Ms. Tenenbaum received a B.A. from Antioch College and a Ph.D. from Brandeis University. She was the founding director of the Holocaust and Genocide Studies concentration and is also affiliated with Women’s and Gender Studies, Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies, Africana Studies, and Jewish Studies.  She teaches in a college-in-prison program through the Emerson Prison Initiative at a medium security prison for men, and co-directs Liberal Arts for Returning Citizens, a college program at Clark University for formerly incarcerated people.

Ms. Tenenbaum’s research on ethnic enterprise, mutual aid, gender, education, and identity intersects the broad areas of sociology of American Jews and historical sociology. Her book, A Credit to their Community: Jewish Loan Societies in the United States, 1880-1945, explores the relationship between immigrant Jewish credit networks and ethnic enterprise. Ms. Tenenbaum’s co-edited anthology, Feminist Perspectives on Jewish Studies, provides a critical evaluation of the impact of feminist scholarship in the various fields of Jewish Studies. Ms. Tenenbaum has also published in the area of pedagogy including articles and book chapters on teaching college courses in prison, Jewish Studies, and class inequality, and co-edited a syllabus collection Gender and Jewish Studies: A Curriculum Guide. Ms. Tenenbaum teaches in the areas of race and ethnicity, genocide, Jewish Studies, and gender, and is the recipient of Clark’s Outstanding Teacher Award and Outstanding Academic Advisor Award.