Amos Goldberg( Jerusalem, 1966) is a professor in the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a member of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute.
He chaired his department( 2020 – 2024) and served as co-editor of the journal Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust( 2007 – 2014). Goldberg has held research fellowships at international institutions such as Cornell University, Clark University, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
His work focuses on the cultural history of the Holocaust, testimonial literature, and wartime diary writing, as well as studies of memory and trauma. Among his most influential publications are Trauma in First Person: Diary Writing During the Holocaust( Indiana University Press, 2017), awarded the Egit Prize and recognized by Choice as an Outstanding Academic Title; Marking Evil: Holocaust Memory in the Global Age( Berghahn, 2015, with Haim Hazan); and The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History( Columbia University Press, 2018, with Bashir Bashir). He has also edited volumes and articles on memory, genocide, and mass violence, establishing himself as an international authority in the critical study of the Holocaust and its contemporary resonances.
The set of interview questions was forwarded to the interviewee in June 2025, with the responses subsequently submitted in September 2025.
1. The Holocaust remains as a central reference point for the study of genocide and mass violence. How does it help explain or interpret crimes and atrocities taking place today?
2. Cover of some of the books by Amos Goldberg.
There is an inherent contradiction or at least tension in the question itself. For it assumes a special feature that the Holocaust possesses which makes it an important reference point for understanding other cases of mass violence. But if the Holocaust can be compared to other cases of genocide and mass violence, then what is fundamentally different about it? And why should it specifically serve as such an ultimate reference point? The contradiction / tension can also be formulated in a slightly different way. On one hand, it is customary to argue that one should engage with the Holocaust on the grounds that it is a paradigmatic case of genocide because it contains in extreme form all the components of the phenomenon. But on the other hand, precisely
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