Professor Omer Bartov, considered one of the world’s leading experts on the subject of the Holocaust, will serve as the 2016-2017 Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence at USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research. He will be in residence at the Center May 4-11, 2017, and will give a public lecture at USC on May 8.

Intended to inspire prominent scholars, the Sara and Asa Shapiro Annual Holocaust Testimony Scholar and Lecture Fund, established in December 2015, enables one senior scholar to spend time in residence at USC Shoah Foundation’s Center for Advanced Genocide Research.  This prestigious fellowship is only available through an invitation by the Center.

The fellowship, which replaces the USC Shoah Foundation Yom Hashoah Scholar in Residency, offers fellows the opportunity to use the Holocaust and genocide resources at USC, including the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, which contains more than 53,000 testimonies of witnesses and survivors of the Holocaust.

The fellowship is endowed by USC Shoah Foundation board member Mickey Shapiro in honor of his parents, who both survived the Holocaust.

Omer Bartov is the John. P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European History and Professor of German Studies at Brown University. His research has covered such topics as the Nazi indoctrination of the Wehrmacht and the crimes it committed in World War II, the links between total war and genocide, antisemitic stereotypes in cinema, and interethnic relations in the borderlands of Eastern Europe. He was educated at Tel Aviv University and St. Antony’s College, Oxford.

Bartov’s week in residence at USC Shoah Foundation is far from an introduction to the Visual History Archive. He first watched testimonies from the Visual History Archive and incorporated them into his research in the 1990s, before the tapes were even digitized. He was also one of the earliest scholars to argue for the integration of testimonies into the historical reconstruction of the Holocaust as documents equal in validity to other forms of documentation.

“There’s been a lot of writing about testimonies in literature, trauma, etc., and that’s all very interesting,” Bartov said. “But they have been heavily underused by historians as documents, and they’re extremely useful. I wouldn’t have been able to write much of what I wrote without testimonies.”

He has just published a new book The Voice of Your Brother’s Blood: Buczacz, Biography of a Town, which examines the history of a town in current-day Ukraine that for centuries maintained a peaceful coexistence of Poles, Jews and Ukrainians – until World War II, when the town became what Bartov calls “a community of genocide.” The second half of the book relies on testimony from several archives including the Visual History Archive.

During his residency, Bartov intends to conduct research in the Visual History Archive on his newest project: the experiences of Holocaust survivors who immigrated to Palestine after World War II. He is interested in what survivors say about how they communicated with the locals, the communities they formed, and what they thought about their new home.

“I’m transferring the idea of Buczacz to Israel/Palestine and how [Jews and Arabs] coexist and how they don’t,” Bartov said. “What are the stories they tell each other that make it possible or impossible for them to share a land? I think looking at that in these testimonies can give very different perspective on that conflict.”

Bartov is looking forward to collaborating with USC Shoah Foundation staff and soliciting their feedback on his ideas during his residency.

“We are very honored to welcome the internationally renowned Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov at a time that marks the third anniversary of the foundation of the Center for Advanced Genocide Research,” said Wolf Gruner, the Director of the USC Shoah Foundation Center of Advanced Genocide Research. “Bartov’s research is special, since, compared with other scholars in the field, he has always been interested in the impact of the murderous policies on the Jews, their relationships with their neighbors, and their responses.”