Antisemitism, an American Tradition by Pamela S. Nadell

Pamela Nadell

Forthcoming | October 14, 2025

Antisemitism, an American Tradition by Pamela S. Nadell, traces the long, often overlooked history of antisemitism in the United States, revealing how this enduring prejudice has shaped Jewish life in America from the 1600s to today.

Jews experienced antisemitism the moment they landed on what would become the United States. When they first arrived in New Amsterdam in 1654, Peter Stuyvesant tried but failed to deport them. As historian Pamela S. Nadell tells in Antisemitism, an American Tradition, this was only antisemitism’s beginning on our shores, as negative European stereotypes about Jews rooted into American soil.

Compared with the Old World, with its expulsions, Inquisition, ghettos, and Holocaust, America’s Jews have a different history—but one where antisemitism, even if it has had fewer dramatic eruptions, is deeply embedded. Jews in America faced restrictions on holding office and getting financial credit. Universities set quotas to limit the number of Jews attending and businesses refused to hire them. Jews endured verbal and physical attacks, and their synagogues and cemeteries, continuing to this day, were vandalized and desecrated.

Antisemitism, an American Tradition investigates the depths of this fraught history and its recent manifestations: white nationalists chanting “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville, Virginia, and a gunman murdering eleven worshippers at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue building.

Nadell also shows Jews responding to prejudice and hate. America’s Jews created advocacy organizations. They turned to the courts to safeguard their constitutional rights. They made common cause with allies to confront all types of hate. They even used their fists when needed.

At a time when prejudice, discrimination, and hate against Jews is flaring across the country, Antisemitism, an American Tradition argues that we must understand the past. This momentous work reveals how antisemitism—and resistance to that hatred—endures, representing not a rupture from America’s history, but a centuries-old legacy.

Pamela S. Nadell is the Patrick Clendenen Chair in Women’s and Gender History and director of Jewish studies at American University. Her books include America’s Jewish Women and Women Who Would Be Rabbis, a National Jewish Book Award finalist. She lives in North Bethesda, Maryland.

In America’s Jewish Women, Pamela S. Nadell weaves together the complex story of Jewish women in America — from colonial-era matriarch Grace Nathan and her great-granddaughter, poet Emma Lazarus, to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Recounting how Jewish women have been at the forefront of social, economic, and political causes for centuries, Nadell shows them fighting for suffrage, labor unions, civil rights, feminism, and religious rights, shaping a distinctly Jewish American identity.

  • ISBN-13: 978-1324050643
  • ISBN-10: 1324050640
  • 352 pages
  • Forthcoming | October 14, 2025

Published by: W.W.Norton & Company, Inc.