The David Myers Voice

David N. Myers (b. 1960) writes and speaks in the register of the liberal Jewish public moralist. The voice belongs to a man who has spent forty years inside the seminar room and the synagogue board meeting, and it carries the marks of both. He reaches for the high diction of the pulpit and the careful hedging of the academic in the same breath.
Start with how he opens an argument. The Daily Bruin op-ed begins: “Our campus has been riven by sharply opposing perspectives on the unfolding disaster in Israel-Palestine.” Note “riven.” Note “unfolding disaster.” He favors elevated, slightly literary verbs and a vocabulary of crisis. He does not write “split” or “divided.” He writes “riven,” and he likes “chasm” and “combustible” in the next sentence. The diction climbs. He wants the reader to feel the stakes as grave and historic, and he signals this through word choice before he makes a single claim.
His characteristic move is the two-handed structure. He builds arguments as balanced pairs held in tension. “This stance of clarity rests on two propositions.” First the massacre, which all must condemn. Second the humanitarian catastrophe, which all must oppose. He erects the scaffolding of formal argument, the proposition and the counter-proposition, and he asks the reader to hold both at once. The op-ed’s whole purpose is to refuse the choice between sides. That refusal is his deepest reflex. “What happens if there is moral virtue on both sides, or conversely, if there is a grave moral failing in both episodes?” The man thinks in symmetry. He distrusts the single answer.
Yet he can drop the symmetry for a hammer blow when he wants moral force. After describing the Hamas killings he writes two words on their own line: “Full stop.” A historian who quotes Bialik and footnotes Fanon also knows the power of the abrupt declarative. He alternates the ornate and the blunt. The long sentence that winds through clauses and citations, then the short verdict that lands. This is a practiced rhetorical rhythm, learned from preaching and from the courtroom register of the public intellectual.
The diction draws constantly on a shared canon. He cites the Hebrew poet Bialik and the pogrom at Kishinev. He invokes the rabbinic teaching that to save one life is to save the world, and he pairs it at once with the Muslim source for the same idea. He closes with Lincoln’s “better angels.” His references are the furniture of an educated liberal Jewish reader who also went to a good college. He assumes that reader. He writes for the person who recognizes the allusion and feels flattered to be addressed in its terms.
His manner is hortatory. He does not merely analyze. He exhorts. “We must demand.” “We desperately need an alternative.” “Might we dare to imagine the possibility of coming together as a community, mourning together, insisting on the dignity of all human life together?” The triple repetition of “together,” the rhetorical question that is really a plea, the first-person plural that folds writer and reader into one congregation. This is sermon cadence. He served as president of a major foundation and directs a Kindness Institute and a Dialogue Across Difference initiative, and the prose matches the institutional vocabulary. He believes in conscience, in decency, in the better angels, and he names these things without irony.
The hedging belongs to the same temperament. “in my view,” “perhaps in the form of a vigil,” “it is hard to avoid the tendency.” He qualifies. He softens. He marks his own claims as claims rather than facts, which is the academic’s habit and also the conciliator’s. He wants to persuade without bullying. The result reads as earnest and a little soft at the edges, even when the underlying judgment is firm.
In the interview register, talking to a friendly outlet, the same patterns hold but loosen. “We have seen the consolidation of one vision of Israel which is the idea of Israel as an ethnocentric Jewish state.” Here the academic shows. He nominalizes. “Consolidation,” “vision,” “the idea of.” He thinks in abstractions and historical processes, and his spoken sentences carry the same nouns his written ones do. He frames the present as a question history will answer. “The question before us is which Israel will emerge as history unfolds.” The historian cannot stop seeing the moment as a chapter in a longer story, and his rhetorical power comes from placing the listener inside that long arc.
He calls himself an optimist, and the prose confirms it. Even the darkest op-ed ends on the vigil, the better angels, the imagined community mourning as one. He will not close on despair. The structural optimism, the refusal of the zero-sum frame, the faith that dialogue and conscience can hold against the chasm, runs through everything. A reader who shares the faith finds him moving. A reader who does not may find the symmetry too neat, the “both sides” too comfortable, the moral clarity he claims more like a managed balance than a stand.
That is the core of the voice. Elevated diction, balanced pairs held in tension, sermon cadence breaking into blunt verdict, a shared liberal-Jewish canon, and an unshakable optimism about reconciliation. He is a historian who writes like a rabbi, and a rabbi who reasons like a historian.