פרופ' Omri Asscher

יחידה
Linguistics
דרגה
Associate Professor
דוא"ל
omri.asscher@biu.ac.il
אתר אישי
תחומי עניין

Omri Asscher is interested in the workings and implications of AI-based translation in intercultural communication; in the role literary and theological translations play in homeland-diaspora frameworks; and, more generally, in any exploration of how translation participates in the formation and circulation of ideas and values in our time.

קורות חיים

Omri Asscher is Associate Professor at the Department of English Literature and Linguistics in Bar-Ilan University.

His work explores the practical, theoretical and ethical implications of machine translation for intercultural communication in our time. He also studies the cultural and ideological roles translation plays in homeland-diaspora frameworks - particularly in Jewish contexts - and, more broadly, the interplay between translation, literature, and cultural history.

Prior to Bar-Ilan, he held postdoc positions at UCLA, Ben-Gurion University, and the University of Haifa. He also served as the Head of the Certificate Program in Translation, Beit-Berl College.

His most recent book, Machine Translation and Translation Theory, was published by Routledge (2025). His first book, Reading Israel, Reading America: The Politics of Translation between Jews, was published by Stanford University Press (2019).

In 2024, he was awarded the Excellence in Teaching award as the Faculty of Humanities laureate, by the Vice Rector’s Office, Bar-Ilan University. In 2021, he was selected to the Israel Science Foundation’s Forum of Young Scholars in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

He has served as a member of the Challenge Call Expert Group for European Coordinated Research on Long-Term Challenges in Information and Communication Sciences and Technologies (CHIST-ERA); as a chair of division for the Association for Jewish Studies conference, on Jewish Languages and Linguistics from Antiquity to the Present; and is currently a member of the advisory board of the Language Mediation in Context (LMIC) book series, LangSci Language Science Press.

His translations into Hebrew include Samuel Beckett's Murphy, Michael Palin’s Himalaya, and Guy Deutscher's The Unfolding of Language and Through the Language Glass; as well as shorter works by Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens, and Leigh Hunt.

קורסים

Introduction to Translation Studies

Translation and Reception as Cultural Exchange

Translation in the Digital Age
 

Selected previous courses:

The Politics of Translation 

Major Issues in Translation: Social Aspects and Linguistic Form 

Workshop in Literary Translation

Workshop in Academic Translation

Translation between History and Memory

Key Moments in the Making of Jewish American Identity

פרסומים

List of publications

Books      

Asscher, Omri (2025). Machine Translation and Translation Theory. Routledge.

Asscher, Omri (2019). Reading Israel, Reading America: The Politics of Translation between Jews. Stanford University Press.

 

Refereed articles in peer-reviewed journals

  1. Asscher, Omri and Mirco Musolesi (under review; preprint). “The Relationship between Professional and General Ethics in Generative AI.” Ethics and Information Technology. preprint: http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29306

 

  1. Asscher, Omri (forthcoming). “The De-liberalization of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks in Hebrew Translation.” Jewish Quarterly Review.

 

  1. Adler, Yael, and Omri Asscher (forthcoming). “The Status of Survivor Testimony among Yad Vashem Historians in the 1950s: The Unique Historiography of Nachman Blumental and Joseph Kermish.” Katedra. [in Hebrew] [equal contribution from both authors]

 

  1. Asscher, Omri (2026). “The Case for Humanities-based Studies of AI Production and Effects.” AI & Society. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-026-03170-y

 

  1. Asscher, Omri, Arif Ahmad, Ananya Agrawal, and Monojit Choudhury. (2026). “ETHICA-MT: Introducing a Framework and Dataset for Studying Ethical Orientations in LLM-based Machine Translation.” In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026, pages 21825–21845, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics. https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.1098/

 

  1. Glikson, Ella, Asscher, Omri, and Raveh Harush (2026). “AI in Multilingual Organizational Communication: The Impact of Culturally Adapting Machine Translation on Global Leadership Self-Efficacy.” Cross Cultural & Strategic Management. https://doi.org/10.1108/CCSM-09-2024-0230 [equal contribution from both authors]

 

  1. Meyer, Phyllis, and Omri Asscher (2026). “American Reform Translations of the Passover Haggadah: Shifting Approaches to the Sh'fokh Ḥamatkha Section, 1892-2021.” Modern Judaism. 46:2, 179-202, https://doi.org/10.1093/mj/kjag015 [equal contribution from both authors]

 

  1. Carpuat, Marine, Omri Asscher, Kalika Bali, Luisa Bentivogli, Frédéric Blain, Lynne Bowker, Monojit Choudhury et al. (2025). “An Interdisciplinary Approach to Human-Centered Machine Translation.” EMNLP. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.13468

 

  1. Asscher, Omri, and Michal Schuster (2024). “Language, Gender, and Refugee Migration: Tigrinya-speaking Asylum-seekers in Israel.” Israel Studies in Language and Society 18, 51-73. [equal contribution from both authors]

  1. Glikson, Ella, and Omri Asscher (2023). “AI-mediated Apology in a Multilingual Work Context: Implications for Perceived Authenticity and Willingness to Forgive.” Computers in Human Behavior 40, 107592. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2022.107592 

[equal contribution from both authors] 

 

  1. Asscher, Omri (2023). “The Position of Machine Translation in Translation Studies: A Definitional Approach.” Translation Spaces 12:2. https://doi.org/10.1075/ts.22035.ass

 

  1. Asscher, Omri (2023). “Israeli Journalism in the Face of Moral-Political Criticism in the Works of Philip Roth and Saul Bellow.” Iyunim 38, 183-208. [in Hebrew] https://www.nli.org.il/he/articles/RAMBI997013725857905171/NLI

 

  1. Asscher, Omri (2023). “The Decline in the Religious Zionist Negation of the Diaspora: A Translation Perspective.” Contemporary Jewry. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12397-022-09471-w

 

  1. Asscher, Omri (2022). “Language Ideology in American Jewish Thought.” Religion 52:3, 384-408. https://doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2021.1994481

 

  1. Asscher, Omri (2022). “The Explanatory Power of Descriptive Translation Studies in the Machine Translation Era.” Perspectives: Studies in Translation Theory and Practice. https://doi.org/10.1080/0907676X.2022.2136005

  1. Asscher, Omri and Ella Glikson (2021). “Human Evaluations of Machine Translation in an Ethically Charged Situation.” New Media & Society 25:5, 1087-1107. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211018833

[equal contribution from both authors]

  1. Asscher, Omri (2021). “Translation as a Probe into Homeland-Diaspora Relations.” Translation Studies 14:1, 36-50. https://doi.org/10.1080/14781700.2020.1773307

 

  1. Asscher, Omri (2021). “The American Oz: Notes on Translation and Reception.” Journal of Israeli History 38:2, 303-327. https://doi.org/10.1080/13531042.2020.1874674

 

  1. Asscher, Omri and Ofer Shiff (2020). “Diasporic Stances, Homeland Prisms: Representing Diaspora in the Homeland as Internal Negotiation of National Identity.” Diaspora Studies 13:1, 1-15. https://doi.org/10.1080/09739572.2019.1685815

[equal contribution from both authors]

  1. Asscher, Omri (2020). “The Ben-Gurion-Blaustein ‘Understanding’ as a Historiographical Yardstick.” Israel Studies 25:3, 33-48. https://doi.org/10.2979/israelstudies.25.3.05

  1. Asscher, Omri (2020). “Exporting Political Theology to the Diaspora: Translating Rabbi Kook for Modern Orthodox Consumption.” Meta: Translators’ Journal 65:2, 292-311. https://doi.org/10.7202/1075837ar

 

  1. Asscher, Omri (2018). “Jewish-American Literature Makes Aliyah? Jewish/non-Jewish Boundary Maintenance, and the Israeli Approach to the Diaspora.” Jewish Social Studies 23:3, 128-159. https://doi.org/10.2979/jewisocistud.23.3.05

 

  1. Asscher, Omri (2018). “Israel for American Eyes: Literature on the Move, and the Mediated Repertoire of Jewish-American Identity.” AJS Review 42:1, 21-38. https://doi.org/10.1353/ajs.2021.0040

 

  1. Asscher, Omri (2018). “’Judaism in Translation’: American Jewish Literature and Culture in Israeli Thought.” Israel 25, 109-137. [in Hebrew]

https://humanities.tau.ac.il/sites/humanities.tau.ac.il/files/media_server/humanities/zionism/%D7%99%D7%A9%D7%A8%D7%90%D7%9C/25/5%20Asher.pdf

 

  1. Asscher, Omri (2017). “A Case for an Integrated Approach to the Mediation of National Literature.” Translation and Interpreting Studies 12:1, 24-48. https://doi.org/10.1075/tis.12.1.02ass

 

  1. Asscher, Omri (2016). “The Ideological Manipulation of Hebrew Literature in English Translation in the 1970s and 1980s.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 15:3, 384-401.

https://doi.org/10.1080/14725886.2016.1151196

  1. Asscher, Omri (2014). “The Integration of Translated Hebrew Literature in America: The Pre-Zionist Phase.” Iyunim 24, 94-129. [in Hebrew]

https://in.bgu.ac.il/bgi/iyunim/24/Omri-Asscher.pdf

 

  1. Asscher, Omri (2014). “An Anthology Editor as Israeli Ambassador to the U.S.: Ehud Ben-Ezer and Representing the Arab in Hebrew Literature to the American Reader.” Dappim: Research in Literature 19, 172-186. [in Hebrew]

https://www.jstor.org/stable/23986517

  1. Asscher, Omri (2010). “A Model for Hebrew Translation of British Humor: Amplification and Overstatement.” Target: International Journal of Translation Studies 22:2, 237-263. https://doi.org/10.1075/target.22.2.04ass

 

 

 

Refereed articles in books

 

  1. Asscher, Omri (2013). “The Augmentation Model in the Hebrew Translation of British Humor,” in Ha-Ivrit Safa Xaya [Hebrew as a living language], edited by Rina Ben-Shachar and Nitsa Ben-Ari, Volume VI, 43-61. [in Hebrew]

 

Other publications [non-refereed]

  1. Asscher, Omri (2026). “The Implications of Machine Translation for Translation Theory: Looking Inward and Outward.” In European Society for Translation Studies Newsletter 68 (Vienna, May 2026), 8-9.

 

  1. Asscher, Omri (2024). “A Translation Hypothesis for the Development of Migrant Communities into Enduring Diasporas.” In Routledge Handbook of Translation and Migration, edited by Brigid Maher, Loredana Polezzi and Rita Wilson. London and New York: Routledge, 42-55.

 

  1. Asscher, Omri (2024). Review of Reuven Gafni’s “Hebraizing Sherlock Holmes”. Journal of Israeli History 42:1–2, 155–157. https://doi.org/10.1080/13531042.2024.2402600.

 

  1. Asscher, Omri (2021). “On two inherent ambiguities in Samuel Beckett’s Murphy.” https://www.newlibrary.co.il/page_18548 [in Hebrew]

 

  1. Asscher, Omri (2013). Review of Michael Weingrad’s “American Hebrew Literature: Writing Jewish National Identity in the United-States”. Studies in American Jewish Literature 32:2, 218-221. https://doi.org/10.5325/studamerjewilite.32.2.0218

 

Other publications: translations (selected)

books 

Murphy by Samuel Beckett, Tel Aviv: The New Library (with my annotation), 2020.

Thinking in Tongues by Guy Deutscher, Tel Aviv: Xargol-Am Oved, 2011.

The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher, Tel Aviv: Xargol-Am Oved, 2007.

Game Theory: A Very Short Introduction by Ken Binmore, Tel Aviv: Aliyat Hagag-Yediot Sefarim.

Articles and essays

“On the Latest Execution” by Charles Dickens, Haaretz, February 2026.

"The Separation of Powers" by Thomas Jefferson, Haaretz, April 2025.

“My Israel Story: An Interim Report on a Winding Journey” by David N. Myers, in Kavim Li-dmutenu, Ben-Gurion Publishing Institute, 2020.

“Getting Up on Cold Mornings” by James Henry Leigh Hunt, in Dehak, 6, February 2016.

“Dissecting the Qumran-Essene Hypothesis,” by Edna Ullmann-Margalit, in Odyssey 4, June 2009.

תאריך עדכון אחרון : 11/10/2026