Acclaimed lecturer and teacher, Professor Pamela Nadell is the author of America’s Jewish Women: A History from Colonial Times to Today (W.W. Norton), winner of the 2019 National Jewish Book Award—Jewish Book of the Year. The book was also published in Hebrew. Her new book Antisemitism, an American Tradition, investigates the dark history of how this hate threaded across the American past from colonial times to today. Already acclaimed as “the book that the world needs now,” Antisemitism, an American Tradition will be published on October 14, 2025 (W.W. Norton) and was supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholars Award. She has testified before Congress three times and was the fourth witness in the congressional hearing with the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and University of Pennsylvania. Her other books include Women Who Would be Rabbis: A History of Women’s Ordination, 1889-1985, a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award in Women’s Studies.
Professor and Patrick Clendenen Chair in Women’s and Gender History at American University in Washington, DC, Pamela Nadell won AU’s Scholar/Teacher of the Year award in 2007. An acclaimed teacher, her courses include Antisemitism: Enduring Hatred, Holocaust, and American Jewish History.
A popular lecturer on American Jewish life, she has riveted audiences from New York’s Streicker Center to Los Angeles’ American Jewish University, from Columbia University to UCLA, and has lectured abroad at universities in England, France, Germany, Hungary, and Israel.
Past president of the Association for Jewish Studies, her consulting to museums includes Tel Aviv’s ANU: The Museum of the Jewish People, Philadelphia’s Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History, and Pittsburgh’s new Tree of Life complex.
Pamela earned a doctorate at Ohio State University, a B.A. from Douglass College, Rutgers University, and studied at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
