Sasha Senderovich (he/him/his)

Sasha Senderovich is the author of How the Soviet Jew Was Made (Harvard University Press, 2022), which was selected as the Best First Book by the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (2024) and was named a finalist for the 2023 National Jewish Book Award.

Together with Harriet Murav, he has translated, from the Yiddish, David Bergelson’s Judgment: A Novel (Northwestern University Press, 2017) and, from Yiddish and Russian,  In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union (Stanford University Press, 2026). His other published work includes a critical introduction and notes to the English-language translation of Moyshe Kulbak’s Soviet Yiddish novel The Zelmenyaners: A Family Saga (Yale University Press, 2013; White Goat Press, 2024), as well as articles and book chapters on contemporary English-language fiction by Soviet-born Jewish émigré authors — including Gary Shteyngart, Anya Ulinich, Boris Fishman, and Irina Reyn — in the United States. 

In addition to his academic work, Sasha has published journalism and public scholarship in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Lilith, the Forward, the New York Times, the New Republic, The New Yorker’s Page-turner blog, Jewish Currents,  Seattle's The Stranger, and LitHub (these articles can be found here). One of his additional regular activities involves summertime teaching as a faculty member of the Great Jewish Books program for high school students, in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Sasha Senderovich holds a B.A. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst (Comparative Literature) and a Ph.D. from the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University (2010). Before moving to the University of Washington in 2017, he has taught at Tufts University, Lafayette College, Rutgers University, and the University of Colorado Boulder.