Omer Bartov was born in Israel and educated at Tel Aviv University and St. Antony’s College, Oxford. His 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). Omer Bartov’s interest in representation also led to his study, The “Jew” in Cinema (2005), which examines the recycling of antisemitic stereotypes in film.
His more recent work has focused on interethnic relations in the borderlands of Eastern Europe. His book Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine (2007), investigates the politics of memory in West Ukraine, while Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (2018), is a microhistory of ethnic coexistence and violence. The book received the National Jewish Book Award and the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research, among others, and has been translated into several languages. Bartov’s Tales from the Borderlands: Making and Unmaking the Galician Past (2022) explores the centuries pre-dating the Holocaust.
He has edited several volumes, including Shatterzone of Empires: Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands (2013), Voices on War and Genocide: Three Accounts of the World Wars in a Galician Town (2020) and, reflecting his new interest, Israel-Palestine: Lands and Peoples (2021). His novel, The Butterfly and the Axe, was published in January 2023. His new book, Genocide, The Holocaust and Israel-Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis, has just come out. Omer Bartov is the Samuel Pisar Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University, where he has taught since 2000.
