Rachel Gordan is the Samuel Shorstein fellow in American Jewish Culture and Society at the University of Florida, where she teaches in the Department of Religion and the Center for Jewish Studies. She received a Ph.D. from Harvard and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Yale. For the 2024-2025 academic year, Gordan is a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow at the Center for Jewish History in New York, where she is working on a biography of novelist Laura Z. Hobson. Gordon grew up in the Boston area.

Professor Gordan’s book Postwar Stories: How Books Made Judaism America details a transformational era in American history immediately following World War II. At the start of the 1940s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had to all but promise that if Americans entered the war, it would not be to save the Jews. By the end of the decade, antisemitism was in decline, and Jews were moving toward general acceptance in American society. Gordon’s book examines the role of popular books in this era of change for Jews and American culture.