Hannah Pollin-Galay: Yiddish, Vibrant among the Ashes

Description: Hannah Pollin-Galay reveals the Yiddish of destruction, and its capacity to bring life and meaning.

Biography: Hannah Pollin-Galay is a scholar of East European Jewish culture, with a focus on the Holocaust. Drawing on both historical and literary methods, her work explores themes such as cultural production under catastrophic conditions, space, gender, interethnic relations and language identity. Her first book, Ecologies of Witnessing: Language, Place, and Holocaust Testimony (Yale University Press, 2018), challenges the assumption of a universal vocabulary for describing and healing human pain. Her second, Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish (U Penn Press, 2024) explores the metamorphosis of speech in ghettos and camps and won the 2024 National Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category, in memory of Ernest W. Michel. She is currently working on a new project investigating Jewish perceptions of nonhuman nature during the Holocaust. Pollin-Galay teaches and mentors broadly on Holocaust history and memory, Yiddish culture in all periods, the environmental humanities, oral history and methods of integrating literature and history. Before coming to UMass, Pollin-Galay taught at Tel Aviv University, where she served as head of the Jona Goldrich Institute for Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture.