Welcome Dr. Pollin-Galay, Rosenberg Senior Scholar

Please join us in welcoming Dr. Hannah Pollin-Galay, as a Rosenberg Senior Scholar, thanks to funding from the Claims Conference.

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 all the ways that these two fields intersect. Her first book, Ecologies of Witnessing: Language, Place and Holocaust Testimony (Yale 2018) asks how place and language shape Holocaust survivor testimony. Her second book, Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish (U Penn Press, 2024), explores the thousands of Yiddish words that were invented or reinvented during the Holocaust, and why they served as a potent means of testimony. Pollin-Galay has published articles in journals such as Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Jewish Quarterly Review and Jewish Social Studies, among others. She is currently working on a translation project, focused on Yiddish ecopoems of the Holocaust.

As Senior Scholar at the Fortunoff Archive, Pollin-Galay will produce an annotated critical edition of a testimony for our Critical Edition Series as part of our Claims Conference Grant Unlocking Survivor Testimony: A Program to Produce Critical Annotated Editions of Non-English Holocaust Testimonies.