Two Jewish women will play key roles in the lawsuit, which seeks damages against two dozen alt-right organizers of the 2017 Charlottesville rally. When the trial of two dozen alt-right organizers of the “Unite the Right” rally begins in Charlottesville on Monday, Jews, among those targeted in the extremist gathering, will be watching closely. But they are also key players in the case. One of the lead lawyers for the plaintiff is Roberta Kaplan, a feminist who has long been active in New York’s Jewish community. And Deborah Lipstadt, perhaps the most famous living historian of the Holocaust and the Biden Administration’s nominee to be global envoy to combat antisemitism, is slated to take the witness stand. (…) The attorneys in the coming days will recall for the jury the chaos that overtook Charlottesville during that mid-summer weekend, and ended in the death of Heather Heyer, who was also a counter-protester. They have described the defendants in court documents as conspirators who brought to Charlottesville the “the imagery of the Holocaust, of slavery, of Jim Crow, and of fascism” as well as “semi-automatic weapons, pistols, mace, rods, armor, shields and torches.” A key witness will be Lipstadt, a former Forward contributing columnist and the protagonist of the 2016 film “Denial,” about her successful defeat of a libel suit filed by a Holocaust denier she had criticized.
Lipstadt is expected to explain to the Charlottesville-area jury “the ways in which the Great Replacement theory, which suggests that Jews are puppet masters, illustrates that you can’t take on white supremacy without taking on antisemitism and vice versa,” Spitlanick said during a Zoom session about the case at a Jewish Women’s Foundation of New York conference last week. The defendants are 24 of the most infamous alt-right individuals and groups in the United States. They include Anglin Jason Kessler, Richard Spencer — who is representing himself at trial, Spitalnick said — Identity Evropa, Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and the National Socialist Front. Last year, Spencer, who was once considered an intellectual leader of the alt-right movement, told the court that the lawsuit has been “financially crippling” to him.
via haaretz: Jewish Lawyers to Lead Charlottesville Trial Against White Supremacists
siehe auch: White supremacists are returning to Charlottesville. But this time, they’re on trial. As hundreds of white supremacists prepared to descend on Charlottesville in 2017, they hashed out logistics in private chat groups. They suggested a dress code of polo shirts during the day and shirts with swastikas at night. They worried about mayo on sandwiches spoiling in the August heat. And they swapped tips on how to turn ordinary objects into lethal weapons, according to messages cited in court papers. Such detailed planning is central to a lawsuit filed by nine Charlottesville residents who allege physical harm and emotional distress during Unite the Right, the deadly two-day rally where a torch-carrying mob chanting “Jews will not replace us!” awakened the country to a resurgence of far-right extremism. After four years of legal wrangling, a civil trial begins Monday in a federal courtroom in Charlottesville, where a jury will decide whether the organizing of the rally amounted to a conspiracy to engage in racially motivated violence. “Defendants brought with them to Charlottesville the imagery of the Holocaust, of slavery, of Jim Crow, and of fascism,” the plaintiffs say in the complaint. “They also brought with them semi-automatic weapons, pistols, mace, rods, armor, shields, and torches.”