Hana Wirth-Nesher

Hana Wirth-Nesher (Hebrew: חנה וירת-נשר; 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.

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), 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. 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.

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.

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. 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. 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. Between 100 and 130 students from Israel and abroad participate each year.

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.

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