Ellen Schrecker

Ellen Wolf Schrecker (born August 4, 1938) is an American professor of American history at Yeshiva University. She is currently teaching and has received the Frederick Ewen Academic Freedom Fellowship at the Tamiment Library at NYU.

She is known primarily for her work in the history of McCarthyism. Historian Ronald Radosh has described her as "the dean of the anti-anti-Communist historians."

Biography

She graduated magna cum laude from Radcliffe College in 1960 and earned her M.A. in 1962 and her doctorate in 1974, both from Harvard University. She has taught at Harvard, Princeton, New York University, the New School for Social Research, and Columbia. From 1998 to 2002, Schrecker was the editor of Academe, the journal of the American Association of University Professors.

Schrecker's best known book is Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America, published in 1998. Kirkus Reviews wrote of this book, "It is no easy task bringing new life to an era already as dissected as the McCarthy era, yet this is what Schrecker accomplishes in a magnificent study of how and why McCarthyism happened and how its shadow still darkens our lives." In addition to McCarthyism, Schrecker has written on related topics such as political repression, academic freedom and Soviet espionage during the Cold War, as well as on Franco-American relations in the 1920s—the subject of her Ph.D. dissertation—and coauthoring a Chinese cookbook.