A scholar forcefully alleges that Israel has committed the gravest of crimes.
Straight talk and solemn accusations.
Bartov, a Brown University professor of Holocaust and genocide studies, offers a frank, sure-to-be-controversial analysis of Israel’s past and present, arguing that the country has “engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocidal actions” in Gaza in response to Hamas’ brutal Oct. 7, 2023, attack. The native Israeli and Israel Defense Force veteran’s conclusions arise from historical research, personal observation, and scrutiny of international law. His years in the IDF had him question the role he and other soldiers were playing in Gaza. “I saw firsthand the poverty and hopelessness of Palestinian refugees eking out a living in congested, decrepit neighborhoods,” he writes. “For the first time, I understood what it meant to occupy another people.” Visiting in June 2024, he notes “the utter inability of Israeli society to feel any empathy for the population of Gaza.” He links this to Israel’s earliest days. Had the nation adopted a constitution and “a bill of rights for all human beings,” he writes, “the creeping racism of Israeli society might have been tempered.” He asserts that the country has “abused” its “status as a unique state rooted in a unique Holocaust,” which frees it “from the constraints imposed on all other nations.” Bartov, worried that “the exclusion and violent domination of Palestinians” will trigger Israel’s “implosion,” means to “contribute to an opening of minds.” Most explosively, he claims Israel has become “the best excuse for antisemites everywhere,” its “addiction to violence and oppression, reliance on great powers and financial clout, and constant harping on the horrors of the Holocaust as an excuse for untethered violence against Palestinians” provoking “horror and disgust.” Bartov writes that Israel, is, “in multiple senses, my home and my homeland.” Poignantly, however, he now feels “increasingly estranged from it. It seems to be a different, strange, and threatening place, whose people, including some of my friends, have been transformed, perhaps irretrievably.”
A scholar forcefully alleges that Israel has committed the gravest of crimes.Pub Date: April 21, 2026
ISBN: 9780374618186
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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