Penn Press is thrilled to announce that Hannah Pollin-Galay’s 2024 book Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish recently won a National Jewish Book Award from the Jewish Book Council. The National Jewish Book Awards began in 1950. Recognizing authors of books of exceptional literary achievement in a variety of Judaic subjects, it is the longest-running North American awards program of its kind. Occupied Words won the award in the Holocaust section, endowed in memory of Ernest W. Michel.
Hannah Pollin-Galay is Associate Professor of Yiddish and Holocaust Studies in the Department of Literature at Tel Aviv University and is the author of one previous book, 2018’s Ecologies of Witnessing: Language, Place, and Holocaust Testimony published by Yale University Press. In Occupied Words, she examines how the Holocaust radically altered the way many East European Jews spoke Yiddish, specifically exploring how Yiddish words created during the Shoah, or Khurbn Yiddish, operated as a form of Holocaust memory and as a testament to the sensation of speech under genocidal conditions.
Pollin-Galay and other winners were recognized at the 74th National Jewish Book Award Celebration on March 12, 2025. The judges’ remarks on Occupied Words were as follows:
How did Yiddish-speaking victims and survivors of the Holocaust understand and respond to the Nazi onslaught through the prism of their mameloshn, and how did Yiddish itself respond to the terror and trauma of its speakers’ lived experience?
In this shattering, landmark study of “What the Holocaust did to Yiddish,” Hannah Pollin-Galay brilliantly excavates what she calls “Khurb Yiddish” from the works of diarists and memoirists, poets, novelists, librettists and even self-appointed lexicographers immediately after the war to show us how new words were forged in extremity and how old words were infused with new and monstrous meaning.
Profoundly original, meticulously researched, and beautifully written, Occupied Words stands alone in its unique contribution to Yiddish and Holocaust Studies, revealing over three thousand new Yiddish words with excruciating consequences for our understanding of how Yiddish shaped the experiences of Holocaust victims then—and how it shapes our memory and understanding of the Holocaust now, eighty years later.
Please join Penn Press in extending our warmest congratulations to Hannah Pollin-Galay!
