A leading Israeli American scholar of the Holocaust explores and explains his native country’s intensifying turn toward violence and exclusion.
The distinguished historian Omer Bartov was born on a kibbutz, grew up in Tel Aviv, and served in the Israel Defense Forces during the Yom Kippur War. He went on to become a leading scholar of the German army and the Holocaust, before turning his attention to his native country.
In Israel: What Went Wrong?, Bartov sketches the tragic transformation of Zionism, a movement that sought to emancipate European Jewry from oppression, into a state ideology of ethno-nationalism. How is it possible, he asks, that a state founded in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, an event that gave legitimacy to a national home for the Jews, stands credibly accused of perpetrating large-scale war crimes? How do we come to terms with the fact that Israel’s war of destruction is being conducted with the support, laced with denial and indifference, of so many of its Jewish citizens?
| Publisher | Pan Macmillan |
| Author | Omer Bartov |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Publication Date | 21/04/2026 |
| Pages | 256 |
| Edition | First edition |
| Size | 14×21 |
| About the Author | Omer Bartov is the Dean’s Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University and the author of many books, including Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz, which won the National Jewish Book Award; Tales from the Borderlands: Making and Unmaking the Galician Past; and Genocide, the Holocaust and Israel-Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis. |
| Publisher Address | webqueries@macmillan.co.uk |
| ISBN | 978-0374618186 |
