Omer Bartov

Israeli-American historian (born 1954)

Omer Bartov

עֹמֶר בַּרְטוֹב

Bartov in 2022

Born|  (1954-04-17) April 17, 1954 (age 71)

Ein HaHoresh, Israel

Nationality|

* Israeli
* American

Education|

* University of Tel Aviv (BA)
* St Antony's College, Oxford (MA, PhD)

Known for| Holocaust studies

Omer Bartov (Hebrew: עֹמֶר בַּרְטוֹב [ʔoˈmeʁ ˈbaʁtov]; 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.[1] Bartov is a historian of the Holocaust and is considered a leading authority on genocide.[2][3]

## Early life and education

[edit]

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.[4] Bartov's mother immigrated to Mandatory Palestine from Buczacz, Poland (now Buchach, Ukraine), in the mid-1930s.[5] Bartov fought in the 1973 Yom Kippur War as a company commander.[6]

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.[7]

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.[a][7]

## Career

[edit]

Bartov has taught in the United States since 1989.[7] 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.[8]

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

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.[10]

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".[11]

## Political views

[edit]

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.[12][13][7]

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."[14]

In January 2024, Bartov said that Israel had repeatedly expressed genocidal intent against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip during the Gaza war.[15] By August of that year, having visited Israel again in June, Bartov said it "was engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions".[b][7] On April 24, 2025, Bartov said: "It's a misnomer to call it a 'war'. [...] This is an occupation by the IDF designed to take over Gaza. There will, of course, be resistance, but it will be guerrilla resistance." He also noted the violence had escalated beyond Gaza to include the West Bank.[16] In July 2025, Bartov wrote an essay in The New York Times in which he argued that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people and noted that other experts in genocide studies had reached the same conclusion.[17]

## Notes

[edit]

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."[7]
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'."[7]

## Books

[edit]

* 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[18]
* 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).[19]
* 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

[edit]

* 2018: National Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category for Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz[20]
* 2018: Zócalo Book Prize for Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz[21]

## Other works

[edit]

* Celluloid Soldiers in Russia: War, Peace and Diplomacy

## Selected honors and awards

[edit]

* 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)[22]
* 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

[edit]

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. ^ Masalha, Nur (2018-08-15). Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History. Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 354\. ISBN 978-1-78699-274-1.
5. ^ "Omer Bartov – Roth on Wesleyan". 23 January 2018. Retrieved 2023-02-21.
6. ^ Chotiner, Isaac. "A Holocaust Scholar Meets with Israeli Reservists". The New Yorker. Retrieved 2 July 2024.
7. ^ 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.
8. ^ a b Bartov, Omer (January 27, 2019). "Curriculum Vitae of Omer Bartov" (PDF).
9. ^ "Omer Bartov". American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Retrieved 2023-02-23.
10. ^ Cohen, Joshua (December 11, 2007). "Tracing Galicia: A Talk With Omer Bartov". The Forward. Retrieved July 22, 2025.
11. ^ Cohen, Mari (19 December 2024). "Can Genocide Studies Survive a Genocide in Gaza?". Jewish Currents. Archived from the original on 16 May 2025. Retrieved 16 May 2025.
12. ^ "Elephant in the room". sites.google.com.
13. ^ McGreal, Chris (15 August 2023). "US Jews urged to condemn Israeli occupation amid Netanyahu censure". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 2 April 2025.
14. ^ 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.
15. ^ "Israel facing genocide allegation at U.N.'s top court: Intent has been expressed "over and over again," says Professor of Genocide Studies". CNN. 12 January 2024. Archived from the original on 6 December 2024. Retrieved 23 June 2024.
16. ^ "Omer Bartov on Gaza: "It's a Misnomer to Call It a War"". Jacobin. 14 April 2025. Archived from the original on 25 April 2025. Retrieved 4 May 2025.
17. ^ Bartov, Omer (July 15, 2025). "I'm a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It". The New York Times. Retrieved July 22, 2025.
18. ^ 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.
19. ^ Bartov, Omer (7 October 2007). Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine. press.princeton.edu. ISBN 9780691131214. Retrieved 3 September 2016.
20. ^ "Past Winners". Jewish Book Council. Retrieved 2020-01-21.
21. ^ "Historian Omer Bartov Wins the Ninth Annual Zócalo Book Prize". zocalopublicsquare.org. 4 March 2019. Retrieved 2023-06-16.
22. ^ "Book of Members, 1780-2010: Chapter B" (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved May 20, 2011.

## External links

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

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