The Destruction of Yiddish or Destruction-Yiddish

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, and has recently begun to foray into the field of ecocriticism. Her first book, Ecologies of Witnessing: Language, Place and Holocaust Testimony came out with Yale University Press in 2018 and her second, Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish (U Penn Press, 2024) asks how the Holocaust changed the Yiddish language. Exploring themes such as sexuality, property and multilingual encounters, this book reveals the profound shifts that occurred within Yiddish in camps and ghettos. She is also currently working on a new project exploring the fraught connections between Jews and nature, across time and space. As part of it, she is translating a series of Yiddish poems by Chava Rosenfarb, which tie together the topics of nature, Holocaust and the Yiddish language.