Twice a National Jewish Book Award winner, American University Professor Pamela Nadell is an internationally renowned expert on American Jewish history.
Her new book Antisemitism, an American Tradition won this year’s National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish Studies. The book investigates the dark history of this hate threading across the American past from colonial times to today. Lauded “as the book the world needs now,” Antisemitism, an American Experience made The Wall Street Journal’s list of “ten books to read” (October 2025). It appeared on Hadassah Magazine and Religion News Service’s best books lists of 2025. A National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholars Award supported writing this book.
Nadell’s America’s Jewish Women: A History from Colonial Times to Today (W.W. Norton, 2019), won the National Jewish Book Award’s top prize “Jewish Book of the Year” and was translated into Hebrew.
At American University in Washington, DC, where Nadell won the university’s highest faculty honor “Scholar/Teacher of the Year” (2007), she is a professor and holds the Patrick Clendenen Chair in Women’s and Gender History.
A popular lecturer on American Jewish life, she has riveted audiences across the US, Europe, and Israel. Many will remember her congressional testimony as the fourth witness in the hearing with the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and University of Pennsylvania (December 2023).
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.
Nadell earned a doctorate at Ohio State University, a B.A. from Douglass College, Rutgers University, and studied at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
