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We had the honor of hosting David Myers on a visit to our campus on Monday, March 4, 2019. His talk in the Lucy Ellis Lounge (1080 FLB) on Monday was entitled, “The Importance of Jewish History: an Impassioned Plea."

David N. Myers is the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Professor of Jewish History in the UCLA History Department, as well as the director of the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy.  In 2017-18, he served as the President/CEO of the Center for Jewish History in New York.

Myers’ scholarly work has touched on a number of key themes in modern Jewish history, including the history of Jewish historiography, the history of Zionism, and modern Jewish intellectual history.  In addition to Re-Inventing the Jewish Past, he has also written 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 in the Oxford University Press Very Short Introduction series, and The Stakes of History: The Use and Abuse of Jewish History for Life (Yale University Press, 2018).  Myers has edited nine books, including The Jewish Past Revisited,Enlightenment and Diaspora: The Armenian and Jewish Cases, and The Faith of Fallen Jews: Yosef Hayim and the Writing of Jewish History, and The Eternal Dissident: Rabbi Leonard I. Beerman and the Radical Imperative to Think and Act.  He is completing a book with Nomi Stolzenberg on the Satmar Hasidic community of Kiryas Yoel, New York.