STONY CREEK FORUM | CONVERSATIONS ONLINE
OMER BARTOV
PROFESSOR OF HOLOCAUST & GENOCIDE STUDIES, BROWN UNIVERSITY
Author of Israel: What Went Wrong? (2026)
in conversation with
PETER BEINART
WRITER, JOURNALIST, EDITOR-AT-LARGE OF JEWISH CURRENTS
Author of Being Jewish After The Destruction Of Gaza (2025)
THURSDAY | SEPTEMBER 10 | 7 PM | VIA ZOOM
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“Its goal is not to condemn Zionism but to explain its evolution from a dream to a nightmare ... Anyone seeking an explanation of Israel’s 'fall from grace' will find no better guide than this perceptive, sophisticated, erudite, elegantly written and strikingly fair-minded book.” The Guardian
About Omer Bartov
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.
Professor Bartov was born on a kibbutz, grew up in Tel Aviv and served in the Israel Defence Forces during the Yom Kippur War. He went on to become an expert on the German army and the Holocaust, before turning his attention to his native country.
In Israel: What Went Wrong?, Bartov explores the transformation of Zionism from a movement of Jewish emancipation and liberation into a state ideology of ethno-nationalism, exclusion and violent domination of Palestinians. He traces the process whereby Israel – whose establishment in 1948 received international support in the aftermath of the Holocaust – now faces accusations of war crimes and genocide.
What are the implications of Israel’s near total impunity for the post-1945 regime of international law? And how do we understand the widespread support for these policies by Israel’s Jewish citizens?
The result is a searing and urgent critique that addresses today’s debates over Zionism, genocide, and the future of Israel with rigour and depth.
About Peter Beinart
Peter Beinart is Professor of Journalism and Political Science at the City University of New York. He is also a Contributing Opinion Writer at The New York Times and Editor-at-Large of Jewish Currents He writes the Beinart Notebook newsletter on Substack.Com
He is the author of Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, published by Knopf in 2025.
Beinart graduated from Yale University, winning a Rhodes scholarship for graduate study at Oxford University. After graduating from University College, Oxford, Beinart became The New Republic's managing editor in 1995. He became senior editor in 1997, and from 1999 to 2006 served as the magazine’s Editor.
PETER BEINART: Online conversation at the Willoughby Wallace Library, April 2025.