Riv-Ellen Prell is a professor and chairperson of American Studies at the University of Minnesota. She received her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Chicago. Her books include Prayer and Community: The Havurah in American Judaism; Interpreting Women's Lives: Personal Narratives and Feminist Theory (with the Personal Narratives Group); and Fighting to Become Americans: Jews, Gender and the Anxiety of Assimilation. She is currently at work on an edited volume on the impact of feminism on American Judaism and a study of post-war American Jewish youth culture.