Yehuda Bauer
(1926-)
Born and raised in Prague, Czechoslovakia,
Bauer was fluent at an early age in the Czech,
Slovak and German languages, later learning Hebrew, Yiddish,
English, French and Polish. His father had
strong Zionist convictions
and during the 1930s he tried to raise money
to get his family into the British
Mandate of Palestine. On March 15, 1939,
the family migrated to Palestine.
Bauer attended high school in Haifa and
at sixteen, inspired by his history teacher,
Rachel Krulik, decided to dedicate himself
to studying history. Upon completing high
school, he joined the Palmach. He attended
Cardiff University, Wales on a British scholarship,
interrupting his studies to fight in the 1948
War of Indepedence, after which he completed
his degree.
Bauer returned to Israel to join Kibbutz Shoval
and began his graduate work in history at Hebrew
University. He received his doctorate in
1960 for a thesis on the British
Mandate of Palestine. The following year,
he began teaching at the Institute for Contemporary
Jewry at the Hebrew University. He served on
the central committee of Mapam,
then the junior partner party of Israel's ruling Mapai (Israel
Labor Party), and was a visiting professor
at Brandeis University, Yale University, Richard
Stockton College, and Clark University. He
was the founding editor of the Journal
for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, and
served on the editorial board of the Encyclopaedia
of the Holocaust, published by Yad
Vashem in 1990. In recent years, Bauer has received recognition
for his work in the field of Holocaust studies
and the prevention of genocide. In 1998,
he was the recipient of the Israel
Prize, the highest civilian award in
Israel. In 2001, he was elected a Member
of the Israeli Academy of Science. Currently,
he serves as academic adviser to Yad Vashem,
academic adviser to the International Task
Force for Holocaust Education, Remembrance,
and Research, and senior adviser to the Swedish
Government on the International Forum on
Genocide Prevention.
Bauer is a respected authority on the subjects
of the Holocaust, anti-Semitism and
the Jewish resistance movement during the
Holocaust. In Bauer's view, resistance to
the Nazis comprised not only physical opposition,
but any activity that gave the Jewish people
dignity and humanity in the most humiliating
and inhumane conditions. Furthermore, Bauer
has disputed the popular view that most Jews
went to their deaths passively—"like
sheep to the slaughter." He
argues that, given the conditions in which
the Jews of Eastern Europe had to live under
and endure, what is surprising is not how
little resistance there was, but rather how
much.
Bauer has often criticized what he considers
to be deleterious trends in writing about
the Holocaust. He has often taken exception
to those who argue that the Holocaust was
just another genocide. Though he agrees that
there have been other genocides in history
that have targeted groups other than Jews,
he argues that the Holocaust was the worst
single case of genocide in history, in which
every member of a nation was selected for
annihilation, and that it therefore holds
a special place in human history.
Yehuda Bauer is currently a Professor of
Holocaust Studies at the Avraham Harman Institute
of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University
of Jerusalem.
Sources: Wikipedia |