Professor Hannah Pollin-Galay

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The new names and faces in the College of Humanities and Fine Arts this fall aren’t just those belonging to our students. We are proud to welcome ten new faculty members across seven different departments of the college, as well as five new folks in the UMass Amherst Writing Program. 
Over the course of the semester, we’re introducing you to these faculty members and to the work they do.

Last year, Professor Hannah Pollin-Galay published her book, Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish, which looked at how Yiddish speakers invented and repurposed words and phrases to help them express and memorialize the horrors of their experiences during the Holocaust. 
Praising the book in Moments Magazine, Dr. Miriam Isaacs writes, “This excellent and important volume is a tribute to those who devoted themselves to preserving, recording and reinvigorating the language of the victims, who passionately threw themselves into their work of trying to recreate a collective culture in Yiddish and who chose to assert the power of Yiddish through creative work in that language.”
Pollin-Galay’s scholarship about the words used to record the experiences of Jews during the Holocaust makes her appointment as the Pen Tishkach Chair of Holocaust Studies and director of the Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies both apt and resonant: “Pen Tishkach” is Hebrew for “lest you forget.”
We asked Pollin-Galay to tell us more about the work that has brought her to UMass and what she is looking forward to in her time here.

Question:  What is your academic background? 
 Pollin-Galay: I received my BA from Columbia College, Columbia University, in Yiddish Studies and English. My MA and PhD are from Tel Aviv University, in History.

Question:  What is your teaching experience? 
 Pollin-Galay: For the past seven years, I have taught courses on Yiddish culture and the Holocaust at Tel Aviv University. In recent years, I also started to teach on the climate crisis and the Green Humanities (in which environmental issues are examined not only through the expected scientific lens, but also for their cultural, social, and historical contexts – ed.). 

Question: Have you worked in other professions that have shaped your approach to teaching and learning? 
 Pollin-Galay: I was an elementary and high school teacher for several years before going to graduate school. Teaching children and teenagers requires a great deal of creativity and interpersonal skills. I do try to take that into my approach to teaching at the university level. 

Question: What are you passionate about when it comes to this work? 
 Pollin-Galay: I love mentoring students one-on-one, walking them through all the challenging phases of thinking and writing, but I also love big classes. In today's digital world, it's somewhat rare to have a substantial group of people gathered under one roof, thinking and talking together. 

Question: Have you published, exhibited, or conducted research? Please share a bit about it, and feel free to include any relevant links. 
 Pollin-Galay: My first book, Ecologies of Witnessing: Language, Place and Holocaust Testimony (Yale UP, 2018) investigated how language and geopolitical context inform the memories of individual Holocaust survivors, focusing on survivors from Lithuania as a test case. 
My second book, Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish (U Penn Press, 2024), asks how the Holocaust changed the Yiddish language. It was awarded a National Jewish Book Award in the category of Holocaust.  

Question: What are you most looking forward to at UMass? 
 Pollin-Galay: I am looking forward to bringing thoughtful and original projects related to Holocaust and genocide studies to the diverse UMass community. I see my work as Director of the Institute for Holocaust, Genocide and Memory Studies as a great honor and a big responsibility. 

Question: How do you hope to engage with the HFA community? 
 Pollin-Galay: I hope to partner with as many HFA faculty members as possible in creating events and research initiatives related to the Holocaust.