Hannah Pollin-Galay is Senior Lecturer (U.S. equivalent: Asst. Professor) in the Department of Literature at Tel Aviv University, where she is also Incoming Director (Fall 2020) of the Goldreich Family Institute for Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture. She researches and teaches in Holocaust Studies, Yiddish literature and all the ways that these two fields intersect. The theoretical side of her work focuses on the connection between language, memory and embodiment. In the context of teaching, she has also begun exploring American Jewish literature and humor.
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.
Her new book project explores the perceived metamorphosis that took place in the Yiddish language during the Holocaust, as well as attempts to document and understand this change.
Her articles have been published in journals such as Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Prooftexts, Jewish Social Studies and Jewish Quarterly Review.
