Background
Yehuda Bauer was born on April 6, 1926, in Prague, Czech Republic. Son of Viktor and Gusta (Fried) Bauer.
1998
Israel Prize
2000
Cover of Rethinking the Holocaust
2001
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Cardiff CF10 3AT, United Kingdom
Cardiff University
New York, NY 10003, United States
New York University
Jerusalem, Israel
Hebrew University
Jerusalem, Israel
Hebrew University
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New Haven, CT 06520, United States
Yale University
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historian humanities educator scholar
Yehuda Bauer was born on April 6, 1926, in Prague, Czech Republic. Son of Viktor and Gusta (Fried) Bauer.
As a native citizen of Prague, Czechoslovakia, Yehuda Bauer was fluent in Czech, Slovak, and German at an early age, and later learned Hebrew, Yiddish, English, French and Polish.
Yehuda Bauer attended high school in Haifa and at sixteen he decided to dedicate himself to studying history. Upon completing high school, he joined the Palmach. Yehuda Bauer attended Cardiff University in Wales on a British scholarship, interrupting his studies to fight in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, after which he completed his degree.
Yehuda Bauer returned to Israel to join Kibbutz Shoval and began his graduate work in history at the 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.
Yehuda Bauer was a visiting professor at Brandeis University, Yale University, Richard Stockton College, and Clark University. He was the founding editor of the journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies and served on the editorial board of the Encyclopaedia of the Holocaust, published by Yad Vashem in 1990.
In addition, Yehuda Bauer currently serves as an academic adviser to Yad Vashem, an academic adviser to the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research, and senior adviser to the Swedish Government on the International Forum on Genocide Prevention.
Yehuda Bauer served on the central committee of Mapam, then the junior partner party of Israel's ruling Mapai (Israel Labour Party).
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. 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.