Hana Wirth-Nesher (Hebrew: חנה וירת-נשר; born 2 March 1948) is an American-Israeli literary scholar and university professor.
[2] 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.
[2] There, they shortened their surname to Wirth[1] and settled in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where her father worked in a factory that produced women's and children's clothing.
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.
[2] She 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.
[10][11] 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.
[12] 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.