David Myers

David Myers

David Myers

Distinguished Professor & Sady and Ludwig Kahn Chair in Jewish History

Email: myers@history.ucla.edu

Office: 5387 Bunche Hall

Phone: 310-825-3780

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Biography

David N. Myers is Distinguished Professor and holds the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Chair in Jewish History.  As of fall 2017, he serves as the director of the Luskin Center for History and Policy (http://luskincenter.history.ucla.edu/); he also directs the UCLA Initiative to Study Hate.  He previously served as chair of the UCLA History Department (2010-2015) and as director of the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies (1996-2000 and 2004-2010).  He received his A.B. from Yale College in 1982 and undertook graduate studies at Tel-Aviv and Harvard Universities before completing his doctorate at Columbia in 1991. He has written extensively in the fields of modern Jewish intellectual and cultural history. He has authored six books: Re-Inventing the Jewish Past: European Jewish Intellectuals and the Zionist Return to History (Oxford: 1995), Resisting History: Historicism and its Discontents in German-Jewish Thought (Princeton, 2003), Between Jew and Arab: The Lost Voice of Simon Rawidowicz (Brandeis University Press, 2008), Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction  (2017), The Stakes of History: On the Use and Abuse of Jewish History for Life  (2018), and with Nomi M. Stolzenberg, American Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic Village in Upstate New York (2022), which won the 2022 National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish Studies.  Myers has edited or co-edited twelve books, including The Eternal Dissident: Rabbi Leonard I. Beerman and the Radical Imperative to Think and Act (2018), with Benjamin C.I. Ravid, Simon Rawidowicz: Between Babylon and Jerusalem: Select Writings.  Together with Michael Berenbaum, he brought to publication the monumental book of the late Steven Lowenstein, The Population History of German Jewry, 1815-1939 (2023). 

 

Myers has taught at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales and the Russian State University for the Humanities, visited at the Institute for Advanced Studies (Jerusalem), and been a fellow on three occasions at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies (Philadelphia). Since 2003, he has served as co-editor of the Jewish Quarterly Review. Myers is an elected fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research and the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities.  At UCLA, he teaches courses on Jewish history and the history of history.  

 

Personal website: www.davidnmyers.com

Field of Study

Jewish, Europe, Modern Jewish intellectual and cultural history

Publications

Books (Authored)

  • Between Jew and Arab: The Lost Voice of Simon Rawidowicz, Brandeis University Press, 2008
  • Re-Inventing the Jewish Past: European Jewish Intellectuals and the Zionist Return to History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
  • Resisting History: Historicism and its Discontents in German-Jewish Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).

Books (Edited)

  • David N. Myers and William V. Rowe, eds. From Ghetto to Emancipation: Historical and Contemporary Reconsiderations of the Jewish Community, introduction by D. N. Myers. Scranton, PA: University of Scranton Press, 1997.
  • David N. Myers and David B. Ruderman, eds. The Jewish Past Revisited: Reflections on Modern Jewish Historians, introduction by D. N. Myers. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.
  • Elisheva Carlebach, John M. Efron, and David N. Myers, eds. Jewish History and Jewish Memory: Essays in Honor of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1998.
  • Richard Hovannisian and David N. Myers, eds. Enlightenment and Diaspora: The Armenian and Jewish Cases. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999.
  • Michael Brenner and David N. Myers, Jüdische Geschichtsschreibung heute: Themen, Positionen, Kontroversen. Munich: Beck Verlag, 2002.
  • David N. Myers et. al. Acculturation and its Discontents: The Italian Jewish Experience between Integration and Exclusion University of Toronto Press, 2008.
  • David N. Myers and Alexander Kaye, eds. The Faith of Fallen Jews: Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and the Writing of Jewish History.

Recent Opinion Pieces and Lectures

Articles

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