About
The Jona Goldrich Institute for Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture is dedicated to preserving and expanding knowledge of the Yiddish language through teaching, research and summer immersion programs. Drawing from the rich, boundary-crossing tradition of Yiddish culture, the Institute seeks to advance Yiddish Studies through innovation and interdisciplinary. Since its establishment in 2005, the Institute has become a hub of Yiddish studies nationally and internationally, sponsoring courses, offering scholarships, hosting guest lecturers, and initiating projects in cooperation with other institutions in Israel and abroad. Our flagship programs include an inter university MA Program in Yiddish Studies, in partnership with Hebrew University, and the International Yiddish Summer Program. The institute has, also founded an online magazine called Iberzets who is operated by our finest MA and Ph.D. students.
Staff:
Head of the institute Professor Hannah Pollin-Galay
Summer program academic director Dr. Rachel Wamsley
Post doc fellow Dr. Yaakov Herskovitz
Administrative director Vered Sagie
Please note that the Jona Goldrich post -doc fellow position for 2025-2027 is now open. Applications can be submitted until March 1st 2025
Visiting Scholars:
Dr.Corina L. Petrescu- Professor of German in the Department of Modern Languages at The University of Mississippi, USA, where she has been teaching since 2008. She obtained her Ph. D. in German Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2006). She is an accredited researcher with the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives (CNSAS) in Romania. Over the years, her research has been supported by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the Fulbright Commission.
Her entire scholarship has developed from her interest in subversion under authoritarian regimes. In her current research, she focuses on the life story and creative output of Yankev Shternberg (1890-1973), an Ashkenazi poet, theatrical director, and cultural analyst of the twentieth century. Her research is dedicated to Shternberg the promoter of Yiddish theater and she shows how his ability to function cross-culturally allowed him to subvert the status quo and leave his mark on more than one culture. By analyzing Shternberg’s theoretical and applied approach to avant-garde theater in interwar Bucharest, Romania, she presents him as a cultural mediator at a time of powerful social and political conflicts in Eastern Europe.
She conducted part of her research for this project to date as a Fulbright Global Scholar at TAU’s Jona Goldrich Institute for Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture in 2023 (April-July). While looking for archival materials on Shternberg in the archives of the Israeli Center for the Documentation of the Performing Arts at TAU and the Hebrew Writers Association at Beit Ariela, she helped index their multi-language collections pertaining to Shternberg’s collaborators Israil Bercovici and Moyshe Altman.
Na'amit Sturm Nagel- Doctoral candidate in the English department at UC-Irvine. Her research focuses on women writing Jewish American Literature during second-wave feminism and the identity politics of the late twentieth century. Her dissertation project examines the elements of life-writing in the works of Lore Segal, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley and Eva Hoffman, to think about why all these female writers depict an ambivalent relationship to the limits of the fictional form and how they utilize humor to navigate this ambivalence.
