Events | Queer Belongings and the Jewish “Homeland”: Israeli and Jewish American Lives Between Home and Away by Hila Amit
Frankel Center for Judaic Studies | March 25, 2025
4.30 p.m. (CT) | Frankel Center for Judaic Studies
Thomas Mann Fellow Dr. Hila Amit discusses the intersections of queerness, migration, and identity in the context of Israel/Palestine and the Jewish diaspora at the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan.
Through a blend of fiction and academic inquiry, Amit examines the ways queer Jewish lives challenge and reimagine narratives of homeland, belonging, and migration.In her academic book “A Queer Way Out: The Politics of Queer Emigration from Israel (SUNY, 2018), Amit explores the story of queer Israeli emigrants. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Berlin, London, and New York, she examined motivations for departure and feelings of unbelonging to the Israeli national collective.
Amit showed that sexual orientation and left-wing political affiliation play significant roles in decisions to leave. Amit investigated how queer Israeli emigrants question national and heterosexual norms such as army service, monogamy, and reproduction, in their decision to leave Israel. In her new research project, Amit is conducting interviews with queer Jewish Americans grappling with notions of Homeland and Belonging, particularly in the wake of the October 7th events and their profound global reverberations.
Meanwhile, her two fiction books center on queer experiences in Israel/Palestine, offering intimate, layered portrayals of life at the margin of society. Her new fiction work deals with a possible loss of the Hebrew language and a possible obsolescence of the state of Israel.
The conversation with Amit will delve into how these themes converge in Amit’s creative and scholarly practices. It will explore the tensions between rootedness and mobility, the impact of historical trauma on personal and collective identity, and the possibilities for imagining alternative futures through queer lenses. Amit will also reflect on the role of storytelling—fictional and academic—as a tool for navigating the complexities of identity, belonging, and resistance in times of upheaval.
This event is organized by the Frankel Center of Judaic Studies, University of Michigan.
Participants
Hila Amit studied creative writing at Tel Aviv University and holds a PhD in Gender Studies from SOAS, University of London. As an author and essayist, she writes about queerness, gender, sexuality and the complex relationships between Israeli Jews and Palestinians. Her short story collection Moving On From Blisswas awarded the Israeli Ministry of Culture Prize for Debut Writers. Her non-fiction book A Queer Way Out: The Politics of Queer Emigration from Israel won the 2019 AMEWS Book Award. 2020 saw the publication of Hebrew for All, which aims to provide access to the Hebrew language using queer and feminist methods. In 2022, her novel The Lower City was published in Hebrew.
