In Memoriam: Alon Confino

Alon Confino

Alon Confino, director of the Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies (IHGMS) and professor of history and Judaic and Near Eastern studies, died June 27. A funeral will be held Tuesday, July 2, at 11 a.m. at the Congregation B'Nai Israel cemetery at 476 N King St., in Northampton.<_o3a_p>

Confino joined the UMass Amherst faculty in 2017 and was appointed Pen Tishkach Chair of Holocaust Studies in 2018. Meaning "lest you forget" in Hebrew, pen tishkach is the guiding principle behind the anonymously endowed chair, which is awarded to a distinguished scholar of the Holocaust who serves as director of the IHGMS.<_o3a_p>

The author of "A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide," Confino was an expert on modern German and European history, the Holocaust and genocide, Zionism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Under Confino's leadership, the IHGMS broadened its subject matter to include genocide, mass violence, racial discrimination and other topics related to the Holocaust, including different Palestinian and Jewish experiences of the foundation of Israel in 1948, about which he was completing a book before his death.<_o3a_p>

An important public intellectual who wrote essays on the use and misuse of the Holocaust by the media, he recently helped organize and draft an influential global definition of antisemitism, known as the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism.<_o3a_p>

"A highly regarded scholar in the international community, Alon was known within his department for his creative ability to bring together differing voices and focus on the importance of dialogue," says Joye Bowman, interim dean of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts and professor of history.<_o3a_p>

"Professor Confino was my irreplaceable friend and colleague in both of his roles as a member of my department and director of the IHGMS," says David Mednicoff, chair of the Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies and associate professor of Middle Eastern studies and public policy. "His deep expertise, erudition and empathy for diverse people's experience around genocide and prejudice made him a cherished source of wisdom and role model around engaged scholarship and teaching. During these challenging days of global and local political polarization, and the ongoing war in Gaza, I am especially sad that we are deprived of my friend's essential and clear-headed voice."<_o3a_p>

A native of Jerusalem, Confino previously held concurrent appointments as a professor of history at Ben Gurion University in Israel and the University of Virginia from 2013-17. He joined the University of Virginia faculty in 1992 as an assistant professor and was appointed professor in 2006.<_o3a_p>

The author of five additional books and dozens of articles and book chapters, Confino was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011. While on a Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars Fellowship in 2016-17, he worked on a book on 1948 in Palestine and Israel that tells two stories: one based on the experience of Arabs, Jews and British drawing on letters, diaries and oral history, and the second placing 1948 within global perspective of decolonization, forced migrations, partitions and postwar diplomacy and the Cold War.<_o3a_p>

He had been an associate fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture (2013-17) and the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (2011-12) at the University of Virginia. He was also a visiting fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. In 2009-10, he co-directed the project "Forced Migration and Ethnic Cleansing in the Modern World" at the University of Virginia. Confino was the Lady Davis Visiting Professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 2006 and has also been a visiting professor at Tel Aviv University and the New York University/University of Virginia program in London. He was directeur d'etudes at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris in 1999.<_o3a_p>

Confino was also the recipient of fellowships from the Humboldt Foundation, the Social Science Research Council and the Israel Academy of Sciences. As a graduate student, he was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship and a DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) Fellowship.<_o3a_p>

He received his B.A. in history in 1985 from Tel Aviv University before pursuing graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was awarded his M.A. in 1986 and his Ph.D. in 1992.<_o3a_p>

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