Omer Bartov

OccupationHistorianKnown forHolocaust studies

Omer Bartov (Hebrew: עֹמֶר בַּרְטוֹב [ʔoˈmeʁ ˈbaʁtov]; born 1954) is an Israeli-American historian. He is the Samuel Pisar Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University, where he has taught since 2000.^[1] Bartov is a historian of the Holocaust and is considered one of the world's leading authorities on genocide.^[2][3] The Forward calls him "one of the foremost scholars of Jewish life in Galicia."^[4]

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.^[5] Bartov's mother immigrated to Mandatory Palestine from Buchach, Ukraine, in the mid-1930s.^[6] He was educated at Tel Aviv University and obtained a PhD from St. Antony's College, Oxford.

Career

Bartov 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.^[7]

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.^[7] He was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005.^[8]

As a historian, Bartov is best known for his studies of the German Army in World War II. He has challenged 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.

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" and calling on U.S. Jewish groups to speak out against the occupation in Palestine.^[9][10] He said that Israel's 37th government had 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."^[11]

Bartov has said that Israel has repeatedly expressed genocidal intent against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip during the Israel-Hamas war.^[12]

Books

• The Eastern Front, 1941–1945: German Troops and the Barbarization of Warfare, Palgrave Macmillan, 2001
• Historians on the Eastern Front Andreas Hillgruber and Germany's Tragedy, pages 325–345 from Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte, Volume 16, 1987
• Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich, Oxford Paperbacks, 1992
• Hitlers Wehrmacht. Soldaten, Fanatismus und die Brutalisierung des Krieges. (German edition) ISBN 3-499-60793-X.
• Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation, Oxford University Press, 1996^[13]
• Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity, Oxford University Press, 2002
• Germany's War and the Holocaust: Disputed Histories, Cornell University Press, 2003
• The "Jew" in Cinema: From The Golem to Don't Touch My Holocaust, Indiana University Press, 2005
• Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine, Princeton University Press, 2007 (ISBN 978-0-691-13121-4). Paperback 2015 (ISBN 9780691166551).^[14]
• Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz, Simon & Schuster, 2018
• The Butterfly and the Axe, Amsterdam Publishers, 2023

Awards

• 2018: National Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category for Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz^[15]
• 2018: Zócalo Book Prize for Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz^[16]

Other works

• Celluloid Soldiers in Russia: War, Peace and Diplomacy

Selected honors and awards

• Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California,
• Berlin Prize Fellowship, American Academy in Berlin, Spring semester 2007
• Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, (2005)^[17]
• John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (2003–2004)
• Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellow, Harvard University (2002–2003)
• National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for University Teachers (1996–97)
• Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History from the Institute for Contemporary History and Wiener Library, London, for the book Murder in Our Midst (1995)
• Alexander von Humboldt Fellow, Germany and France (1985–86, 1987, 1990, 1994)
• French Government Scholarship at the FIAP Language School in Paris, France (1985)
• Rothschild Foundation Scholarship (Rothschild Fellowship) in support of studies at Oxford University (1981–82)

References

External Links

• UC San Diego, Holocaust Living History Collection: The Voice of Your Brother's Blood: The Murder of a Town in Eastern Galicia