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Ellen Schrecker

Ellen Wolf Schrecker, Ph.D. (born August 4, 1938) is a professor of American history at Yeshiva University. She is currently on leave, having received the Frederick Ewen Academic Freedom Fellowship at the Tamiment Library at NYU. Schrecker is primarily known for her work in the history of McCarthyism.

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.

Her emphatic condemnation of the practices of McCarthy-era anti-communists has led some scholars to characterize Schrecker as leftist and an apologist for American Communists. Historian Ronald Radosh has called her "the dean of the anti-anti-Communist historians and John Earl Haynes said "Schrecker… devotes hundreds of pages to demonizing opposition to communism in any form. According to Schrecker, "in this country[,] McCarthyism did more damage to the constitution than the American Communist party ever did." Schrecker says she is "a card-carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union who undertook the study of McCarthyism precisely because of my opposition to its depredations against freedom of speech"

Schrecker has also been outspoken with respect to contemporary issues, describing the Academic Bill of Rights movement as "worse than McCarthy", and arguing that the University of Southern Florida's 2003 dismissal of Sami Al-Arian following his federal indictment for supporting terrorism is an example of contemporary McCarthyism.