Hannah Pollin-Galay
Professor of Judaic Studies | Director of the Institute for Holocaust, Genocide & Memory Studies
BACKGROUND
Hannah Pollin-Galay is a scholar of East European Jewish culture, with a focus on the Holocaust. Drawing on both historical and literary methods, her work explores themes such as cultural production under catastrophic conditions, space, gender, interethnic relations and language identity. Her first book, Ecologies of Witnessing: Language, Place, and Holocaust Testimony (Yale University Press, 2018), challenges the assumption of a universal vocabulary for describing and healing human pain. Her second, Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish (U Penn Press, 2024) explores the metamorphosis of speech in ghettos and camps and won the 2024 National Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category, in memory of Ernest W. Michel. She is currently working on a new project investigating Jewish perceptions of nonhuman nature during the Holocaust. Pollin-Galay teaches and mentors broadly on Holocaust history and memory, Yiddish culture in all periods, the environmental humanities, oral history and methods of integrating literature and history. Before coming to UMass, Pollin-Galay taught at Tel Aviv University, where she served as head of the Jona Goldrich Institute for Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture.
BA: Columbia College, Columbia University; Yiddish and English
MA: Tel Aviv University, Jewish History
PhD: Tel Aviv University, General History
Postdoctoral training: Columbia University, University of Pennsylvania
Books:
- Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, September 2024). Reviewed by Jewish Book Council, Yiddish Forward, Times Literary Supplement, Moment Magazine, In Geveb, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Podcast interview available at New Books Network.
- Ecologies of Witnessing: Language, Place and Holocaust Testimony (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2018). Reviewed in American Historical Review (featured review), Biography, Holocaust Studies, In Geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies, Mehkarei yerushalayim besifrut ivrit, Slavic Review, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, East European Jewish Affairs, Choice (Middletown: American Library Association), Contemporary Jewry.
Selected Articles:
- “The Verbal Inheritance of Genocide” Studies in Contemporary History, 2/2023 (published September 2024)
- “Rethinking the Dictionary: Holocaust Dictionaries in Global Perspective,” written with Betzalel Strauss, Dibur Literary Journal, 12-13 (Fall 2022) (published February 2023)
- “Orphaned Words: Yiddish, English, and Child Speech in Postwar Cinema.” In geveb, June 2020: https://ingeveb.org/articles/orphaned-words.
- "'A Rubric of Pain Words': Mapping Atrocity with Holocaust Yiddish Glossaries." Jewish Quarterly Review 110.1 (2020): 161-193.
- “The Epic Demands of Postwar Yiddish: Avrom Sutzkever’s Geheymshtot,” East European Jewish Affairs 48.3 (2018): 331-353.
- “Naming the Criminal: Lithuanian Jews Remember Perpetrators,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 30, No. 3 (Fall 2016): 506-531.
- “The History of My Voice: Yiddish at the Seams of Holocaust Video Testimony,” Prooftexts 35, No. 1 (Winter 2015): 58-97 (published Fall 2016).
- “Avrom Sutzkever's Art of Testimony: Witnessing with the Poet in the Wartime Soviet Union." Jewish Social Studies 21, no. 2 (2015): 1-34.
- “The Holocaust is a Foreign Country: Representing Geography in Lithuanian Jewish Testimony.” Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust 27, no. 1 (2013): 26-39.
Book Chapters:
- “Social Networks in Holocaust Testimony: Building Theory from the Source with Lithuanian Jewish Witnesses” Networks in the Holocaust, Eliyana Adler and Natalya Aleksiun ed. (Yad Vashem Press, Jerusalem: 2023).
- "Producing Radical Presence: Yiddish Literature in Twenty-first Century Israel" in Disseminating Jewish Literatures Ruth Fine, Natasha Gordinsky, Kader Konuk, Claudia Olk, Galili Shahar, Susanne Zepp eds., (Berlin, De Gruyter, 2020) 235-242.
- “The Small and the Good: Microhistory in the Eyes of the Witness,” In Microhistory of the Holocaust, eds. Claire Zalc and Tal Brutman (Berghan Books, 2016).
Literary Translations:
“Evening on the Steppe,” Original translation and introduction of a Yiddish poem by Benjamin Harshav. Iberzets . Published March 27, 2023.
“From the Depths,” Original translation and introduction of a long Yiddish poem by Chava Rosenfarb. In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies. Published June 7, 2022.
Selected Public Scholarship and Journalism:
- “Since when has Yiddish been considered feminine?” Haaretz, November 18, 2021 (in Hebrew).
- “Teaching Race Through Yiddish Literature in Israel.” In geveb, June 2021.
- “The words that were invented in the ghetto” Ynet October 17, 2020 (in Hebrew).
- “5 Things Progressives Need to Know About the Israeli Elections,” The Nation, September 23, 2019.
- “Look Up,” Boston Review, September 25, 2018.
- “Can a new grassroots movement shift Israeli politics?” The Nation, July 18, 2018.
- “Ironic Inversions: Rare Soviet Yiddish Songs of WWII.” In geveb (August 2015): Accessed Sept 17, 2015.
Selected Awards:
- National Jewish Book Award, Holocaust Studies Prize, in honor of Ernest W. Michel (2024)
- National Yiddish Book Center, Translation Fellow (2024-2025) Frankel Fellowship in Jewish Studies, University of Michigan Ann Arbor (Spring 2020)
- Frankel Fellowship in Jewish Studies, University of Michigan Ann Arbor (Spring 2020)
- The Barbara Heldt Prize for the Best Book Written by a Woman in Slavic Studies, Association of Women in Slavic Studies (2019)
- The Nathan Rotenshtreich Fellowship for Outstanding Doctoral Students in the Humanities (Fall 2011-Spring 2014)
- Yad Vashem Doctoral Research Prize (Spring 2013)
- Genesis Foundation Research Prize for the Study of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union (Winter 2013)
- Fulbright Fellowship to Lithuania (2004-2005)
- Honors Thesis Award, Germanic Languages Department, Columbia University (Spring 2004)
- Phi Beta Kappa, Fall Selection, Columbia University (Fall 2003)