Professor Yosefa Loshitzky is an internationally renowned British-Jewish (Israeli-born) film and media scholar and cultural critic. She is currently a Professorial Research Associate at SOAS, University of London, having previously served as a Professor of Communication, Culture, and Media Studies at the University of East London.
A pioneer in studying migration and “Otherness,” her work Screening Strangers analyzes how media shapes the image of refugees to serve exclusionary policies in “Fortress Europe.” She explores the complex use of Holocaust memory in contemporary politics, specifically how it intersects with global justice movements and anti-colonial struggles. Her book Identity Politics on the Israeli Screen is a classic, examining how Israeli cinema constructs, reinforces, or challenges national myths.
As a media expert, she exposes how Western media employs specific visual languages to “dehumanize” Palestinians, noting that visual erasure often precedes physical violence. As a member of Jewish Voice for Labour, she uses her academic standing to combat censorship and opposes the political conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism. Throughout the recent years of crisis, she has been a prominent academic voice for the BDS movement, advocating for academic accountability in the face of unjust occupation policies.
In her article, Gaza as a Global Metaphor for Reclaiming Justice, Loshitzky argues:
“Gaza as a metaphor opens a space for reading how the struggles of native Indigenous peoples and oppressed people all over the globe intertwine and how communities and cultures can and should resist their erasure. ……Gaza as a metaphor represents, perhaps, the most extreme contemporary attempt to dehumanise a whole group of people turning them, in the perceptive words of Dr Mads Gilbert, the Norwegian doctor who volunteered to help al-Shifa Hospital during the recent attacks, into ‘untermenschen’, the word used by the Nazis to designate what they regarded as undesired sub-humans (Jews, Roma, Blacks, etc) who deserve to be exterminated.”