Raphael Vago

Raphael Vago was born in 1946 in Cluj-Napoca

Raphael Vago was born in 1946 in Cluj, Romania, to Lidia and Bela Vago. His father later became a history professor at the University of Haifa. The family moved to Israel in 1958.

As a teenager he studied for several years at the school of Kibbutz Negba, until he was drafted into the IDF. He earned a bachelor's degree in history and political science at the University of Haifa. He completed his master's and doctorate at Tel Aviv University, receiving his PhD in 1980 for work on Hungarian-Romanian relations under communism.

He became a senior lecturer in general history at Tel Aviv University, now emeritus, and a senior researcher at the Cummings Center for Russian and East European Studies. His research covers national questions, extremist movements, communist rule, the Holocaust and antisemitism in East Central Europe. From 1993 he wrote most of the university's studies on antisemitism in the post-communist states of Eastern Europe.

He has examined efforts to clear the names of interwar extremist leaders and the political use of selective memory in the region. In 2006 he co-edited an article with Rony Stauber on how the Roma remember their history in World War II. He also argued that fascism in Eastern Europe drew support from many social classes, including workers.