The Never Again Syndrome: Uses and Misuses of Holocaust Memory in Contemporary Global Politics

The Dialogue & Dignity Series includes speakers, workshops, and conversations aimed at building appreciation for discussion that includes different points of view for the development of understanding and good solutions to our most pressing issues.

Please join us on Monday, March 25 at 7 p.m. in Olin Auditorium for a public talk by guest speaker Omer Bartov, titled “The Never Again Syndrome: Uses and Misuses of Holocaust Memory in Contemporary Global Politics.”

Omer Bartov was born in Israel and educated at Tel Aviv University and St. Antony’s College, Oxford. 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.” His interest in representation also led to his study, “The ‘Jew’ in Cinema,” which examines the recycling of antisemitic stereotypes in film.

Bartov’s more recent work has focused on interethnic relations in the borderlands of Eastern Europe. Recent publications include “The Butterfly and the Axe” (2023); “Tales from the Borderlands: Making and Unmaking the Galician Past” (2022); “Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz” (2018), winner of the National Jewish Book Award; and “Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine” (2007). 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).