Hannah Pollin-Galay (University of Massachusetts) Presents: What Did People Talk About in the Warsaw Ghetto? Yiddish Words of the Holocaust

The Holocaust radically altered the way its victims–especially Yiddish speakers–spoke and communicated. Finding their prewar language incapable of describing the imprisonment, death, and dehumanization of the Shoah, prisoners added or reinvented thousands of Yiddish words and phrases to describe their new reality. These crass, witty, and sometimes beautiful Yiddish words – Khurbn Yiddish, or “Yiddish of the Holocaust” – puzzled and intrigued the East European Jews who were experiencing the metamorphosis of their own tongue. This talk will focus on the experience of language in the Warsaw ghetto, looking at the new Yiddish words invented, how people debated their meanings, and why they felt it was so important to remember them. No knowledge of Yiddish required!

Bio: Hannah Pollin-Galay is Pen Tishkach Chair of Holocaust Studies, the Director of the Institute for Holocaust, Genocide and Memory Studies and Professor of Jewish Studies and History at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her work explores East European Jewish Holocaust experience, focusing on cultural production, space, gender, interethnic relations and language identity. She is the author of Ecologies of Witnessing: Language, Place and Holocaust Testimony (Yale University Press, 2018) and Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish (UPenn Press, 2024), which won the 2024 National Jewish Book Award. Her articles have appeared in scholarly venues such as Jewish Quarterly Review and Holocaust and Genocide Studies, as well as popular venues such as The Nation, Boston Review and In Geveb.

Cosponsors: Center for Austrian Studies, Center for German and European Studies, Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies, Department of German, Nordic, Slavic & Dutch, Department of History, Holocaust and Genocide Studies Program at the University of St. Thomas, Jay Phillips Center for Interreligious Studies, University of St. Thomas