Alon Confino

A native of Jerusalem, Alon Confino is a professor of history at the University of Virginia and at Ben-Gurion University in Israel. He is an expert on modern German and European history, Holocaust and genocide, Zionism, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Educated at Tel Aviv University and at UC Berkeley, he has published extensively on these topics, as well as contributing to the general media, including NPR. His recent books explored the Holocaust and genocide: Foundational Pasts: The Holocaust As Historical Understanding (2012) and A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (2014), which won a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship and was nominated by Yale University Press for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Among the grants he received are from the Fulbright, Humboldt, and Lady Davis Foundations, the Institute of Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University, the Social Science Research Council, the Israel Academy of Sciences, and the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. At the Wilson Center in 2016-2017 he is at work on a book on 1948 in Palestine and Israel that tells two stories: one is based on the experience of Arabs, Jews, and British based on letters, diaries, and oral history, and the second is placing 1948 within global perspective of decolonization, forced migrations, partitions, and postwar diplomacy and Cold War.