Ofer Ashkenazi

Prof.

Ofer

Ashkenazi

Director and permanent academic member

ofer.ashkenazi@mail.huji.ac.il

Ofer Ashkenazi is a Professor of History and the Director of the Richard Koebner Minerva Center for German History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

After he received his PhD from the Hebrew University in 2006, he conducted post-doctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley, and taught at the University of Minnesota. His research interests include Central European cultural and intellectual history, German-Jewish experience under Nazism, modern visual culture, and memory culture in twentieth-century Europe. He is the author of four monographs: Still Lives: Jewish Photography in Nazi Germany (2025, co-authored with Rebekka Grossmann, Shira Miron and Sarah Wobick-Segev), Anti-Heimat Cinema: The Jewish Invention of the German Landscape, 1918-1968 (2020); Weimar Film and Modern Jewish Identity (2012); and A Walk into the Night: Reason and Subjectivity in Weimar Film (2010). He is the editor and co-editor of several volumes of collected essays, including Einstein, Freud and the Wars to Come: Why War in Context (2018, with Eran Rolnik and David Bar-Gal); “Place and Space in the German-Jewish Experience of the 1930s” (2023, special volume of Jewish Culture and History, with David Juenger and Bjoern Siegel); and the forthcoming Rethinking Jewish History and Memory through Photography (fall 2025, with Thomas Pegelow-Kaplan). He has published articles on various topics, including German-Jewish cultural history, German-Jewish immigration to Palestine, exile photography, the discussion of Nazi violence in post-1945 Germany, and the German peace movement.

Between 2021 and 2025 Prof. Ashkenazi served as the Vice Dean for Teaching Affairs in the Humanities. Between 2019 and 2023 he was a member of the Israel Young Academia. He is currently a member of The International Commission for the Investigation of the Terror Attack at the 1972 Olympic Games, (Kommission zur Aufarbeitung des Olympia-Attentats 1972). He held a Visting-Professor positions in various institutions, including the Joice Z. Greenberg Visiting Professorship at the University of Chicago, and the Mosse Visiting Professorship at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Since 2022 he has served as a co-editor of Historia, the journal of the Israeli Historical Society.

His current research projects reflect his diverse interests: “The Future of the Past: Developing NLP Tools for a Data-Driven Algorithmic Analysis of Documentary Narratives of the Holocaust” (with Renana Kedar, Amit Pinchevski, Omri Abend, and Gavriel Stanovsky, funded through a grant from Israel Council for Higher Education); “German-Jewish Environmental History” (with Guy Miron, Israel Science Fund); and “Zwischen Alija und Flucht. Jüdische Jugendbünde und zionistische Erziehung unter dem NS-Regime und im vorstaatlichen Israel 1933–1945“ (with Ulrike Pilarczyk, Deutsche Forschung Gesellschaft). Together with Annette Vowinckel and Rebekka Grossmann he is developing a project on Jewish refugess from Nazi Germany (funded by Minerva Project Fund). In addition, together with Anat Vogman, he works on a documentary film based on his research (funded through Yad Hanadiv and Gesher).

Prof. Ashkenazi teaches a variety of courses on topics ranging from the the history and commemoration of the Holocaust to modern visual culture. He often teaches survey course on modern European history, World War One and Interwar Europe, as well as seminars on Nazism, German-Jewish history, the history of cinema, and photography as historiograpy.

Prof. Ashkenazi is on sabbatical in 2025.

Selected Publications

Selected Publications

Monographs:

Ofer Ashkenazi, Sarah Wobick-Segev, Rebekka Grossman, Shira Miron, Still Lives: Jewish Photography in Nazi Germany (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025)

Ofer Ashkenazi, Anti-Heimat Cinema: The Jewish Invention of the German Landscape, 1918-1968 (Michigan University Press, 2020)

Ofer Ashkenazi, Weimar Film and Modern Jewish Identity (Palgrave-McMillan, 2012)

Ofer Ashkenazi, A Walk into the Night: Reason and Subjectivity in the Films of the Weimar Republic (Am Oved, Hebrew, 2010)

Recent Edited Volumes:

Ofer Ashkenazi, Thomas Pegelow-Kaplan (eds.), Rethinking Jewish History and Memory Through Photography (forthcoming 2025, SUNY)

Ofer Ashkenazi, David Jünger, Bjoern Siegel (eds.), "Place and Space in German-Jewish History," Special Issue of Jewish Culture and History 25.2 (April 2024)

Ulrike Pilarczyk, Ofer Ashkenazi, Arne Homann (eds.), Hachschara und Jugend-Alija. Wege jüdischer Jugend nach Palästine, 1918-1940 (Gifhorn: Gemeinnützige Bildungs- und Kultur des Landkreises Gifhorn, 2020)

Ofer Ashkenazi, Daniel Wildmann, Special Issue on Exile Photography, The Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, 2019

Ofer Ashkenazi, David Bar-gal, Eran Rolnik (eds.), Einstein, Freud and the Wars to Come: “Why War?” in Context (Jerusalem: Carmel, 2018)

Selected Articles in Refereed Journals:

Ofer Ashkenazi, “Reading Private Photography: Pathos, Irony, and Jewish Experience in the Face of Nazism,” American Historical Review 124.4 (December 2022): 1606-1634

Ofer Ashkenazi, “Ordinary Moments of Demise: Photographs of the Jewish Home in Late 1930s Germany,” Jewish Social Studies 26.3 (Fall 2021): 149-185

Ofer Ashkenazi, “A Jewish Memory of a German Past: Jewish Photography in Nazi Germany,” Zion (82.2 (Fall 2020), 263-294)

Ofer Ashkenazi, Jakob F. Dittmar, “Belonging in Autobiographical Comics: Narratives of Exile in the German Heimat,” A/B: Auto / Biography Studies 35.2 (2020): 331-357

Ofer Ashkenazi, Guy Miron, “Jewish Vacations in Nazi Germany: Reflections on Time and Space amid an Unlikely Respite,” Jewish Quarterly Review 110.3 (Summer 2020): 523-552

Ofer Ashkenazi, “Hidden in Plain Sight: The Nakba and the Heritage of the Israeli Historians’ Debate,” Zeithistorische Forschungen 16.3 (2019): 549-563

Ofer Ashkenazi, “Exile at Home: Jewish Amateur Photography under National Socialism, 1933–1939,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 64:1 (2019): 115-140.

Ofer Ashkenazi, "Transnational Antiwar Activity in the Third Reich: The Nazi Branch of the New Commonwealth Society," German History 36.2 (June 2018): 207-228

Ofer Ashkenazi, "Improbable Twins: The Bifurcating Heritage of Weimar Culture in Helmar Lerski and Walter Frentz’s Kulturfilms," German Studies Review 40.3 (2017): 527-548