# Omer Bartov

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Omer Bartov (Hebrew: עֹמֶר בַּרְטוֹב; born 1954) is an Israeli-American historian. He is the Samuel Pisar 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. The Forward calls him "one of the foremost scholars of Jewish life in Galicia."

## 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 fought in the 1973 Yom Kippur War as a company commander. 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. 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.

## Career

Bartov has taught in the United States since 1989. 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.
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. He was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005.
As a historian, Bartov is best known for his studies of the German Army in World War II. He has challenged 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.

## Political views

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. 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."
In January 2024, Bartov said that Israel had repeatedly expressed genocidal intent against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip during the Israel-Hamas war. By August of that year, having visited Israel again in June, Bartov said that it "was engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions".