Biderman Lecture – Antisemitism, an American Tradition

The Program in Judaic Studies and the Center for Jewish Life invites you to this year’s Biderman Lecture, with author and historian Pamela Nadell, on Monday, February 2.

Description
In Antisemitism, an American Tradition, Pamela Nadell recounts the powerful story of antisemitism in America and how it has shaped the lives of Jews for almost four centuries.

In this “urgent and provocative work on the history of hostility to American Jews” (Kirkus) Nadell writes: “Colonists not only carried rucksacks to America. They carried ideas about Jewish enmity and degeneracy that dwell at the core of Western civilization.”

Called “the book that the world needs now” (The Atlantic’s Franklin Foer), this “vital and unsettling new book” (Religion News Service) shows that freedom in America always came with conditions. When 23 Jews landed in New Amsterdam, Governor Peter Stuyvesant tried to expel them. Eventually, Jews would face restrictions on holding office, admission to schools, and employment in industry. Their cemeteries were vandalized; their synagogues bombed. Much later, white nationalists marching in Charlottesville chanted “Jews will not replace us.” A gunman murdered eleven worshippers on a Shabbat morning members at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue building. Another gunman, boasting that he did it for Palestine, murdered a young couple leaving the Capital Jewish Museum.

Recounting this fraught history, Antisemitism, an American Tradition explores how Jews stood up against this hate, battling back through the law, associations, alliances, and sometimes with their fists. The Wall Street Journal lists this momentous work among its best reviewed books (October 2025). Antisemitism, an American Tradition sounds the alarm on this hatred which plagues America and thew world today.

Open to the public. Kosher refreshments will be available.

Professor Pamela Nadell holds the Patrick Clendenen Chair in Women’s and Gender History at American University. Her book America’s Jewish Women: A History from Colonial Times to Today won the 2019 National Jewish Book Award’s Everett Family Foundation “Book of the Year” and was translated into Hebrew. The Wall Street Journal named her new book, Antisemitism, an American Tradition (W.W. Norton) to its October 2025 best books list.

A past president of the Association for Jewish Studies, Nadell is a member of the Advisory Board planning the rebuild of Pittsburgh’s The Tree of Life. However, to her chagrin, she may best be known for testifying before Congress in the hearing with the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania.