Prof. Alon Confino was a preeminent Israeli cultural historian and expert in Holocaust and genocide studies. He served as a Professor of History and Judaic Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he was also the long-standing Director of the Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies (IHGMS). A leading international authority on modern German and European history, the politics of memory, and the interconnected historiography of Israel-Palestine, Confino was also a principal co-organizer and author of the landmark Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA) released in 2021.
Born and raised in Jerusalem, Alon Confino received his B.A. in history from Tel Aviv University in 1985. He then pursued graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, earning his M.A. in 1986 and his Ph.D. in 1992. He joined the faculty of the University of Virginia in 1992, where he was appointed Professor of History in 2006 and taught until 2017, while also holding a concurrent professorship at Ben-Gurion University in Israel from 2013 to 2017. In 2018, he joined the University of Massachusetts Amherst to lead the IHGMS. Throughout his career, he held prestigious visiting professorships and fellowships at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (as Lady Davis Visiting Professor), the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, and the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011.
His award-winning monograph, A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (Yale University Press), fundamentally reinterpreted the Holocaust through the lens of cultural history. He argued that the Nazi campaign to exterminate European Jewry was driven by a revolutionary, emotional imagination that sought to erase the foundational moral legacy of the past to fabricate a new world entirely cleansed of Jewish memory.
In the later stages of his career, he focused on dismantling binary historical narratives, arguing that historians must acknowledge how Jewish victims of the Nazi Holocaust could concurrently become perpetrators against Palestinians during the 1948 foundation of the state. He contributed to groundbreaking academic anthologies, such as The Holocaust and the Nakba, focusing his empirical research on the destruction and subsequent memory-erasure of Palestinian villages in 1948, including the village of Tantura.
Confino was one of the principal architects of the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA) in 2021. Created as an authoritative empirical alternative to the IHRA definition, the JDA explicitly decouples legitimate political critiques of the Israeli state, anti-Zionism, and non-violent human rights advocacy (such as the BDS movement) from actual antisemitic hatred, providing a vital institutional shield for dissenting scholars and student activists globally.