Omer Bartov
עֹמֶר בַּרְטוֹב
Bartov in 2022
Born	(1954-04-17)April 17, 1954 (age 71) Ein HaHoresh,Israel
Education	University of Tel Aviv (BA) St Antony's College, Oxford (MA,DPhil)
Known for	Holocaust studies

Omer Bartov (Hebrew:עֹמֶר בַּרְטוֹב[ʔoˈmeʁˈbaʁtov]; born April 17, 1954) is anIsraeli-American historian. He is the Dean's Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies atBrown University, where he has taught since 2000.^[1] Bartov is ahistorian of the Holocaust and is considered a leadingauthority on genocide.^{[2][3][4][5][6]}

Omer Bartov was born in 1954 inEin HaHoresh, Israel. His father,Hanoch Bartov, was an author and journalist whose parents immigrated toMandatory Palestine from Poland before Hanoch was born.^[7] Bartov's mother immigrated to Mandatory Palestine from Buczacz, Poland (nowBuchach, Ukraine), in the mid-1930s.^[8] Bartov fought in the 1973Yom Kippur War as a company commander.^[9]

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 theIsraeli Defense Forces.^[10]

Bartov was educated atTel Aviv University and obtained aD.Phil. fromSt. Antony's College, Oxford, with a doctoral thesis on the Nazi indoctrination of the German army and its crimes on theEastern front duringWorld War II.^[a][10]

Bartov has taught in the United States since 1989.^[10] He was a junior fellow at theHarvard Society of Fellows from 1989 to 1992. In 1984, he was a visiting fellow atPrinceton University's Davis Center for Historical Studies.^[11]

From 1992 to 2000, Bartov taught atRutgers University, where he held theRaoul 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.^[11] He was elected a member of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005.^[12]

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 orcrimes against humanity, arguing that theHeer 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 inGalicia.^[13]

Bartov served on the editorial board ofYad 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".^[14]

In 2015, Bartov and numerous other historians signed an open letter by historianDavid R. Marples to Ukrainian PresidentPetro Poroshenko urging him not to sign thedecommunization laws, which declaredUkrainian Insurgent Army members and some other nationalists who had participated in the Holocaust to be "Heroes of Ukraine".^[15]

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.^[16][17][10]

Bartov has said that thethirty-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."^[18]

In January 2024, Bartov said that Israel had repeatedly expressedgenocidal intent against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip during theGaza war.^[19] 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][10] 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.^[20] In July 2025, Bartov wrote an essay inThe 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.^[21]

• 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 fromTel 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^[22]
• 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).^[23]
• Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz, Simon & Schuster, 2018
• The Butterfly and the Axe, Amsterdam Publishers, 2023

• "Eastern Europe as the Site of Genocide".The Journal of Modern History.80 (3):557–593. 2008.doi:10.1086/589591.

• "Indoctrination and Motivation in the Wehrmacht: The Importance of the Unquantifiable",Journal of Strategic Studies, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 16–34, 1986,doi:10.1080/01402398608437246
• "Historians on the Eastern Front:Andreas Hillgruber and Germany's Tragedy",Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte, vol. 16, Tel Aviv, pp. 325–345, 1987
• "Daily Life and Motivation in War: The Wehrmacht in the Soviet Union",Journal of Strategic Studies, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 200–214, 198,doi:10.1080/01402398908437372
• "The Missing Years: German Workers, German Soldiers",German History, vol. 8, pp. 46–65, 1990,doi:10.1093/gh/8.1.46
• "Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich",The Journal of Modern History, vol. 63, no. 1, pp. 44–60, 1991,JSTOR 2938525
• "Time Present and Time Past: The Historikerstreit and German Reunification",New German Critique, no. 55, pp. 173–190, 1992,doi:10.2307/488296,JSTOR 488296
• "The Conduct of War: Soldiers and the Barbarization of Warfare",The Journal of Modern History, vol. 64, pp. Beilage 32-45, 1992,doi:10.1086/244426,JSTOR 2124967
• "Review: Mein Krieg by Hans Georg Ulrich, Harriet Eder, Thomas Kufus",The American Historical Review, vol. 97, no. 4, pp. 1155–1157, 1992,doi:10.1086/ahr/97.4.1155,JSTOR 2165505
• "Time Present and Time Past: The Historikerstreit and German Reunification",New German Critique, vol. 55, no. 55, pp. 173–190, 1992,doi:10.2307/488296,JSTOR 488296
• "Intellectuals on Auschwitz: Memory, History, and Truth",History and Memory, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 87–129, 1993,JSTOR 25618643
• "Wem gehört die Geschichte? Wehrmacht und Geschichtswissenschaft",Mittelweg, vol. 36, no. 3–5, pp. 5–21, 1994,ISSN 2364-7825
• Ian Kershaw andMoshe Lewin (ed.),"From Blitzkrieg to Total War: Controversial Links between Image and Reality." Chapter. In , edited by, . Cambridge: 1997.",Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 158–184
• Joel Blatt, ed. (1997), "Martyrs' Vengeance: Memory, Trauma, and Fear of War in France, 1918-1940",The French Defeat of 1940: Reassessments, New York / Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp. 54–84,doi:10.1515/9780857457172-005,ISBN 978-1-57181-226-1{{citation}}: CS1 maint: work parameter with ISBN (link)
• "German Soldiers and the Holocaust: Historiography, Research and Implications",History and Memory, vol. 9, no. 1/2, pp. 162–188, 1997,JSTOR 25681004
• "Chambers of Horror: Holocaust Museums in Israel and the United States",Israel Studies, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 66–87, 1997,doi:10.1353/is.2005.0049
• "Defining Enemies, Making Victims: Germans, Jews, and the Holocaust",The American Historical Review, vol. 103, no. 3, pp. 771–816, 1998,doi:10.2307/2650572,JSTOR 2650572
• "The Proof of Ignominy: Vichy France's Past and Presence",Contemporary European History, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 107–131, 1998,doi:10.1017/S0960777300004781
• "Widerschein der Zerstörung. Krieg, Genozid und moderne Identität",Zeitschrift für Genozidforschung, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 46–69, 1999,doi:10.5771/1438-8332-1999-1-46
• "Germany as Victim",New German Critique, no. 29, pp. 29–40, 2000,doi:10.2307/488631,JSTOR 488631
• From the Holocaust in Galicia to Contemporary Genocide: Common Ground - Historical Differences. The Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Annual Lecture at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies(PDF), 2002-12-17
• "The European Imagination in the Age of Total War",The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 89–95, 2003,doi:10.1515/9781474470230-015
• "The Holocaust as ‚Leitmotif‘ of the Twentieth Century". In:Zeitgeschichte. 31. Jahrgang, Nr. 5 (2004), S. 315–326.
• "Weiße Stellen und schwarze Löcher: Vergangenheit und Gegenwart in Ostgalizien"(PDF),Journal of German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 155–194, 2007
• "Eastern Europe as the Site of Genocide",The Journal of Modern History, vol. 80, no. 3, pp. 557–593, 2008,doi:10.1086/589591
• "Друга світова війна як виклик для української історіографії"(PDF),Ukraine Moderna (World War II as a challenge for Ukrainian historiography) (in Ukrainian), vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 13–60, 2008
• Communal Genocide: Personal Accounts of the Destruction of Buczacz, Eastern Galicia, 1941-1944. 7th Annual Hugo Valentin lecture(PDF), Upsala: Uppsala University, 2009-03-09, pp. 399–420
• Дискомфортне читання: відповідь моїм критикам (Uncomfortable reading: a response to my critics. Jewish heritage in Ukraine and representations of the Holocaust: discussion of the book “The Forgotten” by Omer Bartov) (in Ukrainian), pp. 326–347
• "למחוק ולשכוח: שרידים אחרונים של גליציה היהודית באוקראינה בת-ימינו",Zmanim: A Historical Quarterly. - 2008. - №103 (Delete and forget: The last remnants of Jewish Galicia in present-day Ukraine) (in Hebrew), no. 103, pp. 14–27, 2008
• David Elliot Cohen, ed. (2008),"Images of Genocide: How Should We Respond?" with Photographs by Magnum Photos",What Matters: The World's Preeminent Photojournalists Ad Thinkers Depict Essential Issues of Our Time, New York / London: Sterling, pp. 83–97,ISBN 978-1402758348{{citation}}: CS1 maint: work parameter with ISBN (link)
• Jolanta Ambrosewicz-Jacobs, ed. (2009),"My Twisted Way to Buczacz",The Holocaust. Voices of Scholars, Krakau: Jabiellonian University, pp. 95–105
• Michele Rivkin-Fish und Elena Trubina, ed. (2010),"From Buchach to Sheikh Muwannis: Building the Future and Erasing the Past"(PDF),Dilemmas of Diversity After the Cold War: Analyses of "Cultural Difference", Washington D.C.: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, pp. 50–79,ISBN 978-1-933549-92-7{{citation}}: CS1 maint: work parameter with ISBN (link)
• Eric Langenbacher andYossi Shain, ed. (2010), "September 11 in the Rearview Mirror: Contemporary Policies and Perceptions of the Past",Power and the Past: Collective Memory and International Relations, Washington: Georgetown University Press, pp. 147–160,ISBN 978-1-58901-640-8,JSTOR j.ctt2tt597.9{{citation}}: CS1 maint: work parameter with ISBN (link)
• "The Question of Genocide in Palestine, 1948: An Exchange betweenMartin Shaw and Omer Bartov",Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 12, no. 3–4, pp. 243–259, 2010,doi:10.1080/14623528.2010.529698
• "Wartime Lies and Other Testimonies: Jewish-Christian Relationships in Buczacz, 1939-44," 25, no. 3 (August 2011)"(PDF),East European Politics and Societies, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 486–511, 2011,doi:10.1177/0888325411398918
• "Review of Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin. By Timothy Snyder"(PDF),Slavic Review, vol. 70, no. 2, pp. 424–428, 2011
• "Moshe Lewin's Century",Kritika - Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 115–122, 2011,doi:10.1353/kri.2011.a411662
• "Guilt and Accountability in the Postwar Courtroom: The Holocaust in Czortków and Buczacz, East Galicia, as Seen in West German Legal Discourse"(PDF),Historical Reflections, vol. 39, no. 2, pp. 96–123, 2013,JSTOR j.ctv47wb5x.5
• Norman J. W. Goda, ed. (2014),"The Voice of Your Brother's Blood: Reconstructing Genocide on the Local Level"(PDF),Jewish Histories of the Holocaust: New Transnational Approaches, New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 105–134,doi:10.1515/9781782384427-008
• Hilary Earl andKarl A. Schleunes, ed. (2014),"Genocide and the Holocaust: Arguments over History and Politics",Lessons and Legacies XI: Expanding Perspectives on the Holocaust in a Changing World, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, pp. 5–28,doi:10.2307/j.ctv47wb5x.5,ISBN 978-0810130913{{citation}}: CS1 maint: work parameter with ISBN (link)
• Claudio Fogu,Wulf Kansteiner, und Todd Presner, ed. (2016),"The Holocaust as Genocide: Experiential Uniqueness and Integrated History", in C. Fogu, W. Kansteiner & T. Presner",Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, pp. 319–331,ISBN 978-0-674-97051-9{{citation}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: editors list (link) CS1 maint: work parameter with ISBN (link)
• Dan Diner, ed. (2016),""Buczacz," (Leiden: NV, 2016)",Enzyklopädie jüdischer Geschichte und Kultur Online, Leiden: Koninklijke Brill
• Robert Gellately, ed. (2017),"The Holocaust", in R. Gellately, ed.. , pp. 213-241"(PDF),The Oxford Illustrated History of the Third Reich, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 213–241,ISBN 978-0-19-872828-3{{citation}}: CS1 maint: work parameter with ISBN (link)
• Antony Polonsky, Hanna Węgrzynek und Andrzej Żbikowski, ed. (2018),"The Truth and Nothing But: The Holocaust Gallery of the Warsaw POLIN Museum in Context." In, edited by , 111–18.",New Directions in the History of the Jews in the Polish Lands, Academic Studies Press,JSTOR j.ctv7xbrh4.17
• Bashir Bashir undAmos Goldberg, ed. (2018),"National Narratives of Suffering and Victimhood: Methods and Ethics of Telling the Past as Personal Political History"(PDF),The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 187–206,doi:10.7312/bash18296-011,ISBN 978-0-231-54448-1{{citation}}: CS1 maint: work parameter with ISBN (link)
• "Response to Ab Imperio Forum",Ab Imperio, vol. 2019, no. 2, pp. 157–183, 2019,doi:10.1353/imp.2019.0036
• "The Return of the Displaced: Ironies of the Jewish-Palestinian Nexus, 1939-1949"(PDF),Jewish Social Studies, vol. 24, no. 3, pp. 26–50, 2019
• "Interrupted Work. Tales from Half-Asia. Small-Town Galicians Encounter the World"(PDF),Prooftexts, vol. 37, no. 3, pp. 469–496
• "What is the Environmental History of the Holocaust?",Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 23, no. 2, pp. 419–428, 2021,doi:10.1080/14623528.2021.1924587
• "Blind spots of genocide",Journal of Modern European History, vol. 19, no. 4, pp. 395–399, 2021,doi:10.1177/16118944211055040
• "Antisemitism in History and Politics",Antisemitism Studies, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 100–114, 2022,doi:10.2979/antistud.6.1.05
• "The Life and Death of the Shtetl",The Journal of Holocaust Research, vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 89–95, 2022,doi:10.1080/25785648.2021.2018845
• Bashir Bashir und Amos Goldberg, ed. (2022),"National Narratives of Suffering and Victimhood: Methods and Ethics of Telling the Past as Personal Political History"(PDF),The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History, New York Chichester / West Sussex: Columbia University Press, pp. 187–206,doi:10.7312/bash18296-011,ISBN 978-3-030-94916-7{{citation}}: CS1 maint: work parameter with ISBN (link)
• Elazar Barkan, Ariella Lang, ed. (2022), "Criminalizing Denial as a Form of Erasure: The Polish-Ukrainian-Israeli Triangle",Memory Laws and Historical Justice, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 195–221,doi:10.1007/978-3-030-94914-3_8,ISBN 978-3-030-94913-6{{citation}}: CS1 maint: work parameter with ISBN (link)
• Emmanuel Dalle Mulle, Davide Rodogno und Mona Bieling, ed. (2023),"The Difference Nationalism Makes: Jews and Others in the Twentieth Century",Sovereignty, Nationalism, and the Quest for Homogeneity in Interwar Europe, London: Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 283–295,doi:10.5040/9781350263413.ch-14,ISBN 978-1-350-26337-6{{citation}}: CS1 maint: work parameter with ISBN (link)
• Cathie Carmichael, Matthew D’Auria und Aviel Roshwald, ed. (2023), "Nationalism, Ethnic Cleansing, and Genocide: A View from Below",The Cambridge History of Nationhood and Nationalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 578–596,doi:10.1017/9781108551458.029,ISBN 978-1-108-42706-7{{citation}}: CS1 maint: work parameter with ISBN (link)
• "Should There Be One Universal Narrative for Remembering the Holocaust? On a Universal Narrative of the Holocaust and Remembering the Past in Ukraine",Eastern European Holocaust Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 13–16, 2023,doi:10.1515/eehs-2023-0005

• 1995:Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History from the Institute for Contemporary History and Wiener Library, London, forMurder in Our Midst
• 2018:National Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category forAnatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz^[24]
• 2018: Zócalo Book Prize forAnatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz^[25]
• 2019:Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research forAnatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz^[26]

• Celluloid Soldiers inRussia: War, Peace and Diplomacy

• Fellow,Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California
• Berlin Prize Fellowship,American Academy in Berlin, Spring semester 2007
• Fellow of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences, (2005)^[27]
• 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)

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

• Genocide studies scholars
• Historians of the Holocaust
• American historians of the Holocaust
• Jewish American historians
• Jewish American activists for Palestinian solidarity
• American activists for Palestinian solidarity
• Jewish Israeli activists for Palestinian solidarity
• Israeli activists for Palestinian solidarity
• Brown University faculty
• Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• Harvard University staff
• Alumni of St Antony's College, Oxford
• Tel Aviv University alumni
• American people of Ukrainian-Jewish descent
• Israeli people of Ukrainian-Jewish descent
• Living people
• 1954 births

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