Pamela Nadell knew she wanted to pursue a career in history from the time she was in elementary school. She is now a professor teaching Jewish civilization, chair of the women’s and gender history program and director of the Jewish studies program at American University, where she has worked for more than four decades.
Nadell is the past president of the Association for Jewish Studies, an international organization of Jewish faculty, scholars and graduates. She has written three books on Jewish history, one of which was named Jewish Book of the Year by the Jewish Book Council. Nadell has addressed Congress three times to discuss antisemitism.
She lives in North Bethesda with her husband — their two adult children moved to Boston. Nadell and her husband were founding charter members of Congregation B’nai Tzedek in Potomac.
Tell me about your Jewish upbringing and background.
I grew up in a suburb of Newark, New Jersey, and I grew up in a town called Livingston, which we used to joke when we were in high school was one-third Jewish, one-third Catholic and one-third Protestant. When I knew enough to research and I was able to look up the Jewish community of Essex County, I discovered that we weren’t far off about the demographics of the town.
It was one of those suburbs [where] my parents could go to the grocery store in Livingston 50 years later and see people they had gone to high school with. It was a very simple suburb. Great schools, great high school.
You’ve been at AU for more than 40 years. Why?
I love American University; I love its students. I have amazing students who have gone on to wonderful things: I have had students who have gone into the rabbinate, students who have gone into Jewish communal leadership, Jewish journalism … Josh Kraushaar, who is the editor of Jewish Insider, which I certainly read every day and a lot of people in the Jewish world do.
What are your responsibilities as director of AU’s Jewish Studies program?
It’s an important intellectual space on campus to learn more about Jewish history and culture, that’s the first thing. The second thing is we obviously want to have a nice size complement of courses; we worked on planning the courses, and we’re also a very important resource on campus. In the spring [of] 2023, as campus antisemitism had been rising around the country — well before Oct. 7 — we developed a guide for understanding antisemitism on the Jewish Studies program website for the AU community. So, in that way, we provide an intellectual source for the campus as well.
I interface extensively with faculty who have research interest, scholarly interests in Jewish studies, which is a very broad field.
You’ve written books about Jewish women’s history. Why is this topic important to you?
My scholarly interests have long focused on women’s history even before I wrote “Women Who Would Be Rabbis.” When I was coming of age, there was a real concern about women to be accepted in the academy. I rode the coattails of the [feminist] revolution into my career in my position at AU. I was a benefit of affirmative action — there were very few women who were in academia before the beginning of the ‘70s.
I was interested in women’s history, but my first book was on Conservative Judaism. Then in 2019, I published “America’s Jewish Women: A History from Colonial Times to Today,” which won the National Jewish Book Council prize. I had worked on that book for a very, very long time.
Tell me about the manuscript that you’re working on now.
Now I’m writing about antisemitism. I have a new manuscript that will be published in September [2025] called “Antisemitism in American Tradition,” and that’s what I’ve been working on for the past two years. [I] really tried to go back to the original sources. In this book, I want to look at the history of antisemitism from the moment the first Jewish community lands, in what becomes the United States of America, in 1654.
Talking to people with lived experience is actually how I got into the new book. I was asked to go on a book tour with American Jewish Women, and antisemitism was rising all around us in 2019 and early 2020. I started [asking] my audiences during the Q&A if they had ever experienced antisemitism and they would burst out with a story that had happened half a century before, and they would tell me a story that had happened yesterday. We think we’re living in a moment of antisemitism that’s brand new in America, but these people remember things that happened 50 years ago.
Why is your work on antisemitism important to you?
I think we need to know our past in order to understand our present. I don’t believe that we repeat [history]; that if we don’t know history, we’re bound to repeat it. I don’t believe that. But the past is formed from moments in time and explains how we got here; it also offers lessons for how to respond to what challenges we might face. I think when we don’t know all kinds of history — American history, history of the world — we’re not only missing out on great stories, but we also aren’t properly informed citizens.
