4 Series: The 1920s in the Weimar Republic: a queer and Jewish perspective
Dr. Ofri Ilani

Yedidia Habkin – The Life and Ideas of an Eccentric German-Jewish Homosexual

Dr Ofri Ilany, of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, will lecture on the topic Yedidya Havkin – The Life and Ideas of an Eccentric German-Jewish Homosexual.

Dr. Ilany will discuss the diaries of Yedidya (Adi) Havkin, a homosexual astrologist who migrated from Munich to Jerusalem at the beginning of the 1920s. In his detailed diaries Havkin dealt extensively with his own homosexuality as well as with sexological and theological theories that explain homosexuality and link it to a host of other conditions.

Dr. Ofri Ilany is an historian and postdoctoral fellow at the Polonsky Academy at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. His current research focuses on Jewish homosexuals during the first half of the twentieth century. His article The Oriental Vice: Representations of Sodomy in Early Zionist Discourse is one of several he has written on this subject.