Riv-Ellen Prell

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.

Articles by this author

Stereotypes in the United States

The process of projecting ideas and fantasies is called stereotyping. Scholars have repeatedly demonstrated that stereotypes, in fact, have more to teach about the “stereotyper” than the “stereotyped.” In relations between minorities and majorities, particularly when a dominant group suppresses and limits another, those stereotypes play a crucial role in rationalizing the rights of the powerful over the powerless and in justifying why a group is despised.

Barbara Myerhoff at Conference on Youth, Press Conference, 1969

Barbara Myerhoff

An award-winning anthropologist and feminist scholar, Barbara Myerhoff emphasized the importance of storytelling and studying one’s own community. Myerhoff’s work pioneered the study of elderly Jews and highlighted the role of women in religion, which had been previously neglected by the scholarly world.

How to cite this page

Jewish Women's Archive. "Riv-Ellen Prell." (Viewed on April 20, 2021) <https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/author/prell-riv-ellen>.

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