Hilla Lavie is a post doc fellow at the History Department/Koebner Center of the Hebrew University. Her current research focuses on German-Jewish history and queer history. She earned her PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2020; her dissertation, which is currently transformed into a book manuscript, focuses on representations of Israel in 1950s-1960s West German Films. The dissertation received the Simon Wiesenthal Prize for Holocaust Studies. She was a guest scholar at the Leibnitz Institute for Jewish history and culture – Simon Dubnow in Leipzig, and at the Friedrich Meinecke Institut at the Free University Berlin with the support of the Armbruster fund. Hilla graduated in Film Studies at Tel Aviv University and holds an MFA (film directing) and MA (film studies); her MA thesis won the Goldhirsh prize for Holocaust Studies. Her latest research on the perception of nature among German-Jews during the Nazi era as reflected in the German-Jewish press, was supported by the International Institute for Holocaust Research Yad Vashem and will be published by Yad Vashem Publications. In the last few years Hilla teaches courses on film and history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
 
Select Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles and Book Chapters
“A Witness for the Prosecution: An Israeli Filmmaker's Reflections on Adenauer's New Germany”, German Studies Review, 2022
“From Kapò to The Battle of Algiers: Gillo Pontecorvo and the Postwar Italian Left”, Geschichtsoptimismus und Katastrophenbewusstsein: Europa nach dem Holocaust, 2022
Being a Jewish Lesbian in Berlin: Belonging and Solidarity during the Weimar Era and the Third Reich”, Queer Jewish Lives between Central Europe and Mandatory Palestine, 2021
"A Critical Look at the Beloved Land: Two West-German Documentary Films Made by Israelis in the 1960s and 1970s", Leo Baeck Institute Year book, 2018.
"An Ambivalent Relationship: Representations of Germany and Germans in Israeli Cinema, 1950–1990", Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook, 2015
"On the Nazi Image in the Israeli Cinema: a Historiographical Dialogue between the Israeli Cinema and the Israeli Holocaust Research", Slil - Journal for History, cinema and Television, 2014

Amit Levy is a research fellow at the Koebner Center’s project “In Europe, In Transit: Daily Life of German-Jewish Refugees in Europe, 1933-1939”, where he studies German-Jewish private photography in the context of migration, transit and knowledge production after 1933. He completed his PhD at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2021) and held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Oxford, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the University of Haifa and the Open University of Israel. 

Amit’s award-winning book, A New Orient (2024), explores the history of Zionist Oriental Studies as migrating knowledge from German universities, and the discipline’s role in shaping Arab-Jewish relations in Mandatory Palestine and Israel. The book was published in Hebrew by Magnes Press/Koebner-Minerva Center; an updated English version will be published in December by Brandeis University Press, with the support of the Israel Science Foundation.

He also serves as the Managing Editor of the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center’s Naharaim: Journal of German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History, published by De Gruyter.

PUBLICATIONS

BOOKS

• A New Orient: From German Scholarship to Middle Eastern Studies in Israel (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2024) (forthcoming. Revised and updated English edition)
• A New Orient: From German Orientalism to Israeli Mizrahanut (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2024) (Hebrew).

PEER-REVIEWED JOURNAL ARTICLES AND BOOK CHAPTERS

• “’Send my regards to those working on the al-Balādhurī manuscript’: The Study of Arabic and Islam in Interwar Jerusalem as Intellectual Common Ground,” in Rachel Mairs, Sarah Irving, Karene Sanchez and Lucia Admiraal (eds.), Colonial Vocabularies: Teaching and Learning Arabic in Europe (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2024; forthcoming).
• “Visualizing Farewell: A Jewish Soldier’s Return to Postwar Germany through Private Photography,” Jewish Culture and History 25, no. 2 (2024): 233–254.
• (co-authored with Hanan Harif) “‘A Complete, Multifaceted Discipline’: The Debate over the History of Jews in Muslim Lands and its Teaching,” in: Uzi Rebhun and Yfaat Weiss (eds.), The History of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem: The Nation State and Higher Education (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2024), pp. 687–718 (Hebrew).
• “Rediscovering the Goldziher Legacy in Jerusalem: Religion, Language, and History in the Making of a Hebrew University,” in: Hans-Jürgen Becker, Kinga Dévényi, Sebastian Günther and Sabine Schmidtke (eds.), Building Bridges: Ignaz Goldziher and His Correspondents. Islamic and Jewish Studies around the Turn of the Twentieth Century, Islamic History and Civilization, Vol. 212 (Leiden: Brill, 2024), pp. 139–164.
• “Conflicting German Orientalism: Zionist Arabists and Arab Scholars, 1926–1938,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 50, no. 5 (2023): 1112–1131.
• “The Archive as Storyteller: Refractions of German-Jewish Oriental Studies Migration in Personal Archives,” Jahrbuch des Dubnow-Instituts/Dubnow Institute Yearbook XVII  (2018): 425–446.
• “A Man of Contention: Martin Plessner (1900–1973) and His Encounters with the Orient,” Naharaim: Journal of German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History 10, no. 1  (2016): 79–100.
• “'The Sheik': Understanding American Orientalism through Visual and Narrative Differences in Three Decades of Discussion,” Slil: Online Journal for History, Film and Television 10  (2016): 39–57 (Hebrew).
• “‘Ma’alesh, Nistader’: Arabic in the Folklore of the Palmach during the 1940s,” Hayo Haya: Student History Journal 11 (2015): 46–66 (Hebrew).

ARTICLES IN ACADEMIC PUBLICATIONS

• “A Discipline in a Suitcase: The Scientific Nachlass of Josef Horovitz,” in Elisabeth Gallas, Anna Holzer-Kawalko, Caroline Jessen and Yfaat Weiss (eds.), Contested Heritage: Jewish Cultural Property after 1945, (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020), pp. 117–127.
• “Der wissenschaftliche Nachlass von Josef Horovitz,” in: Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, Archives of German–Jewish Scholarship: Wissenstransfer und Staatsbildung im Mandatsgebiet Palästina und in Israel (2018) (limited copies).
• “Israel. Orientalist Collections at the National Library of Israel,” Geschichte der Germanistik 49/50 (2016): 147–148.

ACADEMIC ARTICLES IN CATALOGS, MAGAZINES AND BLOGS

• “German Heritage in Word Cards: The Concordance of Classical Arabic Poetry in Jerusalem”, Mimeo: Blog der Doktorandinnen und Doktoranden am Dubnow-Institut.
• “Envisioning a Hebrew University: Ignác Goldziher on the University in Jerusalem”, Mimeo: Blog der Doktorandinnen und Doktoranden am Dubnow-Institut. 
• (co-authored with Tom Eshed) “Elyakim Gotthold Weil”, Ad Acta: The Hebrew University, Jewish Scholars, and the Exile from Europe (Exhibition pamphlet). The National Library of Israel, November–March 2018–2019. 
• “‘There is a need for a native quality of Arabic speaker’: Isaac Shamosh, the First Oriental Lecturer in the School of Oriental Studies, 1936-1937”, The Historical Archive of the Hebrew University Blog, Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center Website.

BOOK REVIEWS

• Eyal Clyne, Orientalism, Zionism and Academic Practice: Middle East and Islam Studies in Israeli Universities (London and New York: Routledge, 2019), in The New East 59 (2020): 207–210 (Hebrew).