Yiddish Hire at Tel Aviv University

Dr. Hannah Pollin-Galay will join the Literature Department of Tel Aviv University in 2018 as Senior Lecturer in Literature with specialization in Yiddish literature and culture.

Dr. Pollin-Galay is an interdisciplinary scholar of Holocaust and Memory Studies. Currently a visiting professor at U-Mass Amherst, Dr. Pollin Galay has held positions at U-Penn, the United States Holocaust Museum, and Columbia University and is the recipient of many fellowships and prizes, including the Nathan Rotenshtreich Fellowship for Outstanding Doctoral Students in the Humanities at Tel Aviv University, a Fulbright Fellowship, and the Yad Vashem Doctoral Research Prize.

Having completed her doctorate at Tel Aviv University under the advisement of Prof. Igal Halfin and Prof. David Roskies, Dr. Pollin-Gallay will return in the spring semester of 2018 in this new role. Dr. Pollin-Galay sits on the editorial board of In Geveb, An Online, Interdisciplinary Journal of Yiddish Studies and teaches, mentors and consults at the National Yiddish Book Center. In addition to her many academic articles and lectures, as a public scholar, Dr. Pollin-Galay has designed pedagogical materials, including films, plays and classroom texts, which aim to bring Yiddish culture to young learners.

Her book, Ecologies of Witnessing: Language, Place and Holocaust Testimony is forthcoming with Yale University Press in the fall of 2018. Here, Dr. Pollin-Galay compares oral narratives across linguistic and geographic boundaries. She examines how the English, Hebrew and Yiddish languages; North American, Israeli and East European landscapes all offer Holocaust witnesses different resources for remembering violence.

The Naomi Foundation is proud to have partnered with Tel Aviv University to create this position to perpetuate and propel the advanced study of Yiddish at Tel Aviv University. The foundation wishes Dr. Pollin-Galay congratulations, b’hatzlacha, and zol zayn mit mazel!