Lecture by Prof. Dr. Omer Bartov

Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main
Campus Westend, Norbert-Wollheim-Platz 1
Casino-Gebäude, Raum 1.801

Moderation

Prof. Dr. Sybille Steinbacher, Director of the Fritz Bauer Institute

This talk discusses the main themes of Omer Bartov’s recent book Genocide, the Holocaust and Israel-Palestine – originally published in August 2024 – and goes on to consider how our understanding of these themes has been affected in the wake of the events of October 7 and the war in Gaza. The questions addressed include the fraught relationship between the terms genocide and Holocaust; the impact on our understanding of perceiving genocide as a local event; the use of first-person accounts in the reconstruction of atrocity; the difficulties in adjudicating genocide; and, finally, the tension between memory and commemoration, on the one hand, and erasure and forgetting, on the other.

Prof. Dr. Omer Bartov

is Dean’s Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University. He has written widely on war crimes, genocide, and antisemitism. The German translation of his most recent book Genozid, Holocaust und Israel-Palästina. Geschichte im Selbstzeugnis has been published 2025 with Suhrkamp publishing house.