I was born in a kibbutz, studied in Israel and Britain, have done research in Germany, Austria, France, Poland, and Ukraine, and have been living and working in the United States since 1989. As a historian, my early research concerned the involvement of the German army in war crimes (The Eastern Front, 1941-1945; Hitler's Army), as well as total war and genocide (Murder in Our Midst, Mirrors of Destruction, Germany's War and the Holocaust), and antisemitic stereotypes (The "Jew" in Cinema). My recent publications concern Eastern Europe (Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine, Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz, and Tales from the Borderlands: Making and Unmaking the Galician Past). I also published two Hebrew-language novels in the 1980s; my first English-language novel, The Butterfly and the Axe, is forthcoming in 2023.