Omri Asscher is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Y&S Nazarian Center for the 2018-2019 academic year. During his time with the Center, Asscher will continue working on a book titled Reading Israel, Reading America: The Politics of Translation between Jews (to be published in Fall 2019 by Stanford University Press) and on a documentary history of American Jewish cultural life from the late 19th century to our times (in Hebrew).

While at UCLA, he will also teach courses in his areas of research, which deal with competing Jewish identities in Israel and America, mainly as reflected in the politics of translation and literary exchange between the two Jewish cultures.

Articles by Asscher have appeared in Jewish Social Studies, AJS Review, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, Translation and Interpreting Studies, and Target: International Journal of Translation Studies, among others. His recent translations into Hebrew are Samuel Beckett’s Murphy and Watt (forthcoming). Among his non-fiction translations are The Unfolding of Language and Thinking in Tongues by Guy Deutscher.

Prior to joining the Center, Asscher was a Kreitman Postdoctoral Fellow at the Ben-Gurion Research Institute for the study of Israel and Zionism at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (2016-2018), a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Ruderman Program for American Jewish Studies at the University of Haifa (2015-2016), and has served as director of the Translation Certificate Program at Beit-Berl College (2015-2018). He completed his PhD in literary and cultural studies in Tel-Aviv University (2014).