volume The Third Reich Trilogy (2003–2008). Evans was Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge from 2008 until his retirement in 2014, and President of Cambridge's Wolfson College from 2010 to 2017. He has been Provost of Gresham College in London since 2014. Evans was appointed Knight Bachelor for services to scholarship in the 2012 Birthday Honours.
Christopher Robert Browning is an American historian and is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). A specialist on the Holocaust, Browning is known for his work documenting the Final Solution, the behavior of those implementing Nazi policies, and the use of survivor testimony. He is the author of nine books, including Ordinary Men (1992) and The Origins of the Final Solution (2004).
The Destruction of Dresden is a 1963 book by British author and Holocaust denier David Irving, in which he describes the February 1945 Allied bombing of Dresden in World War II. The book became an international best-seller during the 1960s debate about the morality of the World War II area bombing of the civilian population of Nazi Germany. Despite having long being praised and held in high esteem, the book is no longer considered to be an authoritative or reliable account of the Allied bombing and destruction of Dresden during February 1945.
Harry Elmer Barnes was an American historian who, in his later years, was known for his historical revisionism and Holocaust denial.
William Jacobus vanden Heuvel was an American attorney, businessman, author and diplomat of Dutch descent. He was known for advising Robert F. Kennedy during the latter's campaigns for Senate in 1964 and President in 1968. Vanden Heuvel established the Roosevelt Institute in 1987. He was the father of longtime editor of The Nation magazine Katrina vanden Heuvel and actress Wendy vanden Heuvel, children from his marriage to author-editor Jean Stein, the daughter of MCA founder Jules C. Stein.
Richard Rampton KC was a British libel lawyer. He was involved in several high-profile cases including Irving v. Penguin Books and Lipstadt, where he defended Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books against David Irving.
The Vrba–Wetzler report is one of three documents that comprise what is known as the Auschwitz Protocols, otherwise known as the Auschwitz Report or the Auschwitz notebook. It is a 33-page eye-witness account of the Auschwitz concentration camp in German-occupied Poland during the Holocaust.
Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust is a 1996 book by American writer Daniel Goldhagen, in which he argues that the vast majority of ordinary Germans were "willing executioners" in the Holocaust because of a unique and virulent "eliminationist antisemitism" in German political culture which had developed in the preceding centuries. Goldhagen argues that eliminationist antisemitism was the cornerstone of German national identity, was unique to Germany, and because of it ordinary German conscripts killed Jews willingly. Goldhagen asserts that this mentality grew out of medieval attitudes rooted in religion and was later secularized.
Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory is a 1993 book by the historian Deborah Lipstadt, in which the author discusses the Holocaust denial movement. Lipstadt named British writer David Irving as a Holocaust denier, leading him to sue her unsuccessfully for libel. She gives a detailed explanation of how people came to deny the Holocaust or claim that it was vastly exaggerated by the Jews.
David Irving v Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt is a case in English law against American historian Deborah Lipstadt and her British publisher Penguin Books, filed in the High Court of Justice by the British author David Irving in 1996, asserting that Lipstadt had libelled him in her 1993 book Denying the Holocaust. The court ruled that Irving's claim of libel relating to Holocaust denial was not valid under English defamation law because Lipstadt's claim that he had deliberately distorted evidence had been shown to be substantially true. English libel law puts the burden of proof on the defence, meaning that it was up to Lipstadt and her publisher to prove that her claims of Irving's deliberate misrepresentation of evidence to conform to his ideological viewpoints were substantially true.
Critical responses to Holocaust denier David Irving have changed dramatically as Irving, a writer on the subject of World War II and Nazism, changed his own public political views; further, there are doubts as to how far Irving applies the historical method. This article documents some of these critical responses over the course of his writing career.
The Nation is a progressive American monthly magazine that covers political and cultural news, opinion, and analysis. It was founded on July 6, 1865, as a successor to William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator, an abolitionist newspaper that closed in 1865, after ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Thereafter, the magazine proceeded to a broader topic, The Nation. An important collaborator of the new magazine was its Literary Editor Wendell Phillips Garrison, son of William. He had at his disposal his father's vast network of contacts.
Denial is a 2016 biographical film directed by Mick Jackson and written by David Hare, based on Deborah Lipstadt's 2005 book History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier. It dramatises the Irving v Penguin Books Ltd case, in which Lipstadt, a Holocaust scholar, was sued by David Irving, a Holocaust denier, for libel. It stars Rachel Weisz, Tom Wilkinson, Timothy Spall, Andrew Scott, Jack Lowden, Caren Pistorius and Alex Jennings.
He previously covered the 2016 election as the magazine's editor at large and, for two decades before that, was part of its London bureau.
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