Miriam Shlesinger

Miriam Shlesinger was born in 1947 in Miami Beach

Miriam Shlesinger was born in 1947 in Miami Beach, Florida, to Edith and Aryeh Geiger. Her father was born in Safed and had moved to the United States. The family moved to Israel and lived in Haifa, where she attended the Hebrew Reali School before going to high school in the United States.

She returned to Israel in 1964 and studied musicology and English linguistics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 1973 she began studying translation and interpreting at Bar-Ilan University. She later earned an MA in literary studies at Tel Aviv University and a PhD at Bar-Ilan on cognitive processes in simultaneous interpreting.

From 1978 she taught translation at Bar-Ilan, and she later headed its translation department and its Language Policy Research Center. There she created a course to train speakers of languages such as Arabic, Russian and Amharic to interpret for new immigrants. She also translated literature, including books by Etgar Keret, and worked as an interpreter at the UN, at peace conferences and in trials, among them the Demjanjuk trial.

In the 1990s she chaired the board of Amnesty International's Israel branch. She married Moshe Shlesinger in 1966 and was a mother of three. She died of cancer in November 2012 and was buried in Kfar Saba.