Another Academic Underscores Omer Bartov’s Shoddy “Scholarship” For What It Is: A Baseless Vendetta Bottomed on Bartov’s Personal Politics

A Brief Comparison of Bartov’s Screed to Federal Judge Roy Altman’s Serious Analysis in “Israel on Trial”; Brown Alumni Magazine Does Puff Piece on Supposed “Viewpoint Diversity” At Brown

(1) Jeffrey Herf, Distinguished University Professor, Emeritus, Department of History of the University of Maryland, College Park, recently published “From Historian to Polemicist: What Went Wrong With Omer Bartov”, an obvious play on the title of Bartov’s most recent anti-Israel diatribe entitled “Israel: What Went Wrong”. Herf’s 16 page article (including notes) was published by the Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs. In the unlikely event that anyone on the Brown faculty, administrators or any Brown students read the article, its publisher and Herf will no doubt be deemed to be in the pocket of “Zionists”.

Herf’s entire article is attached below. Immediately following are the first few pages of his piece:

“…Though [Bartov] never published any books on the history of Israel based on the kind of archival research that is de rigueur for those engaged in the historian’s craft, Bartov has been successful in presenting himself as an authority on Israeli policies and especially on Israel’s war in Gaza. To achieve that, he has relied on transferred prestige grounded on his prior meticulous historical research to lend credibility to his opinions about Israel and the war in Gaza. Prestige transfer is an old and sorry phenomenon in modern intellectual history, whereby persons who have displayed achievements in one area claim that, for example, “as a historian” (and in this case a historian of the Holocaust), they have insight into ongoing events unavailable to others.

“ Bartov’s latest book, “Israel: What Went Wrong” released in April, is an example of that problem. Anyone, and certainly a scholar who makes the grave accusation of genocide, faces a heavy burden of providing evidence and causal reasoning. Yet Bartov does not provide a single footnote to support his claims, nor does he bother addressing the evidence and arguments that would challenge them. The reader is pushed into the position of accepting his claims based solely on the say-so of a prestige-transferring author, as well as the reputation of his publisher—one of America’s finest—Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He has dispensed with the bothersome details of notes and sources, because he believes that what he is writing is so obviously true and morally unassailable that those who disagree are either in denial about the facts or have lost their moral compass.

“The central argument of the book is as follows: Immediately after the October 7 Hamas assault on Israel, which he describes inadequately and laconically, “Israel declared its intention and then engaged in an attempt to destroy the Palestinian people living in Gaza, in whole or in part, as such, thereby reaching the high bar of the Genocide Convention” (pp. 22–23). The evidence for this claim is angry—and selectively quoted—statements about the inhumanity of the Hamas killers on October 7 made by Israeli leaders, but Bartov cannot offer any official statement by the prime minister or official government spokesman that it intends to “destroy the Palestinian people,” because there are no such statements. Israel declared war to defeat Hamas, a fact Bartov represses.

“A core element of Bartov’s polemic, and an important reason why it has struck a chord in the intellectual world, is his claim that Israel misuses the memory of the Holocaust, and that this misused memory has itself become a justification for its unjust, indeed, evil policies. He writes: “Since the Hamas massacre was constantly portrayed as genocidal and Hamas described in Israeli media as a Nazi organization… the lessons learned from the Holocaust” called for the war in Gaza to“be implemented as an unavoidably ruthless measure to prevent the repetition of another Auschwitz” (p. 104). He writes as if the genocidal essence of the attack of October 7 had not already been described in excruciating detail in numerous accounts in the press, and in studies such as the 7 October Parliamentary Commission Report. As anyone who has read the Hamas Charter or Hamas statements in recent years knows very well, there are actual lineages between Nazi ideology and Islamist ideology, both during the Holocaust and in the Islamist long war to destroy the State of Israel. It is a historical fact that enthusiasm for Hitler and the antisemitic conspiracy theories of Nazi Germany have been a factor in the ideology of Hamas.

“As a historian of the German army on the Eastern Front during World War II, Bartov is very familiar with the actions of the Nazi Einsatzgruppen. The Israeli scholar Michael Milshtein, drawing partly on interviews with captured Hamas terrorists, examined the ideology and organization of the Nukhba units created by Hamas. Milshtein pointed out the similarities to the Einsatzgruppen. Yet Bartov does not acknowledge the connection between ideologically driven mass murder in Nazi Germany and Hamas’s attack. He refuses to address the reality that Hamas posed an existential threat to Israel’s existence, and that it was thus fighting for its very survival.

“Bartov argues that the misuse of Holocaust memory was there from Israel’s very founding. The nation’s 1948 War of Independence, waged in response to a civil war launched by the Arab Higher Committee led by the Nazi collaborator Amin al-Husseini and then to an invasion by five Arab countries, only appeared to be “an act of supreme justice.” Instead, he writes that the newborn Jewish State “became entangled in an act of injustice from its very inception,” namely, “the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from what became the State of Israel and the refusal to let them return” (pp. 105–06). Because that was “carried out by Jews only recently displaced from Europe, these two events, the Shoah and the Nakba, became inextricably entangled”. Yet “the respective victims … have insistently rejected the stark reality of this entanglement” (p. 106).

“Bartov writes as if the Israeli historians of 1948, whether Benny Morris, Ephraim Karsh, or others, had not demonstrated convincingly that there was no “expulsion”of 750,000 Palestinians. Rather, there was a war that the Palestinian leaders initiated, the Arab states escalated, and that both lost. In the course of the fighting, thousands of Palestinians were indeed displaced, as happens in many wars, but the Zionists’ purpose was not to expel “750,000” people but to establish a state on the basis of the United Nations resolution that called for both a Jewish and an Arab state on the territory of the former British Mandatein Palestine. In Bartov’s polemic, there is no Arab or Palestinian agency, no resort to arms to reject the UN resolution, no Arab or Palestinian Arab racism, no antisemitism, and no Arab rejection of immigrants seeking entry to a region that already had numerous Arab states. Hence, he suggests a causal connection between the Holocaust—the mass murder of six million Jews in Europe—and what Palestinian writers began to call the “Nakba”—the loss of a war from which the vast majority of Palestinian Arabs emerged alive, though defeated. It is a terrible thing to lose a war, but the Palestinians’ defeat was not in any way comparable to the Holocaust, and losing a war that one’s leaders started is not an act of injustice on the part of the victor.

“Bartov’s rage at Israel reaches a fever pitch when he discusses the apparent misuse of the memory of the Holocaust: “Eventually the catastrophe of the Holocaust became, for most Israelis, a vast fig leaf, its lamentable effort to combine self-victimization and self-pity with self-righteousness, hubris, and the euphoria of power, with one side of the equation justifying the other … .Ethical concern and moral qualms were brushed aside as either marginal or distracting in the face of the ultimate cataclysm that is the genocide of the Jews” (p. 106). Bartov finds “most Israelis” disgusting; there is no other way to put it. He asserts that the misuse of the memory of the Holocaust amounts to a national psychosis that is the primary cause of Israeli immorality. Gone is Bartov the historian of the Eastern Front. Enter Bartov as a new expert offering a psychoanalytic account of how “most Israelis” descend into base immorality.

“Bartov writes as though Israel faces no threats to its existence that are not the fault of its own unjust policies. The readers of his polemic will learn nothing about the wars of secular Arab nationalist states in 1967 and 1973, of the equally long campaign of Palestinian terrorist organizations under the umbrella of Yasser Arafat’s PLO, nor of the religiously inspired antagonism of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas. There is no discussion of the thousands of Israelis killed and wounded in these wars and terrorist campaigns, and hence nothing of the very legitimate fears for their lives that Israelis endure—fears that have nothing at all to do with memories of the Holocaust. These fears were not and are not the result of paranoia about non-existent threats or of memories of the Holocaust in the past. They are responses to real bombs and bullets, and real threats from real governments and organizations.

“Bartov, the historian of the Holocaust, has forgotten his own insights, written in 2004 in The New Republic. There he understood the echoes of Nazism in the Hamas Charter and that the leaders of that organization, like Hitler, meant what they said, in their case when in 1988 they declared war on the Jews and the State of Israel. The soldiers of the IDF did not invent copies of Mein Kampf and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion that they found in homes in Gaza, nor did they fabricate the kitchens and bedrooms riddled with bullets that remained after the October 7 assault; Bartov refrains from mentioning those details…”

What follows in the Herf article is a complete dismemberment of Bartov’s familiar and baseless musings bottomed on, e.g., advancing fact-free, not even arguably legally-based “genocide” gibberish as well as the standard “apartheid” nonsense. Herf points out and dissects the proven lies, deliberate distortions, stunning omissions and utter hypocrisy that permeate the Bartov book.

As the Herf review makes clear, Bartov’s work is not merely lazy and unserious, it is dangerous and not just to Jews but to Western civilization more broadly. That Bartov’s “analysis” comes from a tenured Brown history professor is bad enough; obviously it is a stain - perhaps indelible certainly for the foreseeable future - on Brown and its history department. Moreover, it explains why Bartov is every Jew-hater’s favorite Jew. He breathes life into crackpot theories advanced by the adolescent, keffiyah clad, masked, brainwashed “river to the sea” campus nitwits, anti-Semitic politicians like the never previously employed, failed rapper anti-Semite now purporting to know what he’s doing as Mayor of New York City and three victors in New York City primaries he supported and of course the entire apartheid Muslim world where beheading, female genital mutilation, hostage taking and slavery are all just fine. (As to one of the primary winners Mamdani supported, nominally Jewish Brad Lander, one must ask whether Lander is dumb enough to believe that if in 2028 he is in a primary against a Muslim anti-Semite like Mamdani that Mamdani will support Lander over that person? Mamdani’s “Syrian” wife could even not bring herself to support Lander publicly in the last days of the primary campaign while doing so for the two loony anti-Semites who prevailed in other districts.)

The entire Herf article follows:

https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/EDZEPZJIZEANKXKQNFUY/full?target=10.1080/23739770.2026.2680759

There are at least three possible reasons Bartov takes the positions he does: willful blindness, the popularity of anti-Semitism on campuses and in much of the media, or that he’s a self-hating Jew. Unlike Bartov, I don’t pretend to have any capacity for psychoanalysis. Let him ponder for himself which of the three categories might apply to him.

What’s next for Bartov in selling his book? The clowncasts of Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens?

(2) In stark contrast to Bartov’s unhinged ramblings is “Israel On Trial: Examining The History, The Evidence, and The Law” written by federal district court Judge Roy K. Altman of the Southern District of Florida. An immigrant from Venezuela, he was educated at Columbia University (where he was a quarterback on the football team and a pitcher on the baseball team) and Yale Law School. After law school, he served as a law clerk on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit and as a federal prosecutor. He was the youngest judge ever confirmed in his district. To lawyers and judges, unlike Bartov and so many of his ilk at Brown and around the country, facts and reasoned analysis matter.

Altman carefully reviews six allegations routinely made against Israel by the usual suspects like Bartov and many others. Those are, “Jews are colonists in the Land of Israel”, “Israel’s founding was illegitimate or aberrational”, “Israel has prevented the establishment of a Palestinian state”, “Israel was occupying Gaza (and had turned Gaza into an open-air prison or a concentration camp) before October 7”, “Israel is an apartheid (or white-supremacist) state” and “Israel has committed genocide in Gaza”. He carefully and methodically measures the facts as a judge would do, including assessing the credibility of those asserting particular facts. These are among the analytical concepts unknown to the Bartovs of the world.

“In [Altman’s] courtroom, accusations don’t become true simply because they’re asserted loudly or because they’re popular. We test them. We define our terms. We show our work. We examine the relevant sources, carefully assessing each side’s reliability and scrutinizing its incentives…” (Altman, pp 2-3)

Also completely unlike Bartov, Judge Altman did the heavy lifting. His book is thoroughly sourced - it contains approximately 700 footnotes, nearly 200 in the genocide chapter alone. He completely demolishes all the anti-Zionist/anti-Semitic arguments addressing the above issues with facts, data, and the writings and observations of people who, unlike Bartov, actually know what they’re talking about. Bartov is no more competent to opine on the imaginary “genocide” or “famine” or anything else in Gaza than am I to do brain surgery.

I don’t intend to review Judge Altman’s book here. Instead, I suggest that all of you reading this read his book and decide whether Altman or Bartov has the better arguments. (Or for that matter which of the two actually bothered to check facts or otherwise do anything resembling serious work before putting pen to paper.) Not a spoiler alert - it’s not even arguably close. Altman prevails, hands down, as to every single point without exception.

Finally, Judge Altman’s book ought to be assigned as mandatory reading for every first year student entering Brown, for every student taking any history course at Brown which even comes close to touching the Middle East and certainly for every student enrolled in any course sponsored by Brown’s Hamas/Palestinian propagandizing Center for Middle East Studies. The likelihood of any of those happening at Brown? Zero.

(3) The Brown Alumni Magazine is of little interest outside the Brown community or, for that matter, for many inside the university community. A recent article on “viewpoint diversity” on campus made some interesting observations. The author, Will Bunch, Brown Class of 1981, an opinion columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, quoted Harvard government professor Harvey Mansfield as saying “Viewpoint diversity means wanting more conservatives”. The article went on to note that Mansfield added that Harvard should do exactly that “to get powerful conservatives off the school’s back.” Fair enough. He’s entitled to his opinion. But also telling as to Mansfield.

But where the article went off the rails was in quoting Amanda Anderson, a Brown English professor and director of Brown’s Cogut Institute. According to the article, she argued that viewpoint diversity wrongly “imagines that individuals occupy indentifiable political positions aligned with stable and explicit beliefs that do not change over time” and that there will be a “plurality of positions among individual scholars”. It would be hard to find anyone on the Brown faculty less credible to comment on viewpoint diversity than Anderson.

Further quoting the magazine article:

“[Anderson] continued in the piece [in the October 2025 Chronicle of Higher Education] ‘The deluded attempt to enforce indentitarian political assumptions enjoined by the [Trump] administration cannot achieve such pluralism. On the contrary, it will narrow the ideological range of acceptable expression’”. Anderson opining on viewpoint diversity is laughable. It was Anderson’s Cogut Institute that sponsored a two-day, 21-speaker anti-Semitic hate fest at Brown in February of last year. As I wrote in a post of February 7, 2025:

“On February 5, the Brown Daily Herald (“BDH”) reported that Brown’s Cogut Institute for the Humanities’s (“Cogut”) February 3rd and 4th, 21-speaker “academic” conference drew “over 1500” emails complaining that the event was “antisemitic, racist” and that it “erases Zionism from history”. It was perfectly obvious from its published program, attached to my post of January 10, that the Cogut carnival was destined to be all of that and worse.

“In covering this circus, the BDH spoke to Brown professor Adi Ophir. Ophir is arguably the leader of the lunatic fringe among Brown faculty when it comes to full-throated support for the martyrdom-seeking Islamic murderers, rapists, and hostage takers of Hamas who perpetrated the October 7, 2023 barbarism in Israel. (He is only “arguably” so because the number of competitors for that position on the Brown faculty is large, and the competition fierce.) Apparently traumatized by the prospect of protesters showing up at the Cogut show, Ophir, according to the BDH, noted that “events hosted at Andrews House typically don’t feature any security”. But, in his view, the Cogut undertaking necessitated a “heavy”security presence.

“Cogut Director Amanda Anderson leapt into action. According to the BDH, “the email campaign prompted engagement from the University’s Office of Event Strategy and Management, the University’s Multi-Partial Team [whatever that is] and the Department of Public Safety to ensure that the conference would proceed smoothly”.

“Apparently Anderson believed supporters of Israel would conduct themselves like the hundreds of Brown students and faculty who support the terrorists of Hamas. That adolescent crowd wasted countless student and university hours and irreparably torched the university’s reputation beginning on October 8, 2023. They spent months weeping, wailing and whining about divestment, blind to the factual absurdity of their position, and non-existent “Islamophobia” at Brown while taking over buildings and threatening and otherwise terrorizing Jewish students. Anderson must have anticipated a repeat of masked cowards showing up at Andrews House, but this time threatening and terrorizing Muslim students, shouting profanities, banging on cars and pitching tents to spend the night between the first and second half of what could be described as Cogut’s and Brown’s Center for Middle East Studies (“CMES”) anti-Zionist, anti-Semitic Super Bowl. What did happen by way of the much-feared protest by those who believe anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic as many scholars have so persuasively argued? According to the BDH:

“On the first day of the conference, eight protesters from RICI [“Rhode Island Coalition for Israel”] stood outside the building. The second day saw three protesters, including RICI [board member] Schneider. RICI members held up signs that read “anti-Zionism is Anti-Semitism,” “We stand with Israel” and “Free Hugs” while playing Jewish folk songs.”

“The BDH article concluded by reporting that, to Ophir, “The events of the conference made two things ‘very clear’… This conversation must continue and must expand”. What kind of “conversation” is Ophir talking about? The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (“CAMERA”) reported that, in May, 2021, for example, Ophir:

“Engaged in antisemitic blood libel, Holocaust inversion, and accused Israel of being a “Jewish supremacist” state; glorifed the terrorist organization Hamas; “prayed” for the end of “Jewish supremacy” in Israel; and declared that the American Jewish community is “complicit” in the “colonization” of “Palestine.”. (“There are Jews, including Israeli Jews – how many only God knows – who pray with all their heart for the end of Jewish supremacy in Palestine. I’m speaking as one of them. The last few weeks in Palestine were especially devastating for these Jews. Despair, depression, anxiety, not because of the Hamas rockets – regardless of how frightening they are. Anxiety, because they have found themselves living in the midst of a Jewish mob thirsty for Palestinian blood. A Kristallnacht mob…”) (“Hamas is fighting for the residents of Jerusalem and those who pray in al-Aqsa.”) (“Only God knows how many Jews pray for the end of Jewish supremacy. But in in Palestine, there are certainly too few of them. For them, there is no possible win in sight. The colonization of Palestine, the process of destruction and extraction, go on relentlessly all over the land and the irreversible changes and irredeemable losses are fast and widespread. All this happens with the full support of the former, recent, and current American administration, and with the complicity of much of the American Jewish community. It is the latter that is most painful for a Jew who prays for the end of Jewish supremacy. It is for this reason that the Jewish part of my heart is broken, looking for a new book of lamentation to cry over not the fall of Jerusalem, but its rise to relentless, draconian powers and to wail the total perversion of its soul. We Jews who pray for the end of Jewish supremacy need these lamentations, not only to express our grief, but also to complete the process of parting from Zionism.”)”

“It bears repeating that this unhinged, hair-on-fire rant took place two and 1/2 years before October 7, 2023. Ophir claimed to the BDH that he began planning the Cogut show after a February, 2024 appearance at Brown by Anti-Defamation League President Jonathan Greenblatt where Greenblatt said “Anti-Zionism is antisemitism”. Maybe that sequence is true. Odds are, though, that it is not. After all, there can be no doubt that Ophir has been playing the anti-Zionist game for a very, very long time as the CAMERA website and other sites make perfectly clear.

“Ophir was of course an active participant in the Cogut show. His speaking topic was “Jewish Anti-Zionism: Reflection on its Context, Meaning and Political Imagination”. Ophir plainly is incapable of rational reflection. But equally plainly his capacity for blinkered, anti-intellectual, illiberal political imagination knows no bounds.

“Another performance artist who participated in Cogut’s faux academic exercise was Brown professor Ariella Azoulay. Azoulay first came to public prominence, and well-deserved derision, following her appearance at Cornell in 2020. There she showed photos of the founders of the Jewish state of Israel, but with their faces blacked out. Her explanation? “I can’t bear to look at them.” If she had said anything in my sixth grade social studies class as childish as what she said at Cornell, my teacher would have made her stand in the corner. Azoulay is pawned off as an “educator” at Brown. But neither she nor Ophir is an educator; both are, however, propagandists and embarrassments to the university.

“The February 5 BDH article noted that David Litman of CAMERA “thought that conference lacked Zionist representation. He continued that non-Zionist teachings are becoming increasingly popular in academia, a trend he says is not reflected in mainstream Judaism”. Litman is, of course, correct.

“At Brown, the Zionist perspective is occasionally presented, but almost always when Brown is pressured to do so, and never on a panel or program with Ophir or Azoulay or any of their ilk. Ophir, Azoulay and the other anti-Semitic “anti-Zionists” are free to ramble on without regard to facts, law, judgment or common sense. But to let them get away with it without ever being challenged is shameful, especially by a university that was once a respected and proud liberal institution.

“In a January, 2020 article in The Algemeiner, republished by Campus Watch, Tehilla Katz commented on Azoulay’s pathetically juvenile Cornell comments. Katz concisely and perfectly summarized the problem at that conference, and at Brown now for many years: “Their fear of engaging in dialogue and refusal to hear another side is the antithesis of academia, and a clear example of censorship.” Nothing could be more obvious. But nobody at Brown has the backbone, or is principled enough, to recognize and state the obvious. This includes, sadly, nobody in Brown’s Judaic Studies Department.

“(Notably, Azoulay’s Wikipedia entry lists her “partner” as Adi Ophir. All couples argue from time to time. One can imagine Ophir and Azoulay arguing over which of the two hates Jews and Israel - or perhaps themselves - more. Maybe someone will write a comedy script for Netflix based on these two. But what is not at all funny is that some combination of tuition dollars, financial support from Brown graduates and others and U.S. taxpayers are funding this dynamic duo as well as Cogut and CMES. That is unconscionable.)”

When Anderson’s Cogut Institute promotes a two-day, 21-speaker actual academic conference at Brown on anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism, which of course will never happen, she then might possibly have something to say worth listening to as to viewpoint diversity. Her opinions on this issue until that conference happens are a joke, not even remotely worth being taken seriously.

Willis J. Goldsmith, Brown Class of 1969