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Hana Wirth-Nesher is the Founding Director of the Goldreich Family Institute for Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture at Tel Aviv University (2005-2020). She is Professor Emerita in the Department of English and American Studies, and former Samuel L. and Perry Haber Chair on the Study of the Jewish Experience in the United States. After the completion of her doctorate at Columbia University, she was a Fellow of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.
Professor Wirth-Nesher’s publications are in the areas of twentieth century American and British literature, modernism, Jewish American writing, and Yiddish studies. She is the author of City Codes: Reading the Modern Urban Novel (Cambridge) and Call It English: The Languages of Jewish American Literature (Princeton) , the guest editor of a special issue of Poetics Today on Modern Yiddish Literary Studies, and the editor of What is Jewish Literature? (Jewish Publication Society), The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature (with Michael Kramer), New Essays on Call It Sleep (Cambridge), and most recently The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature. Her essays cover a wide range of authors, from Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce to Henry Roth, Israel Zangwill, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, and Sholem Aleichem. For a fuller list of publications, see my TAU homepage.
She has been a Fellow at the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, a Harry Starr Fellow at the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University, and Visiting Professor at the Johns Hopkins University and the University of Konstanz.
Her current research focuses on the representation of multilingualism and voice in Jewish American writing in English and in Yiddish.
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Hannah Pollin-Galay became interested in Yiddish at the age of 16, when she began volunteering as a receptionist at the National Yiddish Book Center in Massachusetts. She then pursued this interest by completing a BA in Yiddish Studies at Columbia University (2000-2004), conducting oral histories in Yiddish in Lithuania (2004-2005), and launching a children’s Yiddish language program in Los Angeles, California (2005-2007). After moving to Israel in 2007, Pollin-Galay ran a Yiddish educational program through the Tel Nordau elementary school and Leyvik House Union for Yiddish Writers and Journalists in Tel Aviv (2007-2009). Following these pedagogical projects, she returned to academia in 2008 to complete her MA and PhD at Tel Aviv University. You can read more about her research interests, including her recent book on Holocaust testimony and language, through her faculty webpage here.
As director of the Interuniversity MA Program in Yiddish Studies at the Tel Aviv University campus and as Academic Director of the International Summer Program in Yiddish Studies, Pollin-Galay is dedicated to creating a warm intellectual community in which Yiddish literature can thrive. Her BA and MA courses related to Yiddish include:
BA
The Other Culture: Chapters in the History of Yiddish Culture
A Woman’s Language? Gender and Sexuality in Yiddish Literature
Jewish Humor: Literature, Cinema and Social Critique
The Holocaust in American Culture
Human Stains: Jewish American Literature
MA
Jewish Writing and Theories of Literature
Language and Violence: Debates in the Study of Language and the Holocaust
A World Walking on Glass: Modern Yiddish Poetry
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 Prof. Justin Cammy – Smith College
Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and of World Literatures.
Fellow of the Goldreich Institute since 2016.
On-Site Summer Director of the International Yiddish Summer Program.
Justin Cammy holds a Ph.D. in Yiddish Studies from Harvard University. He is Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and World Literatures at Smith College in Massachusetts (USA). In addition to teaching at Smith College, he has been a fellow at the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan for its project on "Yiddish Matters" (2020), translation fellow at the Yiddish Book Center (2018-19), research fellow at the Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem (2014), Visiting Scholar at the Goldreich Institute for Yiddish at Tel Aviv University (2013-14), and Mellon Senior Scholar on the Holocaust at UCLA (2009). He has offered lectures on Yiddish literature and culture at the Yiddish summer program at Tel Aviv University since 2007, and is also a regular faculty member at the Steiner Summer Yiddish Program at the Yiddish Book Center. In 2006 Justin Cammy was awarded Smith College’s Sherrerd Prize for Distinguished Teaching.
His translation of Avrom Sutzkever’s memoir of the Vilna Ghetto is forthcoming.
For more information on his work see this link.
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 Dr. Zehavit Stern - Teaching Associate
Zehavit Stern is a researcher of Yiddish theatre and film, and Hebrew and Yiddish literature and folklore. She currently teaches at the Tisch School of Film and Television and the Goldreich Institute at Tel Aviv University and at the Department of Theater Studies at the Hebrew University. In the years 2011–2015 she was a research fellow at the University of Oxford. She holds an MA in Yiddish culture from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. She has published and lectured extensively on Eastern European Jewish culture. Among her publications are “The Maternal Drag: Motherhood as Performance in Yiddish Film Melodrama,” in Choosing Yiddish: New Frontiers of Language and Culture, and “On Dubbing the Dead: The Dybbuk 1937-1917,” in TDR/The Drama Review (vol. 63:2, 2019). Her forthcoming book, titled The Birth of Theatre from the Spirit of Folk Performance: Eastern European Jewish Culture and the Invention of a National Dramatic Heritage examines the emergence of the narrative that views the Purim-shpil and other formerly rejected folkish expressions as the origins of Jewish theater.
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 Mr. Daniel Birnbaum - Teaching Associate
Daniel Birnbaum holds a B.A. in Liberal Arts from Oberlin College and an M.A. in Comparative Literature from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Mr. Birnbaum has been a Yiddish instructor at Tel Aviv University since 2007, teaching both in the framework of the International Summer Program as well as the School of Languages during the academic year. He developed an original Yiddish textbook for first and second year students, as well as an online Yiddish curriculum. His MA thesis on the literary aspects of Mendele's Fishke the Lame won an award of distinction in Yiddish scholarship from Beit Shalom Aleichem.[WU2]
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