What Then Shall We Do: The Work Myers Left

Historian David N. Myers has inquired into the tension between history and memory under Yerushalmi’s long shadow, the invention of national historiography under Zionism, the recovery of suppressed diaspora-nationalist voices like Simon Rawidowicz, the institutional forces shaping Jewish studies as a discipline, and most recently the concrete political theology of American Hasidic separatism in American Shtetl and the post-October 7 imperatives of applied history through the Luskin Center and UCLA’s Initiative to Study Hate.
The secondary engagement with his work remains derivative: contextualist exegesis, moral positioning on Israel/Palestine, or instrumentalization for progressive or Zionist polemics. What is missing, and urgently required, is a fearless synthesis that treats Myers’ core questions as empirical problems in human evolutionary biology, cultural evolution, coalition theory, and group selection.
The place to start is not theory but a scene Myers documented without quite theorizing in the way this essay will push. In Kiryas Joel, the Satmar enclave in uprate New York, municipal law bends to accommodate a high-fertility, tightly bounded religious community. Zoning rules, school district lines, and public funding streams get reinterpreted through sustained legal pressure. The liberal state does not collapse. It adapts. The result is not assimilation but its opposite: a pocket of intensified difference funded in part by the surrounding system. Myers describes this as political ingenuity. High fertility, strong boundary maintenance, and aggressive institutional capture produce persistence. No amount of discourse about pluralism explains that as cleanly as the simple demographic fact that one group reproduces at three times the rate of its neighbors and organizes accordingly. American Shtetl brilliantly maps the legal and political architecture of Satmar separatism. The next step is to model it as what cultural evolution theory predicts when intergroup competition intensifies: a high-fertility transmission strategy operating under conditions of partial isolation, with boundary maintenance functioning as a coalitional immune system rather than mere theological preference.
The biopolitical stakes of this observation are rarely stated directly in Jewish studies, and Myers has not stated them. Haredi fertility runs at roughly six to seven children per woman. Diaspora liberal fertility sits near or below 1.4. That is a reproductive ratio of roughly five to one per generation. Over fifty years, compounded, it does not merely shift the balance. It replaces the subject. The modal Jewish person that Myers writes about, secular, historically conscious, committed to liberal universalism and the creative tension between memory and critique, may no longer be the modal Jewish person who exists by the time his historiography fully matures as a field. His recovered voices, Rawidowicz’s diaspora nationalism, the binational tradition, the “ever-dying people” who persist through dispersion rather than sovereignty, are becoming a minority taste within a shrinking subpopulation. This extends his own insistence, stated most clearly in The Stakes of History, that history must serve life. Serving life requires measuring it. By 2075, if current fertility differentials hold, the institutional center of gravity for global Jewry shifts toward populations that select for boundary maintenance, theological certainty, and high reproductive investment. A historiography centered on complexity and ambiguity must ask whether it possesses the cultural fitness to survive in that environment, or whether it becomes, like Rawidowicz himself, a brilliant voice that the future will admire without inhabiting.
The selection problem requires more precision than biopolitical realism usually supplies. High fertility under isolation preserves traits and transmits norms with exceptional fidelity. It also risks locking in local optima that prove catastrophic under regime change. A serious evolutionary treatment models tradeoffs rather than simply noting that one strategy outreproduces another. Haredi separatism works well under conditions of external tolerance, welfare state subsidy, and low intergroup violence. Remove those conditions and its vulnerabilities become acute: low secular educational attainment, high economic dependency, limited capacity for rapid environmental adaptation. Diaspora professional liberalism works well under conditions of open meritocratic institutions, low ethnonational competition, and stable international norms. Remove those conditions and its vulnerabilities are different but equally serious: sub-replacement fertility, high assimilation and intermarriage, weak boundary maintenance, and a coalitional style optimized for status competition within universities rather than survival under pressure.
The coalition section of this analysis cannot remain symmetrical, because coalitions are not mirror images. They have different resource bases, different reputational risks, and different enforcement structures. The progressive Jewish academic coalition draws its primary resource from moral and intellectual prestige. It gains status by demonstrating independence from Israeli state narratives, by naming Palestinian suffering, by policing its own community’s excesses, and by signaling sophistication through complexity. Its primary risk is reputational excommunication from peers. The mainstream institutional coalition operates under a different constraint set. It is tied to donors, communal organizations, and a baseline expectation of solidarity under threat. Its members gain status by defending legitimacy, emphasizing antisemitism, and closing ranks when violence spikes. Its primary risk is withdrawal of financial and political capital. These are different games with different payoffs, and Myers’ signature move, insistence on complexity, has variable fitness across them. In a seminar room it reads as sophistication. In a moment of perceived existential threat it can read as hesitation or worse.
Trace a career path and the structure becomes visible from the inside. A graduate student trained in a top Jewish studies program learns quickly which arguments are legible. Archival recovery of marginal voices is safe. Critique of nationalist historiography is safe if framed within accepted moral vocabularies. Direct engagement with genetics, group selection, or differential fertility is not merely intellectually risky. It is socially radioactive, not because it is false but because it destabilizes the moral equilibrium of the field. Myers stops short of that line. It is not sufficient to say he has not yet gone there. The more precise account is that he operates within a coalition that makes that move costly in ways that are entirely predictable from the theory he implicitly uses elsewhere. His coalition rewards moral capital and punishes biological realism.
Turner’s tacit knowledge framework bites hardest at the meso level that most biopolitical analysis skips: the layer of graduate training, hiring committees, journal editorial boards, and informal sanctions that sits between individual psychology and macro institutional forces. This is where norms get reproduced without explicit instruction, where the boundaries of the sayable get transmitted through tone and reaction rather than rule. Myers has analyzed this layer with exceptional care when the subject is Zionist historiography or Holocaust memory politics. The extension is to turn that same analytical instrument on his own field in real time, asking how the post-October 7 moment is restructuring what can be said, who gets hired, which grants get funded, and which frameworks get tacitly excluded.
The Rawidowicz thread deserves sharpening because it is where the stakes of Myers’ recovery project become most concrete. Rawidowicz offered a vision of Jewish existence that refused both total assimilation and total sovereignty: Jews as an ever-dying people who persist through dispersion, whose strength lies in their refusal of the territorial absolute. Myers recovers this as a lost alternative. The uncomfortable question is why it was lost, not merely politically but structurally. Binationalism and diaspora nationalism require a specific environment to function as stable strategies: low intergroup violence, high economic interdependence, external enforcement of minority rights. Remove those conditions and the strategy becomes fragile quickly. After October 7, the environment shifts toward high threat and low trust. Under those conditions, strategies that emphasize clear boundaries and rapid mobilization outcompete those that emphasize ambiguity and coexistence. The tradition Myers recovers may be intellectually rich and morally serious and evolutionarily nonviable under current pressures. If so, saying that directly is more respectful of Rawidowicz than treating him as a permanent symbol of roads not taken.
The decisionist turn becomes unavoidable when the analysis reaches October 7 and its aftermath. Schmitt argued that the exception reveals the true structure of politics by stripping away the procedural and moral language that normally conceals it. October 7 functions that way. It collapses the distance between analysis and action. Israeli decision-makers were not asking which narrative was most historically nuanced. They were deciding how to respond under conditions of fear, urgency, and international scrutiny. Diaspora institutions were not asking which historiography was most elegant. They were deciding what to say to students, donors, and hostile audiences within hours of the attack. In those moments, historical context either stabilizes judgment or paralyzes it. That is the genuinely uncomfortable edge of applied history. There are cases where insisting on complexity prevents catastrophic overreaction. There are cases where it reduces the capacity to identify and respond to real threat. A serious extension of Myers would try to specify empirically when each is true rather than asserting the permanent value of nuance as a professional reflex.
A campus Hillel director drafts a statement the morning after a major incident. One version emphasizes historical background, cycles of violence, mutual suffering. Another names the attack as evil and calls for solidarity without qualification. The first satisfies faculty allies and certain students. The second satisfies donors and those who feel directly threatened. The director cannot publish both. This is a constrained optimization inside a coalition structure, and the choice made reveals which coalition the director depends on for status and continued operation. Myers gives you the language to see the narratives at work. The extension this essay pushes forces you to see the tradeoffs as structural rather than personal.
The reflexive turn cannot be avoided. If coalition theory is accurate, this essay is not outside the system it describes. It is a bid for a certain kind of status, signaling impatience with moralized scholarship, reaching for the authority of evolutionary biology and game theory, risking association with arguments that are professionally dangerous within Jewish studies.
What you end up with is not a rejection of Myers but a hardening of his project. History and memory are not merely narratives communities tell themselves. They are tools deployed by populations with different reproductive strategies, by institutions with different funding streams, by individuals navigating reputational risk under constraint. Some tools fail because the environment shifts faster than the tradition can adapt. The work Myers left is the work of measuring which category applies in each case, of treating the stakes of history with the empirical seriousness that the phrase demands, and of following the analysis past the point where it remains professionally comfortable.