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IN MEMORIAM

Janet Hadda

Professor of English

UC Los Angeles

1945 - 2015

 

Janet Ruth Hadda-Yiddish professor, psychoanalyst, and biographer-died in Los Angeles on June 23, 2015, of metastatic cancer. She was 69. Born December 23, 1945, the eldest daughter of refugees from Nazi Germany, Dr. George and Annemarie (Kohn) Hadda. With degrees from the University of Vermont, Cornell, and Columbia, she joined the UCLA faculty in 1973 to start UCLA's Yiddish Program.

 

In 1979, she became the first tenured professor of Yiddish in the US. She published three books, as well as both academic and popular papers in English, Yiddish, German, French, and Hebrew. She received the Workmen's Circle Arbeter Ring Yiddishkayt Award in 2010. She also became a Training and Supervising Analyst at the New Center for Psychoanalysis and the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis. Psychological insights permeated her later works, "Passionate Women and Passive Men: Suicide in Yiddish Literature" and "Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Life," as well as her study of Allen Ginsberg, "Ginsberg in Hospital."

 

Survivors include her husband, Allan J. Tobin, a neuroscientist, and by her sisters, Ceri Hadda (Lloyd Gelwan) and Kathryn Hadda (Michael Andrews), her stepsons David Tobin (Ana Maria Xet-Mull) and Adam Tobin (Christine Kelly), and two grandchildren, Gabriel Tobin-Xet and Ursula Cashwan Tobin.