Pamela Nadell

Informed by the shared values of America's founding and Jewish identity, Nadell highlights Jewish women's activism in the history of the nation they came to call home, from the 18th to the 20th century. She writes about the colonial era matriarch Grace Nathan and Nathan's great-granddaughter poet Emma Lazarus, about labor organizer Bessie Hillman, and about Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Nadell voiced similar free-speech concerns in 2017 before the House Judiciary Committee during a hearing on antisemitism on college campuses. The hearing would come as Members of Congress debated adding language to a proposed bill defining antisemitism as language which would "demonize, delegitimize, or apply a double standard to Israel." In her testimony, Nadell alleged that such a definition would only limit free speech, and stated that Jewish students "feel safe on campus" without restrictions.

After being elected in 2014, Nadell served as president of the Association for Jewish Studies from 2015 to 2017. While president, Nadell wrote an open letter to Hungarian President Zoltán Balog in opposition of the controversial amendments being made to the National Higher Education Law. The amendment would increase obstacles to universities operating outside European Union (EU) countries with sister-schools inside the EU. In her letter, Nadell expressed concern that such obstacles would encumber scholarship coming out of the Budapest-based Central European University.

In 1995, she was guest editor of an issue of American Jewish History devoted to research about women. She subsequently edited volumes including Women and American Judaism: Historical Perspectives (2001; with Jonathan D. Sarna), and American Jewish Women's History: A Reader, and authored others, including Women Who Would be Rabbis: A History of Women's Ordination and America's Jewish Women: A History from Colonial Times to Today.

She continued her studies at Ohio State University where she earned her Masters in Jewish History (1976) and doctorate in American Jewish History (1982). While completing her doctorate on Eastern-European Jewish Migration patterns, Nadell received a fellowship from the American Jewish Archives, and was honored by Ohio State President, Harold Enarson, for her excellence as a teaching assistant.

After graduating from Livingston High School in 1969, she attended Douglass College of Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, where she majored in Hebraic Studies graduating with high honors. Nadell spent her junior year abroad studying at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Pamela S. Nadell (born 1951) is an American historian, researcher, author, and lecturer focusing on Jewish history. Former President of the Association for Jewish Studies, she currently holds the Patrick Clendenen Chair in Women's and Gender History at American University. Nadell has focused her research on Jewish women and their role within Jewish history as well as in shaping the history of the United States through their role in various social and political movements.

Nadell was born to Alice and Irwin M. Nadell in 1951 and grew up in Livingston, New Jersey.

Her work brings to the fore Jewish women previously ignored in most history books. She highlights the roles women have played in changing historically set precedents. In doing so she has publicized the names of the first women to push against the established male-only rabbinates of the United States, tracing the origins of that debate in the late 19th century to an 1889 short story in the Jewish Exponent, "A Problem for Purim," by the journalist Mary M. Cohen, a member of the historic Philadelphia synagogue, Congregation Mikveh Israel.