Alon Confino is a professor of history at the University of Virginia and at Ben-Gurion University. At the heart of his work are the imagination, sensibilities, and emotions that make the stories people tell themselves about their past to give meaning to their world. He has published extensively on modern German and European history, on nationhood, memory, and historical method. In the last few years he worked on the Holocaust and the result is Foundational Pasts: The Holocaust As Historical Understanding (Cambridge University Press, New York, 2012) and A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (Yale University Press, 2014), which won a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship.  He is now at work on a book project on 1948 in Palestine, at the center of which is the impact of Holocaust memories.