David N. Myers is Distinguished Professor and Sady and Ludwig Kahn Chair in Jewish History in the History Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. He received his A.B. cum laude from Yale College in 1982, pursued graduate studies in modern Jewish history at Tel Aviv University and medieval Jewish thought at Harvard University, and earned his Ph.D. with distinction from Columbia University in 1991 under Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi. Myers joined the UCLA faculty as a lecturer in 1991 and assistant professor in 1992. He has held prominent leadership positions, including Director of the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies from 1996 to 2000 and 2004 to 2010, Chair of the UCLA History Department from 2010 to 2015, and since fall 2017, Director of the Luskin Center for History and Policy and Director of the UCLA Initiative to Study Hate. Additionally, he served as President and CEO of the Center for Jewish History in New York from 2017 to 2018 and as President of the Board of the New Israel Fund from 2018 to 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 in Jerusalem, and held three fellowships at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies in Philadelphia.

Myers has written extensively on modern Jewish intellectual and cultural history, with research interests encompassing the history of Jewish historiography, Zionism, and the history of history. His authored books include Re-Inventing the Jewish Past: European Jewish Intellectuals and the Zionist Return to History (Oxford University Press, 1995), Resisting History: Historicism and its Discontents in German-Jewish Thought (Princeton University Press, 2003), Between Jew and Arab: The Lost Voice of Simon Rawidowicz (Brandeis University Press, 2008), Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2017), The Stakes of History: On the Use and Abuse of Jewish History for Life (Yale University Press, 2018), and American Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic Village in Upstate New York, co-authored with Nomi M. Stolzenberg (Princeton University Press, 2022), which won the National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish Studies. He has edited or co-edited numerous volumes, such as The Jewish Past Revisited: Reflections on Modern Jewish Historians (Yale University Press, 1998), Enlightenment and Diaspora: The Armenian and Jewish Cases (Scholars Press, 1999), The Faith of Fallen Jews: Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and the Writing of Jewish History (University Press of New England, 2013), and The Eternal Dissident: Rabbi Leonard I. Beerman and the Radical Imperative to Think and Act (2018). Since 2003, he has been co-editor of the Jewish Quarterly Review. An elected fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research and the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities, Myers teaches courses on Jewish history and the history of history at UCLA.

Professional Email: myers@history.ucla.edu