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.[5] Bartov's mother immigrated to Mandatory Palestine from Buczacz, Poland (now Buchach, Ukraine), in the mid-1930s.[6] Bartov fought in the 1973 Yom Kippur War as a company commander.[7] In 1976 he suffered severe wounds, together with a score of other soldiers, in a training accident due to a commander's negligence, an episode the IDF covered up.[8] 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 in World War II.[a][8]
Career
Bartov has taught in the United States since 1989.[8] 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.[9]
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.[9] He was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005.[10]
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.[11][12][8] He said that Israel's 37th government had 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."[13]
^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."[8]
^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'."[8]
Books
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) ISBN3-499-60793-X.
Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation, Oxford University Press, 1996[15]
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
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