Prof. Amos Goldberg on Holocaust Memory, Genocide, and Moral Responsibility

Dr. Amos Goldberg, Holocaust scholar at Hebrew University, discusses why he publicly called Gaza a genocide—and the moral responsibility that comes with expertise in genocide studies. He explains how Holocaust memory is being misused to justify violence, why analogies to past genocides matter, and the personal cost of speaking truth in Israel today. This conversation explores the intersection of scholarship and conscience, examining how "never again" became selectively applied and what lessons the world continues to ignore.Dr. Amos Goldberg is Professor of Holocaust History at the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel). Each of his academic degrees, including his PhD, were earned at the Hebrew University. Dr. Goldberg also served as a post-doc visiting scholar at Cornell University and Ben Gurion University of the Negev (Israel). As the J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Senior Scholar-in-Residence at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, Dr. Goldberg will be conducting research for his project, “The Cultural History of the Jews in Warsaw under Nazi Occupation - September 1939-July 1942.”Dr. Goldberg chaired the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at The Hebrew University (2016 – 2018) and established the "The Hebrew University Research Forum of Holocaust, Genocide and Mass Violence," which co-hosted the 2016 bi-annual INoGS (International Network of Genocide Scholars) conference. Between 2007 -2014, Dr. Goldberg served as a co-editor of the journal Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust (in English and Hebrew), for whose editorial board he still serves. He also serves as a member of the editorial board for Theory and Criticism, and as a fellow at The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute.Dr. Goldberg is a cultural historian whose work is interdisciplinary in nature, part of which focuses on the history of the Jews in the Holocaust while other on Holocaust memory and historiography. He led the project in which he was also a co-writer of the four-volume series Years Wherein We Have Seen Evil: Selected Aspects in the History of Religious Jewry during the Holocaust (Yad Vashem); and co-edited, together with Bashir Bashir, two books on Jewish and Palestinian traumatic memories (Van Leer, 2015 [Hebrew]; Columbia University Press, 2018 [English]). Among his other publications is Trauma in First Person: Diary Writing during the Holocaust (2012 [Hebrew]; 2017 [English]), which won the 2012 Israeli Egit prize for Holocaust research and literature; and his co-edited volume with Haim Hazan Marking, Evil: Holocaust Memory in the Global Age (2015) . Dr. Goldberg is now working on two book projects: one on the cultural history of the Jews in Warsaw during the Holocaust, and the other, Critical Thoughts on Holocaust Historiography (Resling Publications, forthcoming in 2019 [Hebrew]).