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Yiddish Book Center, Talk

December 15 @ 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm EST

How the Holocaust Changed the Yiddish Language, with Hannah Pollin-Galay

During and immediately after World War II, Eastern European Jews perceived a radical transformation in the Yiddish language. This perception inspired some intellectuals to create dictionaries and glossaries that deciphered the metamorphosis of Yiddish words. Others incorporated this new strain of Yiddish into their poetry and prose. In this conversation, Hannah Pollin-Galay will explore Khurbn Yiddish (Yiddish of the Holocaust) as a form of Holocaust memory. Following the conversation there will be a book signing.

This event is presented at the Yiddish Book Center and streamed live via Zoom.

About the Speaker

Woman with short brown hair and glasses smiling while posing in front of bookshelf. She is wearing a light blue dress shirt.

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. In that role, she directs projects such as the International Yiddish summer program and Iberzetsan online journal for Yiddish-Hebrew literary translation. 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. She is currently working on a project exploring the fraught connections between Jews and nature, across time and space.

Details

Date:
December 15
Time:
2:00 pm - 3:00 pm EST
Website:
https://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/events

Venue

Yiddish Book Center
1021 West Street
Amherst, MA 01002
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Phone
(413) 256.4900
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