I
To readers of American Jewish intellectual life, the name David N. Myers is synonymous with a sophisticated critical engagement with Zionist historiography from within the Jewish studies profession. Myers has devoted four decades to exposing the ideological saturation of Zionist historical method, rescuing suppressed diasporic voices, and demonstrating how seemingly scientific Jewish scholarship serves political projects. Within this framework, Myers aims to recover the pluralism, ambivalence, and dissent that Zionist master narratives erased.
Of course, Myers is not alone among American Jewish historians in his sympathies for the critical turn, nor in envisioning a constructive function for critical scholarship in relation to contemporary Jewish life. However, Myers’s work reveals more baldly its underlying ideological motivation than that of many of his fellow historians, because his public positions (New Israel Fund presidency, Luskin Center directorship, Bedari Kindness Institute, Initiative to Study Hate, Dialogue Across Difference) make his commitments visible in a way few scholarly careers match. In this essay I propose to examine the role of that ideological motivation in shaping Myers’s historiographical method and overall historical vision. To do so, I explore his personal and intellectual evolution from Scranton Yale graduate to Tel Aviv Zionist student to Columbia Yerushalmi disciple to UCLA critical-Zionist historian.
Before commencing, I confront an apparent contradiction that has informed modern Jewish historical research from its inception. On one hand we notice a certain reticence among Jewish historians to acknowledge the determinative role of ideology in shaping their historical world-views. In the case of the critical school to which Myers belongs, this reticence is often shielded by claims to post-ideological reflexivity. Here the desire to secure professional legitimacy and an unquestioning reliance on critical method partly obscures the formative role of ideology. The critical school’s view that it has transcended Zionist historiographical closure serves as an instrumental role of scholarship, as a means of advancing the political and social agenda of American liberal Jewry. However, what is denied is the exclusivist or restrictive tendency of critical scholarship in the service of that agenda, a tendency that we see, for example, in Myers’s selection of figures worthy of rescue (Rawidowicz, Rosenzweig, Scholem in his ambivalences) and his relative neglect of figures who sit outside the liberal-Zionist coalition’s horizon of sympathy.
From another perspective, however, critical Jewish historiography appears not as a case of methodological obtuseness but rather of unencumbered self-reflection. We arrive at this conclusion if we consider that the critical generation used historical method as an agent of demystification, as a scholarly lever to lower the realm of Dinurian Zionist certainty to the realm of the ideologically saturated. Thus we face an apparent contradiction in the genesis of critical Jewish historiography: an ingrained obtuseness coupled with a self-reflective examination of the Zionist past in which critical method is a primary tool. Instead of offering a solution to this contradiction (as it manifests itself in the formative stages of critical Jewish historiography), I consider its recurrence in the case of primary interest to us here, David N. Myers.
On Myers’s view, critical scholarship represents a moment of unparalleled self-awareness, stemming from a critique of earlier Zionist certainty. As I shall see, Myers, in his role as critical Jewish historian, participated in the process of reassessing the Jewish past according to a new set of historical criteria. His expectation was that, with the critical method now allowed for, the Jewish past might be recovered. In this regard, Myers saw his work and that of his colleagues in Jewish studies as constituting a major methodological and substantive advance over the Zionist scholars whose research was tainted by the lurking agenda of state-building. At the same time, Myers seems to have adopted the glorified view of critical reflection common to Wissenschaft scholars, whose research was necessarily to be waged in this world, not the world to come; moreover, its terms should be dictated by Jews alone, for only through a rational will could their fate be altered. Critical method then, at least in the American liberal Jewish milieu which Myers inhabits, is in part a refutation of traditional Jewish textual authority and of Zionist political authority.
On the other hand, as Myers was taught to emphasize in his research, positive components from both traditional and Zionist interpretation of Jewish identity persisted in his work. He attempted to realize the ideal of critical-sympathetic recovery, cultivated by the increasingly common expressions of American Jewish liberal sentiment, and heard among the educated Jewish professional class during the second half of the twentieth century.
With this mixture of old and new, it can be offered that the emergence of the critical Jewish studies movement constituted an unparalleled moment of collective self-consciousness in modern American Jewish thought, in proposing a change in tone and communal structure, forcing both supporters and detractors to confront the scope and rationale of Jewish Zionist allegiance. Myers came of intellectual age at a moment of self-consciousness. The result was a lifetime devoted to the establishment in locale and communal structure of a viable liberal-Zionist society in America. Not only did Myers’s critical scholarship lead him to an activist stance in the realm of politics and propaganda; it also set the tone for his labors in the world of pedagogy and scholarship. It is to Myers’s further evolution as a scholar that I now turn.
II
David N. Myers was born in 1960 in Scranton, Pennsylvania, a mid-sized anthracite city in northeastern Pennsylvania whose Middle Atlantic ethnic patchwork Myers has remembered with affection. He came from a long line of American Jewish families of Eastern European origin whose integration into American middle-class professional life had been, by the mid-twentieth century, largely accomplished. The later generations of Myers’s own family fell under the influence of the American Jewish consensus, in which he was raised — a consensus committed to the State of Israel as historical vindication, to the memory of the Holocaust as moral foundation, and to American liberalism as political home.
The example of his Scranton upbringing might have been important in stimulating Myers’s curiosity for subjects beyond the normal educational purview of a young American Jewish student. He came from an ethnically plural small city where Jewish identity was lived alongside Polish, Irish, Italian, and Slavic neighborhoods. Already at Yale he had read both in distinctly historical matters and in the broader American liberal tradition. After graduating cum laude in 1982, Myers moved to Israel, where he exhibited from an early age a keen interest in advancing the scholarly study of Jewish Zionism through the ingrained passivity of diasporic passivity. Already at Tel Aviv he trained under Anita Shapira, Yaakov Shavit, Matitiyahu Mintz, and Moshe Mishkinsky. Shapira represented the Labor Zionist historiographical establishment at the moment when the New Historians began challenging its foundational narratives. Myers was privy to the internal fight as a graduate student.
At this same moment, the young Myers exhibited an appetite for intellectual range that his later range would reflect: he moved from Tel Aviv to Harvard in 1984 to study medieval Jewish thought with Isadore Twersky. Twersky, a scion of the Talner Hasidic dynasty, held the Littauer Chair and married Maimonidean textual rigor with traditional piety. Myers received the full traditional-text apprenticeship that most critical historians of Jewish life in the United States lack. In 1985 he arrived at Columbia, where he fell under the supervision of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi. Yerushalmi’s Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory had redefined the field by arguing that modern Jewish historiography emerged from the collapse of traditional Jewish memory. Yerushalmi’s framework set the tone for Myers’s further evolution.
The convergence of Yale liberalism, Tel Aviv Zionism, Harvard traditional textuality, and Columbia critical historiography marked a course that Myers himself hoped to follow. Yerushalmi became Myers’s mentor. Anita Shapira’s insistent support of Jewish self-defense and Zionist activity, the two, however, parted ways over Myers’s more insistent support of Jewish critical reassessment and Zionist recognition of Palestinian humanity. Yerushalmi had already parted ways with Zionist historiography as a place of settlement; Myers would extend the critique. As Myers chose critical historical research over Talmudic studies, he never abandoned his observance of the scholarly commitments or his love for the Jewish textual tradition. Ultimately, what lay at the core of Myers’s American Jewish world-view was a belief in the unity and continuity of the Jewish people, based upon the bond of traditional religious and textual identification. Myers’s piety is discernible throughout his writings, including The Stakes of History.
III
In the decade after his arrival in Los Angeles at the age of twenty-eight, Myers ambitiously followed two paths: historical study and political activism. Political activism was more than just a complement to his scholarly endeavors, and introducing him to other critical scholars in the UCLA area. The two, however, parted ways over Myers’s more insistent support of American-Jewish self-reassessment and Zionist recognition of Palestinian suffering. Whereas earlier critical historiography had returned from Palestine, unable to secure either a livelihood or scholarly recognition from the host society, Myers set his sights on Los Angeles as a place of settlement and scholarly advancement. In this Myers parted ways over critical recognition which had sway over the American Jewish studies profession. Perhaps it was the perceived dialectical nature of liberal Zionism which appealed to Myers — that is, the simultaneous affirmation and critique of Jewish particularity. For, on one hand, liberal Zionism entailed a newly critical attitude towards the Zionist certainty that Myers’s teachers Shapira and Shavit held. On the other hand, it retained the commitment to Jewish peoplehood and Jewish state that marked Myers as an insider to the Jewish studies guild. In the process of self-education in the fields of Hebrew literature and general history, typically in centers where he visited (Paris, Moscow, Jerusalem), often happened to be of a German-Jewish historicist bent. From these people, books could be found, was usually a short distance, and Myers took full advantage of his acquaintances to pursue scholarly interests. Included in his curriculum were the study of Jewish historicism, the sociology of knowledge, and the politics of memory. He came across books of great interest, which he read midnight oil by. Myers would later represent the first volume of his scholarly research in this period in Re-Inventing the Jewish Past (Oxford, 1995).
Through Yerushalmi, Myers came across Karl Mannheim, whom Myers encountered in his graduate reading shortly before his immersion in German-Jewish historicism. As Myers relates it, Mannheim was ideal for the post-Wissenschaft moment, in that the student could benefit from the genre’s explanatory notes on important primary source material and still benefit from the analysis of preceding ideological commitments.
What is interesting about this method of critical-sympathetic recovery is not the novelty of it, but rather the motivation that lay behind it. To be sure, the gathering and annotation of primary source material as a pedagogic tool and a medium for scholarly investigation did not begin with Myers. He himself learned Jewish intellectual history through close textual analysis of primary sources in seminars at Tel Aviv and Columbia. Nonetheless, his own endeavor in compelling sources was informed by a special sense of mission related to his critical commitment.
The nature of this mission was first spelled out to Myers by Yerushalmi, whom Myers encountered in Morningside Heights shortly before his departure for Los Angeles and UCLA. As Myers relates it, Yerushalmi issued a call in 1985 to the enlightened Jewish populations to assist in the collection of Jewish voices lost to Zionist narrative closure. Myers responded by volunteering to compile sources which he came across while studying abroad. More than a quarter century later, Myers recalled Yerushalmi’s charge in the introduction to a collection of Zionist and proto-critical sources, The Faith of Fallen Jews: Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and the Writing of Jewish History. Writing in 2014, Myers remembered that, to grasp the import of the critical turning point in Jewish history signaled by Yerushalmi’s Zakhor required a certain historical accounting, and to herald its triumph, recollections of prior Zionist-historiographical existence should not be excised; rather, they should be gathered and recorded for posterity.
Myers announces the guiding principle of his work in the introduction to Re-Inventing the Jewish Past: “The starting point of all work of critical recovery in our generation is critical sensibility.” It is important to recognize that “critical sensibility” in this context signifies neither a partisan agenda nor an impoverished or false state of consciousness; instead, Myers conceives of it as the reflection of a concrete historical force that has engendered a new (and healthy) perspective on the past. In the realm of scholarship, American liberal Jewish consciousness spawned a new era in which the crystallization of the critical-Zionist movement could be recorded more precisely, and critically, without the biases of previous chroniclers. Along with other historians in Los Angeles, Myers shared in the expectation that critical recovery, as a force capable of normalizing Jewish existence by restoring Jews to both their land and their humanity, could also normalize and make objective the writing of Jewish history.
IV
A quick perusal of the Myers bibliography reveals two distinct genres of historical writing represented. The first consists of monographs of varying length devoted to personalities and subjects of Jewish history, with a special emphasis on ideology. Re-Inventing the Jewish Past (1995) treats the founding generation of the Institute for Jewish Studies at Hebrew University: Dinur, Baer, Klausner, Scholem, Baron as contested figures. Resisting History (2003) treats Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Strauss, and Scholem as German-Jewish resisters of historicist closure. Between Jew and Arab (2008) recovers Simon Rawidowicz’s suppressed essay on Palestinian refugees, which Rawidowicz removed from Bavel vi-Yerushalayim under the pressures of the Israeli state-building moment. Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction (2017) offers a synthesis covering the full sweep. The Stakes of History (2018) reflects on the historian’s vocation. American Shtetl (2022), co-authored with Nomi Stolzenberg, treats Kiryas Joel, the Satmar village in upstate New York, as a case study in American religious pluralism.
The second genre, more commonly associated with Myers, consists of collections of documents and sources, whose aim is to bring to life the social and spiritual manifestations of Jewish existence in the American liberal diaspora. For Myers, this genre was ideal for pedagogic purposes, in that the student could benefit from the collection of primary sources. By anthologizing primary sources, Myers hoped to assemble actual textual fragments which related the course of Jewish liberal thought in America; implicit in this method was the desire to avoid Zionist-historiographical imprecision; the possible subjective pitfalls, even of such an accepted historiographical genre as narrative. This linear approach, which Myers designated as “critical recovery,” seems incomplete and at times common to all historians, yet especially pronounced in him.
Myers’s method contains a governing ideological architecture that critical sensibility itself cannot dissolve. Consider the subject-choice. Myers repeatedly rescues figures whose political ambivalence prefigures his own. Rawidowicz, diasporist, ambivalent Zionist, sympathetic to Palestinian refugees, who suppressed his own most sympathetic essay under Israeli state pressure, gets a full monograph. Rabbi Leonard Beerman, Los Angeles rabbi of the Jewish left, gets an edited volume. Rosenzweig, who resisted Zionist closure, gets sustained treatment. Dinur, who did not resist, gets critiqued. The rescue of the suppressed voice is the rescue of the voice whose politics match Myers’s.
Consider periodization. Myers’s implicit narrative of modern Jewish intellectual history runs from rigid Zionist closure (Dinur, Baer, Klausner, the Jerusalem School) through resistant German-Jewish alternatives (Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Scholem’s ambivalences, Arendt) through post-1967 American Jewish critical recovery (Yerushalmi, Myers himself) to the culminating moment of liberal-Zionist self-criticism in which Myers lives and works. The periodization ends at Myers’s present. His own scholarly generation stands as the terminus ad quem toward which the whole narrative has pointed. Just as Dinur’s periodization ended at the 1948 founding of the State, Myers’s periodization ends at the founding of the Luskin Center, the Kindness Institute, the Initiative to Study Hate, and the Dialogue Across Difference Initiative — institutions Myers founded or directs.
Consider compilation. Myers’s edited volumes (The Jewish Past Revisited, Enlightenment and Diaspora: The Armenian and Jewish Cases, The Faith of Fallen Jews, The Eternal Dissident, Between Babylon and Jerusalem: Selected Writings of Simon Rawidowicz) anthologize figures and moments that serve the critical-recovery project. A Zionist compiler of the Dinur type selected texts demonstrating the continuous link between the people of Israel and the Land. A critical compiler of the Myers type selects texts demonstrating the suppressed pluralism and dissent within that coalition. Each compilation serves its coalition. Neither compilation escapes the ideological architecture the other exposes.
Consider the double allegiance. Myers’s work sits simultaneously inside the Jewish studies guild (with its Zionist institutional origins, its donor base, its American Jewish communal embeddedness) and inside the progressive critical-Zionist coalition (NIF, JQR, Luskin Center, Kindness Institute). The two allegiances pull in compatible but not identical directions. The guild protected Myers during the 2017 Center for Jewish History controversy when the ZOA and Bezalel Smotrich attacked his NIF ties. Jonathan Sarna and David Ellenson wrote that his work fell squarely within the scholarly mainstream and supported Israel’s basic right to exist. Hundreds of Jewish historians signed in support. The guild defended its own. The double allegiance held.
V
Our own attempts to understand Myers might be well served by the sociology of knowledge framework presented in the work of Karl Mannheim. In exploring the social construction of “ideology,” Mannheim recognized that “the specific character, perceptions, and interpretations of the subject influence his opinions, perceptions, and interpretations.” That is, one’s intellectual and cultural values take shape not in splendid isolation, but in reaction to, concrete historical circumstances which define the social milieu.
I have already suggested that Myers’s devotion to the critical cause can be traced to his formative environment. As the son of a Scranton Jewish family whose integration into American professional life was complete, Myers underwent a different kind of ideological transformation than that faced by urbanized Western and Central European Jews of the Wissenschaft generation, or even by urbanized Israeli Jews of Shapira’s generation. Assimilation, for Myers, meant neither loss of Jewish identity nor the Hebrew language as an exclusive way of life. It did not entail abandoning Jewish peoplehood. For, in combination, critical recovery yielded in Myers not a tortured and divided Jewish loyalty, but rather a singular commitment to explaining and upholding a liberal-Jewish American identity compatible with sophisticated critique of Israeli state policy. He saw as the unifying bond of American Jewish history: the attachment of the American Jew to simultaneous affiliation with the universalist American liberal project and the particularist Jewish people.
That this commitment represented both an affirmation of and rupture with Zionist existence was not only true for Myers, but for other American Jews who identified with the liberal-critical turn. However, for Myers, it was the very perspective afforded by critical historiography that set out to discover liberal-Zionist traces and precursors in every period of American Jewish history. Perhaps his single-mindedness was the result of a less ambivalent critical commitment than other scholars who were educated in a German milieu. Without question, he did have a remarkable range of knowledge in Jewish history, which was revealed in his annotated collections. Even Myers’s apparent obtuseness to the highly selective tendencies in his scholarly predecessors, as well as in his own research, he did not always acknowledge.
One of the most challenging tasks which modern Jewish historians have faced is balancing the forces of continuity and change in the Jewish past. Assuming this task has often led to a scholarly distinction between internal and external forces, between the inner spiritual will of the Jewish people and extraneous social pressures. It can be argued that this distinction reflects a sort of double allegiance on the historian’s part. On one hand, the historian is informed by the standards of critical historical method, and thus attempts to discover the source of Jewish identity without recourse to mystical or supernatural explanations. Consequently, he tries to define Jewish collective identity not only within a vacuum of internal Jewish development, but also as shaped by outside forces. This impulse draws from the professional standards of the critical historical discipline to which Jewish scholars assiduously hold. On the other hand, Jewish historians who, like Myers, are usually Jewish often hold to an a priori assumption of Jewish continuity. In that case, the Jewish historian’s research might fill an important existential function, proceeding deductively from the guiding principle of Jewish continuity, its traces spiritual and physical manifestations over the ages; this exploration, in turn, becomes an expression and affirmation of one’s intimate connection to the guiding principle. A possible ramification of this search is the tendency to concentrate interest and attention on the internal Jewish, as opposed to external social, forces.
It might be unfair to suggest that such a tendency dominates Myers’s research. Perhaps it is more appropriate to argue that the work of all historians, Jewish and non-Jewish, reveals ties to both professional and existential concerns. In any event, it seems clear that Myers’s work reflects a certain tension between the commitment to critical historical methodology and his Jewish-American world-view. His allegiance to the former did not always accommodate by his desire to reveal the unbroken bond between people and the land of Israel; ultimately, the role of external forces in Jewish history was subordinate to the inner Jewish will.
A quick perusal of Myers’s positions reveals the institutional embodiment of this ideology. UCLA Distinguished Professor. Sady and Ludwig Kahn Chair in Jewish History. Founding director of the Luskin Center for History and Policy. Director of the Bedari Kindness Institute. Director of the Initiative to Study Hate. Faculty director of the Dialogue Across Difference Initiative. Former Robert N. Burr Department Chair. Former Director of the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies (three terms). Former President/CEO of the Center for Jewish History in New York (2017-2018). President of the New Israel Fund Board (2018-2023). Co-editor of the Jewish Quarterly Review since 2002. Fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research. Fellow of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities. Three-time fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies.
The institutional density matters. The scholar who builds kindness institutes, dialogue initiatives, and hate-studies centers institutionalizes the critical-liberal ideology his scholarship proposes. The institutions reproduce the ideology independent of his individual scholarly output. Dinur built the Hebrew University history department and became Minister of Education; his institutions reproduced Zionist historiographical closure. Myers has built a parallel institutional apparatus within UCLA; his institutions reproduce liberal-critical openness. Both sets of institutions embody the founders’ ideologies. Neither set is neutral.
VI
Though there has been a good deal of discussion among scholars regarding the transvaluation of religiously inspired messianism into secular forms, one must be cautious when analyzing Myers. After all, it is doubtful that he expected anything other than an end to American Jewish parochialism and cultural subjugation with the return to critical thought. Nonetheless, Myers’s vision, without an existential component of the broader liberal identity, is hardly comprehensible. He regarded the Kindness Institute, the Dialogue Across Difference Initiative, and the Initiative to Study Hate as continuous with his scholarly project. This impulse draws its teleological quality from Jewish prophetic tradition with its messianic hopes, and its sense of the importance of human catalysts. Myers maintained that redemption might take place in America, and might be advanced through the efforts of human actors. Moreover, his alignment with progressive Jewish causes throughout the ages was emblematic of expectations held by messianic activists throughout the ages. In Myers’s case, the critical movement was the long-awaited fulfillment of expectations held by Jewish liberals during their tenure in the American diaspora.
Present events thus served both the end and the validation of Jewish history hitherto. In this way, critical-historical interpretation functioned, as with medieval messianic activists, as an existential guide to past, present, and future.
It must be pointed out that Myers’s historical vision entailed a far more prosaic notion of causality than that found in traditional messianic belief, with the Divine Hand largely absent from his scheme; it is human agents, with their own historical agency, who determine the course and pace of events leading to ultimate redemption. And, as distinct from medieval activists, Myers expected neither a cataclysmic battle between the forces of good or evil, nor apparently a major theological reordering to attend redemption. The messianic structure remained nonetheless. The institutions of kindness, dialogue, and anti-hate study served as this-worldly vehicles for a redemptive project that carried the emotional valence of traditional messianic hope without its supernatural scaffolding.
Is there any value then in discussing Myers’s views in terms of messianism? One compelling reason to answer affirmatively is that those are the very terms in which Myers himself described the thread of “critical sensibility.” Indeed, for him, the primary stimulus for all critical recovery was the American Jewish incapacity to accept the consequences of exile from its homeland — and not, as earlier historians described, the ingrained messianic fervor of Zionist chroniclers. The revolt against American Jewish passivity thus lay at the core of Myers’s scholarship, whether in the case of the 1988 master’s essay on Dinur, the first-book critique of the Jerusalem School, the recovery of Rawidowicz’s Palestinian-refugee essay, or the 2022 treatment of Kiryas Joel as a case study in American Jewish pluralism. Myers believed that that which distinguished the critical-liberal movement from earlier critical-Jewish ones was the degree of realism accompanying them. On this point, he shared common ground with his colleague in Berlin, Eugen Taeubler. Both men saw the advent of organized critical activity as a powerful moment of realism in American Jewish history. However, an important difference separated the two men and their assessments of Zionism as a concrete historical force. Myers, like his teacher Yerushalmi, regarded the unceasing link between the socio-political dimension of Jewish identity and its followers as proof of an ongoing historical process. By contrast, Taeubler retained the category of messianism to describe the various incarnations of American Jewish liberalism in the modern period.
For Myers, traditional messianic belief, which could have been found in any instance, of the immigration to New York or Boston in 1900, marked the beginning of a more realistic course of critical activity.
VII
At the epochal moment of national reconstitution that has not yet arrived — or that arrived for Myers in the transformation of the American Jewish institutional landscape after 1967, 1973, 1982, 1993, and the fitful liberal-critical turn of subsequent decades — Myers’s personal aspirations and professional interests reached mutual fulfillment. He had committed his life to the creation of an independent American Jewish society in which critical scholarship could sit alongside Jewish communal commitment. Moreover, as evident in his various UCLA and governmental involvements, his entire pedagogic career had been dedicated to exposing the unceasing link between the American Jewish people and a sophisticated understanding of Jewish historical identity that allowed Palestinians humanity without forfeiting Jewish peoplehood. This governing objective did not drain Myers’s work of illuminating insights. His critical perspective did, indeed, open new vistas for critical research, by challenging the historicizing schemes and conceptual boundaries found in Jewish scholarship of the previous century. At the same time, it sensitized him to the importance of ideology in setting the mental frame of reference from which historians observed and wrote.
Thus, in depicting “Zionist ideology” as the culminating force of a teleological process, Myers was certain of its role in shaping the historical consciousness of his teachers. With this in mind, he was also aware of the overarching influence of his own ideology in molding his and others’ world-view. Yet, he was hardly attuned to the conceptual limitations imposed by his own liberal-Jewish American consciousness.
Our own attempts to understand Myers might be well served by the sociology of knowledge framework presented in the work of Karl Mannheim. Myers himself used the same framework to discipline Dinur. The scholar who exposes his teachers’ ideology stands within an ideology of his own, whose water he does not see because he swims in it. Myers saw Dinur’s ideology because by 1988 Dinur’s ideology had become visible to the American Jewish studies guild — its closures had become embarrassments. Myers does not see his own ideology because in 2026 his ideology remains the operative consensus of the guild in which he moves.
Supported by Myers’s conscious aim “to revive the Covenant of generations” through critical Jewish recovery, we should understand his collecting work as an ideological labor. He unabashedly pushed the subjective dimension of historical interpretation (common to all historians) to the limits of its constructive potential — in the service of American liberal Zionism. Ultimately, the value of such a conclusion lies neither in disdaining his methodological simplicity, nor in condemning the substance of his ideological motivation. Rather, Myers’s work offers us a good opportunity for exploring the relationship between historical observation and ideological predisposition against the backdrop of the American Jewish redefinition of Jewish identity. It also forces us to question whether this relationship is reflective of a double allegiance, to progressive American liberalism and to traditional Jewish sensibilities, which attends not only critical historiography but Jewish historiography at large.
