Iris Hefets is an Israeli-born psychoanalyst, political commentator, public lecturer, and social activist based in Berlin, Germany. She is an executive board member of the German-based organization Jewish Voice for Just Peace in the Middle East (Jüdische Stimme). Professionally, she operates a clinical psychotherapy practice in Berlin-Neukölln. In her public advocacy, she applies psychoanalytic frameworks to analyze German historical guilt, Holocaust memory, and the political discourse surrounding the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Born and raised in Israel, Hefets previously served as an editor for the Hebrew-language online portal Kedma, a platform focused on Mizrahi Jewish discourse, cultural identity, and socio-economic justice.
In 2002, amidst the political crisis and violence of the Second Intifada, she chose to emigrate from Israel due to her opposition to the state’s military occupation policies. Settling in Berlin, Germany, she completed advanced clinical training in psychoanalysis and subsequently established a long-term private psychotherapy practice in Berlin-Neukölln, a district characterized by a significant Middle Eastern and Arab diaspora population.
Following the tightening of restrictions and blanket bans on pro-Palestinian demonstrations by Berlin authorities after October 2023, Hefets initiated a series of solitary peaceful protests. Standing alone at Hermannplatz with a placard reading “As a Jew and Israeli, stop the genocide in Gaza,” she was repeatedly detained by German police. Her cases were cataloged by law enforcement under alleged hate speech or antisemitic public offenses, drawing widespread international media attention to the enforcement parameters of German antisemitism laws against Jewish dissidents.
As a prominent board member and representative of Jüdische Stimme, Hefets co-led the legal opposition against attempts by the German domestic intelligence agency (BfV) and municipal authorities to classify the organization as “extremist” or to freeze its resources. She managed multiple administrative and legal challenges, culminating in a landmark judicial decision restricting state agencies from applying extremist designations to the Jewish anti-Zionist group.
In July 2025, the University of Bremen canceled room provisions and prohibited Hefets from delivering a scheduled public lecture on campus, citing the security apparatus’s stances on Jüdische Stimme. The intervention triggered a structural national debate in Germany published by outlets like Die Tageszeitung (taz) regarding academic freedom (Wissenschaftsfreiheit) and the paradox of non-Jewish state administrators regulating the speech of Jewish-Israeli intellectuals.