In 1980, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (1932–2009), a professor of Jewish history at Columbia University, gave four lectures at the University of Washington in Seattle that became the 1982 book, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory. The work rests on a distinction he presents as nearly anthropological. Traditional Judaism preserved the past through liturgy, ritual, and narrative. It remembered the Exodus at the seder, the destruction of the Temple on Tisha B’Av, the Spanish expulsion through selihot. The sixteenth century produced some historical writing after that expulsion, yet the dominant Jewish relation to the past ran through commemorative observance. The modern Jewish historian, born in nineteenth-century Germany with Wissenschaft des Judentums, entered a different activity altogether. He subjected the past to critical scrutiny, placed it in secular chronological order, cut it loose from liturgical meaning. Yerushalmi called him a fallen Jew. The book closes in melancholy. The historian’s craft cannot replace what memory did, and Jews who seek a past might not want the one the historian offers.
Marc B. Shapiro’s 2015 book, Changing the Immutable: How Orthodox Judaism Rewrites Its History, looks at a different object and produces a different mood. He documents how contemporary Orthodox publishers, biographers, and rabbinic authorities edit their inherited texts. Haredi presses photoshop out women, retouch portraits, remove inconvenient opinions from the Hatam Sofer, clean up the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s early interest in secular learning, airbrush A. I. Kook’s openness to evolution, suppress Soloveitchik’s engagement with modernity. Shapiro sets original editions alongside the sanitized replacements. He quotes Rabbi Shimon Schwab, who argued that if the facts embarrass the mission, the facts must yield. Shapiro writes as an Orthodox insider cataloguing his own community’s manufacturing of its past, not as a mourner but as a precise critic.
Put the two books together and a tension opens. Yerushalmi treats Jewish memory as a mostly pre-critical inheritance, something ancient and communal that the modern historian stands outside of. Shapiro shows contemporary Orthodox memory is not pre-critical at all. It gets produced at industrial scale by publishing houses, yeshiva presses, biographical committees, and editorial decisions made by men who know exactly what they do and why. The Haredi memory community is no survival of medieval piety. It is a twentieth- and twenty-first-century response to modernity, self-conscious, reactive, deliberate. What Yerushalmi framed as a rupture between memory and history turns out to be a contest between two modern projects, each editing the past for present service. He thought the historian stood apart, the fallen Jew who saw clearly but belonged nowhere. Shapiro’s evidence suggests something harsher. The Haredi editor and the academic historian both belong to coalitions that need the past in particular shapes. The Haredi editor works openly and crudely. He cuts photographs, retouches volumes, instructs typesetters. The academic historian works subtly and with prestige. He selects archives, chooses subjects, frames questions, confers or withholds citation. Both practices serve memory communities that depend on accounts of what has been.
David Myers stands at an intersection of these two books. He was Yerushalmi’s student at Columbia. His 1992 essay “Remembering Zakhor: A Super-Commentary” took Yerushalmi’s framework as its starting point. He co-edited the Yerushalmi festschrift Jewish History and Jewish Memory in 1998, and he co-edited The Faith of Fallen Jews: Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and the Writing of Jewish History, a title that wears the inherited framework on its sleeve. His own books, Re-Inventing the Jewish Past on Zionist historiography, Resisting History on German-Jewish thought, The Stakes of History on the ethical use of the past, sit inside the problematic Yerushalmi mapped. Whatever Myers writes about Jewish memory and history runs through Yerushalmi first.
Myers has also engaged Shapiro’s object of study. With Pini Dunner he wrote on a Haredi attack on Soloveitchik that turns on exactly the kind of revisionism Shapiro catalogued. With Nomi Stolzenberg he wrote American Shtetl, the long book on Kiryas Joel, which treats the Satmar community’s construction of itself through American municipal law. The Satmar world is among the principal producers of the counter-history Shapiro documents. Myers has looked at that world closely. He has not, so far as his published work shows, turned Shapiro’s lens back on the academic Jewish studies world he inhabits.
Yerushalmi’s framework gives Myers a way to hold a particular self-image. The historian practices critical distance. He resists memory’s pull toward coalition service. He speaks for the fallen Jew condition with dignity. Shapiro’s empirical work, if extended, might press on that self-image. The progressive liberal Diaspora coalition Myers belongs to and leads has its own memory project. It selects saints: Rawidowicz, Leonard Beerman, binationalist dissenters, diaspora pluralists. It names villains: illiberal Zionists, ultra-Orthodox maximalists, Trump-era ethnic nationalists. It edits the past to produce a usable tradition of pluralist, democratic, ethically alert Judaism compatible with contemporary progressive sensibilities. The Luskin Center for History and Policy turns scholarship into present-day guidance. The Initiative to Study Hate names the enemies the coalition recognizes. The Bedari Kindness Institute codifies the coalition’s preferred affect. The New Israel Fund presidency, which Myers held from 2018 to 2023, aligns scholarship with institutional advocacy.
Myers argues that history has stakes, that it connects to life, that the scholar engages contemporary concerns. The Stakes of History argues for this view at length. Pair it with Shapiro and the same vocabulary shows up on both sides of the line Yerushalmi drew. Truth, responsibility, usable past. Rabbi Shimon Schwab said his community could do without facts that did not inspire. The academic historian does not say this. He publishes footnotes. He qualifies. He maintains peer review. The question Shapiro’s method raises is whether those practices, once an institution has chosen its coalition, produce a different quality of historical truth or a more sophisticated version of the same editorial work.
The progressive Diaspora coalition has material infrastructure, symbolic vocabulary, and emotional ritual. It needs a historical account of American and global Judaism that underwrites its political program: support for Israeli democracy against the Israeli right, defense of diaspora legitimacy against the negation of exile, pluralism against ethno-nationalism, kindness against hate. Myers’s scholarship supplies that account. The account is not false. It marshals real archives, recovers real figures, documents real alternatives that existed and lost. But the selection, framing, and emphasis serve coalition needs in the same formal sense that the Artscroll biography serves Haredi needs. What differs is the editorial taste and the institutional setting.
Yerushalmi’s framework could not quite see this about itself. It let the historian mourn memory from outside without asking whether the historian’s academy was itself a memory community with its own rituals, its own exclusions, its own canonical saints. Shapiro’s documentary method, turned on any institution, exposes the editing. His book names the Haredi publishers because that is his beat. The method travels. An analogous study of editorial decisions at the Jewish Quarterly Review under Myers’s long co-editorship, at the Association for Jewish Studies programming committees, at Center for Jewish History exhibitions, at the Wexner Heritage Foundation curriculum, at New Israel Fund communications, might produce a parallel catalogue. Whether the catalogue looks like censorship or like scholarly judgment depends on which coalition you belong to.
Turner’s convenient-belief framework reads the inherited Yerushalmi stance as exactly this. The academic Jewish historian believes, with Yerushalmi, that his work stands apart from coalition memory, because the alternative requires him to see himself as one more memory-editor with a prestige institution. Becker’s hero systems read the stance as the shape of modern Jewish academic immortality: the scholar, by refusing instrumentalized memory, earns a place in a narrower but higher order. Both readings predict that a figure like Myers, trained inside Yerushalmi and institutionally central to progressive Diaspora Jewish life, might not extend Shapiro’s method to his own coalition even though his scholarship shows he has the skill to do so.
The demographic point completes the picture. Yerushalmi wrote in 1980 when the Haredi world was a periphery and the liberal Jewish academic world set the terms. Shapiro published in 2015 when the demographic arrow had reversed and the Haredi counter-history was no longer a curiosity. Myers operates in the second world but works with the first world’s assumptions. His inherited framework treats Haredi memory as aberrant, Orthodox revisionism as scandal, and liberal academic historiography as the critical baseline. Shapiro’s evidence supports the scandal reading at the local level. Once the method generalizes, it also suggests that the critical baseline is a coalition performance losing the demographic argument. The Haredi publishers Shapiro critiques are producing the Jewish future. Myers’s progressive institutional network produces rich scholarship for a shrinking audience.
Yerushalmi and Myers both refuse the demands of Orthodox Judaism. Shapiro accepts this burden.
Insecurity names the affect that powers the structure of much of non-Orthodox romanticizing of traditional Jewish life. The insecurity is a Jewish authenticity question the post-traditional Jew cannot escape. Am I still really Jewish if I do not keep the mitzvot? The intellectual answer is that there exists a higher, more ethical, more historically serious mode of Jewishness that transcends ritual observance and connects the modern scholar to the covenant through books and institutions rather than shabbat and kashrut. Gershom Scholem formulated an early version. Yerushalmi refined it. Myers institutionalizes it. The claim is necessary because the alternative is to accept that one has exited the covenant community and kept only its memory as property, which is a harder position to live with than the elevated one.
Shapiro’s Orthodox observance answers the authenticity question at the level of practice, not at the level of prose. His scholarship can then do straightforward historical work, including severe critique of his own community, without needing to perform extra reverence. The reverence is covered by his life.
Myers’s compensation might show up most in the proliferation of his institutional roles. A man secure in his Jewish identity has less need to run a kindness institute, a hate initiative, a dialogue initiative, a history-and-policy center, a podcast, a journal co-editorship, a foundation board presidency, and a full professorship at once. The multiplication of roles answers a question the single identity no longer answers on its own.
Yerushalmi romanticizes what he will not live. This shows up in the reverent tone Zakhor takes toward traditional memory. He describes the medieval liturgical mind as if from outside a cathedral he cannot enter. The “fallen Jew” label for the modern historian is a self-description with theological weight. An Orthodox scholar would not call himself fallen because he has not fallen from anywhere. A secular scholar might not use the term because it is not his idiom. Yerushalmi uses it because he stands between. Ordained as a Conservative rabbi, literate, observant of some practices, but not inside the seamless memory community he describes, and so he reaches for what he does not have.
Shapiro’s voice runs differently. He writes from inside Orthodox practice and does not idealize the tradition as a form of memory. He describes Orthodox editors the way a mechanic describes an engine. The things they do, he knows why they do. The distance that produced Yerushalmi’s melancholy is not available to Shapiro, so neither is the compensation.
Myers writes in a later moment when idealizing traditional memory reads as naive or reactionary. His compensation flows sideways into a different mode. The historian as communal teacher, moral leader, institutional builder for his own coalition.
Consider what Myers has built or directs. The Wexner Heritage Foundation teaching role, training liberal Jewish lay leaders. The Luskin Center for History and Policy, turning scholarship into civic guidance. The Bedari Kindness Institute, codifying a moral vocabulary. The Initiative to Study Hate, naming the coalition’s enemies. The Dialogue Across Difference Initiative, producing ritual encounter. The New Israel Fund presidency from 2018 to 2023, aligning scholarship with advocacy. Co-editorship of the Jewish Quarterly Review since the early 2000s. Director of the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies across multiple terms. The Center for Jewish History presidency in New York in 2017-18.
These roles add up to something structurally close to rabbinic function. The rabbi in a practicing community teaches what the past means, shapes ritual, names right conduct, leads the institution, represents the community in civic life. Myers performs these operations in academic and civic registers for a coalition that has shed most Orthodox practice. He gives his coalition what it has lost. Authoritative interpretation of its past, institutional density, moral vocabulary, named enemies, shared ritual encounter. He does this from a chaired professorship rather than a pulpit, but the functional parallel is close.
Yerushalmi reached back toward traditional memory he could not inhabit. Myers reaches sideways and forward, building institutional substitutes for the tradition his coalition has mostly given up. Kindness institute as halakhic substitute. Applied history center as beit midrash substitute. Then & Now podcast as drasha substitute. The initiatives proliferate because no single one fully replaces what has been lost.
A second tell. Myers treats Haredi communities with more sympathy than his political coalition generally extends. American Shtetl presents Kiryas Joel as a legitimate American religious community rather than as a troubling illiberal enclave. His Satmar article in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion reads Satmar anti-Zionism seriously. A progressive academic writing about a community that might find his own liberalism offensive needs a reason to hold that sympathy. One reason: the Orthodox world represents what his coalition no longer has. Sympathy for it is a way of honoring the tradition from outside without having to join it. This parallels Yerushalmi reaching toward the memory community he admired and did not inhabit.
The strain in Myers’s public voice, the visible agony of his position, the moral seriousness, the prophetic register in op-eds on Israel and American Jewish life, the urgency about democracy and kindness and dialogue, reads differently under this frame. A comfortable scholar might not speak this way. The register belongs to a man performing a role he did not inherit and knows he does not quite own.
In Mourning and Melancholia, Freud describes what happens when a loss cannot be mourned because the person cannot fully admit what has been lost or why. Instead of releasing the object, the ego takes it in. The subject becomes the object in a diminished way. The lost thing lives on inside as an idealized image that the self simultaneously claims and cannot live out. Yerushalmi’s relation to traditional Jewish memory reads this way. His family was observant. He got ordained at JTS. He knew the texts and liturgy intimately. Then he lived at a distance from that life while writing about it with a tenderness his prose could not quite justify on analytical grounds. The “fallen Jew” self-description is a melancholic admission. The fallen man carries inside him the community he no longer inhabits.
The sociology of religion has a blunter term: the non-practicing admirer. Max Weber distinguished the religious virtuoso from the mass believer. The intellectual who admires virtuosity without paying its costs occupies a third position, the spectator of virtuosity. The spectator’s admiration must be louder than the virtuoso’s own, because the virtuoso’s practice speaks for itself and the spectator’s admiration has no material substrate. Shapiro is the virtuoso. He keeps shabbat, raises children in a halakhic home, lives inside the social constraints of Modern Orthodoxy, absorbs the costs of criticizing his own community as an insider. His appreciation for tradition is weightless as prose because it is weighted in practice. Yerushalmi and Myers, standing outside that practice, had to carry the weight in their sentences.
This is close to what evolutionary psychologists call costly signaling asymmetry. A costly signal works because the cost is paid. Orthodox practice is a costly signal of commitment to the tradition. The secular admirer’s admiration has zero cost, so it carries no signal value on its own. To get the signal through, he has to inflate the rhetoric, extend the scholarship, multiply the institutional gestures. The result is a voice that often sounds more reverent about tradition than the voice of people actually bound by it. Shapiro, bound by it, sounds drier about it. He can afford to.
Lionel Trilling’s Sincerity and Authenticity catches another layer. Trilling argued that modern selves, cut loose from inherited forms, develop an anxiety about authenticity they could not have had under older arrangements. The sincere man performs his role well. The authentic man worries he has no role at all. Yerushalmi is an authenticity figure in Trilling’s sense. The Orthodox man is a sincerity figure. He inherits his form and inhabits it. His practice is the role. Myers sits closer to Yerushalmi. His career as institutional builder, applied historian, and moral voice for liberal Diaspora Judaism reads as authenticity-anxiety managed through public performance.
Ernest Becker gives a third reading. The hero system is the cultural frame in which a man earns symbolic immortality. Orthodox practice offers a complete hero system: the patriarchs, the sages, the covenant, the world to come, the ongoing chain. When a man leaves that system or inherits only fragments of it, he must build a replacement or live with the ache of its absence. The scholar who writes lovingly about the tradition he does not keep has built a replacement hero system in which the writing itself secures his place. Yerushalmi wrote himself into a line of Jewish historians stretching back through Baron to Zunz. Myers writes himself into a line of institution-builders. Both lineages function as surrogate hero systems for men who declined the inherited one.
The compensatory admiration works only if the admirer does not see it as compensation. If Yerushalmi had recognized that his reverence for medieval Jewish memory was partly self-therapy for a post-traditional intellectual, the reverence would have lost its force. The strength of the affect requires not looking at its source. This is why the pattern reproduces across generations. Myers, a careful historian trained by Yerushalmi, has the analytical equipment to see the structure and does not apply it to himself because the seeing would undo the work the affect performs.
Yerushalmi’s last major book points at all of this. Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (1991) argued that Freud, the secular Viennese Jewish intellectual, remained more Jewish than he could afford to admit. The book reads as self-analysis. Yerushalmi chose Freud because Freud was the paradigm case of the secular Jewish scholar whose Jewishness lived in his writing rather than his observance. Yerushalmi wrote about Freud the way Myers now writes about Yerushalmi. Each generation produces a scholar who studies the previous generation’s compensation without turning the lens on his own.
