Raya Morag (Born 1954 in Jerusalem, Israel) is a Professor of cinema studies at the Department of Communications and Journalism, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Her research and publications deal with post-traumatic cinema and ethics.

Morag is the originator of the “perpetrator trauma” paradigm and is of the founders of the new discourse in trauma studies, which situates the perpetrator at its center.

Morag served as the Head of the Smart Communications Institute between 2014-2019.

Between 2006-2014, Morag served as an Artistic Director of the Documentary Film Committee at the Rabinovich Fund for the Arts, Tel-Aviv. The Rabinovich Fund contributes considerable support to Israeli films.

Since 2008, Morag writes a cinema column in Haaretz, Literature and Culture.

Research Interests

• Post-traumatic cinema and ethics
• Cinema, war, terror, genocide, femininity and masculinity
• Perpetrator trauma
• Documentary cinema
• Perpetrator Cinema
• The perpetrator figure and societal trauma in world cinema
• Corporeal-feminist film critique

Her research analyzes various corpora: New German Cinema; Vietnam War Films; Israeli and Palestinian second- Intifada cinema; New Cambodian Cinema; and post-Cultural Revolution Chinese cinema.

Selected Publications

• Morag, Raya (2020) Perpetrator Cinema. Confronting Genocide in Cambodian Documentary, New York: Columbia University Press. 283 pages.
• Morag, Raya (2017) Perpetrator Trauma and Israeli Intifada Cinema, Trans. Marianna Bar, Tel Aviv: Resling. (in Hebrew). 331 pages.
• Morag, Raya (2013) Waltzing with Bashir: Perpetrator Trauma and Cinema, London & New York: I.B. Tauris. 275 pages.
• Morag, Raya (2011) Defeated Male: War, Trauma, and Cinema, Koebner Series, Jerusalem and Resling, Tel Aviv. (in Hebrew). 310 pages.
• Morag, Raya (2009) Defeated Masculinity: Post-Traumatic Cinema in the Aftermath of War, Brussels: Peter Lang. 294 pages.
• Morag, Raya (2012) (ed.) Special issue: Israeli documentary cinema, Studies in Documentary Film 6.3 April. 100 pages.
• Morag, Raya (2021) “Big Perpetrator Cambodian Cinema, The Documentary Duel, and Moral Resentment,” Screen 62.1: 37-58. . 
• Morag, Raya (2020) “Post-Cultural Revolution Chinese Cinema of Betrayal: The Figure of the Collaborator and the Doubling Paradigm,” Continuum Journal of Media & Cultural Studies: 1-20. 
• Morag, Raya (2020) “The New Post-Khmer Rouge Women’s Cinema, the Horrific Intimacy of Autogenocide, and the Ethics of Un-forgiveness,” Feminist Media Studies.  
• Morag, Raya (2020) “Gendered Genocide: New Cambodian Cinema and the Case of Forced Marriage and Rape,” Camera Obscura (103) 35.1: 76-107. 
• Morag, Raya (2018) “On the Definition of the Perpetrator: From the Twentieth to the Twenty-First Century,” Journal of Perpetrator Research 2.1: 13-19.
• Morag, Raya (2017) “Blood Relations and Nonconsensual Ethics: Israeli Intifada Documentaries,” Post Script 36.2-3: 75-85.
• Morag, Raya (2012) Editorial: “Radical Contextuality: Major Trends in Israeli Documentary Second Intifada Cinema,” Studies in Documentary Film 6.3 April: 253-272.
• Morag, Raya (2012) “Perpetrator Trauma and Current Israeli Documentary Cinema,” Camera Obscura (80) 27.2: 93-133. 
• Morag, Raya (2011) “Post-Trauma, Post Queer: The Hitlerian Imago and the New German Cinema,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 9.4 October: 472-492.

Awards and Prizes

• ISF Grant (2018-2022) for the research project “Cinema of Complicity and the Bystander: 1945-2017."
• ISF Grant (2013-2017) for the research project "The Perpetrator Figure and Societal Trauma in Cinema."
• The Hebrew University Rector Prize (2014), for excellence in research, teaching, and contribution to university academic life.