Omer Bartov

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, which Bartov claims was covered up by the Israeli Defense Forces.

Bartov was educated at Tel Aviv University and obtained a D.Phil. 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. He was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005.

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 2015, Bartov and numerous other historians signed an open letter by historian David R. Marples to Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko urging him not to sign the decommunization laws, which declared Ukrainian Insurgent Army members and some other nationalists who had participated in the Holocaust to be "Heroes of Ukraine".

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 genocidal intent against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip during the Gaza war. 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". 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. 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.

Notes

Works

• 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) .
• Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation, Oxford University Press, 1996
• 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 (). Paperback 2015 ().
• Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz, Simon & Schuster, 2018
• The Butterfly and the Axe, Amsterdam Publishers, 2023

Essays

• "The Holocaust as ‚Leitmotif‘ of the Twentieth Century". In: Zeitgeschichte. 31. Jahrgang, Nr. 5 (2004), S. 315–326.

Awards

• 1995: Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History from the Institute for Contemporary History and Wiener Library, London, for Murder in Our Midst
• 2018: National Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category for Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz
• 2018: Zócalo Book Prize for Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz
• 2019: Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research for Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz

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)
• 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)
• 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

References

1. "Bartov, Omer". vivo.brown.edu.
2. "Bildner Center Event: Omer Bartov".
3. "Omer Bartov".
4. (2025-07-30). "Column {{!}} Leading genocide scholars see a genocide happening in Gaza". The Washington Post.
5. (2010-03-19). "Reconstructing the Holocaust from Below".
6. (September 5, 2025). "An Israeli-American Holocaust scholar says Israel's actions in Gaza meet the definition of genocide".
7. Masalha, Nur. (2018-08-15). "Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History". Bloomsbury Publishing.
8. (23 January 2018). "Omer Bartov – Roth on Wesleyan".
9. "A Holocaust Scholar Meets with Israeli Reservists".
10. Bartov, Omer. (13 August 2024). "As a former IDF soldier and historian of genocide, I was deeply disturbed by my recent visit to Israel".
11. Bartov, Omer. (January 27, 2019). "Curriculum Vitae of Omer Bartov".
12. "Omer Bartov".
13. Cohen, Joshua. (December 11, 2007). "Tracing Galicia: A Talk With Omer Bartov". [[The Forward]].
14. Cohen, Mari. (19 December 2024). "Can Genocide Studies Survive a Genocide in Gaza?". [[Jewish Currents]].
15. "Open Letter from Scholars and Experts on Ukraine Re. the So-Called "Anti-Communist Law", by David R. Marples {{!}} KRYTYKA".
16. "Elephant in the room".
17. McGreal, Chris. (15 August 2023). "US Jews urged to condemn Israeli occupation amid Netanyahu censure". [[The Guardian]].
18. Tharoor, Ishaan. (11 August 2023). "In Israel and the U.S., 'apartheid' is the elephant in the room". [[The Washington Post]].
19. (12 January 2024). "Israel facing genocide allegation at U.N.'s top court: Intent has been expressed "over and over again," says Professor of Genocide Studies". [[CNN]].
20. Bartov, Omer. (14 April 2025). "Omer Bartov on Gaza: "It's a Misnomer to Call It a War"". [[Jacobin]].
21. Bartov, Omer. (July 15, 2025). "I'm a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.". [[The New York Times]].
22. Moses, A. D.. (2008-06-28). "Modernity and the Holocaust". Australian Journal of Politics & History.
23. Bartov, Omer. (7 October 2007). "Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine". press.princeton.edu.
24. "Past Winners".
25. (4 March 2019). "Historian Omer Bartov Wins the Ninth Annual Zócalo Book Prize".
26. "Omer Bartov and Joanna Tokarska-Bakir get 2019 Yad Vashem Book Prize".
27. "Book of Members, 1780-2010: Chapter B". American Academy of Arts and Sciences.