Biography
Riv-Ellen Prell, an anthropologist, is Professor Emerita of American Studies at the University of Minnesota. She is interested in the ways that gender, race, and class have shaped the cultures of American Jews, whether in religious, communal, or family lives. Her publications include “The Economic Turn in American Jewish History: When Women (Mostly) Disappeared” (2019). Her books include Fighting to Become Americans: Jews, Gender and the Anxiety of Assimilation (Beacon), and Prayer and Community: the Havurah in American Judaism (Wayne State). She also curated "A Campus Divided: Progressives, Anticommunists, Racism and Antisemitism at the University of Minnesota 1930–1942.” She is currently working on further research into antisemitism and racism at the University of Minnesota and the Twin Cities in the 1930s, and the connections between the creation of Jewish students activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s and Jewish youth movements and summer camping.