Queer Belongings and the Jewish “Homeland”: Israeli and Jewish American Lives Between Home and Away

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.