Amos Goldberg( Jerusalem, 1966) is a professor in the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute.
Goldberg has held research fellowships at international institutions such as Cornell University, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, CUNY and the Institut für die Geschichte der deutschen Juden in Hamburg. His work focuses on the cultural history of the Holocaust, testimonial literature and studies of memory and trauma.
Among his most influential publications are the awardwinning Trauma in First Person: Diary Writing During the Holocaust( Indiana University Press, 2017); The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History( Columbia University Press, 2018, co-edited with Bashir Bashir) and his recent Hebrew book: You Shall Remember: Five Critical Readings in Holocaust Memory( 2024). In his writings he established himself as an international authority in the critical study of the Holocaust and its memory, and their contemporary resonances. In April 2024 Goldberg published an article on Gaza in the Hebrew online magazine Local Call, " Yes, It is Genocide " which was the first in Hebrew to acknowledge the genocide and which was translated into multiple languages.
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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