Hannah Pollin-Galay is Associate Professor in the Department of Literature at Tel Aviv University, where she is also Head of the Jona Goldrich Institute for Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture. Pollin-Galay researches and teaches primarily in the fields of Yiddish literature and Holocaust Studies. Her first book, Ecologies of Witnessing: Language, Place and Holocaust Testimony (Yale University Press, 2018), asks how people remember differently in different languages and geographic contexts. It focuses on the different memory worlds of Yiddish, Hebrew and English and is based on oral narratives and her second, Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish (U Penn Press, 2024) asks how the Holocaust changed the Yiddish language. She is currently working on a project exploring the fraught connections between Jews and non-human nature, across time and space. In addition to being a 2024-2025 Senior Scholar at the Fortunoff Archive for Holocaust Testimony at Yale University, Pollin-Galay is also a Yiddish Book Center Translation Fellow, where she is translating Yiddish ecopoetry from the Holocaust.
Her articles have been published in journals such as Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Prooftexts, Jewish Social Studies and Jewish Quarterly Review.
