Hana Wirth-Nesher

Last updated
Professor

Hana Wirth-Nesher
Born
Hana Wroclawski

(1948-03-02) 2 March 1948 (age 75)
Munich, Germany
EducationB.A., English, University of Pennsylvania
M.A., English and Master of philosophy, Columbia University
PhD, English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University
Occupation(s)Professor of English and American Studies
Years active2004–present
Employer Tel Aviv University
Known forScholar of American, English, and Jewish American literature
Yiddish language revival
Notable workEditor, The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature (2015)
Co-editor, The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature (2003)

Hana Wirth-Nesher (born 2 March 1948) is an American-Israeli literary scholar and university professor. She is Professor of English and American Studies at Tel Aviv University, where she is also the Samuel L. and Perry Haber Chair on the Study of the Jewish Experience in the United States, and director of the Goldreich Family Institute for Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture.

Contents

Specializing in the role of language, especially Yiddish, in expressing personal identity in Jewish American literature, she has written two books and many essays on American, English, and Jewish American writers. She is the editor of The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature (2015) and the co-editor (with Michael P. Kramer) of The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature (2003). She is the co-creator and academic co-director of the annual Yiddish summer program at Tel Aviv University.

Family and early life

She was born in Munich, Germany, to Shmuel Brostlavsky (Polish: Wroclawski), [1] a Polish Jew, and his wife, originally from Germany. [2] This was the second marriage for both her parents: her father's first wife and son had been killed by the Nazis in Sieradz, Poland, and her mother's first husband had succumbed to typhoid fever after the couple had been deported to a Siberian labor camp. [2] Her parents met in Uzbekistan and resided in Munich from 1945 to 1949 while awaiting a visa to the United States. [2] While her father never spoke about his experiences during the war, Hana later learned that he had been caught trying to cross the Russian border with his brother and his brother's son, and the Nazis had forced him to play his violin while they massacred Jews. Until his death in 1977, he was frequently hospitalized for severe depression and other mental illnesses. [2]

In 1949, at age one, Hana immigrated to the United States with her parents. [2] There, they shortened their surname to Wirth [1] and settled in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where her father worked in a factory that produced women's and children's clothing. [2] At first they lived in a non-Jewish neighborhood, where Hana was the only Jew in her school and swastikas were daubed on their house. [2] When she was 12, her family moved to a Jewish neighborhood, but were ostracized because they were Holocaust survivors. [2] As a result, Hana "never felt really American". [2] Although she later emigrated to Israel, she does not "feel Israeli" either. [2]

Education and teaching career

She earned her bachelor's degree in English with honors from the University of Pennsylvania in 1970. She then studied for her master's degree, master of philosophy, and PhD in English and comparative literature at Columbia University, completing her education in 1977. [3] She was one of the last doctoral students of American literary critic Lionel Trilling. [4] She engaged in post-doctoral research at the Uriel Weinreich Yiddish Language and Literature Program at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research from 1978 to 1979. [3]

From 1976 to 1981 she was an assistant professor of English at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, and an associate professor from 1981 to 1984. In 1984 she immigrated to Israel, where she became a senior lecturer at Tel Aviv University for the next 10 years. She became an associate professor in 1994. Concurrently, she chaired the Department of English from 1985 to 1990 and from 1993 to 1997. In 2004 she became a full professor of English and American Studies at Tel Aviv University, a position she holds to the present day. Since 1998, she is the Samuel L. and Perry Haber Chair on the Study of the Jewish Experience in the United States, and since 2005, she is the Director of the Goldreich Family Institute for Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture. [3]

She was a Fulbright visiting professor at Tel Aviv University from 1982 to 1983, and has also been a visiting professor at the University of Konstanz (Summer 1998 and 2000), Johns Hopkins University (Fall 2001), and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (February 2007). [3] She has guest lectured at numerous universities and colleges across the United States, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Northwestern, Dartmouth, University of California at Los Angeles, University of Southern California, Rutgers, New York University, and City University of New York. [3]

Literary scholar

Wirth-Nesher grew up with her father reading to her in Yiddish, her mother and grandmother speaking to her in German, and her friends conversing with her in English. [2] [1] This personal experience with language led her to learn Yiddish "for herself" and to teach American and English literature at the university level. [2] She has written many articles and essays on important writers of American and English literature, including Charles Dickens, Henry James, James Joyce, Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf, along with writers of Jewish American literature such as Sholem Aleichem, Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick, Henry Roth, Philip Roth, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. [5] [6] [7] [8]

Other activities

Wirth-Nesher was the associate editor of Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History from 1981 to 2004. She was also a consulting editor for The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization , volume 10. [9]

Yiddish summer program

In 2005, as director of the newly formed Goldreich Family Institute for Yiddish Language, she co-created an annual Yiddish summer program at Tel Aviv University in conjunction with the Beth Shalom Aleichem cultural center. [10] [11] Wirth-Nesher and Professor Avraham Novershtern of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Beth Shalom Aleichem co-direct the academic program, which offers 80 hours of intensive Yiddish language instruction. [12] The program further includes cultural studies such as workshops on Yiddish theatre, music, and poetry, and Yiddish-led tours of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, as well as evening social events. [10] [13] Between 100 and 130 students from Israel and abroad participate each year. [11]

Memberships

Wirth-Nesher has been an executive board member of the Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics at Tel Aviv University since 1992 and the Shirley and Leslie Porter School for Cultural Studies since 1990. She is also a member of these advisory boards: Porter Institute Pre-Publication Collections (since 1994), the Longfellow Institute at the Department of English and American Literature, Harvard University (since 1997), and the James Joyce Institute in Zurich (since 1993). From 1986 to 2005 she was an advisory board member of the Journal of Modern Literature . She has served on several executive committees for the Modern Language Association, and consulted on the Jewish American experience as a member of the program committee of the Museum of the Diaspora from 1997 to 2000. Since 2004, she has been a member of the binational board of the Fulbright Foundation. [9]

Personal

Her husband was born in Israel and is a child of Holocaust survivors. [2] They have three children.

Bibliography

As author

As editor

Selected chapters

Selected articles

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jewish American literature</span>

Jewish American literature holds an essential place in the literary history of the United States. It encompasses traditions of writing in English, primarily, as well as in other languages, the most important of which has been Yiddish. While critics and authors generally acknowledge the notion of a distinctive corpus and practice of writing about Jewishness in America, many writers resist being pigeonholed as "Jewish voices." Also, many nominally Jewish writers cannot be considered representative of Jewish American literature, one example being Isaac Asimov.

Gitl Schaechter-Viswanath is a Yiddish-language poet and author.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dan Miron</span> Israeli-born American literary critic and author

Dan Miron is an Israeli-born American literary critic and author.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ruth Wisse</span> Canadian scholar of Yiddish literature

Ruth Wisse is a Canadian academic and is the Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University emerita. She is a noted scholar of Yiddish literature and of Jewish history and culture.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ori Kritz</span> Professor of Hebrew language and literature

Ori Kritz is an Associate Professor and head of the Hebrew Language and Literature program at the University of Oklahoma, a part of the Judaic Studies department. She is a multilingual writer and speaker, specializing in Yiddish, Hebrew, and Jewish literature and in Jewish and Israeli humor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Karen Alkalay-Gut</span> Israeli poet, professor, and editor

Karen Alkalay-Gut is a poet, professor, and editor who lives in Israel and writes in English.

Yael S. Feldman is an American cultural historian and literary critic. She is particularly known for her work in comparative literature and feminist Hebrew literary criticism. Feldman is known for her research on Hebrew culture, history of ideas, gender and cultural studies, and psychoanalytic criticism. She is currently the Abraham I. Katsh Professor Emerita of Hebrew Culture and Education in the Judaic Studies Department at New York University and an affiliated professor of Comparative Literature and Gender Studies. She is also a fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research, and a visiting fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge.

Ken Frieden is the B.G. Rudolph Professor of Judaic Studies— and a full professor in the Departments of English, Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, and Religion — at Syracuse University. He writes about, edits, and promotes Hebrew, Yiddish, and other Jewish literature.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alexander Bogen</span> Jewish artist and partisan

Alexander Bogen was a Polish-Israeli visual artist, a decorated leader of partisans during World War II, a key player in 20th century Yiddish culture, and one of the trailblazers for art education and Artists' associations in the emerging state of Israel.

Evelyn Torton Beck has been described as "a scholar, a teacher, a feminist, and an outspoken Jew and lesbian". Until her retirement in 2002 she specialized in women's studies, Jewish women's studies and lesbian studies at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Ziva Ben-Porat is a literary theorist, writer, and editor who lives in Israel and is a professor at Tel Aviv University.

Jona Goldrich was an American real estate developer and philanthropist. Born in Lviv, he emigrated to Israel in the midst of World War II, where he served in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War and worked for a labor union. By the 1950s, he emigrated to the United States, and he became a real estate developer and investor in Los Angeles County. A Holocaust survivor, he supported Jewish causes in Israel and the United States.

Rivka Basman Ben-Hayim was a Lithuanian-born Israeli Yiddish poet and educator. She was the recipient of the Itzik Manger Prize in 1984. Basman was also awarded the Chaim Zhitlowsky Prize in 1998.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rokhl Auerbakh</span> Yiddish and Polish author (1903–1976)

Rokhl Auerbakh was an Israeli writer, essayist, historian, Holocaust scholar, and Holocaust survivor. She wrote prolifically in both Polish and Yiddish, focusing on prewar Jewish cultural life and postwar Holocaust documentation and witness testimonies. She was one of the three surviving members of the covert Oyneg Shabes group led by Emanuel Ringelblum that chronicled daily life in the Warsaw Ghetto, and she initiated the excavation of the group's buried manuscripts after the war. In Israel, she directed the Department for the Collection of Witness Testimony at Yad Vashem from 1954 to 1968.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nechama Lifshitz</span>

Nechama Lifshitz was a Yiddish language and later Hebrew language soprano and art song performer who came to be a key representative of Soviet Jewish culture in the 1950s and 1960s. Her seemingly innocent concerts were the heart and soul of Lipshitz's contribution to keeping Jewish culture and identity alive in the Communist bloc.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Benjamin Harshav</span>

Benjamin Harshav, born Hrushovski ; June 26, 1928 – April 23, 2015 was a literary theorist specialising in comparative literature, a Yiddish and Hebrew poet, and an Israeli translator and editor. He served as professor of literature at the University of Tel Aviv and as a professor of comparative literature, Hebrew language and literature, and Slavic languages and literature at Yale University. He was the founding editor of the Duke University Press publication Poetics Today. He received the EMET Prize for Art, Science and Culture in 2005 and was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The Dybbuk (<i>The Play of the Week</i>) 2nd episode of the 2nd season of The Play of the Week

"The Dybbuk" is a 1960 television production of the Russian play The Dybbuk by Sholom Ansky, which was authored between 1913 and 1916 and is considered a Yiddish classic, with Cambridge University Press calling it "probably the most performed of any Yiddish play". It was directed by Sidney Lumet for The Play of the Week from an adaptation into English by Joseph Liss. The program, starring Carol Lawrence aired on October 3, 1960.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anna Guzik (variety artist)</span> Soviet-Jewish and Israeli actress (1909–1994)

Anna Guzik was a Soviet variety artist, Russian and Yiddish theatre actress, and recording artist. Like Zinovy Shulman, Nechama Lifshitz, Sidi Tal, and Emil Gorovets, she had a career performing Jewish music and plays on the Soviet stage which was marked by various periods of censorship and official support depending on the political climate.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rakhel Feygenberg</span> Hebrew and Yiddish writer (1885–1972)

Rakhel Feygenberg, often known by her Hebrew pen name Rakhel Imri, was a Russian-born Israeli writer, playwright, translator and journalist who wrote in both Yiddish and Hebrew. She wrote and published prolifically from the early 1900s to the 1960s.

Ephraim Eliyahu Lisitzky was an American Hebrew poet, writer, and educator.

References

Notes

  1. 1 2 3 Wirth-Nesher 2009, p. 11.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 "Hana Wirth-Nesher" (PDF). United States Holocaust Memorial Museum . Retrieved 20 December 2015.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 "Prof. Hana Wirth-Nesher". University of Tel Aviv Department of English and American Studies. Archived from the original on 1 March 2015. Retrieved 20 December 2015.
  4. ↑ Klingenstein, Suzanne (1 March 2009). "Literature Scholars in the United States". Jewish Women's Archive . Retrieved 26 December 2015.
  5. ↑ "Prof. Wirth-Nesher". Congregation B'nai Israel. 2010. Archived from the original on 5 January 2016. Retrieved 27 December 2015.
  6. ↑ "Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian fiction". University of California at Santa Cruz. 1986. Retrieved 27 December 2015.
  7. ↑ Rosner, Shmuel (31 March 2013). "Q&A: Philip Roth and the Jews". The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles . Retrieved 27 December 2015.
  8. ↑ Cleland, Jaime (1 October 2006). "Call It English: The Languages of Jewish American Literature". Women's Studies Quarterly. Archived from the original on 20 February 2016. Retrieved 27 December 2015.
  9. 1 2 "Professor Hana Wirth-Nesher CV". Tel Aviv University. Retrieved 26 December 2015.
  10. 1 2 Chabin, Michele (9 September 2007). "Nostalgia Spurs Young Israelis To Take Another Look at Yiddish". The Washington Post . Archived from the original on 20 February 2016. Retrieved 26 December 2015.
  11. 1 2 Maltz, Judy (21 December 2012). "Yiddish Is Dead. Long Live Yiddish!". Haaretz . Retrieved 26 December 2015.
  12. ↑ Rotem, Tamar (16 July 2009). "Young Eastern Europeans Flock to Tel Aviv's 'Yiddish Summer Camp'". Haaretz. Retrieved 26 December 2015.
  13. ↑ Greene, Adinah (26 July 2006). "TA University Wraps Up Summer Yiddish Program". The Jerusalem Post . Retrieved 26 December 2015.

Sources

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.