Hadassa Ben-Itto

Hadassa Ben-Itto (; May 16, 1926 – April 15, 2018) was an Israeli author and jurist. She was best known for her bestselling book The Lie That Wouldn't Die: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Biography Ben-Itto was born on May 16, 1926, in Brzeziny, Poland, to David Lipmanowicz (1904–1994) and Dvora Broder (1906–1988), both natives of Brzeziny. Her father worked as a building contractor. The family immigrated to Mandate Palestine in 1935, where another daughter, Nira, was born in 1937. She married Gershon Ben-Itto (born 1920) in 1950 and had a daughter, Orly, in 1957. The couple divorced in 1982. In 2004 she was elected honorary president, as well as head of a committee to combat antisemitism. She was the winner of the 1999 Zeltner Prize for outstanding Israeli jurists, and a 2003 citation of merit by the Israel Bar Association. Desiring to write a book for the general public, she took early retirement in 1991 and spent six years writing The Lie That Wouldn't Die: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

The book was published in Hebrew in 1998 and has since been translated into ten languages, including German, Russian, Dutch, Hungarian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Spanish, English, Arabic and Persian.

With a flair for courtroom drama, Ben-Itto centers the book on the 1934 trial in Bern, Switzerland, where the local Jewish community took the local Nazi party to court for publishing the Protocols. While the lower court judge ruled that the Protocols was a work of plagiarism and constituted indecent literature, an appeals court threw out the claim of obscenity while agreeing with the lower court that the Protocols was "absolutely unjustified and outrageous insults and defamation". and the Arab world protests of 2010–2011.

Ben-Itto died on April 15, 2018, in Jerusalem, at the age of 91.