From the halls of Congress to a public conversation with Wisconsin’s Holocaust center director
Award-winning author and history professor Pamela S. Nadell has testified about antisemitism before the U.S. Congress three times, she said in a congressional testimony on Dec. 5, 2023.
Pamela S. Nadell
“The first was in 2017, just three months after white supremacists chanting ‘Jews will not replace us’ paraded through the University of Virginia brandishing torch lights [and] echoing Nazi storm troopers strutting through Germany in the 1930s,” Nadell said. “I emphasize this because the antisemitism igniting on campuses today is not new.”
On July 8, this scholar who has advocated from the halls of Congress, will be visiting Milwaukee to discuss her latest book, “Antisemitism, An American Tradition,” and related topics in conversation. She will do so with her friend and fellow scholar Samantha Abramson, executive director of Nathan and Esther Pelz Holocaust Education Resource Center, a program of Milwaukee Jewish Federation. The HERC event, “Unpacking American Antisemitism at 250,” will take place at Congregation Shalom.
“Antisemitism, An American Tradition’ is a book that I began writing after murders at the Tree of Life Synagogue because, as a historian, I was shocked at how we historians had really missed the long trajectory of antisemitism and, in that case, murderous antisemitism across American history,” Nadell said. “It’s a book that traces the diverse threads of hatred of Jews across American history from the moment the first Jews arrived in 1654 down until the moment when I concluded writing the book.”
“I should emphasize, it’s not the same as Europe,” she said. “America never had an inquisition. It never had pogroms. It never had the Holocaust. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t have and doesn’t still have antisemitic hate.”
Nadell holds the Patrick Clendenen Chair in Women’s and Gender History at American University in Washington, D.C., where she is also director of the Jewish studies program.
While there has undoubtedly been a resurgence of American antisemitism in recent years, Nadell said it’s a misconception that it ever truly went away.
“What causes it to burst out and really… the rise in the past decade, I would say that antisemitism surges in moments of crisis, and we have for a decade now we have lived in a very polarized society where our democracy is being challenged, and I’m not surprised that antisemitism has spiked and of course it’s part of a worldwide phenomenon.”
Nadell’s previous book, “America’s Jewish Women: A History from Colonial Times to Today,” won the National Jewish Book Award in 2019, and the new book took the same award this year, in the American Jewish Studies category. It will come out in paperback this fall, she said.
Abramson, of HERC, is a longtime friend of Nadell’s and was instrumental in bringing her to Wisconsin.
Samantha Abramson
“I’m going to be posing questions to her,” related to what it means to “have knowledge of all the different histories and manifestations of antisemitism in America,” Abramson said. “What does this mean for us?”
The talk will take place, in part, to commemorate five years since the signing of Wisconsin Act 30, which mandated Holocaust education in Wisconsin schools. Earlier that day, Nadell will speak at a summer institute for teachers from across the state.
HERC, Abramson said, “has been the statewide leader in the last five years, bringing those resources to almost 400 school districts across the state.”
She sees this program, she said, as “one in a series of programs we plan to do in the next year, on the five-year anniversary of Act 30, that really recognize the importance of Holocaust education, but also see that it’s a resource for us to study the historic tropes that made the Holocaust possible, and gives us this contemporary relevance for how we fight antisemitism in 2026.”
Unpacking American Antisemitism at 250
- A conversation between Pam Nadell and Samantha Abramson, scholars of antisemitism, presented by the Nathan and Esther Pelz Holocaust Education Resource Center
- 7 p.m., Wednesday, July 8, 2026
- Congregation Shalom
- Register: HolocaustCenterMilwaukee.org
- More info: SaraS@MilwaukeeJewish.org / 414-390-2710
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