David N. Myers

David N. Myers
Born	1960 Scranton, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Alma mater	Yale University Columbia University
Occupation	Historian

David N. Myers (born 1960) is a professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he holds the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Chair in Jewish History. His research focuses on modern Jewish intellectual and cultural history.

A native of Scranton, Pennsylvania, Myers received his A.B. cum laude from Yale College in 1982. He commenced graduate studies in Jewish history at Tel Aviv University (1982–84) before moving on to study medieval Jewish thought at Harvard University (1984–85). He then moved to Columbia University, where he worked under the supervision of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi. Myers received his Ph.D. with distinction in 1991.

Myers joined the faculty of the UCLA History Department in 1991 as a lecturer and 1992 as an assistant professor. He published his first book, Re-Inventing the Jewish Past: European Jewish Intellectuals and the Zionist Return to History, in 1995. It was based on his PhD dissertation about the Institute for Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University.

Myers served for ten years as the director of the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies and, from 2010–15, as the Robert N. Burr Department Chair of the UCLA History Department. He also has served since 2003 as the co-editor, along with Elliott Horowitz and Natalie Dohrmann, of the Jewish Quarterly Review. He is an elected fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research. He received the inaugural Sady and Ludwig Kahn Chair in Jewish History at UCLA in 2015.

Having explored a peak moment in the evolution of Jewish historicism in Jerusalem in the 1920s, Myers next examined the range of philosophical and theological critiques of historicism in the same period in Resisting History: Historicism and its Discontents in German-Jewish Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). He then undertook to rescue from oblivion the brilliant, if oft-forgotten, Jewish thinker Simon Rawidowicz (1897–1957). Best known as the author of the massive Bavel ve-Yerushalayim (Babylon and Jerusalem), Rawidowicz authored a text that he never published in the early 1950s devoted to the claim that after 1948, the age-old Jewish Question had been transformed into the Arab Question. Myers translated (along with Arnold Band) and analyzed this text in Between Jew and Arab: The Lost Voice of Simon Rawidowicz (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2008). Recently, he has been engaged in research on the Satmar Hasidic community of Kiryas Joel, New York.

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