Hana Wirth-Nesher
Hana Wirth-Nesher 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.
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 and the co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature. 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, a Polish Jew, and his wife, originally from Germany. 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. Her parents met in Uzbekistan and resided in Munich from 1945 to 1949 while awaiting a visa to the United States. 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.In 1949, at age one, Hana immigrated to the United States with her parents. There, they shortened their surname to Wirth and settled in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where her father worked in a factory that produced women's and children's clothing. 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. When she was 12, her family moved to a Jewish neighborhood, but were ostracized because they were Holocaust survivors. As a result, Hana "never felt really American". Although she later emigrated to Israel, she does not "feel Israeli" either.
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. She was one of the last doctoral students of American literary critic Lionel Trilling. 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.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.
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, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 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.