Omer Bartov: I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It

Professor Omer Bartov recently wrote an op ed in The New York Times titled “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.” The United States Holocaust Memorial Mueseum has cited him as one of the world’s leading specialist on genocide. Professor Bartov shares his insight.

Omer Bartov Bio: 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, and Hitler's Army. He then turned to the links between total war and genocide, discussed in his books Murder in Our Midst, Mirrors of Destruction, and Germany's War and the Holocaust. Bartov's interest in representation also led to his study, The "Jew" in Cinema, which examines the recycling of antisemitic stereotypes in film. His more recent work has focused on interethnic relations in the borderlands of Eastern Europe. Recent publications include Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine (2007), Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (2018), winner of the National Jewish Book Award, and Tales from the Borderlands: Making and Unmaking the Galician Past (2022). His many edited volumes include 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 Israel-Palestine: Lands and Peoples (2021). Bartov’s novel, The Butterfly and the Axe, will be published in 2023.


Official podcast of The Borgen Project, an international organization that fights for the world's poor. Clint Borgen and team provide an entertaining look at global issues, politics and advocacy.

Learn more at borgenproject.org.