Historian of the Holocaust to lecture at UNM on Israel-Hamas war

As the anniversary of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas militants looms, Brown University professor and Holocaust historian Omer Bartov will visit the University of New Mexico and lecture on genocide, antisemitism and the pro-Palestine protest movement.

Bartov has been named “one of the world’s leading specialists on the subject” by the U.S Holocaust Memorial Museum and has called Israel’s actions in the Israel-Hamas war “genocidal” in an essay published in the Guardian.

In retaliation, Israel’s military campaign in Gaza has taken the lives of more than 41,500 Palestinians and wounded more than 96,000 others, The Associated Press reported, citing figures released Sept. 26 by the Hamas-run Health Ministry. The ministry doesn’t differentiate between civilians and combatants, but the AP report said more than half the dead have been women and children. The United Nation has said more than 1.9 million of Gaza’s 2.4 million people have been displaced in the conflict.

The Israeli government said 329 Israeli soldiers have died over the course of the war.

Bartov is intimately connected to the conflict as an Israeli and former member of the Israel Defense Forces. His lectures concerning Gaza have been met with protest in Israel, but not in the U.S. thus far.

“These are places of learning where challenging ideas have to be presented even if they’re uncomfortable,” Bartov told the Journal in an interview.

The lecture “Speaking of Genocide: The Holocaust, Israel-Palestine, and the War in Gaza since October 7” will be held in the anthropology lecture hall at UNM on Monday at 7 p.m.

Inviting Bartov to lecture at UNM was the idea of Les Field, an anthropology department professor who has taught specifically about the geopolitical conflict in Gaza.

The goal of the lecture is “to enrich and broaden” the conversation about the Israel-Hamas war “critically and analytically” for students and community members, some of whom have been inspired to protest at the university for its financial ties to Israel, Field said.

“Another goal is to fight against the allegation that when people criticize Israel, that they are antisemites,” Field said.

Field is the child of a Holocaust survivor and has witnessed first hand “how just opening up the conversation can create a wave of hostility.”

It’s a sensitive topic, Field said, and the allegation of antisemitism holds a heavy weight, even more so after Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s Working Definition of Antisemitism in an executive order in 2022.

Both Bartov and Field are critical of the IHRA definition, stating that the definition categorizes criticisms of the state of Israel as antisemitism.

“It’s a terrible definition, and since the governor adopted it, that can have actual consequences for speech that will be labeled antisemitic,” Bartov said. “Including potentially what I say.”

Field expressed concern that the governor’s order could be “weaponized” to chill speech about the war as a whole despite its intent to curb antisemitism.

“There was a lot of this going on on American campuses justifying calling in the police to curb antisemitism among protesters, the vast majority of whom were certainly not expressing any antisemitic sentiments, and quite a few of them were Jews themselves,” Bartov said. “And so this abuse of terminology (is) for political ends, often by people who don’t really care about the content of the terminology. They just twist it to serve their own purposes.”

The U.S Department of Education launched investigations about antisemitism and Islamophobia on college campuses last year following an increase in discrimination against both Jewish and Muslim people, The New York Times reported.

Bartov visited the solidarity encampment at the University of Pennsylvania last spring and has written in support of the student movement.

“You can’t change the world,” Bartov said, “but you can make things a little better. And you, as young people, are those who can make a difference.”