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Omer Bartov

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Omer Bartov
Omer bartov 2014.jpg
Bartov in 2022
Born (1954-04-17) April 17, 1954 (age 70)
Ein HaHoresh, Israel
Nationality
  • Israeli
  • American
Alma mater
OccupationHistorian
Known 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 Buczacz, Poland (now Buchach, Ukraine), in the mid-1930s.[6] Bartov fought in the 1973 Yom Kippur War as a company commander.[7] In 1976 he suffered severe wounds, together with a score of other soldiers, in a training accident due to a commander's negligence, an episode the IDF covered up.[8] 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 in World War II.[a][8]

Career

Bartov has taught in the United States since 1989.[8] 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.[9]

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.[9] He was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005.[10]

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" in the occupied Palestinian territories and calling on U.S. Jewish groups to speak out against the occupation in Palestine.[11][12][8] 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."[13]

In January 2024, Bartov said that Israel had repeatedly expressed genocidal intent against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip during the Israel-Hamas war.[14] By August of that year, having visited Israel again in June, Bartov said that it "was engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions".[b][8]

Notes

  1. ^ Bartov recalls some of his research: "As my research had shown, even before their conscription, young German men had internalised core elements of Nazi ideology, especially the view that the subhuman Slav masses, led by insidious Bolshevik Jews, were threatening Germany and the rest of the civilised world with destruction, and that therefore Germany had the right and duty to create for itself a 'living space' in the east and to decimate or enslave that region's population. This worldview was then further inculcated into the troops, so that by the time they marched into the Soviet Union they perceived their enemies through that prism."[8]
  2. ^ Bartov wrote in The Guardian, in August 2024: "By the time I travelled to Israel, I had become convinced that at least since the attack by the IDF on Rafah on 6 May 2024, it was no longer possible to deny that Israel was engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions. It was not just that this attack against the last concentration of Gazans – most of them displaced already several times by the IDF, which now once again pushed them to a so-called safe zone – demonstrated a total disregard of any humanitarian standards. It also clearly indicated that the ultimate goal of this entire undertaking from the very beginning had been to make the entire Gaza Strip uninhabitable, and to debilitate its population to such a degree that it would either die out or seek all possible options to flee the territory. In other words, the rhetoric spouted by Israeli leaders since 7 October was now being translated into reality – namely, as the 1948 UN Genocide Convention puts it, that Israel was acting 'with intent to destroy, in whole or in part', the Palestinian population in Gaza, 'as such, by killing, causing serious harm, or inflicting conditions of life meant to bring about the group's destruction'."[8]

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[15]
  • 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).[16]
  • 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[17]
  • 2018: Zócalo Book Prize for Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz[18]

Other works

Selected honors and awards

References

  1. ^ "Bartov, Omer". vivo.brown.edu. Retrieved 3 September 2016.
  2. ^ "Bildner Center Event: Omer Bartov". Archived from the original on 2008-05-11. Retrieved 2008-04-06.
  3. ^ "Omer Bartov". Brown University. Archived from the original on 2012-10-16.
  4. ^ Tracing Galicia: A Talk With Omer Bartov, History, By Joshua Cohen, Forward, December 11, 2007
  5. ^ Masalha, Nur (2018-08-15). Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History. Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 354. ISBN 978-1-78699-274-1.
  6. ^ "Omer Bartov – Roth on Wesleyan". 23 January 2018. Retrieved 2023-02-21.
  7. ^ Chotiner, Isaac. "A Holocaust Scholar Meets with Israeli Reservists". The New Yorker. Retrieved 2 July 2024.
  8. ^ a b c d e f g Bartov, Omer (13 August 2024). "As a former IDF soldier and historian of genocide, I was deeply disturbed by my recent visit to Israel". The Guardian. Retrieved 13 August 2024.
  9. ^ a b Bartov, Omer (January 27, 2019). "Curriculum Vitae of Omer Bartov" (PDF).
  10. ^ "Omer Bartov". American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Retrieved 2023-02-23.
  11. ^ "Elephant in the room". sites.google.com.
  12. ^ McGreal, Chris (15 August 2023). "US Jews urged to condemn Israeli occupation amid Netanyahu censure". The Guardian.
  13. ^ Tharoor, Ishaan (11 August 2023). "In Israel and the U.S., 'apartheid' is the elephant in the room". The Washington Post. Retrieved 26 November 2023.
  14. ^ "Israel facing genocide allegation at U.N.'s top court: Intent has been expressed "over and over again," says Professor of Genocide Studies". CNN. Retrieved 23 June 2024.
  15. ^ Moses, A. D. (2008-06-28). "Modernity and the Holocaust". Australian Journal of Politics & History. 43 (3): 441–445. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8497.1997.tb01398.x.
  16. ^ Bartov, Omer (7 October 2007). Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine. press.princeton.edu. ISBN 9780691131214. Retrieved 3 September 2016.
  17. ^ "Past Winners". Jewish Book Council. Retrieved 2020-01-21.
  18. ^ "Historian Omer Bartov Wins the Ninth Annual Zócalo Book Prize". zocalopublicsquare.org. 4 March 2019. Retrieved 2023-06-16.
  19. ^ "Book of Members, 1780-2010: Chapter B" (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved May 20, 2011.
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