Omer Bartov

Omer Bartov ( ; born April 17, 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. Bartov is a historian of the Holocaust and is considered a leading authority on genocide.

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's parents were Zionists and fought in the 1948 Palestine war.

Bartov fought in the 1973 Yom Kippur War as a company commander. In 1976, he and a score of other soldiers were severely wounded in a training accident due to a commander's negligence, which Bartov says the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) covered up. 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.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." 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.

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

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". (In August 2024, Bartov wrote in The Guardian: "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'." 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.

Personal life Bartov lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Bartov also has a son who lives in Tel Aviv. 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 Tales from the Borderlands: Making and Unmaking the Galician Past, Yale University Press, 2022 The Butterfly and the Axe, Amsterdam Publishers, 2023 Genocide, the Holocaust and Israel-Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis, Bloomsbury Academic, 2023 Israel: What Went Wrong?, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026. . .

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

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)