Omer Bartov

Omer Bartov was born in 1954 in Ein HaHoresh

Omer Bartov was born in 1954 in Ein HaHoresh. His father was the writer and journalist Hanoch Bartov, and his mother came to Mandatory Palestine from Buczacz in the mid-1930s. He grew up in Tel Aviv.

He served as an officer in the Yom Kippur War and finished his service as a company commander. In 1976 he was badly hurt in a training accident.

He earned a bachelor's degree at Tel Aviv University in 1979. He completed a doctorate at St Antony's College, Oxford, in 1983, on German soldiers on the Eastern front in World War II.

He taught at Tel Aviv University, then at Rutgers University, where he held the Raoul Wallenberg Professorship in Human Rights. He joined Brown University in 2000. His work challenged the view that the German army stayed apart from Nazi crimes, and he also wrote on Jewish life in Galicia and on the town of Buczacz.

He also published 2 novels in Hebrew. In 2023 he signed a letter saying Israel runs an apartheid regime in the occupied territories, and in 2025 he wrote that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. He is married to Wai-yee Li, a professor of Chinese literature at Harvard.