22 Facts About Hana Wirth-Nesher

Hana Wirth-Nesher was born on 2 March 1948 and is an American-Israeli literary scholar and university professor.

Hana Wirth-Nesher is Professor of English and American Studies at Tel Aviv University, where she is 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.

Hana Wirth-Nesher is the editor of The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature and the co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature.

Hana Wirth-Nesher is the co-creator and academic co-director of the annual Yiddish summer program at Tel Aviv University.

Hana Wirth-Nesher was born in Munich, Germany, to Shmuel Brostlavsky, a Polish Jew, and his wife, originally from Germany.

Hana Wirth-Nesher's parents met in Uzbekistan and resided in Munich from 1945 to 1949 while awaiting a visa to the United States.

In 1949, at age one, Hana Wirth-Nesher immigrated to the United States with her parents.

At first they lived in a non-Jewish neighborhood, where Hana Wirth-Nesher was the only Jew in her school and swastikas were daubed on their house.

Hana Wirth-Nesher earned her bachelor's degree in English with honors from the University of Pennsylvania in 1970.

Hana Wirth-Nesher 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.

Hana Wirth-Nesher was one of the last doctoral students of American literary critic Lionel Trilling.

Hana Wirth-Nesher 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.

Hana Wirth-Nesher was a Fulbright visiting professor at Tel Aviv University from 1982 to 1983, and has been a visiting professor at the University of Konstanz, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Hana Wirth-Nesher 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.

Hana 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.

Hana Wirth-Nesher 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.

Hana Wirth-Nesher was the associate editor of Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History from 1981 to 2004.

Hana Wirth-Nesher was a consulting editor for The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, volume 10.

Hana 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.

Hana Wirth-Nesher is a member of these advisory boards: Porter Institute Pre-Publication Collections, the Longfellow Institute at the Department of English and American Literature, Harvard University, and the James Joyce Institute in Zurich.

Hana Wirth-Nesher 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.

Hana Wirth-Nesher's husband was born in Israel and is a child of Holocaust survivors.