Hilla is a Dutch-Israeli political sociologist and Lecturer in Social Sciences at Amsterdam University College (AUC) and affiliated with research centers at the University of Amsterdam. She earned her MA degree at the University of Chicago and completed her Ph.D. in Sociology at the New School for Social Research in New York, focusing her doctoral research on Israel’s regime of separation. For over 20 years she studied the evolution of Israeli rule in the Palestinian Occupied Territories, contributing to understanding complex phenomena such as surveillance and bureaucratic control, regimes of separation, the rise of the New Right, and the relation between the normative and the prerogative in Dual States and hybrid regimes.
Her academic inquiry explores democratic theory and memory politics too, especially European discourses on antisemitism. Her forthcoming monograph, Transitaires (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2027), investigates the forgotten passage of North African Jews in Europe in the 1950s, drawing from research supported by fellowships at IMÉRA, Sciences Po Aix, and NYU’s Remarque Institute. An active public intellectual and institutional reformer, she co-founded Academia for Equality, an organization dedicated to the struggle against the complicity of Israeli academia with the occupation, war, apartheid, and striving for academic freedom, against the silencing of critical voices in Israel and the wider academic world, and gate48, a platform for critical voices in the Netherlands. She frequently provides commentary on Middle Eastern geopolitics, authoritarian governance, and social justice movements.