During the Holocaust, ghetto and camp prisoners could not stop thinking—and talking—about the body. Hunger, disease, slave labor and torture all made prisoners hyperaware of their physical selves. Judging by the case of Yiddish, this new relationship to the body changed the way that language worked from the victims’ perspective.

Khurbn Yiddish (Yiddish of the Holocaust) is saturated with new terms for excrement, for hunger and, most prominently, for sex. This lecture will explore new Holocaust-era Yiddish words for sex and sexual violence, uncovering stories of both desire and abuse. These terms illuminate the importance of new historical realities such as sex barter and loss of libido, as well as long-standing ideas about the Jewish female body.

About the Speakers

Hannah Pollin-Galay is Professor of Yiddish and Holocaust Studies in the Department of Literature at Tel Aviv University. She is the author of Ecologies of Witnessing: Language, Place and Holocaust Testimony (Yale University Press, 2018) and the forthcoming Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish, (University of Pennsylvania Press, September 2024).

Zoë Waxman is Professor of Holocaust History at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Writing the Holocaust: memory, testimony, representation (2006), Anne Frank (2015), and Women in the Holocaust: A Feminist History (2017), as well as numerous articles relating to the Holocaust and genocide.

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This talk is made possible thanks to the support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council.