A Special Issue of The Journal of Holocaust Research in Honor of Yehuda Bauer on His 95th Birthday: Introduction

This special issue of The Journal of Holocaust Research is dedicated to the internationally renowned Israeli Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer. It gathers articles by Bauer’s students and colleagues who have interacted with him for decades in honor of his 95 birthday. This special issue builds on a summer workshop held at Yad Vashem in July 2021 to recognize and celebrate Bauer. The symposium, with the participation of authors of this special issue and Bauer himself, was jointly organized by Yad Vashem and the WeissLivnat International Center for Holocaust Research and Education at the University of Haifa. It is a most difficult task to summarize Bauer’s long and distinguished career in one volume. The following contributions nonetheless attempt to touch upon some of the most essential themes related to Professor Bauer’s academic work and research corpus. In what follows are personal reflections on Bauer, commentaries regarding his achievements and contributions, and theoretical and historiographical analyses inspired by his work. Yehuda Bauer was born on 6 April 1926 in Prague, Czechoslovakia. In 1939, he immigrated to Palestine with his parents. Upon completing high school in Haifa, he joined the Palmach. He later attended Cardiff University in Wales on a British scholarship, interrupting his studies to fight in Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, after which he completed his degree. Bauer returned to Israel to join Kibbutz Shoval in the Negev, of which he was a member for some 40 years. He began his graduate studies in history at the Hebrew University and received his doctorate in 1960. The following year, Bauer began to teach at the Institute for Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, becoming the director of the Holocaust Studies Division at the institute in 1968. In 1982, he served as the founding director of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism (SICSA) at the institute. In addition to educating and mentoring generations of students at the Hebrew University, Bauer has been an integral part of the educational and research institutions at Yad Vashem since the 1960s. Together with his close friend and colleague Yisrael Gutman, in 1993 Bauer initiated the establishment of the International Institute for