3 Series: The 1920s in the Weimar Republic: a queer and Jewish perspective
Hila Lavie, The Koebner Center for Jewish History, The Hebrew University
At the bar at “Mali Weigel”: Being a Jewish Lesbian in Gay Berlin of the Twenties

Dr. Hilla Lavie, a research fellow at the Koebner Center for Jewish History at The Hebrew University, will deliver a lecture entitled At the Bar at Mali Weigel: Being a Jewish Lesbian in Gay Berlin of the Twenties.

The lecture will follow the lives of several Jewish lesbians whose social, cultural and intellectual activities in Berlin during the 1920s contributed to the flourishing of the local lesbian community. After the turbulent years of a shared struggle to achieve a safe and liberated lesbian space during a period characterized by political uncertainty and growing antisemitism, the bond forged between Jewish lesbians and their non-Jewish counterparts was put to the test in the face of the rise of the Nazis to power.

Dr. Hila Lavie is an historian and film researcher. She is a research fellow at the Richard Koebner Minerva Center for German History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at the Center for the Study of German Jewry during the Holocaust at Yad Vashem. In recent years she has chronicled for the purposes of a documentary film, the struggle of the LGBT community in Germany to gain recognition for the persecution of lesbians under Nazi rule and for the right to commemorate the victims in the memorial at the Ravensbrück concentration camp for women.