Omer Bartov

Omer Bartov is John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European History, and Professor of German Studies at Brown University in Rhode Island, USA..

Born in Israel and educated at Tel Aviv University and St. Antony's College, Oxford, Omer Bartov's early research concerned the Nazi indoctrination of the Wehrmacht and the crimes it committed in World War II, analyzed in his books, The Eastern Front, 1941-1945 (1985) and Hitler’s Army (1991). He then turned to the links between total war and genocide, discussed in his books Murder in Our Midst (1996), Mirrors of Destruction (2000), and Germany’s War and the Holocaust (2003), as well as to the role of stereotypes in representations of violence, leading to his study, The “Jew” in Cinema (2005). Bartov’s growing interest in Eastern Europe is reflected in his study Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine (2007), which investigates the politics of memory in the borderlands of Eastern Europe. As a framework for this research, he led a multi-year collaborative project at the Watson Institute, culminating in the co-edited volume, Shatterzone of Empires. Bartov's most recent book is Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (2018), where he reconstructs the transition of an interethnic community from long-term coexistence to genocidal violence. He is now working on a monograph titled "Tales from a Vanished World: Small-Town Galician Encounter Modernity." Bartov directed the project “Israel-Palestine: Lands and Peoples” at the Watson Institute in 2015-2018, and now heads a three-year student exchange program between Brown and the Hebrew University. He is in the early stages of researching a book on “Israel, Palestine: A Personal Political History.”

https://www.brown.edu/academics/history/people/omer-bartov