Judaic and Near Eastern Studies Department Announces Inaugural CBI Lecture on the Holocaust and Contemporary Social Problems

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The Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies will host its inaugural CBI Lecture on the Holocaust and Contemporary Social Problems featuring Omer Bartov, Samuel Pisar Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies for Brown University, on Wednesday, Feb. 28, at 4 p.m. in Thompson Hall, Room 104. The event, which will also be streamed via Zoom, is free and open to the public. 

Bartov will discuss "The Never Again Syndrome: Uses and Misuses of Holocaust Memory in Contemporary Global Politics" in a lecture that will raise some fundamental questions regarding the use and abuse of the Holocaust as a historical event, a traumatic memory, and a warning to future generations. 

It will discuss questions such as: Was the Holocaust unique, and if so, what can we learn from it? Was the pledge to prevent genocide from happening again kept, and if not, why? Can the mass murder of the Jews serve as a guide to the nations of the world, and in what ways? If the Holocaust was the clearest justification for the need to create a Jewish state, what role has it played in Israel's history for the last seven decades?

Born in Israel and educated at Tel Aviv University and St. Antony's College, Oxford, Bartov’s early research concerned war crimes in World War II and the links between war and genocide. He has also written on representations of antisemitism in twentieth-century cinema. 

More recently, he has focused on interethnic relations, violence, and population displacement in Europe and Palestine. His latest books include "Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz" (2018), "Tales from the Borderlands: Making and Unmaking the Galician Past" (2022), and "Genocide, The Holocaust and Israel-Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis" (2023). 

Bartov is currently writing a book tentatively titled “The Broken Promise: A Personal-Political History of Israel and Palestine,” which is dedicated to investigating the first generation of Jews and Palestinians in Israel, a generation to which he also belongs. His novel, "The Butterfly and the Axe," was published in 2023 in the United States and Israel.