Program Faculty and Staff

Justin Cammy is a literary and cultural historian of Yiddish at Smith College. He is chair of both the Program in Jewish Studies and the Program in World Literatures, and also holds appointments in Middle East Studies, Russian and East European Studies, and Translation Studies. Cammy’s critical edition and translation of Abraham Sutzkever’s From the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremberg (McGill-Queen’s University Press) received the 2022 Leviant Prize in Yiddish Studies from the Modern Language Association. His most recent writing includes an essay on “Sutzkever in Africa” which anchors a new translation of the Yiddish poetic cycle Elephants at Night, and an afterword to Levi Shalit’s memoir of the Siauliai Ghetto.  

Samuel  Spinner is Assistant Professor and Zelda and Myer Tandetnik Chair in Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture at Johns Hopkins University. His research and teaching encompass Yiddish and German-Jewish literature and culture from the 19th century to the present. His interests include modernism; the history of anthropology; museum studies; visual culture; and Holocaust studies. His book Jewish Primitivism was published by Stanford University Press in July 2021. His next book, tentatively titled Monuments of Words: Books and Holocaust Memory, explores the aesthetics of monumentality in literature in relation to Holocaust representation and remembrance. 

Hannah Polin-Gallay is Senior Lecturer  in the Department of Literature at Tel Aviv University, where she is also Director of the Goldreich Family Institute for Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture. She researches and teaches in Holocaust Studies, Yiddish literature and all the ways that these two fields intersect.  Her first book, Ecologies of Witnessing: Language, Place and Holocaust Testimony (Yale University Press, 2018), asks how people remember differently in different languages and geographic contexts. It focuses on the different memory worlds of Yiddish, Hebrew and English and is based on oral narratives. Her newest book, Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024), examines how Yiddish changed to express and memorialize the trauma of the Holocaust.

Madeleine (Mindl) Cohen is the Academic Director of the Yiddish Book Center. Mindl has a PhD in Comparative Literature with an emphasis in Jewish Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. She has worked as the Editor-in-Chief for In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies and taught Yiddish language at Harvard University. Mindl also teaches as a visiting lecturer in Jewish Studies at Mount Holyoke College.