Omer Bartov ( ; born 1954) is an Israeli-American historian. He is the Dean's Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University, where he has taught since 2000.
Early life and education
Omer Bartov was born in 1954 in
Ein HaHoresh, Israel. His father,
Hanoch Bartov, was an author and journalist whose parents immigrated to Mandatory Palestine from Poland before Hanoch was born.
Bartov's mother immigrated to Mandatory Palestine from Buczacz, Poland (now
Buchach, Ukraine), in the mid-1930s.
Bartov fought in the 1973 Yom Kippur War as a company commander.
In 1976, Bartov and a score of other soldiers were severely wounded in a training accident due to a commander's negligence, an episode the IDF covered up.
Bartov was educated at Tel Aviv University and obtained a PhD from St. Antony's College, Oxford, with a doctoral thesis on the Nazi indoctrination of the German army and its crimes on the Eastern front during World War II.
Career
Bartov has taught in the United States since 1989.
He was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows from 1989 to 1992. In 1984, he was a Visiting Fellow at Princeton University's Davis Center for Historical Studies.
From 1992 to 2000, Bartov taught at Rutgers University, where he held the Raoul Wallenberg Professorship in Human Rights. At Rutgers, he was also a Senior Fellow at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis. Bartov joined the faculty of Brown University in 2000.
As a historian, Bartov is best known for his studies of the German Army in World War II. He has challenged the 'clean Wehrmacht' belief, the popular view that the German Army was an apolitical force that had little involvement in war crimes or crimes against humanity, arguing that the Heer was a deeply Nazi institution that played a key role in the Holocaust in the occupied areas of the Soviet Union. He has also written extensively about Jewish life in Galicia.
Bartov served on the editorial board of Yad Vashem Studies for two decades, but quit during the Gaza war because he felt his colleagues on the journal were of the opinion that "the killing and maiming of thousands of children is either none of its business or perfectly justified".
Political views
In August 2023, Bartov was one of more than 1,500 U.S., Israeli, Jewish and Palestinian academics and public figures to sign an open letter stating that Israel operates "a regime of apartheid" in the occupied Palestinian territories and calling on U.S. Jewish groups to speak out against the occupation in Palestine.
Bartov has said that the thirty-seventh government of Israel brought "a very radical shift", adding, "I am a historian of the 20th century and don't make analogies lightly" before recounting how the movement of fringe politics into the mainstream in Europe led to fascism, and emphasizing: "This is the current moment in Israel. It's terrifying to see it happening."
In January 2024, Bartov said that Israel had repeatedly expressed Gaza genocide during the Gaza war.
Notes
Books
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The Eastern Front, 1941–1945: German Troops and the Barbarization of Warfare, Palgrave Macmillan, 2001
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Historians on the Eastern Front: Andreas Hillgruber and Germany's Tragedy, pages 325–345 from Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte, volume 16, 1987
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Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich, Oxford Paperbacks, 1992
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Hitlers Wehrmacht. Soldaten, Fanatismus und die Brutalisierung des Krieges. (German edition) .
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Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation, Oxford University Press, 1996
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Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity, Oxford University Press, 2002
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Germany's War and the Holocaust: Disputed Histories, Cornell University Press, 2003
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The "Jew" in Cinema: From The Golem to Don't Touch My Holocaust, Indiana University Press, 2005
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Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine, Princeton University Press, 2007 (). Paperback 2015 ().
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, Simon & Schuster, 2018
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The Butterfly and the Axe, Amsterdam Publishers, 2023
Awards
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2018: National Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category for Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz
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2018: Zócalo Book Prize for Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz
Other works
Selected honors and awards
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Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California
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Berlin Prize Fellowship, American Academy in Berlin, Spring semester 2007
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Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, (2005)
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John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (2003–2004)
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Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellow, Harvard University (2002–2003)
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National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for University Teachers (1996–97)
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Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History from the Institute for Contemporary History and Wiener Library, London, for the book Murder in Our Midst (1995)
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Alexander von Humboldt Fellow, Germany and France (1985–86, 1987, 1990, 1994)
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French Government Scholarship at the FIAP Language School in Paris, France (1985)
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Rothschild Foundation Scholarship (Rothschild Fellowship) in support of studies at Oxford University (1981–82)
External links
