Academic interests: modern German cultural history, film studies and film history, German-Jewish studies, Holocaust studies, queer history, environmental history

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