Yuri Slezkine

Who is Yuri Slezkine?

Yuri Slezkine is a Russian-born American historian, writer, and translator. He is a professor of Russian history and Director of the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is best known as the author of the highly acclaimed book The Jewish Century. Slezkine holds a PhD from the University of Texas, Austin.

He originally trained as an interpreter in Moscow State University. His first trip outside the Soviet Union was in the late 1970s when he found work as a translator in Mozambique. He returned to Moscow to serve as a translator of Portuguese, and spent 1982 in Lisbon before emigrating to Austin, Texas the next year.

He is currently a W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.