Comment on Preeminent Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer dies at 98

(JTA) For his doctoral dissertation in history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Yehuda Bauer focused on the British Mandate that before Israel’s independence controlled historic Palestine. In a conversation with Abba Kovner, the poet who had led the resistance to Nazi rule in the Vilna ghetto, the young historian said he knew there was a larger story to tell but admitted that he was fearful of taking on a subject as monumental as the Holocaust. Kovner convinced him that there was no more important event in Jewish history and that his fear of the subject was “a very good starting point.” Over the next 60 years, Bauer, who died October 18th at age 98, would go on to become perhaps the preeminent scholar of the Holocaust, chronicling in meticulous detail and pointed analysis the destruction of European Jewry, the unprecedented nature of the Shoah and the need to apply its lessons to prevent similar human catastrophes. Among his groundbreaking books were “Out of the Ashes” (1989), about the American Jewish role in rehabilitating survivors of the genocide; “Jews for Sale?” (1995), about the morally troubling negotiations between Nazi and Jewish leaders in the early years of the war, and “Rethinking the Holocaust” (2001), an overview of the field of Holocaust studies that included sometimes searing critiques of his contemporaries. “In many ways, the entire field of Holocaust education, remembrance, and research is part of Yehuda’s legacy,” Robert J.