Visiting Faculty
Ofrá Amihay is a lecturer at the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies and at the Cinema & Media Studies Program at Boston University, where she teaches courses of cinematic representations of the Holocaust and Israel. She holds a PhD from New York University, and her research focuses on Hebrew and comparative literature and visual culture, with a special interest in text and image relations. She co-edited The Future of Text and Image, a volume on textual-visual conjunctures in literature and art, and published articles on comics, photography, biblical motifs in modern narratives, and children’s literature. Her book The People of the Book and the Camera: Photography in the Hebrew Novel was published by Syracuse University Press in Spring 2022.
During her first year at the Elie Wiesel Center, Dr. Amihay was thrilled to teach four writing-intensive courses on cinematic representations of the Holocaust and Israel. She concluded each course with a round of presentations by all students on topics related to the courses, expanding students’ familiarity with films beyond the scope of the syllabus. These included almost 70 in-class presentations by students on topics including documentary, fiction, and new perspectives in Holocaust cinematography, and specific themes in Holocaust and Israeli films – such as gender, trauma, postmemory, and humor.
In March, Dr. Amihay was invited as the guest speaker at the opening night of the Boston Jewish Film festival, discussing the Israeli film The Property, depicting a Holocaust survivor and her granddaughter’s journey to Warsaw. Dr. Amihay had three students join her at the event, as part of ongoing efforts to engage students in extra-curricular activities, and two of the students ended up presenting on the film in class.
In summer 2026, she was invited to teach a cross-cultural intensive communication workshop at Xidian University in Xi’an, China, a nice conclusion to a year abundant with writing and communication workshops with BU students. She feels fortunate to have had the opportunity to interact with students over such though-provoking topics at the Center this year, and looks forward to another equally exciting year!