Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

A distinctive
feature of social and
cultural life at CMC

 

My Family’s Murder

Thu, January 26, 2023
Dinner Program
Omer Bartov

A historian turns to literature: Omer Bartov, the Samuel Pisar Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University, speaks about his new novel, "The Butterfly and the Axe."  Spring 1944:  A Jewish family is murdered in a remote Ukrainian village. Who were they? Who were the killers? Three generations later, an Israeli woman and a British man of Ukrainian origin set out to find out how their families were implicated in this crime. They also discover how this untold murder has warped their own lives.

Professor Bartov’s Athenaeum presentation commemorates International Holocaust Remembrance Day (January 27th) and is co-sponsored by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights at CMC.

 

Born in Israel and educated at Tel Aviv University and St. Antony's College, Oxford, Omer  Bartov's early scholarship concerned the Nazi indoctrination of the Wehrmacht and the crimes it committed in World War II and was 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," "Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz ," winner of the National Jewish Book Award, and "Tales from the Borderlands: Making and Unmaking the Galician Past." His many edited volumes include "Shatterzone of Empires: Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands," "Voices on War and Genocide: Three Accounts of the World Wars in a Galician Town," and "Israel-Palestine: Lands and Peoples."

Bartov’s novel, "The Butterfly and the Axe," will be published in 2023. 

Professor Bartov’s Athenaeum presentation commemorates International Holocaust Remembrance Day (January 27th) and is co-sponsored by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights at CMC.

 

Food for Thought: Podcast with Omer Bartov

 

View Video: YouTube with Omer Bartov

Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum

Claremont McKenna College
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