The Hebrew University of Jerusalem – Visual History of the Holocaust

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI) is the leading university in Israel, and it is ranked among the best 100 universities worldwide. It stresses excellence and offers a wide array of research and study opportunities in various disciplines. The Department of Communication and Journalism is part of the Faculty of Social Science, the largest faculty of the Hebrew University with a total of 3,600 students and ranked among the world’s 100 leading faculties of social science. The department was ranked 37th place in communication studies and is the leading department of its kind in Israel. It offers a vivid research environment with productive intersections of excellent expertise in crucial fields related to the VHH project including visual culture studies, media studies, cinema studies and online media research. Besides the Department of Communication and Journalism the project is linked with the European Forum at the Hebrew University, a unique network of research centers related to different European countries, among them the DAAD Center for German Studies and the Center for Austrian Studies.

Role in the Project

With the phase of its implementation, Tobias-Ebbrecht Hartmann and his team at the Hebrew University took the lead in the work package dealing with the overall curatorial concept developed in the project. He and his team are also responsible for the task of the curation and advanced digitization of popular culture content including graphic novels, computer games, visual artworks and media art installations.
At the Hebrew University of Jerusalem VHH relates to interdisciplinary research networks in the field of visual history that result from the work of the research group “German Postwar Visual History in a European Framework” headed by Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann and funded by the DAAD Center for German Studies from 2015 to 2017, which organized workshops, lectures and scientific meetings dealing with questions of visual appropriation, migration of images, audio-visual heritage and visual historiography. The VHH project is embedded in a larger research focus on Digital Visual History that also includes the current research group “Commemorating the Holocaust in the Digital Age: Immersion, Augmentation, Virtual Reality” headed by Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann and funded by the DAAD Center for German Studies.
The Department of Communication and Journalism and the European Forum regularly also offer courses on “Global Holocaust Memory, Popular Cinema and the Digital Age”, “Memory Cultures in Germany and Europe” as well as “Digital Memory Cultures”, which are integrated in the research, development and testing of VHH content. Especially the workshop course “Producing Videoclips with Cinematic- Archival and Visual-Digital Materials” provide a forum for developing and testing elements of the project’s work.