Daniel Blatman

Daniel Blatman is an Israeli historian, specializing in history of the Holocaust.

Early life and education Blatman was born in Tel Aviv into an Eastern European Jewish family that included some Holocaust survivors and attended Tichon Hadash high school. He studied the history of contemporary Judaism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, from which he graduated in 1981 before obtaining a master's degree in 1988. After teaching at Danziger high school in Kiryat Shmona from 1981 to 1992, he completed a doctorate in 1993 under the supervision of Israel Gutman.

Career history

From 1997, Blatman taught at his alma mater and, in 2009, became an associate professor at the Institute of Contemporary Judaism. He also teaches at Georgetown University in Washington, at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. and a visiting professor at the History Department of the Paris Institute of Political Studies in 2013–14. He is the chief historian of the Warsaw Ghetto Museum.

Blatman's book The Death Marches, published in 2012, was researched over more than a decade across 20 archives in eight countries. He presents an account of the forced marches of concentration camp prisoners in the waning months of World War II.

Criticism of the Israeli Government

Associated with the proposed 2023 Israeli judicial reform, the Likud-led far-right coalition was compared to Germany in the 1930s by some journalists and historians in Israel including Daniel Blatman, an Israeli historian, specializing in history of the Holocaust, When interviewed by Ayelett Suhani for Haaretz, Blatman said "Israel's government has neo-Nazi ministers. It really does recall Germany in 1933". However, he was referring specifically to the authoritarian aspects of 1930s Germany, he did not draw direct connections to the ghettos or the Holocaust.

In 2016 Blatman criticised Benjamin Netanyahu for referring to removal of Israeli settlers from the West Bank as "ethnic cleansing". This triggered a discourse with Benny Morris, in which Blatman asserted that ethnic cleansing had been done by Israel in 1948.

In May 2025, Blatman accused Israel of carrying out genocide in Gaza: "I have been engaged in researching the Holocaust for about 40 years. I never imagined in my worst nightmares that the Jewish state would bomb starving children to death".

Prizes

1991: The Pridan Prize for Studies in East European Jewish History, Hebrew University.