Yehuda Bauer
In recent decades, Bauer became involved in policy toward antisemitism. He played an important role in the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance since its inception in 1998, and helped draft the organization’s controversial yet popular Working Definition of Antisemitism.
Born in 1926 in Prague, Bauer and his family fled to Mandatory Palestine in 1939, on the day Nazi Germany invaded Czechoslovakia. He spent the remainder of his teenage years in Haifa.
After completing high school, Bauer began his studies at Cardiff University on a scholarship from the British government, but was interrupted in 1948 by the War of Independence, returning to Israel to fight in the Palmach’s Oded Brigade.
Bauer moved to the Negev to join Kibbutz Shoval in his mid-20s, affiliating himself with the socialist-Zionist HaShomer HaTzair movement and its party in the Knesset, Mapam.
Like many Mapam members, Bauer was initially a stalwart Marxist, but grew disillusioned as news of repression increasingly came out of the USSR. The 1952 Prague Trials — in which Soviet authorities arrested and imprisoned one of Mapam’s own leaders, Mordechai Oren — shook the party to its core and shifted the pro-Soviet line of many members.
“I know Marxism very well, I read all that stuff from A-Z. It took me some time to get out of it. Historical materialism, a lot of this is based on errors. When I found that out I left,” he told The Times of Israel in 2023.
Bauer stood to the left of many in his party, opposing its more nationalist elements embodied by former Palmach commander Yigal Allon, who later split from the party to form his own.
Changing the narrative
At a time when many Israelis viewed Holocaust survivors as passive “sheep to the slaughter” who had not left Europe in time — as opposed to the proactive sabras who came to Israel in earlier waves of aliyah — Bauer collected oral histories from survivors who told a very different story of Jewish resistance in the ghettos.
Much of Bauer’s earlier work detailed the sheer magnitude of organized Jewish resistance against Nazi Germany, particularly in Polish ghettos.
He also wrote about post-Holocaust Jewish organizations, such as Bricha, meaning escape, which provided aid to survivors and helped smuggle them into Mandatory Palestine from displaced persons camps in Europe before Israel’s establishment.
Bauer challenged the idea that resistance to Nazi Germany consisted only of physical violence. In his eyes, any Jewish action that ran contrary to Nazi policies — keeping religious tradition, smuggling food and underground political organizing — was resistance.
Defining and educating against global antisemitism
When American and European leaders formed the International Holocaust Remembrance Association in 1998, Bauer became the organization’s academic advisor and began to take an active role in promoting a policy to counter antisemitism.
The IHRA’s most well-known achievement is its Working Definition of Antisemitism, which has encountered opposition, primarily from left-wing voices around the world, who argue the definition silences criticism of Israel. Bauer contended with this viewpoint and argued the definition is better than its alternatives.
“Of course, it could have been better. Anything could be always better. That’s what came out, and I thought it was better than nothing,” he said. “This was a certain development, and I was part of it, that’s it,” he said.
The IHRA definition has been adopted by governments of the vast majority of European countries and many states in the US.
Opposing extreme nationalism
A staunch opponent of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governments, Bauer made a habit of critiquing what he called Israeli politicians’ “misunderstandings, wrong conclusions and wrong analyses” regarding the Holocaust.
“They interpret it in a nationalistic way, they use the Holocaust as a tool for politics,” he said. “This is especially true of [Netanyahu]. He’s got no clue, simply has no idea what happened. He deals with Iran, he knows something about Iran, he doesn’t know anything about the Holocaust.”
He didn’t reserve his criticism for solely right-wingers, either. Bauer expressed serious skepticism when in 2009, then-defense minister Ehud Barak visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp and said the IDF arrived “50 years too late.”
“It’s pure nonsense, pure and absolute nonsense. What do you mean, they wouldn’t have killed Jews because of some Israeli planes? There were plenty of other planes,” he commented.
Later in his life, Bauer made the decision to boycott Yad Vashem’s annual Holocaust memorial service on Yom HaShoah, Israel’s Holocaust remembrance day, because of the “nationalist speeches” politicians would deliver.
Bauer advocated for the end of the decades-long conflict with the Palestinians. While during the British Mandate, Bauer supported a binational state with Palestinians, by 1948, he concluded the prospect to be unrealistic. Up until his death, he remained intensely critical of Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
In 2011, Bauer joined other public figures in signing a “declaration of independence from the occupation” calling for the establishment of a Palestinian state and asserting such a state’s importance in maintaining Israel’s independence.
“We are occupying people who hate us, and that’s not a good thing. As long as the kind of nationalist government that we have is in power, there’s no possibility of a solution,” he said of Israel’s predicament.
Bauer’s last published book, titled “The Jews: A Contrary People,” is a collection of argumentative essays, more so than unified text. Within its pages, he lays out his firmly held atheist beliefs and hopes for the future of Israel.
“The dream of a Jewish democratic state will come to an end only if the right wing is in power,” he said in a 2014 Haaretz interview, summing up his book’s last chapter. “A Jewish democratic state is not necessarily a contradiction. It is a contradiction that depends on the political situation.”
Charlie Summers