Omer Bartov: Academic Silence, Gaza, and the Costs of Speaking

In this episode, we speak with Omer Bartov about academic silence, Gaza, and the costs of speaking publicly about ongoing mass violence. Bartov reflects on the pressures shaping scholarly speech in the United States, the uneven application of legal and moral frameworks, and what the world’s response to Gaza reveals about whose lives are recognized and protected. He also addresses the personal and professional consequences of speaking out, the limits of academic caution, and the need for structural reform within the academy. These themes are explored further in his forthcoming book, Israel: What Went Wrong?, with link to purchase included in the description below:

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/477841/israel-what-went-wrong-by-bartov-omer/9781911717690

0:00 Introduction and Biography

01:58 Academic Silence on Gaza: Moral Stakes and Scholarly Responsibility

12:41 The Personal and Professional Costs of Speaking Out

18:06 Pressure, Self-Censorship, and Navigating Institutional Warnings

22:38 Silence, Intimidation, and Comparative Academic Climates Across Countries

28:36 Gatekeeping, Disciplinary Policing, and the Questioning of Scholarly Authority

33:09 Has the Academy Failed a Moral Test or Revealed Structural Limits?

39:41 Academic Freedom, Donor Dependency, and the Capitalist University Model

47:47 The Future of Holocaust and Genocide Studies in U.S. Higher Education

51:02 Past Silence, Present Clarity, and the Ethics of Scholarly Reckoning

56:35 Hierarchies of Grievability and the Limits of “Never Again”

58:48 Advice to Early-Career Academics Facing Ethical and Professional Risk

Transcript

0:00

Look, I mean, I think that academe is generally a very privileged profession. You get paid to do what you would have done anyway, what you like doing. You have a lot of free time on your hands and you eventually get tenure. And so you have some kind of freedom of thought. But if you betray that, if you don't say what you think, then you know, how should I put it? It's like in countries that become corrupt the rot will start eating you from within. So if you don't have courage to speak your mind, do something else. In this episode, we speak with Omer Bartov, Professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University. This conversation addresses academic silence, moral responsibility, and the professional costs of speaking publicly about Gaza, while also engaging themes

from his forthcoming book, Israel: 1:50

What Went Wrong?, and broader questions about academic freedom and reform within the contemporary university. Well, thank you very much for being here today. We’re very interested in broaching the subject of academic silence. We have in the very early stages of we have set up, invited various guests on the platform to speak about the ongoing tensions between Israel and Palestine, but with the volume of literature out there at the moment, we felt that it was necessary to broach a very different question on all of this, because especially those of us who are here in the United States who are affected in various ways with what is going on over there. So I want to particularly focus on the issue of silence. I will start with three anecdotes, one involving a senior administrator, another a student, a third a professor at a university here in the US. These are fictional accounts, but they illustrate very closely the sort of reluctance among us to broach the subject of the conflicts. So first of all, we have Sarah. Sarah is Pakistani and she’s currently based in the United States, where she teaches genocide studies. Colleagues—both peers and senior faculty—warn her against speaking or writing openly about Gaza. They caution that doing so could place her on monitoring lists such as Canary Mission or CAMERA, jeopardizing her chances of securing an extraordinary ability visa and, eventually, a green card. Faced with the risk to her professional future, Sarah chooses silence. The second anecdote Naira is a student enrolled at a university in Texas and feels deeply compelled to speak about what she understands as the genocide in Gaza. Yet she is afraid to express her views publicly among classmates, fearing cancel culture and other forms of institutional and social persecution, both on and off campus. She is particularly shaken by the brutal, unexpected, and seemingly arbitrary arrest of the Tufts student Rümeysa Öztürk in March 2025, and worries that a similar fate could await her. In the end, Naira chooses silence. The third anecdote Ruth is a senior administrator, the director of the Genocide Center in New York State. She's asked by donors to issue a statement on the ongoing violence in Israel and Palestine. The donors maintain that Israel’s actions in Gaza are entirely legitimate and constitute self-defense since October 2023. Ruth, however, believes this framing fails to account for the broader reality and the scale of death in Gaza. She finds herself torn between her ethical convictions and her dependence on donors whose support ensures the survival of her institute. In the end, Ruth, like the others, chooses silence. Professor Bartov, you have written and spoken about genocide, mass violence and moral responsibility for decades now. How do you understand the relative silence—or caution—among academics when it comes to Gaza? What do you think is at stake in that silence? Let me start by saying that the Tufts student who was abducted by ICE, that happened about a mile from where I'm sitting right now, so it was very close to me. Look, I mean, obviously, this is a very big question. It's not so easy to answer it. I’ll say a couple things. First of all, I don't think there is total silence. I mean, we saw a lot of people speaking out. There is a very lively debate going on. There was more before the current moment, partly because of people are very happy to put it aside since there is a so-called ceasefire and the genocide is supposed to have ended and they want to move on. But there was a great deal of talk, writing, speaking. So I would challenge the notion that there is total silence in the United States as well as, of course, in Europe. Israel is a very different case and we can talk about it separately. What there is, however, is intimidation. And many people have been intimidated. That includes students. You will remember there were very large scale campus protests in the spring of 2024 in particular. So that was not silence, but they were silenced so that by the end of the spring semester, most of these protests were gone. And now many universities have imposed all kinds of restrictions that intimidates students. And there were also students who had to pay a price for their protest. So there is intimidation, certainly of students, and there is pressure on faculty and there is pressure on university administrators, particularly on presidents. And you examples highlight some of that. The pressure on faculty is largely, I'd say, driven both by social conformism. People are afraid not to be liked or not to be or to be outed by their own colleagues. And for many, it's also career pressure. That is, academics who are not known to be the bravest people in the world, tend to worry about their careers. And if you are untenured or even if you are tenured, but you are hoping to be promoted once more. You don't want to stir the water too much in the wrong direction at any part of your career. And we've seen a fair amount of that on administrators, especially presidents. The pressure is also, first of all, financial. It's pressure from donors. It's pressure, as we've seen, of course, from the federal government. That is the vast funds that universities depend on and that has actually exposed the sort of soft belly of academic institutions in the United States in general. First of all, private universities, which are highly dependent on donors as well as on federal funds, but also on public universities, which have increasingly changed their business model to resemble more and more that of private universities. So obviously, there are many pressures on all levels, and that's quite a part from one of your examples, which is about students at American universities or faculty at American universities who are not American citizens, whether they're green card holders or visa holders, and there's been massive intimidation. And I know that also from particular individual examples that I will obviously not cite here. But but I know that. So it is very depressing. It's not the first time in American history that this has happened. The United States had McCarthyism. It had the red Scare in the wake of the First World War. So while in the United States, there is a sort of hallowed freedom of speech and academic freedom also going back to the beginning of the 20th century, there have been attacks on that over and over again. I think my own interpretation and I'm writing about it right now, is that the university, as an institution in the United States, is in a state of crisis. And the crisis is not only because of Gaza and all the debate over that, it's a larger crisis, but that is certainly highlighted some of the vulnerabilities within the American university system and the direction in which it is heading. Now, I'll just say finally on this question, as you know, I've spoken out and I've spoken out as responsibly as I can, of trying to be as well informed as I could and to speak as clearly as I can. And I think that people who are in my position should do so. And I admit that I'm somewhat privileged. I cannot be promoted beyond what I've been promoted, in any case, about to retire. So I don't really give a damn. I'm also an Israeli. I served in the Israeli army. I have very good inside knowledge of Israel and have contributed myself for better or for worse. I've written extensively on the Holocaust as well, other genocides. And so I have kind of layers, which does not mean that I have not been put on all kind of nasty lists, but I don't really pay any attention to that. But I think that I can understand why people find it difficult to speak out. But I think that more people should and not as many have as I would have liked. Some because simply they don't agree with me. They have different opinions, and that is perfectly fine. Not everyone, certainly not in academe. People need to disagree. That's what academe is based on. Not a consensus, but people who have thought that they should and decided not to, despite the price they would pay for that is relatively minimal in face of the horrors that they ought to have spoken out about. That's a very depressing reality. So you speak about the fact that you're obviously in a privileged position, and I think many of us wish that we were in a similar position to be able to speak out. Surely it has not been smooth sailing all the while to be someone who has been vocal on the subject. So what personal and professional costs have you encountered as a result beyond what you've just mentioned? Of course, I'm sure that the plot is thicker than that. There is more to say about the personal and professional costs involved in speaking out. Well, first, I don't know that everybody would want to have the privileges that I have. Because some of them, that I'm old and people would rather be young than old. I would be happy to be 20 years younger. So, I mean, that's not exactly a privilege. And I think that some you know, when I was in my twenties and I served in the IDF for four years, I served in Gaza, I served in the West Bank. Am I proud of everything I did there? No. So that, too, is a kind of, you know, double sided privilege. But what price of I paid? Look, I mean, I don't know exactly what it is. That's the truth. But it has not been high to me. It has not being high unless, you know, I would actually want to go into the depths of the web and start looking up all kinds of nasty things that have been written about me. But I'm very good at blocking, spamming and blocking. I don't read more than one line of something nasty. I just block it. I really don't see any reason to do that. And I will say something that struck me and it struck me, especially after I published an op-ed in July of 2025 in the New York Times, which got a great deal of response. I received a two types of responses, and that to me was the most interesting. One type of response was from people who wrote to me from various places from the United States, U.K., Europe, Israel, who thanked me for articulating clearly what I thought was going on and for enabling them to think about it, for organizing something that they felt for them was very difficult to think through. And even people who did not agree with me entirely were thankful that I spoke out. And some people felt that it gave them and wrote me that it gave them license to finally speak out. That was one type. And that for me was very important. And certainly was worth the the very long time that it took to write that thing. The other type of response was outrage. And people wrote me all kinds of rather disgusting things. But what interested me there was that none of that, or almost never, was on the basis of any knowledge or any opinion. It was simply emotional outrage. And so in that sense, I think that I would emphasize the point that the role of people like me and other academics, other specialists and international law is to bring knowledge and analysis to the public. And so the public that hates it will respond angrily. That's fine. There's no problem with that. I mean, as long as people don't, use illegal means. But you're role, if you know something about this, if you're an expert, is to speak out not simply for political reasons, but because you know things that other people don't. And they are confused, they are bewildered, they find themselves in pain. Your role is to put your emotions aside and to try to be as detached, analytical, well-informed as possible. And people don’t do that in many ways are betraying their own profession and their own role in society. And that, to me, is the most important. There are those who would say, “Well, I'm an academic. I write about the Holocaust that happened in the past. I don't comment on the present.” You can be with a Germans call a Fachidiot, a sort of professional idiot. I only do my little thing, but that's not your role as an educator. That's not your role as somebody who believes that their knowledge can actually provide some insights into the present and not only into something that happened in the past. Right. So obviously, it's very important for us, those of us who spent so much time developing, honing the skills, the intellectual tools that we have acquired through our profession, to be able to not just apply them now, but also offer them to our students, provide them with the ability to analyze what is happening in the world. That's a point very well taken. Have there been moments when you were advised to formally or informally to remain quiet, soften your language or step back? And if there were such moments, how did you navigate those pressures? Look, I mean, I think people know me and I think the people who know me know that that's not a good approach to tell me not to speak. What I had, which was I'd say somewhat depressing, was that during my last visit to Israel, which was just over a year ago, in December of ‘24, and it was partly the reason that I decided not to go there, at least until the next elections. People that I knew who are friends, who are mostly left leaning, indicated suggested that maybe I should tone down a bit that they found what I was saying difficult for them to take. And I found that a bit sad because it wasn't really again, it was not that people necessarily disagreed with me, it was that they felt uncomfortable with speaking those truth. But that's within the Israeli context. And that's a very different context where people are very close to the violence in all kinds of ways, both personally with their families engaged, either being victims of October 7th or victimizing others with children or serving in the military. So it's a very raw environment. But here, very far from the fray. No, I don't think that anybody trying to tell me that, there was some look, I mean, I'm teaching a class right now on, the Holocaust and the Nakba. Now that class is supposed to be capped at 20. It's a seminar, but more students wanted to take part in it, and it's last time that I'm going to teach it simply because I'm about to retire. And there's no other class of that sort being taught at Brown. And so I opened it up so I have close to 40 students there, which created all kinds of issues, logistical issues. And I did get hints that there was a lot of opposition from unnamed sources about me teaching that class. But I was also informed that the university had my back. So I suspect that had I been an assistant Prof. Certainly if I were of of Arab or Palestine in background, or if I were an immigrant, I might have decided not to teach it. I don't know what I would have done. But obviously I paid no attention to that. And I'm teaching the class and I'm trying again to teach that as responsibly as I can. It's an interesting class to teach it. I've been teaching it for the last ten years. But of course, things have changed since. And it was the same thing. I taught a class on genocide last year and I changed the syllabus, meaning I inserted a week on the so-called conflict, really on the occupation in Israel-Palestine and on the war in Gaza and the genocide in Gaza. And I know there were people, some people felt uncomfortable, but I should say that more students showed up to that class than to any other class. because they wanted to know I'm really glad that you pointed out that the situation or the scenario is not just one directional in that sense because like every situation, there are many administrators, many professors who are outspoken. And I would even say that in my case. I do have a very good support system around me. And the university has never objected to any activities I have engaged in or even, for instance, right now just having this conversation with you. So, yes we do have a variety of situations out there. So is the silence in the United States unique compared to, and when I say silence, of course, let’s include intimidation because that's an important nuance. Is the silence or intimidation in the United States unique compared to what's happening in other countries in your experience? Let me just say that I want to make a distinction between speaking out and being outspoken. Academics are people and they can go and demonstrate and be outspoken. That's fine as citizens. In fact, they should. That's their role as citizens. But as academics, as teachers in the classroom, they should speak. They should speak out. They should speak clearly. They don't need to be outspoken. They need to be responsible and they need to talk about what they know. But they have to do it in a way that also takes into account the students that they're teaching. And there will be students there who come from different backgrounds and have different opinions. And one has to respect that and to always take that into account and not to use your position as somebody who knows more to yourself. In a sense intimidate students in the classroom. So I just want to stress that because I think there were also after October 7th, but also before October 7th, there were academics who in some ways abused their position. And that has to also be recognized and who sort of sorted out the student body in a way that some felt welcome and some did not, and then went to other kinds of classes where they did feel welcome. And so it became a kind of political game within universities that was really played out by the faculty, and I don't think that was helpful at all. And the most typical tension was between Jewish studies and Middle Eastern studies. I think that was counterproductive. So that's one thing when we're speaking about academe specifically. Now, the difference between the United States and other countries, yes, there is a difference. You know, I was just now in the UK, I spoke in London and at Oxford, I was at my alma matter at St Anthony's College, at Oxford, and speaking with people there, I had a sense that there is less of a sense of intimidation than there is in the United States and again, it's complicated to say exactly why, because it's not only from the top, it's not only from the government. It has to do with how universities are organized. It's very difficult in Oxford to put pressure on the college because there's so many layers. There’s the college and the University. But yes, I felt that people felt freer to speak than they do in the United States. Of course, if you look at what's happening in Israeli academe, that's the kind of future that you can look at if you want to be particularly pessimistic about the American university, because the degree of intimidation on Israeli campuses is completely on a different scale by the government, which funds the major universities, by the administrations, and very much unlike Europe and the United States, by the student body, which is very right wing in Israel, and it's actually intimidating the faculty. And the faculty is basically in a process of Gleichschaltung of adjusting, of coordinating itself to the general sentiment of the public. So that's the sort of worst that you can think of. And then look, I mean, there are many universities in the world that we can mention where there is no academic freedom. China doesn't enjoy academic freedom. And I can tell you I know something about it from my own family, from another part of my family, that there are people who worry about what they teach in American universities about China because there will be students in the classroom who may report on that. And then those faculty members, if they want to go and do research in China, may not be able to do that. Or if they do that, may find themselves in uncomfortable circumstances. So there is that, too. In the US, we have to fight and protect what is cherished as academic freedom and there is not enough awareness of that by faculty members across the board in the United States. So basically we do have our checks and balances here, which is, I think the reason why many of us still want to be here despite everything. We just hope that the situation will settle. That's what we are hoping, at least those of us who are foreigners in the country. My question now is regarding something I have encountered a lot because I interact, with many people, because when we invite them on the platform and often I've heard people say, well, this person specializes in a different field and should not be speaking about Israel and Gaza or this person is a Holocaust scholar or genocide studies scholar, and is not exactly as a Jewish studies scholar or a middle east scholar. And so this is how people are policed. And there's this gatekeeping, this silent gatekeeping or this subtle gatekeeping that is going around. I want to ask you now, as a historian of genocide, how has it felt to see your scholarly authority questioned or dismissed when your analysis turned to what to present, towards what's going on in Israel and Palestine now, rather than the past? As I said, I don't read too much of that because most of them are expressions of outrage, they're not serious. If anybody were to seriously challenge what I'm saying and what I'm writing on good scholarly grounds, I would read it. I would take it into account. There have been a few such cases, but In most cases, that's not what's going on. So people will say, will write, that I'm a ‘Kapo’. What do they mean that I'm a ‘Kapo’? That I'm betraying my own nation, right? I'm collaborating with the enemy. Okay. That's neither here nor there. They'll say he should write about the Holocaust. What does he know about Israel Palestine? Well, they should look at my scholarship and they'll know. And usually the people who say that themselves don't know much, so they put themselves as critics. So I don't find it useful to engage in that sort of thing. I do think, as I said before, that if you have knowledge, understanding, experience and you think that you can bring that to bear to explain what is going on, especially when people are confused, you should do it if you don't if you really don't have much knowledge and there are such people and yet you want to express your outrage and you do that as an academic in an academic setting, then yes, then at that point you may be undermining yourself. And people can tell at least if they are also in that profession, if you make claims for knowledge that you clearly don't have, then you should be criticized for that. I think that I've written a fair amount of this. I've been teaching for a long time on Israel Palestine or genocide on the Holocaust. I know Israel pretty well. And so and I've never tried because I don't know enough about that. I've never tried to write from the inside of Palestinians or an Arab society, because my Arabic is not good and because that's not something that I feel I'm an expert in. So I've tried to limit myself to areas that I do know something about. And as I said, I think that my analyses I know that my analyses have been found to be helpful by people who are knowledgeable. It doesn't really bother me that some people will use this kind of ad hominem rhetoric. It's not really something I spend time on. Do you believe the academy has failed a moral test in this moment? Or is it revealing something that has long been structurally embedded? There are two things. First of all, it's not just the academy. First of all, and this is the United States and Europe. The countries that presented themselves and with some justification as those that created a regime of international law. I mean, I think that you know more about that probably than I do. Regimes that created a regime of international law after World War II, created the UN, agreed on the genocide Convention, signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Later on agreed on the Geneva Accords and so forth, created the ICJ and then the ICC. These countries that have presented themselves as the defenders of human rights and international law are the countries that during two years of destruction and obliteration and in Gaza not only said nothing, but actually supported it with arms economically and politically. So that is a huge crisis. That has never happened before. There have been many genocides, of course, after 1945.‘Never again’ was never, never again. But it's the first time that a country that is an ally of those supporters of international law was supported in carrying out genocide, that's a first. So the general context is a context of I'd say, severe danger, undermining of an international order that is what keeps us by now inches away from a complete collapse of this order and entry into chaos, which would bring far more violence to everyone that's generally. Now in academe, yes, as I said, there is something structural that precedes everything that happened after October 7th and that structural phenomenon, particularly in the United States, if I were to put it in one word, I would say it's that faculty members have lost the notion of faculty governance, that over the last few decades, universities have changed and have become different animals from what they were and what they were supposed to be. They've become corporate, they've become centralized, they've become highly dependent on donations. They were since World War II. They've become increasingly dependent, of course on federal funds. And faculty have sort of retreated into their offices and have allowed administrations to take over and to manage these extremely complicated entities that are called universities. And in that sense, what we refer to as academic freedom, which is really about faculty evaluating themselves. Not being evaluated by anyone else and faculty teaching what they and their colleagues believe they can and should teach, no matter what the rest of the world says, because they live within the academic world and they decide on what is quality, what is good teaching, what is not. And they promote themselves. Of course, that's the way that system works, that they have lost their higher sense of the calling. And I'm just writing about that now. You know there was a book came out in 1927 by a French essayist and philosopher, Julien Benda, called La Trahison Des Clercs of the the Treason of the Intellectuals as it was translated into English. And he speaks about that there, about how the intellectuals, which include scholars and writers and artists, have become increasingly divorced from that notion of the higher morality that they should actually uphold and become imprisoned in a politics of national politics, race and class. That is a process that we have seen growing over time in the American university. And these universities have also become sort of breeding grounds of a particular elitism in the United States. And we see the revolt of the masses, if you like, against that. But that is a reflection of an educational system in the United States of K-12 schools in the United States that keep most of the population outside of the university and make the university increasingly unattainable. And then the universities becoming places where you are not studying humanism, you are being trained in professions where once you come out, you will be useful to the marketplace. That was not the calling of the university. So in that sense, there is a much larger crisis going on. And that's, I think, one reason that at a moment of moral crisis, which was sort of came to the fore after October 7th, academics didn't have the wherewithal to face up to it, didn't know how to deal with it. And the universities as organizations shut it down because they were afraid that any sort of a positive response to protests would undermine their own business model. So I think this is very fascinating because I'm thinking about even the days when I used to read about educational philosophy. I'm thinking specifically of John Dewey. Who raised this distinction between forming individuals properly speaking in the lines of what you're saying just now with values of humanism and all of that versus creating careerists. And I also, I'm kind of connecting this conversation with a keynote speech given by Rosi Braidotti who talks about post-humanism. She's a philosopher, and she spoke about how the university, as a system itself, as an entity, has survived many storms, one of them being the internet era. And of course, now we have A.I.. That's another sort of like threat to us. But it's important, she says, for that model not to veer into being a completely capitalist model. And we see that America has been, when I worked in different countries, I noticed how America's model that was used in the universities became the model that was applied in other countries, too. So being able to maintain that or to uphold the academic freedom that we are speaking about today would mean that we would have to move away from that capitalist model. How realistic is that when the universities, the institutions depend on donors? I mean, I am in a Holocaust and genocide institution. I am funded by donors as well. And I also, of course, we all know that universities depend on funding, and many of us, especially during these times, have been affected by the budget cuts. So how do we move away from that model. in very practical terms? One thing I'd say just sort of in an aside that the motto of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton is to work in furthering useless knowledge. And that's based on on a book that was written by the founder and first director of the Institute on useless knowledge. And the university as we see it developing now, partly because of this, as you said, the capitalist model, technocratic model, also close links with the military industrial complex that go back to the 1950s, actually to the 1940s is useful knowledge. And that's a major distinction between the two. It has to be said that, as we know, I mean, I assume you are coming from another country. I've come to the United States from another country. People come to American universities because American universities are considered to be, and in many ways are, the best universities in the world. And so we have to take that into account. I think there's a bit of arrogance about that statement. It's not always true. It depends how you measure that greatness. But they're certainly attracting or used to, before the current administration, used to attract large numbers of people and benefited greatly from that, both the universities and American society in general. Pulling people in. And part of that was the vast investment of funds in American universities that they have such extraordinary facilities for science, for medicine, for also humanities, but humanities is cheap, but for art, for technology, for engineering, high tech and so forth. So can you go against this trend? This has been the trend now for a long time. Can one go against it? That's a huge question. I don't know whether we can. I mean, I have been trying to imagine and how can you create an alternative. Universities now, they want to attract students and they charge students exorbitant amounts of money. It's absolutely unbelievable that you have to pay $100,000, for a year, for an undergraduate education. That is it Just a general will B.A. I paid nothing when I was an undergraduate at Tel Aviv University. My wife paid nothing when she went to HKU. And did we have a less good education? Not at all. So how do you change that? Students expect to have lovely dorms, great services, beautiful classrooms. Universities build all these very expensive edifices on they're grounds just for prestige. And then they want to attract a lot of faculty, the best in the world. So they have to pay them and they have vast numbers of administrators who are incredibly well paid for doing what I think is often not very difficult. So how do you change that? Maybe the model would be to create a different type of university, not within those universities that seem to be going in a particular direction, but another kind of university that would actually be dedicated to the humanities and social sciences. Those places would be much cheaper to maintain because you don't need all this money and all these buildings you can teach well in a shed. If you have a good professor and you have attentive students and you have access to a library, or by now of course, just to the Internet, you don't need all of that. But that sounds very idealistic. I don't know whether it's possible, but I think we are at a moment of crisis. And I actually don't think that's only in the United States because I think that in European universities there is an increasing imitation of the American model, and there's more and more money being invested in that. Universities in general have become more and more tied also not only in the United States with military industries, with technology that has military use. So this kind of military industrial complex that was invented in the United States, I think is increasingly also in European universities. Can we go against this? Look if you don't do this model of a very different university, which might be just a curiosity rather than anything else, you have to change much larger things than the university itself. You have to change the way society operates. As I said, the most important thing is to go back to the model of the great society of creating what the United States once had. It had the best elementary and secondary school system in the world, and that went to the dogs. You need equal education in order to create a different kind of university, but that means changing your socioeconomic system much more fundamentally. And no single university can do that. That's a social decision that has not been made. In preparing for today's interview, we reached out to individuals working as students, faculty and administrators and invited them to pose a question shaped by their own position in the academy. The first question comes from Björn Krondorfer, Regents Professor, Director of the Martin-Springer Institute, and Endowed Professor of Religious Studies at Northern Arizona University. And he asks, as a historian and a professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, your impeccable scholarly work and also political engagement straddle the lines between past and present, and also between two fields of inquiry currently in crisis. What do you predict for the future of the two separate, yet connected fields of Holocaust and Genocide Studies in US Higher Education? So first of all, thank you for the very nice words. I wrote a little bit about that, just a couple paragraphs in the op-ed piece in The New York Times in July, and I'm deeply worried about that. And actually, I'm hosting a workshop on the future of Holocaust and Genocide Studies after October 7th at Brown in April. What worries me is that because by large, with some prominent exceptions, Holocaust historians and certainly it's institutions dedicated to studying and commemorating the Holocaust, did not speak out at all about the violence that Israel wreaked on Gaza and is still doing so. The future of Holocaust studies. As we have understood it, is being threatened. It's threatened because the claim was at least since the 1980s, 1990s, as Holocaust studies became something that it wasn't before, became a prominent preoccupation. The claim was that while we are studying a particular historical event, studying, it has much greater universal implications. And that we're studying it also, so as so to speak, in our minds to make sure that things like this do not happen again. And the conduct of these institutions and of so many scholars have undermined that. So I'm afraid that Holocaust studies may retreat into the kind of ethnic enclave from which it sprang in the immediate aftermath of World War II. And that would be a very sad development. What it needs to do is to go in the other direction that it was heading toward before these events, that is, for Holocaust studies and genocide studies to be actually the same thing because the Holocaust was one particular genocide, the largest one of the modern era, but it's one of part of a genocidal phenomenon. And that's the correct direction to go in. This next question comes from Chigbo Arthur Anyaduba, Associate Professor at the University of Winnipeg, where he teaches genocide studies and postcolonial literature.

He asks: 51:11

In your July 2025 New York Times opinion piece, “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It,” you stated, “My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people.” You arrived at this conclusion partly based on the extremist statements made by prominent Israeli government and military leaders who have publicly expressed their intent to completely annihilate Palestinians and render Gaza uninhabitable. While your view is consistent with popular interpretations of Israel’s actions as genocidal, you seem to imply that the genocide of Palestinians is a current issue rather than a foundational aspect and fundamental basis of the Israeli state’s formation. Generations of Israeli leaders have routinely made similar genocidal statements at different periods of Israel’s bombardment of Palestinians. You fought as a soldier for the IDF against Palestinians and subsequently built a prominent career as a genocide scholar. And for decades of your scholarship, you did not directly address the genocide of Palestinians until recently, within the narrow frames of recent atrocities. Would you consider those previous years as a period of silence and tacit complicity? If so, how do you reconcile that past silence with your newfound clarity and conclusion? So as you see, I've been attacked from all sides. That's the good thing about speaking out. Let me say a few things here. I actually didn't fight against Palestinians when I fought I was fighting against the Arab armies. But that's just the luck of the draw. I was in the Syrian border. Look, I mean, as a genocide scholar, I have a particular view on genocide. I'll put it that I cannot respond to everything in that question, but I’ll put it that way. I adhere to the Genocide Convention’s definition of genocide. And I that because it's a definition that is part of an international convention and states that signatories of that convention have an obligation which they haven't fulfilled to act in a particular way to prevent and punish the crime of genocide. So that means that I have always tried to make sure that what I'm studying, what I'm teaching and what I'm writing about as genocide conforms to that definition. There are many other definitions, of course, but that's the only one that matters legally in international law. If you state and I've heard this stated many times, so this is not new to me that Zionism as a movement was always genocidal from the very beginning, that the goal of Zionism was to eradicate the Palestinians. And that is what it has consistently done from the very beginning. You first of all, I don't think it's true about Zionism, but whether it's true or not, what you are implying is that you are creating a kind of concept of genocide that is so wide, is so large that you are emptying it of its very specific legal definition. You can, of course, say that about all settler colonialisms, so you can say all settler colonialisms are genocidal. That is being said by the sort of fodder of settler colonial studies. But if you do that, you are using a definition of genocide that is too large to be useful. So I would agree that the goal of Zionism was to create a Jewish majority state. And that a function of that goal was the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948, and it is at the core of Israeli occupation policy since 1967, and it's definitely at the base of what Israel has been doing since October 7th. But I don't think that Zionism was really focused on a genocide of Palestinians. It had very different agendas, which had nothing to do with Palestinians or with Arabs at all. And in fact, the book that I wrote that is coming out in April talks exactly about that, how the Zionist was transformed from a movement that was about liberation and emancipation of Jews as a minority in Europe to a state ideology that became increasingly exclusive racist, militarist and finally also genocidal. And just a final audience question. The next question comes from Alise Ndacayisaba, a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin.

And she asks: 56:42

When we trace silences from Burundi and Congo to Gaza, where evidence fails to provoke action, are we seeing a hierarchy of whose lives are deemed grievable, and what does the world’s inaction in Gaza reveal about who the doctrine of “Never Again” was actually written to protect? So the the the quick answer is yes, of course there is and there always has been a hierarchy of victimhood and a hierarchy of care. You can go to any of the multiple cases of colonial violence. You can look at slavery and you can look at the suffering of the working class in the 19th century. Of course, that's always been the case. Our goal is to try to fight against that, to teach against that. But it is the case absolutely. In the case of what's happened in Gaza, it's obviously we could see on the media everywhere and international media, European media just as much as American media hierarchy where every story of an Israeli victim was being told in great detail and Palestinians were just given in numbers and often numbers that immediately doubt was being cast on. Although by now, as you know, the IDF just admitted that the number of losses is exactly the number that the health ministry in Gaza had always claimed as we knew that it would, because it always has in the past too, And so, yes, I mean, I agree with that. Can we change that? There may have been a bit of a change because the horrible suffering of Palestinians. But that's something that is still a huge work in progress. Thank you. And I will just finish this with a question. The last question for me. What advice would you give early career academics who feel ethically compelled to speak but fear, professional retaliation? Well, I mean, it's up to them. Look, I mean, I think that academe is generally a very privileged profession. You get paid to do what you would have done anyway, what you like doing. You have a lot of free time on your hands and you eventually get tenure. And so you have some kind of freedom of thought. But if you betray that, if you don't say what you think, then you know, how should I put it? It's like in countries that become corrupt the rot will start eating you from within. So if you don't have courage to speak your mind, do something else. This was Not to Forgive, but to Understand with our guest Omer Bartov. To our listeners, don't forget to like, subscribe and stay tuned for more discussions.