Omer Bartov: 7 books

As the Cold War followed on the heels of the Second World War as the Nuremburg Trials faded in the shadow of the Iron Curtain both the Germans and the West were quick to accept the idea that Hitler's army had been no SS no Gestapo that it was a professional force little touched by Nazi politics. But...

In Erased, Omer Bartov uncovers the rapidly disappearing vestiges of the Jews of western Ukraine, who were rounded up and murdered by the Nazis during World War II with help from the local populace. What begins as a deeply personal chronicle of the Holocaust in his mother's hometown of Buchach--in...

Mirrors of Destruction examines the relationship between total war, state-organized genocide, and the emergence of modern identity. Here, Omer Bartov demonstrates that in the twentieth century there have been intimate links between military conflict, mass murder of civilian populations, and the definition...

“A substantive contribution to the history of ethnic strife and extreme violence” (The Wall Street Journal) and a cautionary examination of how genocide can take root at the local level—turning neighbors, friends, and family against one another—as seen through the eastern European border town...

"While attempts to come to terms with past catastrophe... can help prevent its recurrence, they may also provide arguments for... actions against the real or imagined perpetrators of previous disasters. The confrontation with... catastrophe can help us understand the roots and nature of this century's...

War endlessly tries to mask itself. The myth of the heroic soldier testing his individual courage stands in stark contrast to the reality of mass, anonymous death and the suppression of individual actions. Murder in Our Midst shows that this fundamental tension reached its natural conclusion in the...

In this groundbreaking book, leading Arab and Jewish intellectuals examine how and why the Holocaust and the Nakba are interlinked without blurring fundamental differences between them. While these two foundational tragedies are often discussed separately and in abstraction from the constitutive historical...