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Janet Hadda, Yiddish professor, author and psychoanalyst, 69

Dr. Janet Ruth Hadda died in Los Angeles of metastatic cancer on June 23 at the age of 69.
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July 8, 2015

Dr. Janet Ruth Hadda died in Los Angeles of metastatic cancer on June 23 at the age of 69. 

Hadda was born Dec. 23, 1945, the daughter of refugees from Nazi Germany, George and Annemarie (Kohn) Hadda. Her grandfather, Siegmund Hadda, was the last director of the Jewish Hospital in Breslau (Wroclaw). She and her parents came to New York in 1948 to join her grandparents, who had survived Theresienstadt. Devastated by the Nazi regime and the Shoah, her parents wanted no part of being Jewish, nor would they speak German, even privately. Her grandfather, however, read her Heinrich Heine and told her that she would be a professor of German at Columbia. Her innovative way of challenging both parents and grandparents was to complete her doctorate in German from Columbia, while working at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research to develop her specialty in Yiddish, a language disdained by many German Jews. She also held degrees from the universities of Vermont and Cornell.

Moving to UCLA in 1973 to start its Yiddish program, she later became the first tenured professor of Yiddish in the U.S., publishing academic and popular articles in English, Yiddish, Hebrew, French and German. She initially developed a specialty in American-Yiddish poetry, particularly the works of Yankev Glatshteyn, the subject of her first book and numerous articles.

Hadda began psychoanalytic training in 1982 to improve her understanding of modernist Yiddish poetry. Increasingly drawn into clinical practice, she became a training and supervising analyst at the New Center for Psychoanalysis and the Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, as well as a member of the Certification Committee of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Her second book, “Passionate Women, Passive Men” (1988), explored psychological issues around suicide in Yiddish literature. Her psychoanalytic insights also contributed to her treatments of Isaac Bashevis Singer (“Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Life”) and of Allen Ginsberg, whose stay in the New York State Psychiatric Institute from 1949 to 1950, she argued in a much-admired piece in American Imago, allowed him to emerge as a great poet.

She is survived by her husband, neuroscientist Allan J. Tobin, whom she married in 1981 and with whom she explored the intersections of mind and brain. Other survivors include her sisters, Ceri Hadda and Kathryn Hadda, her stepsons David Tobin (Ana Maria Xet-Mull) and Adam Tobin (Christine Kelly), and
two grandchildren, Gabriel Tobin-Xet and Ursula Cashwan Tobin.

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