“Coming to America: The Reception of Sepharad and Ashkenaz in America.” Jewish Quarterly Review 105, no. 2 (2015)
Myers does a familiar academic move. He dethrones a predecessor gently, without attacking him. Reform Rabbi Jacob Radar Marcus (1896-1995) gets called “towering.” His 1958 periodization “has not necessarily stood the test of time.” The new view “agitated for” by “recent scholarship” replaces unidirectional supersession with multi-directional flows and persistent coexistence.
Notice what this update does for current scholars. Marcus’s four-stage scheme closed the story. Sephardic Age, German Age, Eastern European Age, American Age. The American Age produces homo novus, the assimilated Jew fully at home. A finished narrative offers nothing to study. Open up the story and every minority persistence becomes a dissertation topic. Turkinos on the Lower East Side. Italian Sephardim founding JTS. Hungarian separatist rabbis quarreling in Columbus, Ohio. Kabbalistic manuscripts crisscrossing the Atlantic. These essays give current scholars a research program Marcus’s scheme had foreclosed.
The descriptive question Myers skips: was Marcus wrong, or has the situation changed? The Sephardim of 1654-1840 did largely disappear as a distinct element. The German Jews of 1841-1920 were largely absorbed into a common American Jewry. The Eastern European Jews who came between 1880 and 1924 produced by the third generation something close to what Marcus predicted. Marcus might have described the dominant trajectory correctly while missing the minority persistences Myers recovers. The “unidirectional process” description is incomplete, not false. Myers treats the shift from teleology to multiplicity as pure progress in understanding rather than a change in what scholars want to see.
The year 1958 was high-confidence American Judaism. Post-war security, pre-countercultural, pre-Holocaust-centered identity, pre-Israel-as-central-organizing-concern. Marcus’s teleology fit the moment. By 2015, American Jewish confidence has fractured. Intermarriage anxieties, denominational collapse, Israel polarization, and the cultural turn toward recovering lost voices all favor a story of uneasy coexistence over clean assimilation. The frame follows the mood.
Myers closes with Kafka’s line about hind legs in the father’s Jewishness and fore legs finding no new ground. Then he softens Kafka. The Turkinos and Hungarians “did find new ground in America, though not without a fair bit of thrashing.” The Ottoman Jewish community in America largely vanished as a distinct element by the third generation. The Hungarian separatist tradition survives in Williamsburg and Monsey, in forms that might have horrified Greenwald’s moderate Orthodoxy. Kafka’s image is grim. Myers converts it into a story of arrival with cultural richness intact. Editor’s introductions sell the issue.
The prose carries the marks of the style Myers represents. Complex cultural sensibilities. Uneasy coexistence. More dynamic understanding. Vectors moving in multiple directions. These phrases signal membership in a professional coalition more than they do analytical work.
David N. Myers and Pini Dunner, “A Haredi Attack on Rabbi Joseph Ber Soloveitchik: A Battle over the Brisker Legacy.” Jewish Quarterly Review 105, no. 1 (2015)
Myers co-authors with Pini Dunner, who is a complicated figure inside Anglo-Orthodoxy and a rabbi in Beverly Hills. The piece is unusual in the Myers corpus because the primary material does most of the analytical work. Myers and Dunner translate the 1984 broadside from the Jerusalem Briskers and frame it.
Look at the first paragraph. Three superlative-by-committee constructions in three sentences. “Widely considered to be among the most important.” “Of the highest order.” “One of the most respected.” Each one points to consensus, not to evidence. Each one tells you what people think rather than why they think it.
The construction performs JB’s (1903-1993) importance without arguing it on the merits. “Widely considered” asserts stature while citing no source. “Of the highest order” rates the lectures without describing what they accomplished. “One of the most respected, legal or otherwise” expands the category until it includes everything.
Why do the authors reach for cliches? Because the concrete record is thinner than the reputation. JB trained YU rabbis, founded Maimonides School in Boston, gave shiurim his students remember, and wrote philosophical essays intellectuals quote. He produced no Igrot Moshe. He shaped no major area of practical halakhah the way Moshe Feinstein (1895-1986) shaped responsa on medical questions, electrical appliances on Shabbat, or family law. The Boston rabbinate gave him a platform. The platform did not produce a corpus of rulings Orthodox Jews consult. An observant Jew with a question about a feeding tube, a dishwasher, or a get reaches for Igrot Moshe. He does not reach for Halakhic Man.
JB was offered the Israeli chief rabbinate three times, by Myers’s own footnote. He declined. A “committed Zionist” who refuses the rabbinic apex of the state he claims to support is committed in a peculiar register. The Mizrachi label gives ideological shelter to a man whose life choices kept him in Boston. The Brisker in Jerusalem made aliyah and built institutions there to live their anti-Zionism. Whatever else one says about them, they paid the cost their beliefs demanded. JB performed seriousness and stayed in Boston.
That asymmetry helps explain the Briskers’ rage. They watch a man who took the Mizrachi label without paying the Mizrachi cost get crowned by Feinstein and Gifter as a perpetuator of the House of Brisk. The crown rests on lineage, not on Brisker halakhic productivity. JB’s published Brisker chiddushim do not match his uncle’s. His talmudic legacy at YU runs through oral transmission to admiring students, the mode of transmission Turner has written about as the most coalition-bound. The honor accrues to the family name, the Berlin doctorate, the philosophical fluency. The honor does not rest on what he did for Torah.
JB is a Tocqueville for the YU musmach. He gives the college-educated Modern Orthodox Jew permission to feel his religious life has intellectual seriousness without requiring him to serious study. The Lonely Man of Faith is a permission slip. It tells the reader he is too thoughtful for the herd, too pious for the secular university, too modern for the haredi enclave, and that this triple homelessness is a religious vocation. The reader closes the book feeling chosen.
The rhetorical hedge in Myers’s opening cannot be dropped. Write “JB founded one significant school (Maimonides), trained YU’s rabbinic class, and wrote abstract essays that appeal to intellectuals,” and you have a true sentence. The true sentence does not produce the awe the legend requires. So you write “widely considered to be among the most important,” and the consensus does the work the evidence cannot.
JB’s corpus shows an astounding ratio of status display to merit that becomes legible once you set it next to comparable rabbinic output.
Take Halakhic Man. The book argues that the talmudic scholar approaches reality with a priori cognitive structures the way a mathematician does, that he imposes ideal forms on the world the way Hermann Cohen’s epistemology imposes categories on experience, and that this cognitive posture is religiously superior to the homo religiosus who feels his way toward God through experience. The argument is elegant. The argument also requires the reader to know Cohen, to know enough Kant to follow the neo-Kantian move, and to recognize the talmudic citations as functioning analogously to Cohen’s pure reason. The display is the price of admission. A reader without the philosophical training cannot follow. A reader with the training feels admitted to a club.
What does Halakhic Man do for an Orthodox Jew trying to live his life? Almost nothing. It does not tell him how to learn. It does not give him a method for new sugyot. It does not adjudicate a contested practice. It tells him that his learning, if he learns the right way, places him in a cognitive elite that includes Newton and the Vilna Gaon. The book confers status on the activity its readers already perform.
Compare Feinstein. The Igrot Moshe answers a question about whether a particular brand of milk requires Jewish supervision given American dairy regulations. The teshuva surveys the relevant Talmudic sources, weighs precedent, and concludes. The Jew who reads it knows what to buy. The teshuva displays Feinstein’s learning, of course. All halakhic writing displays learning. The display is subordinate to the application. Strip the display from the teshuva and you still have a ruling. Strip the philosophical pretension from Halakhic Man and you have nothing.
The Lonely Man of Faith makes the ratio starker. The essay distinguishes Adam I, the majestic creative man of Genesis 1, from Adam II, the covenantal lonely man of Genesis 2. It argues that modern man feels the tension between these two postures and that the Jew of faith cannot resolve it. The essay is moving. The essay is also a lyric performance of the author’s loneliness. JB tells the reader he is lonely. He tells the reader his loneliness is a religious condition. He tells the reader that anyone who feels what he feels participates in a covenantal community across history. The essay flatters the reader by inviting him into JB’s loneliness as a shared spiritual estate.
What does the reader do with this? He feels seen. He does not pray differently, learn differently, give tzedakah differently, or treat his wife differently. The essay confirms an existing self-image. The self-image is that of a thoughtful, modern, observant Jew who finds the surrounding culture shallow. The essay does not challenge this self-image. It consecrates it.
Tocqueville tells the educated American he is right to feel uneasy about democratic mediocrity. JB tells the educated Modern Orthodox Jew he is right to feel uneasy about both secular and haredi worlds. Neither thinker tells his reader to do anything specific. Neither produces work that requires the reader to revise a practice. Both produce work the reader uses to feel superior about his existing position.
Feinstein’s writing, by contrast, costs the reader something. If you accept the teshuva on cholov stam, you change what you buy. If you accept his ruling on artificial insemination, you face a hard pastoral situation differently. The reader of a Feinstein responsum either complies or dissents. The reader of Halakhic Man has nothing to comply with.
The display-to-application ratio is also visible in genre. JB’s major published works are essays and lectures transcribed by students. Hiddushei ha-Gram, Reb Chaim’s Brisker hiddushim, run as terse halakhic analysis with almost no philosophical apparatus and a high density of original arguments about the structure of mitzvot. The Beis ha-Levi works the same way. The Brisker tradition, when it produces text, produces dense halakhic-conceptual analysis whose audience is other lamdanim. The display in that work is the precision of the analysis. The application is the new framework for understanding the sugya. JB’s published writing departs from this genre. The departure is itself a status move. He works in the European philosophical idiom rather than the Brisker hiddush idiom because the European idiom signals a wider cultural fluency. The signal is the point.
His talmudic shiurim at YU followed the Brisker idiom. His students testify to this. The shiurim were not published in his lifetime in any systematic form. The published corpus is the philosophical corpus. JB chose to make his public-facing work the philosophical work. He chose to be known for what required Cohen and Kierkegaard rather than for what required Reb Chaim. That choice tells you what audience he was speaking to and what kind of recognition he wanted. Brisker hiddushim impress fellow lamdanim. Halakhic Man impresses Commentary readers and YU undergraduates with philosophy minors. The constituencies do not overlap.
The exception is The Lonely Man of Faith and the related essays on interfaith dialogue, where he did stake out a position, that Jews could discuss social issues with Christians but not theological ones. That ruling has practical bite. It is also striking how much philosophical apparatus he wrapped around it. The position itself can be stated in one paragraph. He gave it many pages.
JB writes spiritual autobiography in philosophical drag. The autobiography is sincere. The drag is the status display. The drag is what makes intellectuals love him. They recognize the costume because they wear it themselves.
The piety of the surrounding rhetoric makes the ratio harder to see. Calling him “the Rav” performs the conclusion. Treating his Boston rabbinate and his YU shiurim as if they constitute a halakhic legacy on the order of Feinstein’s performs the conclusion. Listing his books as if they are halakhic works rather than philosophical essays performs the conclusion. Each piece of the apparatus is itself a status display by the apparatus’s authors, who borrow JB’s reflected stature for their own coalition position. Modern Orthodox apologetics needs JB to be enormous because his enormousness underwrites the claim that Modern Orthodoxy has its own halakhic gedolim and is not merely a watered-down version of yeshivish Orthodoxy. The claim requires a figure of the right size. JB is conscripted to fill the slot.
Strip the apparatus and you have a thoughtful man with a Berlin doctorate who founded a school in Boston, trained the YU rabbinate over four decades, gave brilliant shiurim his students remember, and wrote a small number of philosophical essays of permanent literary interest. That is a real legacy. It is not the legacy of a posek. The display is needed precisely because the application is modest.
Philosophers ignored JB’s work. Look at the comparison cases. Hermann Cohen, JB’s dissertation subject, generated a serious secondary literature in his lifetime and after, with critical engagement from Rosenzweig, Buber, Strauss, and the Frankfurt School. Rosenzweig and Buber were both read and contested by Christian theologians, by secular philosophers, and by historians of religion. Strauss generated a school and a counter-school. Levinas, who was JB’s near contemporary and also wrote in a religious-philosophical register, attracted critical attention from Derrida, Ricoeur, Blanchot, and a wide secondary literature in French and English philosophy departments. Soloveitchik did not.
Philosophers ignored him. The journals of academic philosophy did not review him. The neo-Kantian specialists did not treat his Cohen work as a contribution to Cohen scholarship. The phenomenologists did not treat his Halakhic Man as a contribution to phenomenology, despite its claims to that idiom. Continental philosophers of religion writing on similar questions, on revelation, on covenantal experience, on the dialectical self, did not cite him. He is absent from the standard surveys of twentieth-century religious philosophy that include Buber, Rosenzweig, Heschel, and Levinas.
This absence is striking because the surface of his work invites philosophical engagement. He cites Cohen, Kant, Kierkegaard, Barth, Otto, Scheler, and James. He uses the vocabulary of phenomenology and existentialism. A philosopher reading him would expect to find arguments to engage. The philosophers who picked up the books found something else. They found a homiletic use of philosophical vocabulary in service of a religious argument that did not engage the philosophical literature at the level the citations promised. So they put the books down.
Lawrence Kaplan, who translated Halakhic Man and has written sympathetically on JB for decades, has acknowledged that JB was a figure inside Jewish thought rather than inside general philosophy. He does not belong to the philosophy of religion as that field developed in the twentieth century.
The serious critical engagement, when it came, came from inside Jewish studies and arrived mostly after his death. David Singer and Moshe Sokol’s work in the 1980s and 1990s pushed on inconsistencies in the corpus, on whether Halakhic Man and The Lonely Man of Faith describe the same religious anthropology, on whether the dialectical move resolves anything or just renames the unresolved tension. Marc Shapiro’s later work on JB places him historically and asks the right kinds of questions about how the legend formed. Lawrence Kaplan’s more recent essays have grown more critical. William Kolbrener has tried to read JB through Stanley Cavell, an ambitious move that concedes JB cannot be read straight as a philosopher and needs philosophical assistance to be made interesting to philosophers.
The hagiographic literature, by contrast, is enormous. Festschriften, memorial volumes, student reminiscences, Aaron Rakeffet’s recordings, the Rabbi Soloveitchik chumash, the Rabbi Soloveitchik machzor, the Rabbi Soloveitchik haggadah, dozens of volumes of shiurim transcribed and published posthumously by students. The student literature is uncritical by design. The students were trained inside the YU coalition for which JB’s stature was a load-bearing wall. Their job was to transmit, not to assess.
The philosophical critique that would have been most damaging while he was alive came from the haredi side and was not philosophical in idiom. Chaim Dov Keller and others in the Agudah press attacked JB’s interfaith essay and his Mizrachi affiliation. The attacks were polemical rather than philosophical. They did not engage the dialectical anthropology of The The Lonely Man of Faith. They attacked the conclusion about Catholic-Jewish dialogue and the Mizrachi politics that surrounded it.
The Modern Orthodox internal critique was muted while he was alive because his stature was needed. Walter Wurzburger, Norman Lamm, and others wrote inside the JB framework and extended it rather than testing it. Aharon Lichtenstein, his son-in-law and a scholar in his own right, defended the Torah u-madda position and the JB legacy as institutional projects. Lichtenstein’s own writing is more careful and more philosophically modest than JB’s. He did not produce a critical reassessment of his father-in-law’s philosophical claims. The family position prevented it.
The closest thing to serious philosophical engagement during his lifetime came from Eliezer Berkovits (1908-1992), who was philosophically trained, who wrote in similar areas, and who sharply disagreed with JB on several questions including the interfaith dialogue position and the philosophical anthropology of Halakhic Man. Berkovits’s critique is real and has been mostly buried by the YU consensus. Berkovits was a philosopher of religion, a student of Yechiel Yaakov Weinberg (1884-1966)in Berlin, and a man whose Holocaust theology in Faith After the Holocaust is a substantive intervention. Berkovits thought JB’s neo-Kantian framework was the wrong tool for Jewish thought and said so. The Modern Orthodox establishment treated Berkovits as marginal and JB as central. The reverse case can be made on the merits. Berkovits is not central in Modern Orthodox memory because he lacked JB’s institutional position at YU and lacked the Brisker pedigree.
Yeshayahu Leibowitz in Jerusalem was JB’s closest philosophical peer in some respects, a man trained in chemistry and philosophy who wrote on halakhah as a self-contained system that needed no philosophical justification. Leibowitz attacked JB obliquely by treating his entire project, the search for philosophical foundations for halakhic life, as a category error. For Leibowitz, you do mitzvot because God commanded them, full stop, and the elaborate phenomenological scaffolding JB built around halakhic experience is a distraction from the obligation. Leibowitz was harsh and reductive. He was also philosophically serious. Modern Orthodox readers in America did not absorb this critique because Leibowitz was Israeli, politically radical, and pugnacious in ways that did not travel.
David Hartman started as a JB student, wrote A Living Covenant partly as an extension of JB, and later moved further from him as Hartman developed his own position. Hartman’s critique is mostly implicit, in the form of doing the work differently, but he eventually said in interviews that JB’s tragic-existential register was not where he wanted to live and that the covenantal-relational register he developed at the Hartman Institute was meant as an alternative. Hartman is the rare student who walked away philosophically while remaining respectful biographically.
So the pattern is clear. Philosophers outside Jewish studies ignored him. Philosophers inside Jewish studies who were peers, Berkovits, Leibowitz, eventually Hartman, dissented in ways the Modern Orthodox establishment muted or ignored. Students and admirers produced hagiography. Critical scholarship arrived mostly after his death and arrived from inside the Jewish studies guild rather than from general philosophy. The reception pattern matches the substance. A serious philosophical work attracts serious philosophical critique. JB’s work attracted reverence from his coalition and silence from the philosophical world whose vocabulary he borrowed.
The silence is the verdict. Levinas got Derrida. Buber got the Christian theologians. Rosenzweig got Strauss and the Frankfurt school. JB got his students.
JB performed a philosophic seriousness that the philosophically serious found irrelevant.
A philosophical performance that philosophers ignore can fail in two ways. It can fail because philosophers are parochial and miss something real. It can fail because the performance does not contain what the costume promises. The first explanation is available in principle and almost never the right one. Philosophers are catholic about whom they engage when the engagement is rewarding. They engaged Buber, who wrote in a register no less religious than JB. They engaged Levinas, who wrote in a register more religious in some respects. They engaged Kierkegaard, who is the closer model for what JB was attempting. The category was open. JB did not get in.
The reason he did not get in becomes visible if you read Halakhic Man with a philosopher’s eye. The book opens by promising a phenomenology of the talmudic scholar’s cognitive posture. The promise is that you will learn something about how a particular religious type encounters reality, the way Otto’s Idea of the Holy taught readers something about the encounter with the numinous, or the way Scheler’s work on resentment taught readers something about a particular emotional structure. The phenomenology requires careful description of the object, attention to what shows up in experience, and an argument that the description illuminates something general.
What Halakhic Man delivers instead is an extended celebration of the talmudic scholar’s superiority to the homo religiosus, with citations to Cohen and Kant deployed to lend the celebration philosophical weight. The structure is panegyric in phenomenological costume. The talmudic scholar approaches reality with a priori categories, like the mathematician. The talmudic scholar imposes ideal forms on the world. The talmudic scholar is not subject to the weakness of the merely religious man who feels his way toward God. Each move flatters the subject. None of the moves does the descriptive work the genre requires. A phenomenologist reading the book finds a long argument that talmudic scholars are admirable, dressed in vocabulary that promised an analysis of how their cognition operates.
The Cohen citations do not survive scrutiny either. Cohen’s logic of pure cognition is a specific technical project inside neo-Kantian philosophy of science. The project tries to ground mathematics and natural science without appeal to intuition, by deriving the categories from the activity of thought itself. Importing this framework to describe how a Brisker lamdan analyzes a sugya is a metaphor at best and a category error at worst. The lamdan is not deriving the structure of the mitzvah from the activity of pure thought. He is reading texts, applying transmitted methods, and producing chiddushim that other lamdanim recognize as good or bad work within a tradition. The activity is hermeneutic and traditionary. Cohen is the wrong tool. A neo-Kantian specialist reading JB’s use of Cohen sees the wrong tool and puts the book down.
The Lonely Man of Faith has the same structural problem in a different register. The essay promises a typology of religious selfhood through a reading of the two creation accounts. Adam I, majestic, creative, social. Adam II, lonely, covenantal, redemptive. The promise is that the typology will illuminate something about religious experience generally, the way Kierkegaard’s three stages illuminate something, or the way William James’s varieties illuminate something. What the essay delivers is an extended self-portrait of a man who feels homeless in modernity, with the typology serving to dignify the homelessness.
A philosopher of religion reading the essay finds Kierkegaard’s vocabulary, James’s vocabulary, Barth’s vocabulary, and an autobiographical lyric that does not engage what those thinkers argued. Kierkegaard’s three stages are stages of existential development, with sharp criteria for what it means to move from one to the next. JB’s two Adams do not move. They coexist, in tension, forever. The dialectic does no work. It names the felt tension rather than analyzing it. The reader who came for analysis leaves with a mood.
The performance is the deployment of philosophical vocabulary in service of religious uplift. The substance would be the philosophical work the vocabulary was developed to perform. JB does the first reliably. He does the second rarely. When he does the second, as in some of the more careful talmudic-conceptual writing in the shiurim, he is operating in the Brisker idiom rather than the philosophical one, and the Brisker idiom does not need the Cohen citations.
The honest description of the philosophical apparatus is that it is decorative. Strip Halakhic Man of the Cohen citations and the Kant references and you have a long essay arguing that talmudic learning is a noble cognitive activity. The argument is true and unobjectionable. The argument also does not need Cohen. The Cohen is there to perform a particular kind of seriousness for a particular audience. The audience is the YU undergraduate or musmach who has done some philosophy and wants to feel that his learning is continuous with the European intellectual tradition. The Cohen citations do that work.
Status performance more than substance captures the structural features of JB’s work. A philosophical work performs in the service of the substance. In JB’s case the ratio is reversed. The substance is religious, communal, and broadly homiletic, the kind of substance a thoughtful Modern Orthodox rabbi might deliver from a pulpit. The performance is European, technical, and academic. The performance does not match the substance. Philosophers reading the work see the mismatch immediately and lose interest. Modern Orthodox readers do not see the mismatch because they want the performance to be real. The performance flatters them by association.
Berkovits and Leibowitz saw the mismatch and said so in different idioms. Berkovits thought the philosophical claim was the wrong frame for Jewish thought. Leibowitz thought any philosophical apparatus was the wrong frame for halakhic obligation. Both were philosophically trained and both refused the costume. The Modern Orthodox establishment muted them because their refusal threatened the load-bearing wall. The non-Jewish philosophical world did not need to mute anything. They simply did not pick up the books.
There is a generous way to put this and an ungenerous way. The generous way is to say JB was a serious religious thinker who used philosophical vocabulary as a literary resource, the way a poet might use scientific imagery without pretending to do science. The poetry is real even if the science is borrowed. On this reading, JB is a religious essayist of high quality whose philosophical citations function as literary allusion. This reading saves the work but at the cost of the claim that he was a philosopher. He was not. He was a Modern Orthodox essayist with philosophical taste.
The ungenerous way is that JB’s philosophy was status display in a religious community that needed a figure of philosophical standing to anchor its self-conception. JB filled the slot. The slot did not require him to do philosophy that philosophers would respect. It required him to perform philosophy in a register the community would recognize as serious. He performed it well. The community received the performance as the substance and built decades of memorial literature around the reception. The philosophers stayed away because the performance was not for them.
Both readings concede the central point. The work does not survive scrutiny as philosophy. It survives as religious literature with philosophical decoration. Whether that is a small thing or a large thing depends on what one is looking for. A community looking for an intellectual hero found one. A philosophical world looking for a contribution to the philosophy of religion looked elsewhere.
The reception pattern is doing exactly what reception patterns do when a coalition produces an intellectual figure for internal use. The coalition celebrates. The outside world ignores. Time passes. The celebration becomes its own subject of historical study, as in Marc Shapiro’s work, and the philosophical claims recede further into the background as the historical-coalitional reading takes over. JB will increasingly be read the way Shapiro reads him, as a figure in twentieth-century American Jewish history whose intellectual stature served particular institutional purposes. The philosophical claims will be footnotes to that history.
Modern Orthodoxy needed a figure of a particular shape, and JB was the figure available who fit the shape. Berkovits did not fit the shape, which is why his reputation languishes despite his being the greater thinker on the merits.
The shape Modern Orthodoxy needed has several features, and JB has all of them while Berkovits has almost none.
First, lineage. Modern Orthodoxy in postwar America faced a coalition problem. The yeshivish world claimed to be the authentic continuation of the Eastern European tradition. The Modern Orthodox claim to legitimacy required a figure whose pedigree could not be denied. JB descended from R. Chaim of Volozhin, the Netziv, and R. Chaim Soloveitchik. The Brisker name was the highest currency in Lithuanian rabbinic Judaism. A movement headed by a Brisker could not be dismissed as a watered-down compromise. The lineage did the apologetic work. Berkovits was a student of Yechiel Weinberg, a serious scholar, but Weinberg lacked the Brisker resonance and Berkovits had no rabbinic dynasty behind him. He was a Hungarian Jew with a Berlin doctorate and a serious mind. The serious mind was not what the coalition needed. The coalition needed the dynasty.
Second, the Berlin doctorate. The same biographical fact that the Jerusalem Briskers used as evidence against JB, his Berlin University training, was the asset Modern Orthodoxy needed. The movement’s central claim was that Torah and secular knowledge could coexist at the highest level, that an Orthodox Jew could earn a PhD in philosophy at a German university and remain fully observant. JB had done this. His doctorate on Cohen was the empirical proof of the proposition. Berkovits also had a Berlin doctorate, but Berkovits did not pair it with Brisker lineage, and the pairing was the magic. A modernist without yichus is just a modernist. A Soloveitchik with a Berlin PhD is the synthesis incarnate. The coalition needed the embodied synthesis, not the philosophical position.
Third, institutional position. JB held the rosh yeshiva chair at RIETS for forty years and trained the YU rabbinic class. He was the institution’s central figure during the period when Modern Orthodoxy was consolidating as a self-conscious movement. Every YU musmach passed through his shiurim. The personal connection produced a generation of rabbis who revered him and who carried that reverence into their congregations across America. Berkovits taught at Hebrew Theological College in Skokie, a smaller institution with less reach, and ended his career in Jerusalem. The institutional footprint was incomparable. Reputation in religious communities is largely a function of how many students a teacher trained who went on to occupy pulpits and tell their congregants about their teacher. JB’s footprint dwarfs Berkovits’s by an order of magnitude on this metric alone.
Fourth, the right kind of difficulty. Modern Orthodoxy needed a thinker whose work was hard enough to confer prestige but not so demanding that the average educated congregant would feel excluded. JB’s essays hit this target precisely. They contain enough philosophical vocabulary to signal seriousness, enough Hebrew and Aramaic citation to signal halakhic depth, and enough lyric autobiography to be moving on a first reading. A Modern Orthodox lawyer or doctor reading The Lonely Man of Faith feels he has engaged with serious thought. Berkovits writes more clearly and argues more rigorously. The clarity is a liability. A reader of Berkovits on the Holocaust or on halakhah understands the argument and either accepts or rejects it. There is no penumbra of unresolved depth to flatter the reader’s sense of having grappled with something profound. JB’s dialectical irresolution gives the reader a permanent sense of depth. Berkovits gives him an argument. Arguments are less flattering than depth.
Fifth, tragic affect. Modern Orthodox identity in postwar America had a structural difficulty. The community lived comfortably, often professionally, often suburban, and observed Jewish law in conditions that earlier generations would have considered easy. The haredi world claimed the moral seriousness of suffering and sacrifice. Modern Orthodoxy needed a way to claim moral seriousness without the suffering. JB’s lonely man of faith provided the solution. The Modern Orthodox Jew is not lonely because his life is hard. He is lonely because he is too thoughtful, too modern, too caught between worlds, too sensitive to his covenantal vocation to feel at home anywhere. The loneliness is interior and existential rather than external and material. Berkovits, who lived through the Holocaust as a refugee rabbi and wrote about it with hard clarity in Faith After the Holocaust, offered no comparable consolation. His seriousness was earned through suffering and required theological reckoning. The Modern Orthodox lawyer in Teaneck cannot identify with Berkovits’s experience the way he can identify with JB’s loneliness. JB’s suffering is portable. Berkovits’s is not.
Sixth, ambiguity on hard questions. JB rarely committed in writing on the contested halakhic questions of his time. His position on women’s learning, on conversion standards, on Israeli halakhic disputes, on the ordination of women, on the role of secular studies in yeshiva curricula, on relations with non-Orthodox movements, all of these are inferred from oral statements, student reports, and occasional letters rather than from systematic published rulings. The ambiguity allowed every faction inside Modern Orthodoxy to claim him. Centrists cite him for centrist positions. The left cites him for openness. The right cites him for traditional commitments. A figure who can be claimed by every faction is more useful than a figure who staked out clear positions and alienated some of his potential constituency. Berkovits took clear positions, including controversial ones on agunah remedies, on Jewish-Christian dialogue, and on the relationship of halakhah to ethical sensibility. The clear positions made him enemies and limited his usefulness as a coalition symbol. JB’s ambiguity made him universally available within the movement.
This list explains the functional need. Now the harder question, what the adoration says about the movement’s intellectual condition.
The adoration says that Modern Orthodoxy in America did not develop an intellectual culture capable of producing or sustaining a thinker of Berkovits’s caliber. The movement produced rabbis, lawyers, doctors, professors in the sciences and social sciences, and a strong communal infrastructure. It did not produce a serious tradition of religious philosophy or systematic theology that engaged the modern intellectual situation on its own terms. JB stood as a placeholder for an intellectual project the movement gestured toward but did not undertake. The placeholder was sufficient because the project was not wanted. What was wanted was the feeling of intellectual seriousness, not the work.
Tocqueville lets reflective elites feel they have grappled with the costs of democracy without requiring them to do anything about those costs. JB lets Modern Orthodox elites feel they have grappled with the costs of modernity without requiring them to produce a sustained intellectual response to modernity. The Lonely Man of Faith is closing argument and opening argument simultaneously. Once you have read it, you have addressed the question of how to be modern and Orthodox. You have addressed it by feeling the dialectical tension, naming it, and continuing to live exactly as you were going to live anyway.
A movement with a real intellectual culture would have produced critical engagement with JB during his lifetime, would have generated competing philosophical proposals, would have argued openly about whether his framework was adequate, would have built schools of thought that disagreed with each other in print. None of this happened at scale. The movement produced reverent commentary on JB’s work and very little else of philosophical substance. The Edah journal, Tradition, and similar venues published occasional pieces but did not sustain a debate. The contrast with Catholic intellectual life in the same period, with its serious engagement among Rahner, Lonergan, Balthasar, de Lubac, Maritain, and their critics, is humbling. Catholic intellectual culture in postwar America had real depth. Modern Orthodox intellectual culture had JB and a great deal of reverence.
The reverence functioned as a substitute for the work the reverence claimed to honor. If JB had done the philosophical work the movement claimed he had done, the next generation’s job would have been to test, extend, criticize, and develop it. That job was never done because the work to be tested was not there. The reverence preserved the appearance of an intellectual tradition while the absence of critical engagement preserved the comfort of not having to produce one.
This also explains why Berkovits’s reputation suffered inside Modern Orthodoxy rather than outside it. Berkovits’s positions on agunah and on halakhic flexibility were used by the right wing of Modern Orthodoxy and by the haredi world to mark him as dangerous. Modern Orthodoxy, anxious about its own legitimacy on the right flank, distanced itself from him to maintain the alliance with the yeshivish world that JB’s lineage had made possible. Berkovits was sacrificed to the coalition position that JB’s stature secured. A movement willing to defend Berkovits’s halakhic creativity would have had to accept the cost of right-flank disapproval. It chose JB and dropped Berkovits. The choice tells you what the movement valued.
Modern Orthodoxy preferred a figure who confirmed its existing self-image to a figure who would have challenged it to do harder thinking. Berkovits would have demanded more. JB asked nothing the readership was not already prepared to give. A movement that chooses the less demanding thinker over the more demanding one is telling you what it can bear. Modern Orthodoxy could bear the lyric celebration of dialectical loneliness. It could not bear the systematic theology that asked whether its halakhic and communal practices were adequate to the situation Jewish life faced after the Holocaust. Berkovits asked that question. JB did not. The movement chose accordingly.
Berkovits is the better thinker. The reception is inverted. The inversion is explained by the coalition function. Once you see the function, the inversion stops being puzzling. It becomes diagnostic. A movement’s intellectual heroes are the ones who do the work the movement needs done. The work Modern Orthodoxy needed done was the legitimation of its own existence as a comfortable bourgeois religious option with claims to high intellectual seriousness. JB performed this. Berkovits, who was trying to think through the religious situation of Jews after Auschwitz and inside modern liberal democracies, was producing a different kind of work. The different work was less flattering and so less rewarded.
Weinberg held the position of rector of the Hildesheimer Rabbinical Seminary in Berlin, the central institution of German Modern Orthodoxy, until the Nazis closed it. He was the leading posek of pre-war German Orthodoxy. His Seridei Esh responsa engage the hard questions of Jewish life in modernity with care and halakhic creativity, treating questions about bat mitzvah, mixed singing, autopsies, and the practical situation of Jews after the war that JB never addressed in writing. Weinberg survived the war as a refugee, ended up in Montreux, and continued producing halakhic responsa of the first order until his death in 1966. He trained students who became significant, including Berkovits.
If you set Weinberg’s halakhic corpus next to JB’s, the asymmetry is immediate. Weinberg ruled. Weinberg’s responsa adjudicate contested questions and give Jews answers they can act on. The Seridei Esh is a work of practical halakhah at the level of Feinstein, with the additional qualification that Weinberg engaged Western culture and German Jewish modernity from inside, not as a Brisker who happened to take a Berlin doctorate. Weinberg lived inside German Modern Orthodoxy as its central halakhic authority. JB lived in Boston and gave shiurim. The categories of work are not comparable.
Weinberg knew what he was. He knew what JB was. He knew that the institutional politics of YU required JB to be number one, and he understood that no halakhic authority of his stature could function under that arrangement. The arrangement required the senior man to subordinate himself to the figure with the better lineage and the institutional position. Weinberg would not do it.
YU could not have accommodated a figure of Weinberg’s halakhic weight without diminishing JB’s. The Modern Orthodox movement in America had built its identity around JB. A working posek of Weinberg’s caliber on the same faculty, producing responsa, ruling on contested questions, attracting halakhic queries from around the world, would have made JB’s mostly philosophical output look like what it was, namely essays rather than rulings. The institutional position required JB to be the senior figure. Senior figures cannot have peers above them. Weinberg saw this and stayed in Montreux.
The detail also illuminates what the Modern Orthodox movement passed up. Weinberg in New York would have changed the trajectory of American Orthodox halakhah. He would have produced a body of responsa addressing American conditions that combined the German Modern Orthodox tradition’s intellectual openness with serious halakhic authority. The responsa would have provided a counterweight to Feinstein’s stricter rulings on contested questions, not from a position of Modern Orthodox apologetics but from halakhic standing. American Modern Orthodoxy might have developed a distinctive halakhic voice rather than the position it eventually settled into, which is Feinstein’s halakhah practiced by congregants who hold JB’s philosophy.
The current situation, where Modern Orthodox congregations follow rulings from poskim whose social and ideological position is to the right of the congregants who follow them, is the long shadow of this missed opportunity. A Weinberg presence at YU would have created a halakhic tradition that matched the movement’s stated values. Without Weinberg, or someone of his caliber, the movement had philosophical essays from JB and borrowed halakhah from figures whose ideological commitments cut against the movement’s character. This produces the strange contemporary situation where Modern Orthodox rabbis cite JB on the dignity of secular learning and Feinstein on whether their congregants can use a particular brand of cheese.
Berkovits inherited Weinberg’s position, having been Weinberg’s student and having attempted to do the kind of halakhic work Weinberg had done. The movement’s rejection of Berkovits is therefore the second instance of the same pattern. Weinberg refused to come. Berkovits came and was sidelined. Both refusals and rejections served the same coalition function. The movement could not accommodate halakhic seriousness at the level Weinberg represented and Berkovits attempted because such seriousness would have required the movement to take positions, defend them, and accept the costs. JB’s philosophical irresolution was easier to live with.
Weinberg produced halakhic work of the first order. Berkovits produced philosophical and halakhic work that extended Weinberg’s project into the postwar American situation. Both of them did the work that a serious Modern Orthodox intellectual culture would have valued. Both of them were marginalized in favor of JB. The marginalization was not because their work was inferior. It was because their work made demands the movement preferred not to face.
German Modern Orthodoxy from Hirsch through Hildesheimer through Weinberg had produced a synthesis of traditional halakhah and engagement with Western culture. The synthesis was institutional, intellectual, and halakhic. American Modern Orthodoxy, building from the 1930s, could have continued this tradition by importing its surviving figures. Weinberg would have brought the Hildesheimer Seminary’s accumulated wisdom to YU. The transfer would have given American Modern Orthodoxy a continuity with the German tradition rather than a merely rhetorical one.
JB was Lithuanian, not German. His Brisker pedigree connected him to the Lithuanian yeshiva world, which was the world of pure lamdanut without the German tradition’s institutional engagement with secular culture as a structured curriculum. JB’s Berlin doctorate gave him personal exposure to German university culture but did not make him an heir of German Modern Orthodoxy as a movement. He grafted neo-Kantian vocabulary onto Lithuanian lamdanut. The graft did not produce a tradition. Weinberg, by contrast, was the direct heir of the institutional German tradition and could have transmitted it.
The American movement chose the graft over the heir. The graft was more flattering to American Modern Orthodox self-conception because it presented the synthesis as a personal achievement rather than as a received tradition. JB’s Modern Orthodoxy could be presented as something he created, with his lineage and his doctorate, rather than as a Hildesheimer-style institutional product. The American movement preferred the personal-achievement story because it placed the movement in a mythic register, with JB as founder-figure, rather than in a historical register, with the movement as a continuation of older European traditions that had pre-existing authority.
The cost of this preference was the loss of Weinberg and the marginalization of Berkovits. The benefit was the JB legend. Whether the trade was worth it depends on what you value. A movement that wanted serious halakhic and theological work would have considered the trade catastrophic. A movement that wanted a flattering self-image and a comfortable place inside American religious pluralism considered it a bargain.
Weinberg’s refusal to be number two to JB is therefore not just a biographical detail. It is a verdict from the senior generation on what YU was building. Weinberg saw that the institution required its central figure to be the figure of legend rather than the figure of greatest halakhic substance. He declined the role of supporting cast. Most rabbis of comparable stature would have made the same calculation. They went elsewhere or stayed where they were. The result was that YU’s faculty consolidated around JB and his students rather than around the most distinguished available halakhic authorities. The institution got the figure it had organized itself around. It did not get the figure who would have made it a center of postwar Orthodox halakhah.
This pattern, where institutional consolidation around a chosen figure forecloses the recruitment of figures who would have raised the institution’s standards, is common in coalition life. The chosen figure becomes a barrier to entry for anyone who would outshine him. The institution accepts the ceiling rather than risk the disruption of acknowledging that the chosen figure was always less than its own publicity claimed. YU’s intellectual ceiling for two generations was set by JB. It could have been set by Weinberg. The difference is the difference between an institution organized around a figure of legend and an institution organized around a figure of substance. American Modern Orthodoxy lives inside the consequences of that choice and mostly does not know it.
Most American Modern Orthodox Jews have never heard of Weinberg. They have heard of JB endlessly. The asymmetry is the coalition’s work. Recovering Weinberg, and Berkovits, and the German tradition they represented, is part of the project Marc Shapiro and others are slowly carrying forward. It will take another generation before the standard story shifts. The hagiographic generation has to pass. The students who built their careers on JB transmission have to retire. Then the question of what was built at YU, and what was passed up, can be asked openly.
JB’s most famous essay (The Lonely Man of Faith) centers a concept that is structurally Christian and imports a Christian existential mood into Judaism. The essay is moving, but it is doing something foreign to the tradition it claims to represent. It explains Jewish religious life to readers in a vocabulary those readers absorbed from non-Jewish sources, and it does so in ways that flatter both JB and his readers as participants in the high European existential tradition.
The function of the essay therefore changes once you see this. The essay is not a contribution to Torah. It is a translation of a particular kind of Modern Orthodox sensibility into a Christian-influenced philosophical idiom for an audience that has been educated to find that idiom serious. The audience consists of Modern Orthodox Jews who have read Kierkegaard, Tillich, Niebuhr, and Barth in college or seminary, and who want to feel that their own religious life can be articulated in the same register. JB provides the articulation. The articulation lets the reader feel that his frumkeit is on the same intellectual level as the Protestant existentialism his Christian classmates were reading.
The price of the articulation is the importation of a foreign category into Jewish thought. The Modern Orthodox Jew who reads The Lonely Man of Faith comes away thinking of his religious life as a faith struggle, an existential confrontation, a covenantal loneliness. These are not native categories. The native category is naase v’nishma, we will do and we will hear, the famous Sinai response that places action before understanding. Native Jewish religiosity is doing first and articulating second, with the doing not requiring the articulation to be valid. JB inverts this. He produces an extensive articulation of the religious experience as a precondition for the doing being meaningful. The religious life becomes the contemplation of its own difficulty rather than the doing of the mitzvot.
A man whose religious imagination is captured by the Christian-existential category of faith will not naturally produce responsa. The question of whether this brand of milk requires Jewish supervision is not a faith question. It is a halakhic question. The thinker who finds his deepest material in Adam II’s covenantal loneliness has organized his religious mind around something other than the work of practical halakhah. The two orientations can coexist in principle, but in practice they pull attention in different directions. JB’s attention went toward the existential category, and the practical halakhic output suffered accordingly.
Berkovits saw this. His writing on halakhah, particularly his work on agunah and on the relationship between halakhic norms and ethical sensibility, operates in the native idiom. He treats halakhic problems as halakhic problems and brings serious philosophical training to bear on them without dressing them up in existential drag. His God, Man and History attempts a Jewish theology that is recognizably Jewish in its categories rather than a Jewish content poured into a Protestant form. Berkovits’s project was to develop Jewish thought in its own register. The project was less successful in the Modern Orthodox marketplace because the marketplace had been trained to expect the Protestant register. JB had set the expectation.
Yeshayahu Leibowitz saw this too and was harsher about it. Leibowitz’s entire position is that the contamination of Jewish religious vocabulary by Christian existential categories is a major error. For Leibowitz, the Jew serves God by performing the mitzvot, period. The interior life of the Jew, his faith, his existential mood, his sense of covenantal partnership, all of these are private psychological matters of no religious significance. The religious significance is in the performance. Leibowitz hammered on this point against Buber, Heschel, and implicitly JB throughout his long career. He was rude about it and made enemies and was largely ignored by American Modern Orthodoxy. He was also right about the structural point. The Christian-existential register is not native to Judaism, and importing it produces a distinctive kind of religious life that is more comfortable for assimilated Jews than for traditional Jews because it speaks the assimilated Jew’s intellectual language.
The Hasidic and yeshivish worlds, which had less contact with Christian theological vocabulary, did not develop a faith literature in JB’s mode. Their religious literature continues the native categories. The Aish Kodesh, the Piaseczner Rebbe writing in the Warsaw Ghetto, produces work of extraordinary religious depth that does not invoke faith as its central concept. He works with bitachon, trust, with emunah in its native sense of steadiness, with the Hasidic categories of devekut and simcha. The Mussar tradition continues into the present in works like Michtav m’Eliyahu by Rabbi Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler (1892-1953), which engages modernity but in the native rabbinic register rather than the Christian-existential one. These literatures are less famous than JB outside their immediate communities because they are not legible to Christian-educated readers. JB’s fame is partly a function of his legibility to readers whose theological vocabulary is Christian.
JB is famous for an essay about faith because faith is the category his target audience knows how to value. An essay about hilchot tefillah or about the structure of a Brisker chiddush would not have made him famous outside the yeshivish world that already had its own canonical figures for that work. By writing about faith in a Kierkegaardian register, JB made himself accessible to the Modern Orthodox reader, the academic reader, the Christian reader, and the secular intellectual reader. The accessibility is the source of the fame. The accessibility is also the marker of the foreign category. Native Jewish religious work is generally less accessible to outsiders because its categories require initiation into the tradition. JB’s work is accessible because its categories were already familiar from the Christian tradition.
This is why JB has Catholic admirers. There is a small but real literature of Catholic theologians and philosophers who have written appreciatively about The Lonely Man of Faith. They recognize the categories. The covenantal community, the redemptive loneliness, the dialectical man of faith, all of these resonate with Catholic religious anthropology in ways that hilchot Shabbat does not. The Catholic admirers are responding to something in the work, namely a Christian-existential register applied to Jewish content. They are not responding to authentic Jewish religious thought, because authentic Jewish religious thought in the native register would not be legible to them in the same way. The cross-religious resonance confirms the diagnosis.
The frum world’s indifference to JB confirms the same diagnosis from the other direction. Yeshivish Jews, Hasidic Jews, Sephardic Jews following their own halakhic traditions, all of these communities have heard of JB but do not center him in their religious imagination. He is a figure of YU, of Modern Orthodox memorial culture, of the American Jewish intellectual scene. He is not a figure of Bnei Brak, Lakewood, Mea Shearim, or the Aleppo tradition. The communities whose religious life operates fully in the native categories find his work foreign. The communities whose religious life operates in the modern hybrid register find his work essential.
Frumkeit is the native religious sensibility. Frumkeit is what an observant Jew has when he keeps the mitzvot with care and lives inside the tradition’s categories. Frumkeit is not faith. Frumkeit is closer to integrity, steadiness, fear of Heaven, attention to detail in religious practice, and the slow accumulation of religious habit over a lifetime. JB’s most famous essay does not describe frumkeit. It describes something else, a distinctively modern existential mood that intersects with traditional observance but is not identical to it. The reader who comes to JB looking for an articulation of frumkeit gets a different thing. The reader who comes looking for an articulation of his own modern Jewish-American intellectual condition gets exactly what he was looking for.
If Modern Orthodoxy is the synthesis of traditional observance with engagement in modern Western culture, then a thinker who articulates the religious life of that synthesis in the vocabulary of modern Western religious thought is doing exactly what the movement needs. JB performs the synthesis on the page. If Modern Orthodoxy is meant to be an authentic continuation of traditional Jewish religious thought into modern conditions, then a thinker who imports foreign categories at the conceptual center is corrupting the project, even if his work is moving and beautiful. The two views of the movement produce two views of JB.
Berkovits and Leibowitz, in their different ways, took the second view. They thought Modern Orthodoxy should be developing Jewish religious thought in the native register, with whatever modifications modern conditions required, rather than translating Jewish content into Protestant existential form. They lost. JB won. The marketplace chose the translation over the development.
This also explains why The Lonely Man of Faith feels anomalous inside frumkeit. It is anomalous inside frumkeit. Frum Jews do not generally produce or consume faith literature. They produce and consume halakhic literature, mussar, drashot on the parsha, and the like. JB’s essay is read in Modern Orthodox circles, in academic circles, in interfaith circles, but not in frumkeit. The essay sits oddly in frumkeit because it was written for a different audience, in a different register, addressing a different set of religious problems than the ones frumkeit is organized around. The essay is a Modern Orthodox achievement and a Christian-existential achievement and an American Jewish intellectual achievement. It is not an Orthodox Jewish religious achievement in the older sense of that phrase. The older sense of that phrase produces responsa, commentaries, and mussar works. It does not produce essays about lonely men of faith.
The traditional Jewish life problem is structural. A serious frum Jew davens shacharis with kavanah, learns daf yomi or his daily seder, gets to work, makes a living, comes home, learns again at night, makes time for his wife and children, prepares for Shabbos starting Wednesday or Thursday, observes the chagim with their elaborate halakhic requirements, attends a chasunah or bris or shiva visit several times a month, and starts over the next morning. The schedule is full. The mental load is heavy. The halakhic detail is constant. There is no slot in the day for existential brooding because the day is already accounted for.
The tradition is engineered to produce this density. The three daily prayer services, the constant brachot before and after eating, the laws of speech, the Shabbos preparations, the kashrus vigilance, the family purity laws for married couples, the holiday cycle, the learning obligation, all of these together produce a religious life that fills available cognitive and temporal bandwidth. A Jew operating fully inside the system does not have idle hours to wonder whether his life is meaningful. The wondering would require empty time, and the system is designed to leave little empty time. The meaning is generated by the doing, not by the contemplation of the doing.
Mussar literature, when it addresses interior life, focuses on character refinement rather than meaning-questions. The Mesillas Yesharim works through middot and their improvement, step by step, with the assumption that the reader is already inside the system of mitzvot and is asking how to perform them with greater integrity. The book does not ask whether the system as a whole is justified. It does not need to. The reader has not stopped to ask. He is too busy keeping the system to step outside it.
Existentialism by contrast presupposes the empty hour. Sartre’s man in the cafe choosing his next move, Kierkegaard’s Abraham trembling on the mountain, Heidegger’s Dasein confronting its own death, all of these figures have time to confront the meaning question. They have time because they are not bound to a daily ritual cycle that fills the hours with required action. The European intellectual existentialists were mostly secular or post-religious men whose religious traditions had collapsed into private interior matter, leaving them with the experience of meaning as something to be sought rather than something received and enacted.
Christian existentialism in particular emerges from a religious tradition that had already moved most religious life into the interior. Protestant Christianity, especially in its post-Reformation forms, hollowed out the external practices of medieval Catholicism and relocated religious significance to faith, conscience, and personal relationship with God. The Protestant Christian has fewer required daily practices than the medieval Catholic. He has more interior life to manage. The same modern conditions that produced the secular cafe-philosopher also produced the Protestant existentialist, because both are working in a context where external religious life has thinned out and interior religious life has expanded to fill the vacated space.
JB writing about faith in a Kierkegaardian register is therefore writing in a register that fits Protestant Christian conditions and modern secular conditions but does not fit traditional Jewish life. The Lithuanian yeshiva world he came from did not produce existentialism because it did not have the cognitive vacancy existentialism fills. R. Chaim Brisker did not write essays about the lonely man of faith. He wrote chiddushim about the lomdus of mitzvot. The chiddushim filled his time. The hours he might have spent contemplating the meaning of religious life were spent producing analyses of how the mitzvah of tefillin works, what its formal structure is, what the conceptual relationship is between its various halachic components. The output is dense, technical, fully absorbing. There is no time left over for existential brooding because the lomdus has consumed the available bandwidth.
Leibowitz insisted that Jewish religious life is exhausted by the performance of mitzvot. He dnied that the interior life has religious significance independent of the practice. The mitzvah is the thing. The Jew’s mood while doing the mitzvah, his sense of meaning, his existential grappling, all of these are private psychological matters that do not enter the religious account. Leibowitz could insist on this so harshly because he saw clearly that the moment one allows the interior life religious significance, one has begun to import a Christian framework into Jewish thought. The Jew who needs to feel his faith for his religious life to be meaningful has stopped being a frum Jew in the traditional sense and has become a Protestant Jew with kosher kitchen.
Existential brooding about meaning has no obvious fitness payoff. The man who lies awake worrying about whether his life signifies anything beyond the bare facts of getting and spending is not, on the face of it, leaving more descendants than the man who sleeps soundly because he is too tired from his work and his religious obligations to ask the question. The brooding is a cognitive expenditure that produces no calories, no offspring, no protection from predators, no coalition advantage. By the standards of inclusive fitness it is waste motion.
The puzzle is therefore why existential brooding exists at all in human populations. The answer is that it does not exist at the population level. Most humans across most of history have not brooded about meaning. They have been busy with subsistence, family, and the ritual life of their communities. The brooding is a marginal phenomenon, found mostly among elites with the leisure to engage in it, and historically these elites have been a small fraction of the population. When the leisure is widespread, as it became in industrial and post-industrial societies, the brooding spreads. When the leisure is rare, the brooding is rare. The brooding tracks the available cognitive bandwidth, which tracks the surplus produced by the surrounding economy.
Brooding about meaning becomes adaptive when the brooder can convert the brooding into status, resources, or coalition position. The man who broods alone in his bedroom is a fitness sink. The man who broods, writes about his brooding, gets the brooding published, attracts students who pay him to teach them about brooding, becomes a celebrated figure whose brooding makes him a candidate for institutional positions, marriage matches, and reputational protection, that man has converted the brooding into fitness payoff. The brooding becomes a peacock’s tail, a costly signal that demonstrates cognitive surplus and attracts allies and mates.
JB’s career fits this pattern. The brooding he engaged in, expressed in essays about loneliness, about dialectical tension, about the man of faith confronting modernity, became the basis for his institutional position at YU, his marriage to Tonya Lewit who came from a distinguished family, his reputation as the leading figure of American Modern Orthodoxy, his ability to attract and command students, his platform for shiurim that drew large audiences, his eventual canonization in Modern Orthodox memorial culture. The brooding paid off. The man who brooded successfully became the central figure of his coalition. His descendants, his sons-in-law, his students, his students’ students, all benefited from the reputational capital his brooding generated. The brooding was a status display, and the status was real, and the resources flowed.
The Lonely Man of Faith, considered as religious philosophy, is a thin contribution that imports foreign categories into Jewish thought without developing them significantly. The Lonely Man of Faith, considered as a status display by a man positioned to convert philosophical performance into institutional power, is a brilliant success. The essay does for JB what the peacock’s tail does for the peacock. It demonstrates that he can afford the cognitive expenditure, that he has the cultural capital to deploy Kierkegaard and Cohen and Barth, that he is the kind of figure other ambitious Modern Orthodox men want to be associated with. The display attracts the resources. The resources confirm the display. The cycle reinforces itself across decades.
The Brisker tradition before JB had its own version of this fitness conversion, but in a different register. R. Chaim Brisker’s lomdus produced status within the Lithuanian yeshiva world. The status produced a position at Volozhin, then at Brisk. The position produced students, marriages, institutional standing, and the dynasty that JB inherited. The lomdus was a cognitive display that converted to fitness through the yeshivish coalition’s recognition apparatus. The display worked because the coalition valued lomdus and rewarded those who produced it at the highest level.
JB’s innovation was to replicate the fitness conversion in a different coalition. The YU musmach in 1955 was not impressed by a chiddush in the Brisker mode in the way a Volozhin student in 1880 had been. He was impressed by Kierkegaard, by Cohen, by the European intellectual tradition his secular university classmates were reading. JB built his display in the medium his audience could appreciate. The display worked. The fitness conversion was successful. JB’s coalition position became as central in postwar American Orthodoxy as R. Chaim’s had been in pre-war Lithuanian Orthodoxy, even though the substantive religious work was thinner.
The hagiography has to maintain that JB’s reputation tracks the merit of his work. The sociological reading shows that the reputation tracks his successful conversion of cognitive display into coalition position, with the work serving as the medium of the display rather than as the engine of the reputation in any direct sense. The reputation is what reputations always are, namely a coalition’s recognition of someone whose performance serves the coalition’s needs. The performance and the merit are correlated but not identical, and in JB’s case the gap between them is vast.
JB’s particular display worked in his coalition and could not work in others. The yeshivish world was too busy to value an essay about loneliness. They had Gemara to learn. The Modern Orthodox world was less busy in the relevant sense. Its members were professionals, lawyers, doctors, businessmen, who kept Shabbos and kashrus but spent most of their cognitive time in secular work. They had hours of secular intellectual life that they wanted to integrate with their religious life. They had the modern condition of a partly-emptied religious schedule, with secular work filling the hours that traditional Jewish life would have filled with learning. They had the cognitive bandwidth for existential brooding because their religious lives were less totally absorbing than the lives of their yeshivish counterparts.
JB wrote for this audience. His essays addressed the experience of a Jew whose life is not fully filled by traditional practice, who has hours of secular professional life, who reads Western literature and philosophy, and who needs an articulation of his religious life that can sit alongside his secular life as an equal partner in the conversation. The Lonely Man of Faith is the manifesto for this kind of Jew. The yeshivish Jew did not need the manifesto because his life was already filled. The Modern Orthodox Jew needed it because his life was not, and he needed an articulation of his religious life that would justify its place in his bifurcated existence. JB provided the justification. The Modern Orthodox Jew read the essay and felt that his bifurcated life was not a compromise but a higher synthesis.
The whole picture comes together cleanly once you see it. Traditional Jewish life produces no existentialism because it has no empty time for the meaning question. Modern Orthodox life produces a market for existentialism because its members live partly outside the tradition and have the empty time. JB writes existentialism in Jewish costume for this market. The market rewards him with status, position, and reputational capital. The reputational capital flows to his descendants and students. The fitness conversion is complete. The work itself, considered as religious philosophy contributing to the development of Jewish thought, is thinner than the reputation suggests. The thinness does not matter for the fitness story. What matters is that the display was effective for the audience, and it was. The audience was looking for exactly what he produced. The match between supply and demand was excellent. The reputation followed.
Berkovits did not have this match. He wrote in the native register, addressing native Jewish religious problems, in a coalition that wanted the Christian-existential register. His display did not fit the audience’s recognition apparatus. The audience did not know how to value him. He was correctly understood by Weinberg and by other senior figures, but the senior figures were dying off, and the new audience that was rising in the postwar American Modern Orthodox world wanted a different kind of thinker. Berkovits’s reputation languished because his display was wrong for the market, not because his work was inferior. JB’s reputation flourished because his display was right for the market, not because his work was superior. The market is the explanation. Substance is decoupled from reputation in coalition life, which tends to reward flattery more than merit.
Intellectual reputation in high intensity in-groups such as religious communities is not primarily about intellectual merit. The merit and the reputation are partly correlated, because grossly incompetent displays do not produce status, but the correlation is loose. Within the band of competent displays, the reputation tracks the match with audience preferences much more than it tracks the depth or rigor of the work. JB’s work is competent. So is Berkovits’s. So is Weinberg’s. The reputational gulf between them is not explained by competence differentials. It is explained by which display fit which audience and which audience had the institutional power to convert reputation into legacy. JB had YU. Berkovits had Skokie and then Jerusalem. Weinberg had Montreux. The institutional differentials were not random. They reflected the success of the displays in attracting institutional patronage, which reflected the audience preferences of the coalitions doing the patronage.
The coalition’s status game plays out through its preferred intellectual heroes. The hero’s job is to produce displays the coalition values. The coalition rewards the hero with status. The status converts to fitness. The hero’s descendants and disciples inherit the position. The cycle continues until the coalition itself transforms or dissolves. Modern Orthodoxy is currently transforming, as the postwar generation passes and the next generations confront new conditions, and the JB legend is beginning to weaken correspondingly. In another generation the legend will be much weaker than it is now, because the audience that valued the particular display he produced will have been replaced by audiences with different preferences. The work will remain. The reputation will shift toward what the work contains rather than what the postwar coalition needed it to contain. Berkovits’s reputation may rise as JB’s settles. The corrective is already happening in the work of Marc Shapiro and others. It will take time but the direction is set.
Modern Orthodox intellectual tradition has moved through a sequence of performed positions, each suited to its moment’s audience preferences, none of them representing the kind of work serious Jewish thought requires. JB performed dialectical tension for the postwar audience that wanted to feel sophisticated about its modernity. Meir Soloveitchik performs civic alignment for the current audience that wants to feel confident about its political coalition. Neither performance produces the work the tradition needs. The work the tradition needs would look more like Berkovits’s work, or like serious halakhic responsa addressing the questions Jewish life faces, or like rigorous theology in the native register. The audiences have not rewarded that work. So the figures who produce it remain marginal.
The first paragraph of Meir Soloveitchik’s Wikipedia entry retrieved April 27, 2026, says he is “a great nephew of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, the leader of American Jewry who identified with what became known as Modern Orthodoxy.” American Jewry in JB’s lifetime had no single leader. The community was divided across denominations, regions, institutional affiliations, and ideological factions. The Reform movement had its own leadership through the UAHC and HUC. The Conservative movement had its own through USCJ and JTS. The Orthodox world itself was divided among Modern Orthodox YU-aligned figures, the Agudah world with Feinstein and the Moetses, the Hasidic courts each with their own rebbe, the Sephardic communities with their own rabbinic authorities, the Yeshivish world with figures like Aharon Kotler (1892-1962) and his successors, and so on. No single figure led this complex.
Even within Orthodox Judaism alone JB was not the leader. Moshe Feinstein issued binding halakhic rulings to a much larger constituency than JB ever addressed in his published writings. Aharon Kotler built Lakewood and shaped the postwar yeshivish world. The Lubavitcher Rebbe (1902-1994) led a global movement that dwarfed JB’s institutional reach. The Satmar Rebbe led a movement of his own. Within Modern Orthodoxy specifically, JB was the central figure at YU but he shared the field with Mizrachi leaders in Israel, with the Religious Zionist establishment, with figures like Lichtenstein later on. He was a major figure. He was not the leader of American Jewry. The phrase is hagiographic rather than descriptive.
The qualifier that follows is also comical over-reach. “Who identified with what became known as Modern Orthodoxy.” The construction implies that JB defined the movement rather than being a figure within it. It also implies that Modern Orthodoxy is what JB identified with, when in fact Modern Orthodoxy is a coalition that needed a figure of his stature and lineage to authorize its existence. The relationship between JB and Modern Orthodoxy is the inverse of what the Wikipedia phrasing suggests. The movement needed him more than he needed it. The phrasing makes him the originator and the movement the identifier of his identity, when in fact the movement constructed itself around him as a legitimating figure.
The opening paragraph of the Meir Soloveichik Wikipedia entry is doing inheritance work. It is establishing Meir’s significance by establishing JB’s, and it is establishing JB’s by claims that exceed the historical record. Meir’s significance is real in his own register, namely as a public-facing rabbi with a Princeton credential and a Manhattan pulpit who has cultivated a particular political-cultural niche. The Wikipedia entry could state this without the JB inflation. It does not state it because the inflation is the point. The inflation supplies the lineage capital that authorizes Meir’s position. Strip the inflation and Meir becomes a competent rabbi with a notable pulpit and a Princeton degree. With the inflation, he becomes the great-nephew of the leader of American Jewry, and his own activities acquire reflected significance from the lineage.
The Modern Orthodox intellectual tradition is structurally a celebrity-driven coalition product whose central figures have been chosen for their performance capacity rather than their substantive contributions.
Back to the Myers-Dunner essay. The Briskers’ broadside is ugly. Their attack on Karlinsky for writing a biography is small and vicious. The “moridim velo-ma’alim” footnote treats a haredi-aligned scholar as a renegade, which tells you how much pressure the boundary was under. None of that means their assessment of JB’s halakhic weight was wrong. They may have been correct that he was not a continuator of the Brisker line in substance. They may have been correct that the Festschrift was a Feinstein-led courtesy that confused the picture. The ferocity is excessive. The underlying judgment about JB’s halakhic productivity is closer to defensible than Myers’s frame allows.
The Myers-Dunner framing leans modern. “Pious presence” for the Edah Haredis is the tell, paired with “Zionist heresy” for what they came to oppose. They lived in a city they regarded as occupied by a movement aimed at uprooting the religion. “Pious” is a courtesy the secular Jewish historian extends to a faction whose doctrine he cannot endorse. “Heresy” inside scare quotes does the same work in reverse, signaling that the historian does not accept the description. The same care is not extended to the Briskers’ assessment of JB. That asymmetry is the coalition position of American Jewish studies as a field.
The essay about the Jerusalem Briskers is a coalition purity document. The Jerusalem Briskers watch JB collect a Festschrift in 1984 with approbations from the senior Agudah rabbis in America and see the professional coalition line collapsing. Feinstein, a blood relative, writes about “the glory of our family.” Gifter places Soloveitchik “among those who perpetuate the House of Brisk.” The distinction between Modern Orthodoxy and yeshivish Orthodoxy, which the Jerusalem Briskers need to hold firm, is being erased by their own senior colleagues.
The response is the classic move of a professional coalition that feels its purity markers slipping. Escalate the rhetoric against the boundary-crosser to make the cost of further crossing too high. Soloveitchik becomes the “Boston Sadducee,” the “uprooter of Israel,” the “product of the cursed Berlin Haskalah,” the “poisoner of the hearts of the Children of Israel.” The language is maximal because the stakes are low in one sense, Soloveitchik has his own following and institutions, and high in another, the haredi coalition’s claim to be the sole legitimate heir to the Brisker tradition depends on keeping Soloveitchik outside the line. Moshe Feinstein’s warm letter pulled the line inward. The broadside pushes it back.
The Jerusalem Briskers stick it to Hayim Karlinsky, a haredi-aligned rabbi writing a biography of the Beis Ha-Levi, published by Makhon Yerushalayim, which was a center of haredi textual scholarship. Why the attack? Because a biography of the Beis Ha-Levi that draws on sources from R. Simcha Soloveitchik in Brooklyn and acknowledges help from RIETS faculty like Dovid Lifshitz and Berish Mandelbaum re-connects the Brisker lineage to the American Modern Orthodox branch. The book’s existence, regardless of its content, threatens the severed-lineage story the Jerusalem Briskers need. So Karlinsky becomes “wicked and evil H. K.,” a sapling-cutter, and Makhon Yerushalayim becomes “a den in which all the Maskilim of our generation disseminate their false and blasphemous opinions.”
The moridim velo-ma’alim line in the footnote is the escalation tell. The phrase comes from bSan 26b on the treatment of informers and renegades, people one lowers into a pit and does not raise out. The Jerusalem Briskers are applying the classical halakhic treatment of traitors to the staff of a haredi Torah institute that published an uncontroversial biography. The ferocity is out of proportion to the offense. The ferocity is the point. When the boundary is porous, the punishment for boundary-crossing must look disproportionate to deter the next crosser.
The Brisker Rav’s anti-Zionism is the doctrinal core that the Jerusalem Briskers cannot afford to lose. R. Chaim’s letter in Or la-yesharim in 1900, which Myers and Dunner quote in a footnote, called the Zionist leaders “bad people” whose “purpose is to uproot the fundaments of religion.” The Jerusalem Briskers settled in the city because settling there while refusing cooperation with Zionism performs the doctrine. Joseph Ber Soloveitchik’s Mizrachi Zionism inside the same rabbinic family line makes the doctrine look like a choice rather than a commandment. That is unbearable for a professional coalition whose entire position is that the doctrine is the only faithful reading of the tradition.
The phrase “the existence of an alternative Soloveitchik lineage” names the structural problem precisely. The Jerusalem Briskers need a single authentic line running through R. Chaim to R. Velvel to themselves. Joseph Ber’s career threatens the line not because he is a weak scholar but because he is a strong one whose scholarship cannot be dismissed. A dismissible modernist would not require this level of attack. The intensity of the broadside is evidence of Soloveitchik’s legitimate claim.
Orthodoxy contains internal professional coalition conflicts that outsiders rarely see. The standard academic map of American Jewish religious life runs Reform, Conservative, Modern Orthodox, haredi, and treats each as a professional coalition in tension with the others. The coalition dynamics are more granular. The Jerusalem Briskers are not in meaningful tension with Reform Jews, who are so far outside their frame as to be irrelevant. They are in acute tension with Agudah rabbis in America who warm up to Modern Orthodox colleagues, because those rabbis are close enough to matter. Coalition conflicts are usually most intense at the nearest boundary, not the farthest one. The broadside is aimed at Feinstein and Gifter and Ruderman as much as at Soloveitchik, because those three threaten the line from inside.
The document sat in Dunner’s private collection. His family has Anglo-Orthodox roots that touch multiple strands of European Orthodoxy, and he has written on haredi history with an insider’s eye. Myers brings the JQR imprimatur and the academic framing apparatus. The collaboration is productive because Dunner has access to the material and context that a secular Jewish historian might struggle to get, and Myers has the platform and the scholarly register.
The frame is measured but tips modern. Phrases like “unbridgeable and often unnoticed boundary lines within Orthodoxy itself,” “militant Orthodoxy that not only regards non-Orthodox Judaism as beyond the bounds of legitimacy but treats with mocking contempt one of the most revered and prominent exponents of Orthodox Judaism,” and “a haredi world struggling to beat back the advances of a modern world” position the reader sympathetically toward Soloveitchik and skeptically toward the Briskers. The framing is defensible given what the document contains. A more neutral frame might have said that both sides are making professional coalition-maintenance moves and that the broadside’s ferocity is proportional to the Briskers’ perceived loss, not to any threat Soloveitchik posed to their community.
What the piece does not reach was that Joseph Ber Soloveitchik was also doing coalition work. Torah u-madda was not just an intellectual synthesis. It was a coalition technology that let college-educated American Orthodox Jews stay Orthodox while participating in American professional life. The Jerusalem Briskers correctly identified it as the rival coalition’s foundational doctrine and attacked it as such. Both sides defended coalition boundaries. Soloveitchik’s synthesis won the demographic battle in America because the American context rewarded it. The Briskers won the purity battle inside their own enclave because the enclave context rewarded that. The broadside is the sound of one professional coalition watching the other’s victory condition coming into view.
The piece works as a glimpse into Orthodox internal politics. What it does not do is push the analysis to the coalition-theoretic register where the broadside becomes legible as a generic move rather than a haredi excess. That move would require stepping outside the field’s implicit alliance with Modern Orthodoxy against haredi extremism. Myers, as an editor of JQR and a figure inside American Jewish studies, does not take that step. He lets the document speak and frames it in a register that treats Soloveitchik as the reasonable party and the Briskers as the unreasonable one. That frame is possibly correct on the merits. It is also the frame his coalition would expect him to produce.
“Editor’s Introduction: Enlightening and Enlighteners: German Jews and Education in the Maskilic Age and Beyond: Editor’s Introduction.” Jewish Quarterly Review 106, no. 3 (2016)
Myers edits a forum on Haskalah and lets the frame do the argument. The headline word is “mimesis.” Jewish cultural borrowing in the name of self-improvement. The maskilim wanted to look good to gentiles. They translated children’s books into Hebrew that Jewish children could not read. They wrote Adam and Eve stories that taught bourgeois marriage. They produced elementary schools that German-ized their students to the point of demographic disappearance. The whole forum circles one implicit question: was the Haskalah a project of liberation or a project of accommodation that liquidated the community that launched it?
Myers answers by arranging the essays along what he calls a pendulum: state imposition at one pole, Jewish self-fashioning at the other, with the maskilim swinging between the two. The framing sounds neutral. It is not. The vocabulary loads the case. “State imposition of cultural and social values.” “State-based social engineering.” “Jewish internalization of gentile expectations.” “A status worthy of gentile respect.” Read straight through, the forum describes a population that accepted coercion from above and shame from within, translated into another language, and vanished. Brämer’s essay, by Myers’s summary, tracks the 1824 Prussian edict through to “the point of disappearance.” That is a strong word for an editor’s introduction to leave sitting there without softening. The forum puts Enlightenment on trial and lets the conservatives score points.
Hirsch is the giveaway. Gottlieb shows that “embattled conservatives are no less capable of introducing innovations into tradition than are progressives.” The quotation marks around “embattled conservatives” and “progressives” are Myers doing scholarly neutrality while flagging the categories as contested. The essay rehabilitates Hirsch as creative rather than reactive. In a forum organized around mimesis and disappearance, the Orthodox rabbi who insisted on “the spiritual supremacy of rabbinic talmudism” gets credited with innovation, while the reformers who won the nineteenth century get credited with a symbolic act that produced books their children could not read. The scorecard tilts.
Run the professional coalition-analysis diagnostic on what the forum does for its carrier group. Academic Jewish studies in 2016 sits in a particular position. The field depends on the existence of living Jewish communities, on donor interest, on the legitimacy of Jewish particularism as a subject worth a chair and a journal. A triumphalist Haskalah narrative, the old Graetz-to-Mendelssohn story of enlightenment marching forward, supports a certain kind of liberal assimilated American Jewish self-understanding. That self-understanding is in demographic trouble. Intermarriage rates, non-Orthodox denominational decline, the Pew numbers. Meanwhile the Orthodox grow. A forum that subtly questions whether the Haskalah delivered what it promised, that treats its educational projects as mimesis rather than progress, that ends on Prussian schools diminishing to disappearance, speaks to a field reconsidering its inherited story because the inherited story no longer describes where living Judaism lives.
Compare this to the Yiddish issue. The mourning runs the same direction. There, scholarly nostalgia for a lost cosmopolitan vernacular. Here, scholarly skepticism toward the Enlightenment project that helped kill the vernacular. Both moves criticize nineteenth-century German-Jewish elite aspiration. Both moves extract the scholar from that aspiration. The scholar stands outside the project now, analyzing it, rather than inside it continuing it.
Manekin’s essay is the sharpest piece in the summary. “Gaming the System.” State procedures for rabbinic selection. A maskilic candidate elevated over the more qualified traditionalist Chajes. Kohn poisoned in his soup. Myers describes this as “the interplay between state aims and communal desires,” which is soft. The essay as summarized says something harder: enlightened reform in Galicia ran through administrative capture, and the community killed the rabbi who arrived by that route. The rabbi-by-bureaucracy model looks less like triumph and more like a Weberian cautionary tale. Myers lets this sit without comment.
The Idelson-Shein irony carries the most weight and Myers almost buries it. Haskalah advocates translated children’s books into a language the children could not read. The translation project was a “symbolic act” performing the maskilim’s ambition. That is a devastating line about a movement that claimed to educate. It describes a priesthood writing for itself while telling itself the work serves the people. Plenty of contemporary movements resemble this. The sentence would carry further if Myers let it land rather than tucking it between Gottlieb and Salzer.
What the forum underplays: the Haskalah produced real achievements the summary does not honor. Mendelssohn’s Bible translation did get read, eventually, by enormous numbers of Jews who used it as a German primer and a path into modernity. The movement generated Wissenschaft des Judentums, which is the ancestor of the forum. The contemporary American Jewish studies professor, including Myers, exists because the Haskalah won a certain kind of fight. The forum’s critical posture toward Haskalah mimesis comes from an institutional perch that is a late Haskalah product. The introduction does not acknowledge this. Turner’s point about convenient beliefs applies. The scholar gets to criticize the project whose success created the chair he writes from.
The Adler essay at the end is the carrier-group flag. Two women’s autobiographies. “Bildungs romance.” “Educational liberation.” “Self-empowerment.” A forum that otherwise reads skeptically about state imposition and gentile respect closes on two women overcoming patriarchy through education. The critique of enlightenment reform gets suspended when the subjects are women. The coalition signal is clean. The field can question what the Haskalah did to community coherence, but cannot question what it did for individual women without losing standing.
The forum is honest to a point about what the Haskalah cost. It does not pursue the question of what replaced what it dissolved, or who the winners and losers were when the heder gave way to the Prussian Jewish elementary school, or why the communities that rejected the Haskalah are the ones growing now. Those questions sit in the summary as implications rather than arguments. Myers is too careful an editor to make them explicit. The forum lets them accumulate and trusts the reader.
The phrase “symbolic act” that Idelson-Shein applies to the Haskalah translation project could be applied to the forum. Scholarly writing that does not reach the readers it nominally addresses and performs the ambitions of the guild that produces it. The forum about maskilic self-performance performs the preoccupations of present-day Jewish studies. That is what academic journals do. The forum shows some awareness of this, which is why it is better than Myers’s Yiddish issue. Mimesis all the way down.
“Editor’s Introduction: On Gerson Cohen’s “Blessing of Assimilation” a Half Century Later.” Jewish Quarterly Review 106, no. 4 (2016)
Myers gives an introduction to a JQR forum marking fifty years since Cohen’s 1966 address.
Cohen gave “The Blessing of Assimilation” as a graduation address at Hebrew Teachers College two years before he became chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary. He ran the Conservative movement’s flagship institution. His thesis that Jews survive by adapting names, languages, and dress while keeping some core legitimates Conservative Judaism’s professional coalition identity as the middle path between Orthodox fossilization and Reform dissolution. Cohen’s theory of Jewish survival is also Cohen’s theory of his own movement’s legitimacy.
Baron’s “Ghetto and Emancipation” from 1928 did similar work thirty-eight years earlier. Baron attacked the lachrymose reading of medieval Jewish life that Eastern European Orthodox memory kept alive, and he questioned Emancipation’s benefits for Jews. Both men wrote as scholars who also ran the Conservative seminary. Both rejected the Orthodox reading of the past and the Zionist negation of the diaspora. Both theorized a form of Jewish continuity that required neither halakhic rigor nor aliyah. Columbia and JTS housed a coherent intellectual project with professional coalition stakes.
The argument cannot fail in its own terms. Every case where Jews kept distinctiveness while adapting counts as properly channeled assimilation. Every case where Jews disappeared counts as the other kind. Nothing in the framework predicts which adaptations preserve a community and which dissolve it. The ShaLeM acronym Cohen mocks at least makes a testable claim: keep the names, languages, and dress and you survive. Cohen’s version lets the analyst sort cases after the fact.
Eisen and Ruderman notice what Myers softens. By 1984, Cohen had moved from optimism to anger. The “Mending the Shattered Tablets” essay concedes that American Jews sit in a bad way. The continuous chain that ran through Weiss’s Dor dor ve-dorshav had snapped. Cohen’s 1966 frame assumes a Jewish cultural substrate thick enough to absorb outside influence without dissolving. By 1984 that substrate had thinned past the point where his balancing act could hold.
Benor’s response raises a structural objection. Her study of Jewish languages shows that distinctiveness came from what Jews kept apart, not what they borrowed. Yiddish, Ladino, and Judeo-Arabic each drew on a surrounding vernacular and recast it inside a Jewish frame, with Hebrew letters, liturgical vocabulary, and speech patterns that marked the speaker as Jewish. The adaptation served separation. Benor’s point on contemporary Jewish English, that American Jews signal distinctiveness through children’s names and Jewishly inflected speech, points at a nativist impulse rather than an assimilationist one. Cohen’s causal story may have the arrow pointing the wrong way.
The Krochmal image Cohen quotes, Torah as a path beset on one side by freezing cold and on the other by consuming fire, does most of the rhetorical work. It lets the speaker claim the middle without specifying where the middle runs. Every generation that made the wrong call got burned or frozen. Every generation that survived walked the path. The image cannot guide anyone prospectively.
Cohen’s essay is also an intra-Jewish argument against the Orthodox claim to carry authentic tradition. If Jews survived by constant adaptation, then Orthodox insistence on unchanging practice looks like innovation disguised as continuity. Cohen turns the Orthodox charge of assimilation back against them. The real rupture in Jewish history, on his telling, is not adaptation but refusal to adapt.
Ruderman’s closing question about whether the blessings of healthy assimilation can be discerned in contemporary American Jewish life answers itself in the demographics. Conservative Judaism has lost more than half its share of American Jewry since Cohen gave the address. The movement that most fully embodied his theory shrank fastest. Orthodox communities, which Cohen coded as fossilized, have grown. The unhealthy versions of assimilation accelerated and the healthy middle path hollowed out. Cohen’s theory worked when the substrate was thick. Once the substrate thinned, the middle path stopped being available as a real option for most people.
‘The Curious Case of David Myers and the Center for Jewish History’ (Oct. 27, 2017)
This ope-ed is a coalition move dressed as fact-checking. The authors Gold and Simon sit on the Partners for Progressive Israel board, which tells you their position before you read a sentence. They present Myers as the neutral scholar-administrator and his attackers as PR hacks and Trump donors. The credentialing operation runs hard: Yale, Harvard, Columbia, UCLA, Sarna, Ellenson.
The fight is jurisdictional. Who runs the central archive of American Jewish history? The Center for Jewish History holds the records. Control of the archive shapes what counts as the Jewish past, which shapes what counts as Jewish authority in the present. Torossian, Sheinkopf, Birnbaum, Abramowitz, and Allen understand this. So do Sarna and Ellenson. The board’s two statements of confidence show pressure, not calm.
The Myers case turns on his position on settlement boycotts. He rejects global BDS but accepts targeted boycotts of West Bank commercial activity. This distinction holds liberal Zionism together. If it stands, liberal Zionists can oppose settlements while remaining inside the pro-Israel tent. If it collapses into BDS, they are out. The right’s campaign aims to collapse it. The authors’ piece aims to defend it.
The authors cannot see their own position from outside. They treat the conflation of anti-settlement and anti-Israel views as a bad-faith rhetorical move. The right’s position holds together within its own frame. If any daylight between Israel proper and the settlements legitimizes BDS logic, then closing that gap protects maximalist Zionism. The authors dismiss this as cynicism because acknowledging it would require defending their position on substance rather than credentials.
The rhetorical pattern repeats across similar disputes. Establish credentials. Quote establishment scholars. Describe opponents as PR professionals and political operatives. Cite institutional confidence from the board. The substance of the disagreement receives less space than the credentials.
The piece also reveals the institutional left’s weakening position. In 2017, they still had the board, the scholars, the credentials. The Myers model of liberal Zionism holds fewer institutional positions today. The right’s conflation strategy worked better than Gold and Simon thought possible. The fight over Myers was a late battle in a war the institutional left was already losing.
One tell: the authors use “progressive Zionism” and “Zionist left” as if these terms still carry institutional weight. The categories now feel dated.
The deeper irony sits in the rhetorical closing. Gold and Simon claim the future of the Jewish state depends on making their distinctions visible. But The Center for Jewish History is an archive, not a policy shop. Using the hiring fight as a vehicle for their settlement politics concedes the structure of the attack while denying the attackers’ charge.
The Stakes of History: On the Use and Abuse of Jewish History for Life (2018)
If Between Jew and Arab shows the project in action, The Stakes of History argues for why the project is legitimate historical work and articulates the philosophical foundation for everything Myers has been doing across his career and everything he continues to do in public formats.
The central move. Myers argues against Yerushalmi’s position in Zakhor. Yerushalmi framed history and memory as opposed, with modern critical history as “the faith of fallen Jews” that cannot substitute for traditional Jewish memory. Myers argues this chasm is overdrawn. Historians are memory-formers. Critical historical work and memory construction operate together rather than against each other. The modern Jewish historian occupies a “middle space” between history and memory, producing scholarship that serves present purposes while maintaining scholarly rigor.
Myers credits Yerushalmi as his teacher and chief intellectual interlocutor. But Myers thinks Yerushalmi was wrong about this question. The book is Myers making his case more fully after Yerushalmi’s death. Myers notes that when he made a version of this argument while Yerushalmi was alive, Yerushalmi “sharply and unequivocally disagreed.” The disagreement is consequential. It is not a peripheral matter. It concerns the fundamental nature of what historians do and what their work is for.
The three modes Myers articulates matter for understanding everything else. History as Liberation (chapter 1) — history that frees groups from false narratives, exemplified by John Hope Franklin’s African American history. History as Consolation (chapter 2) — history that comforts in difficult times, exemplified by Gerda Lerner. History as Witness (chapter 3) — history that testifies and bears witness. Each mode is a legitimate use of history. Myers defends all three.
These modes map onto what Myers does. Between Jew and Arab is liberation — freeing a suppressed voice, offering an alternative Jewish political vision. The Ellenson festschrift is consolation of a kind — honoring a scholarly tradition in a moment when its relevance might seem diminished. The Yerushalmi volume is witness — preserving the legacy, ensuring the voice continues to be heard. The post-October 7 Al Chet additions are witness — testifying to Jewish moral obligations. The Tisha B’av pieces are witness combined with liberation. The Gaza op-eds are liberation — trying to free Jewish discourse from narratives Myers considers partial or harmful.
Myers invokes Saul Friedlander, a major Holocaust historian whose empirical work is unimpeachable and who writes with simultaneous theoretical sophistication and moral commitment. Myers aligns with this model. The model says scholarly rigor and moral commitment can coexist. Friedlander’s two-volume Holocaust history carries both encyclopedic scholarly mastery and moral framing that some readers find essential and others find problematic. Myers adopts this combination.
The Nietzsche subtitle is important. “On the Use and Abuse of Jewish History for Life” directly echoes Nietzsche’s 1874 essay. Nietzsche worried about surfeit of history producing “a malignant historical fever” that paralyzes rather than energizes. Nietzsche distinguished monumental, antiquarian, and critical modes of history. He advocated history “in the service of a powerful new life-giving influence.” Myers is updating Nietzsche’s question. What should Jewish history be for? What should it serve? His answer is the three modes.
This book is where Myers makes explicit what the earlier scholarly work implicitly does. Between Jew and Arab applies engaged history to a question without fully theorizing what engaged history is. Resisting History practices careful scholarly work without arguing against Yerushalmi’s framework. The Stakes of History provides the theory.
Myers has built a career on the bet that engaged Jewish history is legitimate scholarly work and serves purposes better than purely detached critical history does. The bet has been contested — Yerushalmi contested it in Myers’s lifetime, and other historians would contest it today. Myers has made his case across multiple scholarly books, engaged in intellectual debates, and tested the methodology in historical work. The bet is defensible. Whether one accepts it is a substantive question, not a question about Myers’s competence or scholarly standing.
Myers writes in response to a “crisis of the humanities” — declining enrollments at UCLA, economic pressures on universities, questions about the value of historical study. The book is partly a defense of the discipline at a moment when disciplinary existence is uncertain. Myers’s “bullish” position on history’s utility is not just methodological. It is institutional advocacy. History must justify its continued existence. Myers argues it can and should by serving liberation, consolation, and witness.
The acknowledgments show that Michael A. Meyer read the manuscript. David Ellenson read the manuscript. Saul Friedlander read the manuscript. Brenner read the manuscript. These are intellectual networks Myers operates within. The book passed through their vigilance before publication. The argument survived their scrutiny. Their willingness to read and improve the manuscript without apparently demanding Myers retreat from his position suggests that Myers’s middle-space position is defensible within the scholarly community he operates within.
The critic’s counter would be: Myers has chosen his readers carefully. Scholars positioned differently than Friedlander or Brenner might have pushed harder against the argument. The scholars who would have pushed hardest against the argument — defenders of a strict Yerushalmi position, say — are not on the reader list. The framework observes this without claiming to adjudicate whether it is problematic. Scholars generally choose readers who can substantively engage the argument. Whether the readers Myers chose adequately represented potential objections is a question readers of the book can consider.
The chapter structure deserves attention for what it reveals. History as Liberation comes first. History as Consolation comes second. History as Witness comes third. This ordering matters. Liberation comes first because it is the most engaged mode. Consolation is softer. Witness is pulled toward rigor. The ordering suggests Myers wants to start with the boldest claim.
Myers periodically picks a Jewish thinker who operates inside the establishment and speaks from within it against Jewish power. Magnes in 1992. Rawidowicz in 2008. Yizhar also in 2008. Leibowitz everywhere. Beinart in 2025. Manekin and Thrall in 2024. The hero of the template is the “connected critic,” to use Walzer’s phrase Myers invokes in the Yizhar review. He belongs. He stays. He criticizes. His criticism gains authority from his membership.
Against this hero stands the counter-figure: the Jewish thinker who sides with power. Stone. Netanyahu. Kahane. The settlers. Yisre’eli. These figures get a different treatment. They receive neither the genealogical recovery nor the charitable reconstruction. They get moral diagnosis. Stone “did not fully absorb the lesson.” Netanyahu betrays Jabotinsky’s better self. Kahane is read as an ontology of hate.
The method is genealogical. Myers does not argue that his political position is correct on the merits. He builds a lineage of Jewish moral voices who converge on his position, then uses the lineage to delegitimize the opposing position as a departure from the tradition. Turner would call this essentialism. Myers essentializes the Jewish moral tradition as dissent, empathy, and critique of power. His essentialism is as strong as the Kahanist essentialism he condemns. It’s a different selection of the same canon.
The Anidjar exchange showed how the template handles challenge. Anidjar’s critique was structural. Rawidowicz argued against the lone center; Myers reinstated the lone center through his method. The scholars who have been making the Jew-Arab linkage argument for a generation were excluded from the frame. Myers defended himself by invoking discipline. “Creative misprision.” Derridean artfulness. I am a historian. The defense confirmed the charge without naming it. In the final paragraph Myers admitted the identification with Rawidowicz: “I often feel, as he did, at odds with mainstream Jewish communal politics.” The admission comes in the language of moral independence rather than coalition belonging, but the content is coalition positioning. Feeling outside the mainstream inside a UCLA Jewish Studies program and the NIF presidency is its own kind of mainstream.
Myers does better scholarship when the stakes drop. The 2004 Slezkine review pushes back on the Mercurian-Apollonian thesis and offers honest appraisal. The Haredi gender analysis in the Hebrew response does sociological work, separating “pragmatists” from “ideologues” among the new Haredim and noting women’s 70% share of Haredi students. The Veidlinger review grants the book’s strengths while naming its methodological limits around “backshadowing.” In these pieces Myers reads as a working scholar.
The quality drops when the template engages directly. The Beinart review reads less as review than as coalition embrace. Myers identifies with Beinart the way he identifies with Rawidowicz. The Thrall-Manekin review closes with “the threat it poses today is at least as much moral as physical.” This is the coda Myers always reaches for, and it does no analytical work. The Kahane review cannot decide whether it wants to do intellectual history or moral diagnosis and wobbles between the two.
The 2008 Khirbet Khizeh review is the key document for understanding Myers’ self-conception. He wrote it the same year he published the Rawidowicz book. The review praises Yizhar for “connected criticism” emerging “from within the establishment itself,” observes that Yizhar was Ben-Gurion’s friend and a six-term Mapai MK, and notes that the tradition of criticism in Hebrew letters “most often emerges from within the establishment itself.” Myers describes the position he wants to occupy. The Rawidowicz project is another attempt at the same thing. The Beinart review seventeen years later does the same work.
The Magnes lecture from 1992 is where the template first appears fully formed. “A mix of principled commitment and organizational involvement, avoiding the extremes of a Luftmensch and an apparatchik.” Magnes is the primal figure. Myers at 32 is describing himself. The Rawidowicz book, the Beinart review, the NIF presidency, all of it follows from the template he laid down as a young scholar. The career is the slow institutional realization of the hero system.
The hero system Myers serves is the American liberal Jewish intellectual’s self-understanding as the conscience voice inside a powerful tradition. The hero stays Jewish, stays inside, stays connected, and stays critical. He refuses Diaspora withdrawal, refuses anti-Zionist departure, refuses Kahanist embrace of power. He does the internal reckoning. The Jewish Studies scholar who builds a career on this hero system acquires symbolic immortality by joining the lineage he recovers. Magnes, Rawidowicz, Yizhar, Leibowitz, and now Myers. The hero system requires the lineage, the lineage requires the template, and the template requires the exclusion of figures who refuse it. Stone refuses it. So do Netanyahu, Kahane, Yisre’eli. They cannot be integrated. They have to be named as departures.
The template has been productive. Three decades of work. Dozens of essays. A Cambridge chapter. An NIF presidency. A chair at UCLA. It has been consistent. What it has not been is testable. It selects its evidence and disqualifies counter-evidence as moral failure.
The American research university, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, has been the most consistently anti-nationalist institutional environment in American life for at least two generations. The faculty culture, the journals, the conferences, the hiring committees, the tenure review processes, the teaching curricula, all of these have been organized around assumptions that treat nationalism as a problem to be diagnosed rather than a phenomenon to be understood on its own terms. The intellectual lineage runs through figures like Hannah Arendt on totalitarianism, Eric Hobsbawm on invented traditions, Benedict Anderson on imagined communities, Ernest Gellner on nationalism as the product of industrialization, Eric Wolf on Europe and the people without history, Edward Said on Orientalism, the postcolonial studies establishment that grew from his work, the various ethnic studies programs that emerged from the political movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and the broader cultural studies enterprise that absorbed and transmitted all of this to graduate students across the humanities.
The cumulative effect is that American academic humanists have absorbed an instinctive anti-nationalism the way fish absorb water. They do not argue for it. They do not defend it. They do not justify it. It is the medium in which they swim. When they encounter a nationalist movement, a nationalist text, a nationalist political project, their default analytic move is to expose its contingency, its constructedness, its myths, its violence, its exclusions, its complicity with power. The default is so deeply set that it operates pre-reflectively. The scholar does not decide to be anti-nationalist before sitting down to write. The anti-nationalism is built into the categories he brings to the work.
Myers operates in this medium. His scholarly career has been organized around projects that fit comfortably within the academic anti-nationalist consensus. His work on Jewish historiography is sympathetic to figures who pushed against narrowly nationalist conceptions of Jewish history. His work on Hermann Cohen and the German Jewish liberal tradition celebrates figures whose Judaism was universalist and ethical rather than nationalist and particularist. His work on alternatives to political Zionism, including his interest in Brit Shalom and Judah Magnes and the binational option, recovers figures who opposed mainstream Zionism’s nationalist trajectory. His work on diaspora as a positive Jewish category challenges the Zionist narrative that treats diaspora as exile to be overcome. His critical engagement with contemporary Israeli politics, including his sustained criticism of the occupation and of Israeli right-wing nationalism, fits the standard academic position on Israel-Palestine.
His anti-nationalist orientation is so thoroughly the default of his professional environment that it does not appear to him as a position requiring defense. It appears as the obvious analytical framework any serious scholar would adopt. Other positions appear as deviations from the obvious.
American Jewish studies has been institutionally organized around figures and projects that fit the academic liberal consensus. Hermann Cohen receives more attention than Yehuda Halevi. Mendelssohn receives more attention than the Vilna Gaon. Buber receives more attention than Israel Salanter. The Conservative movement receives more attention than the haredi world. Reform receives more attention than Sephardic Orthodoxy. Israeli leftist intellectuals receive more attention than Israeli religious Zionists, who in turn receive more attention than haredi Israeli figures. The pattern holds across decades and across institutional contexts. The field selects for objects of study that confirm the field’s prior commitments.
The scholars who entered the field starting in the 1960s and 1970s shared a particular set of political and religious commitments. They built the institutions, hired the next generation, set the research agendas, founded the journals. The next generation absorbed the framework. The framework reproduces itself through normal academic incentives. Tenure, publication, conference invitations, fellowship awards, all flow more easily to scholars whose work fits the framework. Scholars whose work does not fit the framework face headwinds. Some persist anyway and carve out marginal positions. Others adjust their work to fit. Most never enter the field in the first place because they self-select out at earlier stages.
The result is a field that produces a particular scholarship, which is often excellent within its own terms. It is also systematically blind in particular directions. The blind spots correspond to the field’s prior commitments. Nationalism is read as constructed and problematic. Traditionalism is read as resistant to modernity and therefore deficient. Liberal modernism is read as the obvious correct position. Religious Zionism is read with suspicion. Haredi life is read as either anthropological curiosity or as a reactionary problem. The Israeli right is read as a deviation from the legitimate Israeli political tradition. The Israeli left is read as the carrier of Israel’s authentic values. None of these readings is defended at length because none of them needs to be defended within the field. They are the field’s working assumptions.
Myers operates at the high end of this field. His scholarship is careful, his prose is clear, his historical sense is strong, and he engages texts with respect. He is also a thoroughly representative product of the field’s framework. His anti-nationalism is not a personal idiosyncrasy. It is the field’s default. His sympathy for figures like Magnes and Buber on the binational question, his criticism of Israeli right-wing politics, his interest in diasporic Jewish thought, his engagement with non-Zionist and post-Zionist Jewish thinkers, all of these fit the field’s preferred contours.
What this means for reading his work is that one cannot simply trust the framing to be neutral. The framing is never neutral. The framing is always doing the work the field’s framework prepares it to do. A reader who shares the framework will find Myers’s work confirming and well-executed. A reader who does not share the framework will find Myers’s work executing well within a framework that needs to be examined as such. The latter reading is harder because the framework is the air the field breathes. Examining it requires stepping outside the field’s assumptions, which is something most working scholars within the field cannot do without paying significant professional costs.
Jewish Studies is funded by, employed by, evaluated by, and generally assimilated into an institutional environment whose default orientation is hostile to the nationalism that animates much of contemporary Jewish life, especially in Israel. Israeli academic Jewish studies has its own version of this problem, since the Israeli universities are themselves embedded in the broader transnational academic community and absorb its norms. But the American context is more extreme because American universities have less direct connection to Jewish nationalism as a lived political project. The American Jewish studies professor working at a major research university is operating in an institutional environment whose default categories treat his subject matter, when that subject matter takes nationalist forms, as problematic.
This produces a challenge for the American Jewish studies scholar who connects to Jewish nationalist concerns. The scholar can either suppress those connections in his professional work, which is what most do, or develop a critical distance from them that allows them to be treated as objects of study, which is what figures like Myers do, or actively oppose them, which is what figures further to the left in the field do. What the scholar generally cannot do is treat Jewish nationalism as a normal political phenomenon deserving the kind of sympathetic and rigorous engagement that other forms of group identity receive in the academy. The institutional pressure is too strong. The default is too deeply set. The career costs of resistance are too high.
The contrast with how the academy treats other minority nationalisms is instructive. Black nationalism, indigenous nationalisms, Palestinian nationalism, various postcolonial nationalisms, all receive sympathetic and rigorous engagement from the academy. The framework is selective. It is not anti-nationalist across the board. It is anti-nationalist when the nationalism in question is European, white, Western, or associated with Western power, including Jewish nationalism in its mainstream Zionist form. The selectivity is the giveaway. A genuinely anti-nationalist framework would treat all nationalisms as equally constructed, equally problematic, equally deserving of critical analysis. The academic framework treats some nationalisms as suspect and others as expressions of authentic identity that deserve protection from critical analysis. The selectivity tracks the political coalition the academy has been building since the 1960s.
Jewish nationalism is on the wrong side of this selectivity. It is treated as the kind of nationalism the academy is suspicious of, namely the kind associated with Western power and with a state that is read as a Western implant in the postcolonial world.
American Shtetl: A Hasidic Town in Suburban New York (October 26, 2017)
Myers documents the Satmar formation regime. Yiddish from cradle to grave. No college. Segregated schools from age three. Modesty signage at the village gates. Marriage at young ages with eight to twelve children per family. Internet panic. Information control. The community produces similarly-formed individuals because it controls the conditions of formation.
Myers describes the success without naming the implication. He notes that those who leave carry the formation with them, “part of that person’s soul remains back in the community,” but treats this as poignant rather than as evidence of the regime’s depth. He mentions Board of Ed. v. Grumet (1994) only in passing and does not press the case’s implications for his “manifestly American” framing. He notes that Kiryas Joel grows by resisting the same forces (Internet, intermarriage, college, secular employment) that have hollowed out non-Orthodox American Judaism.ransmission requires the conditions his coalition has dispensed with.
Myers two-party system” framing of the Satmar succession dispute is rhetorically generous but analytically light. The dispute is not a two-party system in any American sense. It is a coalition war over who controls the legitimating language of daas Torah and fidelity to Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum. Calling it a two-party system Americanizes what is structurally a battle over moral vocabulary. Myers performs the move because it serves his “manifestly American” frame. The community looks more familiar when its internal politics map onto American political forms. The cost is precision.
The talk has admiration that exceeds what his coalition can endorse. He admires the political savvy. He admires the demographic vitality. He admires the hospitality of his interlocutors. He admires the pot smokers among the free thinkers. The admiration runs through the language even when the conclusions hedge.
The applied history dimension matters too. Myers directs the Luskin Center for History and Policy. The Kiryas Joel research is not merely scholarly. It feeds policy debates over religious accommodation, school district carve-outs, zoning, welfare administration, and the boundaries of municipal authority. His framing of the community as “manifestly American” supports a policy posture that treats Satmar separatism as eccentric within the American system rather than as a counterexample to it.
The talk says little about the financial structure of Kiryas Joel beyond a 60% poverty rate and rumors of welfare fraud. It does not engage the public school district as a vehicle for state special-education funding extraction, which is the structural reason the district exists. It treats the economy as a black box with entrepreneurial outflow at one end and state and federal transfers at the other. This sits inside the “manifestly American” frame. Pressing the finances forces a different conclusion: that Kiryas Joel functions as a separatist enclave subsidized by the surrounding liberal state it claims to resist. That conclusion sits outside the frame Myers has chosen.
The Q&A is also revealing. The student who asks about state and federal conflict gets a soft answer about political savvy and welfare fraud, with no engagement of Grumet or the constitutional question. The student who asks about Myers’s reception inside the community gets a charming anecdote about Trent Lott. The student who asks about people who leave gets the most honest answer in the talk: substance abuse, family rupture, custody fights settled in family courts elected by Satmar voters. That answer alone undercuts the “manifestly American” frame more than anything else Myers says. He delivers it without comment and moves on.
All Jewish History in Less Than an Hour with David N. Myers (2018)
The central analytical move Myers makes is the anti-semitism-and-assimilation dual thesis. He argues that both forces, usually seen as sources of Jewish demise, have been preservative. This is inherited from Gershom Cohen’s 1966 “Blessing of Assimilation” address and extended to include anti-semitism as a parallel preservative force. Myers names this inheritance, which is a form of scholarly honesty that the framework can credit.
Myers produces an analytical position that requires a caveat he supplies: “anti-semitism in non-lethal doses.” The caveat is necessary because the thesis cannot survive without it. Anti-semitism at lethal doses destroys rather than preserves. By restricting the preservative claim to non-lethal doses, Myers preserves the thesis but also produces a question about what work the thesis does. If we already know that lethal anti-semitism destroys, then the claim reduces to something narrower: that the persistent mild presence of external hostility contributes to group cohesion. This is a defensible claim but it is much less striking than the provocative framing “anti-semitism as preservative” initially suggests.
The proportionality principle is relevant here. Myers’s audience at The Center for Jewish History is engaged with these questions. They have operational stakes in how Jewish history gets presented to wider audiences. They will run hard vigilance on claims that could be misused. Myers’s caveat about non-lethal doses is visible to the framework as a stakes-produced modification of the thesis. He cannot advance the thesis without the caveat because his audience’s operational vigilance would reject it immediately otherwise. The thesis as delivered is disciplined by the operational stakes of the audience he is addressing.
Now watch what happens in the historical narrative. Myers produces a framing of Jewish history through four revolutions: theological (monotheism), cultural (Philo and the pattern of acculturation), secular (Enlightenment and emancipation), and political (Zionism and Jewish nationalism). The framing is legible and gets the narrative done in the constraints of the very short introduction. Periodization choice makes certain features visible while rendering others harder to see.
The Sephardic and Mizrahi experience gets one sentence about the expulsion from Spain in 1492 and the Ottoman welcome. That is it. The Philo material is Alexandrian, which handles one form of Hellenistic Jewish experience. The Ashkenazi narrative dominates. The modern narrative runs through German Jewish thinkers (Mendelssohn, Friedlander, Marr) and the French Revolution. Zionism appears in its European formulation through Pinsker and Herzl. The Iberian Sephardic tradition, the Ottoman Jewish experience documented by scholars like Naar, the North African experience, the Yemenite experience, and the Mizrahi experience generally all get folded in as one sentence or not discussed.
This is exactly the pattern Naar critiqued in the panel Myers moderated in 2021. Myers was the moderator of that panel and did not push back on Naar’s critique. Here he is producing a Jewish history survey that performs the pattern Naar was critiquing. Moderating a panel requires neutral facilitation. Delivering a historical survey in an hour requires selection. Myers might have private views about these questions that do not get expressed in either venue.
But the framework can identify something. Myers’s synthesis reproduces the Ashkenazi-inflected framing of Jewish history that Sephardic studies scholars like Naar have been documenting as the default pattern. Myers was trained by Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, whose own work operated within historiographical traditions that emphasized European and Ashkenazi Jewish history. Myers’s very-short-introduction inherits this formation. A survey of Jewish history produced by a scholar trained in a different tradition would distribute its attention differently.
This matters because the very-short-introduction format reaches audiences who are not specialists. These readers absorb the framing as authoritative because they cannot check it against alternative frameworks they do not know exist. The proportionality principle says these readers hold whatever Myers tells them reflectively because their stakes in the distribution of Jewish historical attention are not engaged. They are not gullible in Mercier’s sense, but they are not positioned to run operational vigilance on the framing because the framing operates at a level where their own knowledge cannot check it. A general educated American reader who buys this book will have a picture of Jewish history that emphasizes what the book emphasizes and elides what the book elides.
Now take what Myers says about Israel-Palestine. The question arrives at the end as an audience question. Myers handles it through Simon Rawidowicz’s framework about Israel’s “important historical inversion” where Jews became the majority and now must bring to their new status the experience of having been a beleaguered minority. He names the unrealized aspiration in Israel’s Declaration of Independence and treats this as an “ethical imperative.”
Myers does not use the word “fascism.” He does not frame the current Israeli government as problematic. He does not align with the post-Zionist historiography. He does frame the minority-rights issue as real and as ethically serious. The framing locates Myers within the liberal Zionist position that recognizes the moral weight of the minority question while maintaining the legitimacy of the Zionist project overall.
The proportionality principle helps here. Myers is delivering this to an audience at The Center for Jewish History, which has institutional stakes in not alienating either its donor base (which tilts toward traditional Zionist support) or its scholarly constituency (which includes critical positions on current Israeli politics). The framing through Rawidowicz is calibrated to be legible to both audiences. Traditional Zionists can hear it as acknowledging that minority rights matter while accepting the framework of Jewish majority status. Critical Zionists can hear it as naming the ethical imperative that Israel has not met. The dual legibility is not accidental. It is the kind of careful framing that scholars in coordinating institutional positions develop for audiences with varied stakes.
Take Myers’s treatment of the future. He predicts that American Jewish community will become smaller and more traditionally observant, with the non-Orthodox share declining. This demographic prediction based on current trajectories matches the scholarly consensus on American Jewish demographics (Pew data and similar studies) and does not represent an idiosyncratic Myers view. He is transmitting accepted specialist findings to a general audience, which is legitimate use of scholarly authority.
Myers does not predict the rising Orthodox share will change the character of American Jewish political engagement, which specialist demographers and political scientists have noted produces effects on American Jewish political alignment. He does not follow the demographic prediction through to its political implications. This might reflect the time constraints of the format. It might reflect Myers’s situation where the political implications would alienate parts of his audience. The framework cannot determine which without more evidence, but the absence of the political follow-through is visible.
Take the Q&A about white supremacists admiring Israel. Myers acknowledges the point: “notwithstanding the recent appearance of white supremacism which ironically enough you note seems to have a pro-israel or pro-zionist view.” He does not develop this. He moves quickly to anti-semitism’s “remarkable malleability” and its durability. The move is a deflection. The questioner was making a point about how contemporary white supremacism relates to Zionism in a way that complicates the conventional narrative. Myers acknowledges the observation but does not engage it substantively. He returns to safer ground about anti-semitism’s persistent recurrence.
The framework can identify this as a pattern. The questioner’s point connects to a set of claims that post-Zionist and far-left critiques of Israel have advanced about the affinities between Zionism and other ethnonationalisms. Engaging this point substantively would require Myers to take a position that would impose coalition costs on him in one direction or another. Deflecting to the safer topic of anti-semitism’s malleability avoids the coalition costs.
Take the final institutional pitch. Myers asks the audience to donate to The Center for Jewish History. The talk has been delivered as the inaugural event in a new series, launching Myers’s presidency, featuring his new book, promoting future programming. Every element serves the institutional function. The substantive content of the talk is shaped to perform the institutional function. A very-short-introduction to Jewish history delivered in a different setting would have different shape. This one is shaped for this launch.
Institutional leaders do institutional work. Content cannot be separated from its institutional function. Myers as CEO of The Center for Jewish History produces a very-short-introduction that launches the series that launches his tenure that supports the institution. The framings he selects, the emphases he places, the questions he deflects, all serve this institutional situation. A different scholar in a different situation would produce a different book and a different talk.
The thing the framework illuminates from this transcript that the earlier one did not. Myers is a capable synthesist working within a scholarly tradition (Yerushalmi, Baron, the Columbia Jewish history line) who has developed institutional positions that reward certain kinds of public work. The public work is competent, legible, and carefully calibrated for its audiences. It also reproduces framings that scholars in other traditions have critiqued, not because Myers rejects those critiques but because his situation and formation produce this kind of output. The thesis about anti-semitism and assimilation as dual preservative forces is his distinctive intellectual move. The rest of the content is inherited synthesis.
Mercier’s proportionality principle was doing most of the work. Places it operated: identifying that Myers’s audience at the Center has operational stakes that discipline what he can claim without the “non-lethal doses” caveat. Identifying that general educated readers of the very-short-introduction format lack stakes that would engage operational vigilance on the framing Myers supplies, so they absorb his periodization as authoritative because they cannot check it. Identifying that Myers’s deflection on the white-supremacist-Zionism question is what his coordinating institutional situation rewards, because substantive engagement would impose coalition costs.
The audience is not gullible, but non-gullibility operates within the domains where audiences have stakes. Stakes-engaged audiences (scholars at the Center, donors, institutional colleagues) run hard vigilance on claims and force Myers to supply caveats. Stakes-absent audiences (general readers buying the book at a museum shop) do not run the same vigilance on the framing, not because they are dupes but because their stakes do not engage at that level of historiographical detail.
The situationist point was operating implicitly when I noted that Myers’s output is produced by his institutional situation and formation rather than by some stable Myers-character that would produce the same synthesis in any context. A Myers who had trained with a Sephardic studies advisor rather than with Yerushalmi would have produced a different periodization. A Myers without the Center CEO position would have delivered the talk differently or not at all. A Myers in a different career moment would have emphasized different things.
“Revisiting the History of Modern Jewish Scholarship: A Bicentennial Perspective.” Jewish Quarterly Review 109, no. 3 (2019)
This is Myers sixteen years after the Ehrenfreund review, now editing JQR, marking the bicentennial of Zunz’s 1818 manifesto. The genre has shifted from book review to field-curatorial introduction, and the register has shifted with it. Gone is the methodological bite of the 2003 piece on dating Jewish historiography. In its place is an institutional victory lap.
The opening is a triumphal narrative. Zunz at twenty-three writes the founding document in 1818. The field grows against political headwinds. Two hundred years later Jewish studies sits in hundreds of colleges and universities, has reached China, fills AJS and World Congress programs, and includes “diverse array of men and women, Jews and increasingly non-Jews.” The arc is linear and upward. The one prediction Zunz got wrong, that Hebrew books would decline, was reversed by Zionism and Israel, which Myers calls “the densest concentration of scholarly talent and institutional support in the world.” The celebration is unbroken.
What is missing from the arc? The Holocaust destroyed the center of gravity of European Jewish scholarship and scattered the survivors. American Jewish studies grew in conditions of American Jewish prosperity, university expansion, and foundation funding. Israeli Jewish studies grew inside a state-building project with its own ideological commitments. The rise of Jewish studies as a recognized academic field tracks the rise of ethnic studies and identity-based disciplines generally, and it was built by donor networks, endowed chairs, and institutional advocacy. Myers knows all of this. The bicentennial introduction is not the place to say it. A celebratory frame calls for celebratory prose.
The three essays on Wissenschaft are conventional field maintenance. Kohler on the Halevi-Maimonides question complicates the received picture. Zirkle on Graetz’s exegesis against Christian supersessionism is standard Graetz recovery work. Schorsch on Graetz’s biblical scholarship is the senior scholar doing his senior scholar turn. Schorsch was one of the figures Myers named in 2003 as the path-clearer for the historiographical turn, and here he is still clearing the path, sixteen years on. The continuity of personnel is a field fact.
The Yahuda forum is where the issue does real work. Abraham Shalom Yahuda was a Baghdadi Jew who held a chair in Madrid in 1915, ten years before Wolfson at Harvard and fifteen years before Baron at Columbia. The standard story of modern Jewish scholarship runs through Germany, then America, then Israel, with the Ashkenazi center producing the founding figures and the discipline’s shape. Yahuda sits outside that line. He was a Sephardi Middle Eastern Jew operating in Spanish, Arabic, German, and English academic worlds, pursuing Samaritan studies and Saadia Gaon and pre-Islamic Arabic poetry, and trying to position himself as a political operator in Spain, Britain, and Palestine. The forum decenters the German-American-Israeli axis by recovering a figure who does not fit it.
The Mostafa Hussein contribution is the one that catches my eye from the description. Yahuda’s work on pre-Islamic Arabic poetry is framed as “a double move to identify with the distant past as a means of distinguishing himself from contemporary Arabs.” That is a coalition-positioning observation. Yahuda claimed the Arab cultural inheritance that predated Islam as a way of asserting Jewish-Arab cultural kinship while holding the contemporary Arab political world at arm’s length. The move is structurally similar to what European Jews did with local German history in Ehrenfreund’s book: claim the deep past of the host civilization as a way of establishing belonging while keeping distance from the present-day coalition dynamics. Myers names the double move in one sentence and does not dwell on it. A different editor might have built the whole forum around that observation.
Gonzalez’s “scholar-shtadlan” frame is the right one. Shtadlanut is the premodern Jewish practice of elite intermediaries who negotiated with Gentile power on behalf of the community. Applying the term to Yahuda names him as a man doing coalition-broker work through the medium of academic scholarship. Scholarship as coalition apparatus. Myers lets the concept through without developing its implications. If the scholar-shtadlan frame applies to Yahuda, it applies to Wolfson and Baron and Graetz and arguably to Zunz. The founding gesture of modern Jewish scholarship was an attempt to negotiate Jewish legitimacy with the German academic establishment on terms the establishment would recognize. Wissenschaft was the currency of that negotiation. The whole field is a shtadlanut project dressed in Wissenschaft clothes. Gonzalez’s phrase, deployed on Yahuda, could unlock the whole discipline. Myers does not unlock it.
The closing sentence is the tell. The Yahuda forum, Myers writes, will “unsettle fixed narratives of the discipline’s origins.” This is a modest claim phrased as a ritual gesture. Unsettlement of the German-centered narrative would require naming the Ashkenazi hegemony of the field, tracking how Sephardi and Mizrahi scholars were kept to the edges, and asking what coalition interests were served by the standard origin story. The forum does some of this work by its existence. The introduction does none of it in prose. The gesture toward unsettlement is the gesture a field in good standing makes when it wants to appear self-reflective without revising its self-image.
Myers in 1987 handles Bardakjian and the Armenian genocide debate with coalition care, preserving Holocaust uniqueness while endorsing comparative study. Myers in 1988 handles Browning with coalition care, preserving the catalyzing mystery of Hitler’s antisemitism while endorsing moderate functionalism. Myers in 2003 handles Ehrenfreund with scholarly generosity, endorsing the socio-cultural turn while not pressing on what the turn displaces. Myers in 2019 handles the bicentennial with institutional warmth, celebrating the field’s growth while letting the Yahuda forum do the decentering work his own prose will not do. Myers in 2021 and 2022 curates contested material (Simmel, Eastern European Jewish studies) while keeping the field’s working assumptions intact.
The throughline is that Myers is a careful, productive, institutionally skilled scholar who operates inside the structures of American Jewish studies and does the work those structures reward. He knows where the unstable ground is. He walks around it. When he allows others to walk onto it, as with Yahuda or Tworek, he places them where the field can absorb the disturbance rather than be reshaped by it.
Why does the field need protecting? What is its hero system? What would happen if the protection lapsed? The answer to all three is available in the materials he curates. He does not take it out and look at it.
“An Axionormative Dissenter: Reflections on Julius Stone.” In The Law of Strangers: Jewish Lawyers and International Law in the Twentieth Century (2019)
The concept “axionormative dissent” carries the argument. Mendes-Flohr coined it to describe modern Jewish intellectuals who achieve fluency in mainstream discourse while challenging its conventions. Myers takes the concept and turns it into a membership test. Stone dissents in international law by rejecting Austinian positivism and defending minority rights. Good Stone. Then Stone defends Israeli settlements and denies Palestinian nationhood. Bad Stone. The bad Stone fails the axionormative test because his position aligns with state power rather than minority status.
The move is clever. It lets Myers praise Stone’s method while condemning his politics, and frame the condemnation as Jewishly authentic rather than politically partisan. Myers claims the higher Jewish ground rather than attacking from a non-Jewish or anti-Zionist position. Rawidowicz and Meron get elevated as the “truer” Jewish intellectuals because their positions align with current liberal American Jewish academic consensus on Israel. Stone gets gently excommunicated for his sins.
The belief that real Jewish intellectualism dissents from Israeli power is convenient for a UCLA Jewish Studies professor writing in 2016. It lets him remain Jewishly engaged and academically respectable in a humanities academy that has moved sharply against Israel. The convenience does not make the belief false, but the convenience needs an acknowledgment Myers does not offer.
Notice what Myers concedes and what he skips. He concedes the Article 49 debate has been hotly contested. He notes Meron’s reading and Stone’s reading diverge. He does not engage the arguments on legal-historical grounds. He treats Stone’s Article 49 position as a moral-psychological failure rather than a legal disagreement. The same with Stone’s 1981 claim about Palestinian national identity. Myers calls it “an impermissible game with both history and justice.” He does not show that it is wrong. He signals that serious people do not say such things now.
Stone’s position may have been more coherent than Myers grants. A minority rights advocate in 1932 who becomes a majoritarian in 1948 is not inconsistent if the underlying commitment is Jewish survival across different structural situations. Minority rights protect Jews in diaspora. State power protects Jews in a state. The strategic logic stays constant. The structural position changes. Myers treats the shift as a moral lapse, which presumes axionormative dissent, not Jewish survival, sits at the core of Stone’s project. Stone might not have agreed.
The essay is a Jurisdictional Wars document. UCLA Jewish Studies defines which Jewish intellectual postures count as authentic. Rawidowicz, whose 1950s essay on Palestinians was so heterodox he refused to publish it, gets rescued from the archive by Myers’ own earlier book Between Jew and Arab and then brought forward as the real standard of Jewish intellectual virtue. Meron, international law’s acceptable Jewish conscience, gets cited as the responsible counter to Stone. Stone, whose international reputation as a jurisprudent is larger than either, gets reframed as the cautionary example. Myers sorts the Jews.
The gentleness is the gentleness of excommunication. Myers says he wants to amplify Mowbray. He praises Stone’s erudition, innovation, concern for justice. Then he says Stone “did not fully absorb” the lesson he should have learned. Respectable academic communities remove figures from their pantheon this way, without appearing to remove them. The subject remains honored. The honor moves into the past tense.
The phrase “axionormative dissent” performs a coalition function. It sounds technical. It flatters the reader who recognizes Mendes-Flohr. It lets the argument travel in academic venues where “anti-Zionist” or “pro-Zionist” cannot travel. Mendes-Flohr’s original concept describes a structural position in German Jewish modernity. Myers extends it into a moral test. The extension carries no explicit argument. It travels by association with the prestigious original.
Stone and his defenders answer differently. They say the real dissent in international law is rejecting the settler-colonial frame that treats Israel as exceptional while exempting comparable state formations from the same scrutiny. They say Meron’s reading of Article 49, whatever its legal merits, imports a European wartime context the drafters did not have in mind. They say the San Remo resolution and the Mandate instruments matter for determining legal rights in the West Bank. Myers has no interest in these arguments. His essay concerns Jewish intellectual belonging.
“Historicism through the Lens of Anti-Historicism: The Case of Modern Jewish History.” In Historicism: A Travelling Concept (2020)
Myers goes meta. He writes about historicism’s crises, by which he means the moments when philosophers and theologians accused academic historians of corrosive effects on faith and identity. Three case studies. Hermann Cohen against Graetz in 1880. Rosenzweig’s turn from history in 1913. Yerushalmi’s Zakhor in 1982. Each case takes a figure who attacked the coalition’s founding methodology. Myers narrates those attacks with evident sympathy and then neutralizes them.
Myers acknowledges that historicism had real costs. He concedes the critiques were serious. He grants Cohen, Rosenzweig, and Yerushalmi their complaints. Then he announces the happy ending: these crises “induce fear of change – of desiccation, distortion and desacralization. This fear can often induce rigorous polemics. In some cases, they defy expectations and lead to both enhanced self-reflection and a reinvigoration of historical practice itself.” The attacks strengthened the thing they attacked. The coalition absorbs its critics and comes out stronger. No opponent is ever an opponent. Everyone is a contributor.
Notice the three figures Myers selects. Each is already inside the family. Cohen was Graetz’s student at the Breslau Jüdisch-Theologisches Seminar. Rosenzweig was Cohen’s disciple and a founding figure in the Akademie. Yerushalmi was a Columbia historian, the very institution and role Myers writes from. The critiques come from inside the coalition. Orthodox critics of Wissenschaft do not appear. Samson Raphael Hirsch, who wrote the famous nineteen letters against precisely this kind of scholarship, is absent. The Chatam Sofer’s opposition to Zacharias Frankel’s Breslau project, the founding Orthodox rejection of the whole historicist enterprise, is absent. The Lithuanian yeshiva world’s refusal to accept critical editions is absent. Rav Kook’s metaphysical engagement with history is absent. The essay stages an argument with historicism in which only in-house critics get to speak.
The coalition admits internal diversity and internal conflict. It excludes the external rival entirely. What looks like self-criticism is boundary maintenance. Cohen, Rosenzweig, and Yerushalmi are rendered as loyal opposition. Their critiques belong to the family story. Hirsch’s critique does not exist within the frame.
The selection also produces a particular shape for the argument. Cohen’s 1880 critique came during the Treitschke affair, when a German nationalist historian was deploying Graetz against the Jews. Myers narrates this carefully. Cohen had to distance Jewish philosophy from Graetz’s “narrow, parochial” Jewishness to defend Jews against antisemitic attack. The move is presented as necessary, even admirable, given the political pressure. Rosenzweig’s turn from history is framed as a theological response to the Great War’s shattering of Enlightenment optimism. Yerushalmi’s Zakhor is read as a mournful acknowledgment of modernity’s rupture from traditional memory. Each critique gets a contextual excuse. The context always explains why the critic had to say what he said, and why his critique is, on examination, less damaging than it appeared.
Yerushalmi is the tell. Zakhor argued that traditional Jewish memory and modern Jewish historiography are fundamentally at odds, that the historian’s craft destroys what traditional communities did to transmit the past, and that the historian stands in the rubble after the catastrophe. That is a strong claim. It cuts at the coalition’s founding commitment. Myers domesticates it. He calls Yerushalmi’s example “a powerful one” that nonetheless “followed him down this reflective path.” The essay ends by crediting Yerushalmi with inspiring “a vigorous debate about the relationship between history and memory” that produced “new work on memory formation after the Holocaust” by Friedlander, Langer, Felman, Hartman, Young, Wieviorka, Nora, Ozouf, and Assmann. Yerushalmi’s cry of anguish becomes a research program. The critic’s fire becomes the coalition’s warmth.
The closing sentence gives the whole game. “These fears end in a methodological dead-end. But in other cases, they defy expectations and lead to both enhanced self-reflection and a reinvigoration of historical practice itself.” The coalition’s methodology emerges not merely intact but improved. The critics made the historians better historians. The coalition survives every assault because every assault turns out, on closer inspection, to have been a gift. Becker called this the immortality project. Myers’s essay performs it on behalf of the entire field.
A small but telling moment. Myers describes Yerushalmi as “the towering scholar of Jewish history, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi.” In the Six Theses essay he described Gerson Cohen in comparable terms. The Berenbaum chapter used the same register for Berenbaum. Myers’s prose has a ceremonial tier reserved for coalition elders. The adjectives mark membership. Towering. Renowned. Distinguished. Signal. These are the words that pass around the AJS banquet circuit.
Graetz wrote in anger because Treitschke had attacked the Jews. Cohen cooled Graetz’s anger because Jewish survival in Wilhelmine Germany required the coolness. Rosenzweig turned from history because the Great War had destroyed the optimism that made liberal Jewish scholarship plausible. Yerushalmi mourned the rupture from traditional memory because the Holocaust had destroyed the traditional communities. In each case, a gentile or historical catastrophe produces the Jewish methodological crisis. The coalition’s intellectual moves are always responses to external pressure rather than endogenous choices. This framing does real work. It allows the coalition to present its path as forced rather than chosen. It never had to reckon with Orthodox alternatives because circumstances prevented the reckoning.
But the circumstances did not prevent the reckoning for everyone. Orthodox communities in Germany, Hungary, Lithuania, and Poland faced the same antisemitism, the same Great War, and the same Holocaust. They drew different methodological conclusions. Myers’s essay has no room for this comparison because his chosen critics all stayed inside the Wissenschaft family. The critics who walked out of the family entirely are not on the syllabus.
Myers is a careful steward of a confident coalition at its moment of institutional maturity. The Six Theses stakes out programmatic positions. The Berenbaum Festschrift canonizes an exemplary member. The PAAJR piece supplies the founding legend. The historicism essay processes internal critique and demonstrates coalition resilience. Each genre has a distinct function. Together they constitute a mature coalition’s full self-representation: program, exemplar, origin, reflexivity. The coalition has the institutional resources to produce all four genres and the intellectual confidence to let a little internal critique into the record. What it does not have, anywhere, is a willingness to engage its serious external opponent.
The serious external opponent is Orthodox Judaism. Not as a caricature, not as the “singular and unbending” foil Myers invoked in the Six Theses piece, but as a rival scholarly civilization with its own texts, methods, credentialing systems, and demographic success. Myers’s essays know this rival exists. The essays do not argue with it. They write as if it does not.
Myers’s audience shares his assumptions and knows, without being told, which texts and figures are in bounds. An outsider reading the essays without that tacit knowledge might not notice the omissions. A Lakewood rosh yeshiva reading them would notice immediately. The essays are written past him. He is addressed by his absence.
The historicism essay ends by praising Yerushalmi for producing a field-reinvigorating debate. Yerushalmi’s argument in Zakhor is that the academic historian has replaced the traditional transmitter of Jewish memory, and that this replacement represents a catastrophic loss rather than progress. The historian, Yerushalmi wrote, is a “physician of memory” who arrives after the patient is already dead. Myers quotes the image and then files it under “enhanced self-reflection.” The physician of memory has become a research program coordinator. Yerushalmi’s mourning has been converted into productivity. The conversion is the coalition’s signature move. Everything that happens is proof that the coalition works. The more devastating the critique, the more impressive the recovery. This is an immortality project written in the grammar of intellectual history.
“PAAJR at Inception: Novelty, Growth, and Birth Pangs in the Post-World War I Era.” In A Commitment to Scholarship: The American Academy for Jewish Research (2020)
The origin story for the American academic Jewish studies coalition locates its source in Europe. Germany is the master. The founders were “European-born and German-trained scholars.” Marx recalls Zunz. Rosenzweig conceives the Akademie. Täubler directs it. The Hebrew University’s founding faculty come from Europe. The Akademie, YIVO, and Hebrew University are “three distinct strands of postwar scholarly culture” whose “competition” creates a marketplace. Into this marketplace the American upstart enters, hoping to match European standards. The trajectory closes with Baron at Columbia (1930), Wolfson at Harvard (1925), and the eventual triumph: “Jewish studies in America represents the pinnacle of intellectual and institutional success in the field.”
Myers is narrates his coalition’s founding legend. The legend does specific work.
First, it establishes lineage. The AAJR descends from Zunz via Marx. Zunz founded Wissenschaft des Judentums in 1818 as a Reform-adjacent project to subject Jewish texts to critical scholarly methods. The coalition’s founding document and its founding method are both anti-Orthodox in historical effect. Myers writes this as ordinary background rather than as a substantive claim. Traditional yeshiva scholarship does not appear in the ancestry at all. The Lithuanian yeshiva world of the 1920s, which was producing Chaim Ozer Grodzinski, the Chofetz Chaim, and the Brisker method at exactly the period Myers describes, is not in the story. That world has its own institutional history, its own journals, its own scholarly apparatus. Myers’s narrative erases it. Not by attack. By omission. The coalition he narrates has no competitor in the story because the competitor has been placed outside the frame of what counts as scholarship.
Second, the legend establishes a particular virtue: critical editions, collaborative projects, ecumenism. The closing passage gives the game away. The earlier era understood Jewish scholarship as “an enterprise by and for Jews,” while “today’s more ecumenical and open-bordered field” represents progress. This is Myers’s own coalition value dressed as historical observation. The Six Theses essay said the secular is not the enemy of the religious, that assimilation can be a blessing, and that boundaries are porous. Here the same commitments appear as the story’s moral. Ecumenism is better than insularity. Openness is better than boundary maintenance. An Orthodox reader notices that the ecumenism has a direction. It dissolves Jewish particularity into academic universalism. It does not run the other way.
Third, the legend identifies which ancestors count. Ginzberg, Deutsch, Malter, Lautenbach, Marx, Baron, Wolfson, Scholem, Epstein, Klausner, Dinur, Baer, Mahler, Ringelblum, Rawidowicz, Tcherikower, Weinreich, Shtif, Lestschinsky. The coalition’s family tree. Not in the tree: the Chazon Ish, Rav Kook (who founded Merkaz HaRav in Jerusalem in 1924, the same window Myers covers), the Telz Yeshiva, the Mir, Yeshiva College under Revel (founded 1928 in New York). The orthodox institution-building of exactly this period is prolific and Myers does not mention it. The Wolfson appointment at Harvard in 1925 appears; Revel’s founding of Yeshiva College in New York the same year does not. The selection is the argument.
Fourth, the legend reads institutional competition as productive “marketplace.” Three rival postwar centers in three languages with three ideologies produced creative tension and collective advance. Notice what this framing does. Ideological conflict becomes a feature rather than a bug. The coalition Myers belongs to was forged in conflict among German integrationist, Yiddishist-Diasporist, and Hebraist-Zionist positions. All three positions are in the family. Orthodox Judaism is not one of the options in the marketplace. It is off-stage. The ecumenism Myers celebrates operates within a specific coalition boundary.
Myers twice notes, apparently with neutral curiosity, that scholars in the 1920s understood their work as “by and for Jews” rather than ecumenically. The parenthetical comparison to “today’s more ecumenical and open-bordered field” is a value judgment smuggled in through passive tense. The field has become ecumenical. Something has happened. The institutional mechanism of that shift, the demographic and ideological composition that made it happen, the Orthodox demographic growth proceeding in the opposite direction, none of this appears. Ecumenism arrives as weather rather than as the coalition’s own achievement.
Myers describes Täubler’s Biblioteca Judaica and Marx’s Zunz-echoing ambition for critical editions of Bible, Midrash, and Talmud “without succumbing to an excess of regard for earlier editions.” Translate. Critical editions produced by academic scholars using Western philological methods, without deference to the text-traditions preserved by traditional Jewish communities. The yeshiva world produces commentaries and chiddushim and responsa. The academy produces critical editions. These are two epistemic jurisdictions. Myers’s essay narrates the rise of one as if the other did not exist. The Soncino and Vilna Shas sit in every yeshiva. The academic critical editions sit in research libraries. Myers’s coalition owns the library and Myers writes the history.
Myers does not say Wissenschaft defeated yeshiva learning. He does not say academic credentialing should replace rabbinic credentialing. The essays assume each of these as settled background and build on it. This is the hallmark of a mature coalition. It no longer needs to argue its foundational moves. It writes history.
“Editor’s Introduction: Rethinking Georg Simmel’s “The Stranger” in an Age of Strangeness.” Jewish Quarterly Review 111, no. 2 (2021)
Myers performs liberal-Jewish academic identity under cover of a scholarly introduction. The coalition position shows most clearly in the line about Jews accused of disloyalty “or loyal only if they vote Republican.” A partisan sideswipe sits inside what pretends to be a sociological frame. It tells you which coalition Myers belongs to and which accusations he counts as accusations.
Jews know strangerhood, therefore Jews should identify with today’s strangers: immigrants, people of color, Muslims, Syrians, Afghans, Eritreans, Mexicans, LGBTQ people. The list does coalition work. LGBTQ people do not fit Simmel’s wandering and fixation frame at all. Mexicans in the American Southwest are not strangers in any Simmelian sense. The list is a contemporary progressive inventory smuggled under a sociological category.
Myers invokes Simmel, who resisted fixed representations of Jews, then fixes Jews as the paradigmatic strangers. Feldt goes further and calls Jewish history “the classic” example. Morris-Reich gives the partial dissent, insisting on an “impervious border” between the sociological type and real Jews. The disagreement is coalition-productive either way. If the stranger is Jewish, Jewish studies sits at the center of modernity. If the stranger is not Jewish but Jews still illuminate modernity, Jewish studies still sits at the center. The pendulum between universal and particular that Feldt names keeps the field central.
What the introduction will not say: Israel produces its own strangers and levies its own fixed taxes on them. Jewish host-society agency in several Western countries has been considerable for more than a century. Host populations welcome some migration flows and resist others for reasons beyond xenophobia. Simmel’s stranger is a sociological form, not a moral claim on the host. Myers converts the form into a moral claim by listing the strangers the reader is expected to sympathize with.
The Kafka pairing is loose. “Before the Law” is about a man denied entry who waits his whole life and dies at the door. Simmel’s stranger comes today and stays tomorrow. The pairing works as atmosphere.
The UN figure of 80 million displaced sits in the first paragraph without any question about why displacement happens or what host societies owe. Myers treats the number as self-evidently producing a moral obligation on receiving countries. Simmel had nothing to say about refugee resettlement policy.
Simmel’s parents converted out of Judaism. He resisted Jewish claims on him. He died in 1918 before the destruction of the world he described. Recovering him as a Jewish thinker is a coalition act. The forum admits this in Morris-Reich and denies it in Feldt. The figure of the stranger lets Jewish studies have it both ways.
The strongest contribution in the summary sounds like Illouz. Her observation that the stranger has metamorphosed into the tourist who pays to be a stranger catches a real shift in contemporary class and mobility. It does not need the Jewish frame to work.
‘The Task of the Jewish Historian Today: A Conversation’ (2021)
Myers is moderating rather than presenting his own views, which is the first thing to notice. The moderator situation imposes constraints. He has to keep the conversation moving, he has to draw out panelists evenhandedly, he has to represent the co-sponsoring institutions, and he has to keep the event within its time budget. His behaviors in this situation track these incentives rather than expressing whatever substantive positions he holds on the questions being discussed. The session is not evidence of his own scholarly positions on contested questions. It is evidence of his skill at an institutional role.
What the transcript shows about Myers’s situational position within academic Jewish studies. He co-initiated this series with Shmuel Feiner of the Historical Society of Israel and brought in Noam Pianko of AJS. The three institutions represented (UCLA Center for Jewish Studies, Historical Society of Israel, Association for Jewish Studies) constitute central establishment infrastructure of the field. Myers sits at a node where these institutions coordinate. He is not at the periphery of the field calling for reform. He is at the center organizing the field’s self-reflection.
This matters for the Mercier application to Myers’s work more broadly. A scholar at this kind of institutional node operates under certain stakes. His professional standing depends on continued good relationships with the institutions whose cooperation he needs. His public positioning must be compatible with continued institutional collaboration. Positions that would alienate Historical Society of Israel or AJS would cost him the kind of coordinating role this panel represents. The proportionality principle predicts that his public work will stay within the range these institutional relationships can absorb.
Watch what happens in the exchange with Devin Naar. Naar mounts a sustained argument that Jewish studies has systematically excluded Sephardic and Mizrahi experience, that this is not just inclusion but requires rethinking basic categories, and that “the inclusion narrative is missing the point.” Anita Shapira pushes back, saying historians focus on “a small piece of reality” and cannot represent “the vast spaces of the whole civilization of jews,” and telling Naar not to feel “neglected as as you describe it.”
Myers’s frames Naar’s position neutrally (“you spoken of power dynamics as so central to the discipline”) and invites Naar to extend it. He does not push Shapira on the substance of her deflection. He lets Iris Eshel-Shine come in with a position closer to Naar’s, which creates more balance, but he does not himself take a position on whose account of the field is more accurate.
Myers is comfortable hosting a conversation where a junior scholar makes a sustained critique of the field’s center, but he does not endorse or push the critique. He preserves his ability to continue collaborating with all parties.
Watch how Myers handles the fascism question. He raises it, invoking Snyder, Moyn, Ben-Ghiat, Stanley, and the “robust debate” about whether fascism applies to Trump. He also quickly notes “we can also talk about israel and israel is uh the question of whether or not and to what extent israel is becoming more and more of fascist state” — though Iris says that line, not Myers. Myers raises American fascism analogies. The panel then discusses analogies generally and is skeptical of them.
What Myers does not do is push the Israel-fascism analogy. He brings up Trump-fascism as the framing, lets Iris add Israel as a parallel, and then moves the conversation to analogies in general. If Myers were positioned as a strong critic of Israeli politics, this would be a moment to press. He does not press.
The transcript shows Myers raising questions more than advancing positions. His questions are well-constructed and substantively informed. He frames the discussion around contested issues: presentism, historical analogies, the politics of inclusion, the public role of the historian, fake news. He gets panelists to engage these issues. But across an 87-minute discussion he does not articulate a substantive position on any of them beyond the framing language of the opening.
Myers has built a professional position through coordination work across Jewish studies institutions, through leadership at UCLA, through public engagement on contemporary questions, and through scholarly work on modern Jewish intellectual history. The combination requires maintaining productive relationships across factions that disagree with each other. Shapira and Naar disagree. Scholars aligned with different positions on Israel disagree. Scholars committed to different methodological approaches disagree. Myers’s coordinating role requires he not align permanently with any faction against others.
His public positioning is probably more carefully calibrated to preserve cross-coalition relationships than his private positions are. Scholars in this kind of coordinating role typically maintain sharper private views than their public work expresses, because the public work’s utility depends on preserved collaborative capacity.
The transcript also shows something about Myers’s scholarly formation. He mentions meeting Shapira as a student in her seminar in fall 1982. Shapira trained him in Israeli intellectual history and Zionist thought. His work on Simon Rawidowicz and on Jewish historiography sits in the tradition Shapira comes out of. His current coordinating role puts him in conversation with scholars like Naar who are positioned against that tradition. Myers occupies a position between his formation and the field’s current directions.
Anita Shapira’s comments on the Trump-Hitler parallel, her explicit statement that following Trump helped her understand how educated people could follow Hitler, is a political positioning that imposes coalition costs with some audiences. Myers lets this comment stand without pushing it further.
‘Trump still has his Jewish enablers, and Gadi Taub is one of them’ (2021)
First, the institutional disclosure at the bottom matters. “David N. Myers…is the President of the New Israel Fund.” Myers is defending his own organization against Taub’s attack. The piece is coalition work for an organization Myers leads.
Second, the Taub context matters. Gadi Taub is an Israeli political commentator who has moved sharply rightward, now associated with the religious-nationalist coalition around Netanyahu. Taub’s 2021 piece apparently accused NIF of normalizing antisemitism. Myers responds by reframing Taub as a Trump enabler who supports illiberal democracy. The rhetorical move is substitution. Taub attacked Myers’s organization on antisemitism grounds. Myers responds by recategorizing Taub as an antisemite-adjacent authoritarian enabler. The move is effective within Myers’s coalition because it flips the accusation. It is ineffective outside that coalition because it looks like evasion of Taub’s argument.
Third, the register is combative in a way Myers’s scholarly work is not and even the current op-eds mostly are not. “Trump still has his Jewish enablers, and Gadi Taub is one of them.” “Gadi Taub checks off all the boxes.” “In simple-minded fashion, Gadi Taub…” “He distorts and misrepresents…” “anti-democratic authoritarians that Gadi Taub openly courts.” This is personal polemic. Myers is attacking Taub directly rather than engaging Taub’s argument substantively. The framework identifies this as characteristic of coalition infighting rather than public intellectual argument. Taub and Myers are former allies or at least co-participants in Israeli-diaspora liberal Zionist discourse. Taub has defected to the right. Myers is treating him as a defector who must be marked as such rather than engaged as an interlocutor.
Fourth, the substantive issues are real but handled through coalition positioning rather than analysis. The IHRA definition debate is substantively serious. Reasonable people disagree about whether codifying the IHRA working definition into law produces useful anti-antisemitism protection or chills legitimate criticism of Israel. Myers’s position (the definition is useful as educational tool but problematic as legally binding formula) is defensible and is the ADL’s position, as Myers notes. The piece does not argue carefully. It asserts it and then uses the assertion to mark Taub as outside the mainstream. A scholarly treatment would engage the IHRA examples, identify which criticisms of Israel are protected and which cross into antisemitism, discuss how courts would apply the definition, engage the legislative proposals. The piece does none of this. It positions.
Fifth, the NIF defense is institutional. “The New Israel Fund proudly supports full equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel…proudly supports a more equitable distribution of resources…committed to a vision of democracy that realizes the ideals of the Proclamation of Independence.” Myers speaks for NIF using NIF’s preferred self-description. The organizational voice overrides the scholarly voice. The framework identifies this as what happens when scholars take institutional leadership positions. The institution’s voice becomes their voice when they speak publicly for it.
Sixth, the Amos Oz invocation. Taub invoked Oz in support of his own position. Myers notes that Oz “was a member of the International Council of the New Israel Fund to his dying day” and “saw NIF as embodying the best of democratic values in the state of Israel.” Myers is claiming Oz for his coalition by citing Oz’s institutional affiliation rather than engaging whatever Oz said that Taub claimed. Both sides want Oz. Myers asserts Oz through organizational ties. Taub apparently asserted Oz through direct quotes. Neither engages the other’s evidence.
Seventh, the Trump framing does rhetorical work that the framework can name. 2021 is the transition moment after the January 6 riot. Associating Taub with Trump at this moment imposes coalition costs on Taub that would not apply in other periods. Myers is using the available political context to mark Taub. This is not scholarly argument about whether Taub’s claims about NIF are accurate. The piece does not address Taub’s claims. It associates Taub with Trump and lets the association do the work.
The combative register is more intense than most of Myers’s 2023-2025 output. This is Myers as institutional defender against an adversary. The later work is Myers as prophetic voice within his own coalition calling for reckoning. The roles are different. The defensive institutional voice attacks outside adversaries. The prophetic voice challenges inside the coalition. Both use moralized register but toward different ends.
The piece also demonstrates something relevant to the hyper-moralization complaint. When Myers is defending rather than prophesying, the moralization operates as coalition marking. Good guys (NIF, ADL, Amos Oz, AJCongress, World Jewish Congress) versus bad guys (Trump, Orban, Taub, illiberal democrats, anti-democratic authoritarians). The taxonomy sorts people into coalition positions. The sorting is efficient for in-group readers and ineffective for out-group readers. Taub’s supporters will not be persuaded. NIF’s supporters will feel their positions validated. The piece does coalition maintenance work.
Myers writes: “Let there be no mistake: the New Israel Fund supports the right of the Jewish people to self-determination in this land. But we also have internalized the historical lesson of Jewish existence that there is a moral and political imperative to treat minorities in the State of Israel — and Palestinians who dwell under Israel control in the West Bank — with equality and justice.”
This is the Rawidowicz position. The historical lesson of Jewish existence as minority requiring just treatment of minorities when Jews hold majority power. Myers’s 2008 Rawidowicz book argued exactly this. The 2021 NIF piece deploys the same argument through institutional voice. The scholarly position and the organizational position are identical. The framework has been saying Myers runs a consistent project across formats. The 2021 piece confirms the consistency.
This piece is less impressive than the scholarly work because the situation produces less impressive output. Personal polemic against a named adversary in response to that adversary’s attack on one’s organization is a genre with its own conventions. It is not designed to engage substantive argument fairly. It is designed to mark the adversary and defend the institution. Myers does this competently. But competent coalition defense is not the same thing as careful scholarly argument. Readers who encounter Myers primarily through this kind of piece get a misleading picture of his capacities. Readers who encounter him primarily through scholarly work get a misleading picture of his public operations.
What the hyper-moralization complaint picks up. When Myers writes in defensive institutional mode, the moralization is unmotivated by deep scholarly engagement with the immediate question. He has strong positions on IHRA, refugee rights, minority equality, democratic values, and so on. But this piece does not develop those positions substantively. It asserts them and uses them to mark Taub. The assertion-without-development pattern is what produces the hyper-moralized feel. A reader gets the sense of strong claims made without the argumentation that would ground them. The argumentation exists in Myers’s scholarly work. It does not appear in the op-ed because op-eds do not have room for it. The substrate is there. The popular piece compresses it to rhetoric.
The piece is a 2021 defense of NIF by its then-president against a 2021 attack from Taub. Four years later, as NIF-adjacent positions have become more controversial within American Jewish communal politics after October 7, Myers’s own positions have apparently become sharper and more visible. The trajectory from 2021 institutional defense to 2025 prophetic critique is observable in the material we have been looking at. In 2021 Myers defends NIF’s moderate liberal Zionist positioning against attacks from the right. In 2025 Myers writes Al Chet confessions for Jewish sins against Palestinians. The positions are continuous but the register has shifted toward more radical expression. The framework can observe this shift without claiming to fully explain it. Possible factors: October 7 and Gaza demanded sharper response; Myers left the Center for Jewish History presidency which had institutional constraints; the Biden-to-Trump transition created new urgencies; he became older and more willing to spend accumulated reputational capital; the coalition he operates within has shifted in ways that demand sharper positions.
This is Myers at his most coalitionally combative, which is not Myers at his best. The best Myers is the scholar producing Between Jew and Arab or Resisting History. The Myers of this Haaretz piece is defending his organization against an attack in a format that rewards combat over analysis.
Archives and the Control of Jewish Culture – Jason Lustig with David N. Myers – February 16, 2022
Lustig was Myers’s UCLA doctoral student. The 2022 event performs the credentialing function such conversations serve.
Lustig’s framework treats archives as “epistemic things” that construct rather than contain history. This applies the constructivist move Myers learned from Funkenstein and extended in Re-Inventing the Jewish Past to a new institutional layer. Where Myers showed that the Hebrew University historians of the interwar period constructed a national past through European historicist methods, Lustig shows that the archivists supplying those historians their materials were doing parallel work one institutional rank down. The book reads as Myers’s project at the level of source production rather than source interpretation.
The three archives Lustig studies map precisely onto Myers’s preferred geography. Berlin, Jerusalem, Cincinnati. German-Jewish, Israeli, American. These are the three nodes of the Wissenschaft des Judentums tradition Myers has spent his career mapping. The Eastern European Hasidic archives, the Sephardic archives, the rabbinic responsa literature as distributed archive, the Chabad library systems, the yeshiva libraries, the Satmar internal historiography Myers himself encountered when researching Kiryas Joel, none of these appear. The archive that counts is the Wissenschaft archive.
The critical move lands hardest against Jerusalem. The Israeli state archive is treated as making hegemonic claims over diaspora Jewry. Bein and the cultural Zionist project get described in terms that emphasize their imperial pretensions. The Kibbutz Galuyot framing of in-gathering archival materials parallel to in-gathering Jewish bodies is presented as a Zionist totalization unsustainable against the demographic and cultural reality of diaspora Jewish life.
Marcus and Cincinnati receive warmer treatment. Lustig describes Marcus’s “omniterritoriality” as both alternative and parallel to the Jerusalem totalization. The American Jewish Archives positioned itself as the archive for the American Jewish future after Marcus concluded European Jewry was finished. The Cold War dispersal logic, the microfilm fetish, the Caribbean and South American collecting trips, these are presented as a coherent diasporic counter-vision to Jerusalem’s centralization. Marcus emerges as a sympathetic figure whose archive expressed a sustainable diasporic vision.
Myers prompts Lustig to invoke Simon Dubnow as the framework that holds the three archives together. This is the giveaway. Dubnow theorized Jewish cultural autonomy and shifting historical centers. He was the canonical articulator of diasporic nationalism against statist Zionism. Locating the three archives within Dubnow’s frame Americanizes Berlin and Cincinnati while diasporizing Jerusalem. The frame produces the result Myers’s coalition needs. Jerusalem becomes one node among others, not the apex. The American and German-Jewish projects become co-equal contributors to Jewish historical consciousness rather than peripheral to an Israeli center.
Dubnow supplies the implicit hero. The losing side of an internal Jewish argument gets restored as a usable framework for contemporary work. The recovery functions at once as scholarly even-handedness (Dubnow was a serious thinker, treating him as such is not obviously coalition work) and as soft immanent critique of statist Zionism (your tradition has costs and roads not taken).
Lustig’s constructivism exposes the archive as an epistemic thing produced by archivists with particular ideological commitments. The framework does not turn on itself. Lustig’s institutional position is at the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies at Texas, with Israel Institute teaching funding. Myers’s position runs through UCLA, the Luskin Center for History and Policy, and his prior NIF presidency. The Leo Baeck Institute, where Lustig held his Westheimer fellowship, has its own coalition position within American Jewish studies. The conversation occurs under the Leve Center for Jewish Studies at UCLA. None of this gets named. The framework that exposes Berlin, Jerusalem, and Cincinnati as coalition-laden archive-making projects does not extend to Westwood, Austin, or New York.
The archive is a coalition technology. Whoever controls the archive controls the legitimating language of Jewish authenticity. Berlin asserted German-Jewish primacy. Jerusalem asserted Zionist hegemony. Cincinnati asserted American diasporic primacy. Each used the vocabulary of preservation, gathering, and continuity in service of different coalition claims. The contemporary academic Jewish studies coalition has its own archive-making project, its own preferred saints, its own canon, its own vocabulary of authenticity. The Lustig book and the Myers-Lustig conversation are themselves moves within that project. The Dubnovian framing is not a neutral analytical apparatus. It is the contemporary coalition’s preferred ancestor.
Hasidic communities maintain their own archival traditions. The Satmar chronicler Myers met when researching Kiryas Joel produced a ten-volume biography of Rabbi Teitelbaum. The Chabad library litigation between Agudas Chasidei Chabad and the Russian state, which raises every issue Lustig addresses about archival ownership, restitution, and cultural continuity, gets no mention. The yeshiva archives, the rabbinic responsa literature as distributed archive, the records of Orthodox communities before and after the Holocaust, these are absent. The omission is not accidental. The archives that count for Lustig and Myers are the archives produced by and for the academic Jewish studies coalition. Religious archives produced by and for religious communities sit outside the frame.
Kiryas Joel maintains its archive on completely different principles. The Verzon Tzadik biography Myers cites in the 2017 Athenaeum talk is hagiography. It records every minute of Rabbi Teitelbaum’s life. It is partisan, internal-coalition-serving, and functionally hegemonic for the community. It is not critical in the Wissenschaft sense. It works for the community precisely because it does not perform the constructivist self-awareness Lustig values. The community archive transmits a usable past because it is willing to do the work of memory that Myers’s coalition can no longer do without irony.
The Yerushalmi-Funkenstein-Myers thread runs underneath the conversation. Yerushalmi mourned the rupture between memory and history. Funkenstein introduced historical consciousness as a mediating term. Myers built his career on the wager that critical history might supply something like what memory once supplied. Lustig extends the wager to archives. Critical archival practice might supply something like what cultural transmission once supplied. The Turner critique stands. There is no continuous historical consciousness. There are people trained to handle the past in particular ways, held in alignment by exposure to common conditions. The archive is one of those conditions. But the archive cannot do the work of community. It can document the absence of community while performing critical sophistication about the absence.
The conversation has its own ritual logic. Myers hosts his former student. They share a vocabulary, a canon, and a coalition. The questions are setups that let Lustig demonstrate the methodological sophistication the coalition values. The critique of archival totality occurs within an already-shared consensus that totality was always a problematic ambition. The discussion arrives at the agreed conclusion that archives are political, constructed, and hegemonic, and worth approaching with critical distance. No one disagrees because no one in the conversation occupies a position from which disagreement might come. Coalition members produce coalition-confirming arguments using coalition-approved vocabulary. The events at which they do this confirm everyone’s standing.
“Editor’s Introduction: Reflections on the State of Eastern European Jewish Studies.” Jewish Quarterly Review 112, no. 2 (2022)
This introduction reads as a field-maintenance document. Myers opens by reminding readers that he and Horowitz coedited JQR for seventeen years, cites the journal’s “formidable articles,” and situates the forum as a prestige venue. The introduction does the coalition work of binding contributors together as a recognizable school.
The most revealing essay in the lineup, judging from Myers’s summary, is Tworek’s. Tworek attacks Hasidic studies and Eastern European Jewish studies for insularity, exclusionary impulses, and identitarianism, and for unreceptive treatment of non-Jewish scholars. Myers calls this a cri de coeur and puts it last. The placement matters. By ending with Tworek, Myers signals that the field contains its own critic and therefore polices itself. The critique gets absorbed into the field’s self-presentation as open and reflective. Tworek’s accusations, if true, describe serious coalition capture. Myers treats them as an invitation to further conversation.
The Ukraine line at the end is the tell. “Erstwhile Ukrainian villains become present-day heroes.” Myers compresses a century of Ukrainian-Jewish relations, including pogroms and Holocaust collaboration, into a throwaway clause that clears the way for sympathy with Ukraine in 2022. The phrase does real rhetorical work. It tells readers the field has decided how to think about Ukraine now, and it does so without argument. A field that took its own scholarship seriously might pause longer on the question of how Ukrainian national memory handles figures such as Bandera, or on the fact that the current Ukrainian president is Jewish and the war frame has reorganized older antagonisms. Myers skips all of it.
The framing of Eastern Europe as the site of loss is conventional and not wrong. The Nazi genocide did destroy the world’s largest Jewish population center. What Myers will not examine is why so much of Jewish studies keeps returning to this particular loss as the organizing trauma of the field, what that focus crowds out, and how Holocaust centrality functions as a coalition marker. Aleksiun’s essay apparently argues that Holocaust studies should play a larger role in Polish Jewish studies. Myers calls this counterintuitive. It is not counterintuitive at all within the field’s coalition logic. It expands the territory.
The Russian and Polish revival stories are told through “heroic individuals who emerged from the shadows of Communism.” The hagiographic register is unearned in a scholarly introduction. Lukin, Kelner, and the others might well deserve tributes, but tributes are not analysis. Myers is doing memorial work and calling it scholarship on scholarship.
Freeze’s piece on the “affective revolution” tracks the broader humanities shift toward sexuality, eros, and queer readings. Litvak and Seidman are serious scholars. The frame Myers gives it, recovering love from platonic flatness, is the standard academic justification for importing contemporary sexual politics into historical material. Whether the recovery is grounded or projected onto the sources is a question the introduction does not raise.
The Jan Gross paragraph is the one place the introduction touches something live. Neighbors did cause a narrative shock. Polish-Jewish memory politics remain contested. Zubrzycki apparently tracks the oscillations. That is a real subject.
The strongest thing one can say about the introduction: it names Tworek’s critique and publishes it. The weakest thing: Myers frames the critique as productive conversation rather than diagnosis, which keeps the field’s coalition structure intact while performing openness.
Part I: How Did We Get Here?: A Deep Dive into the History of Israel and Palestine, 1882-1948 (Dec. 7, 2023)
The Fordham event shows Myers’s coalition method under maximum pressure. October 7 had happened two months earlier. Campus protests were in full swing. The American left was fragmenting on Israel. Myers’s narrow stable position had narrowed further. The Fordham series is the response. Four parts, a paired Palestinian-American interlocutor, a Jesuit university host invoking Nostra Aetate, QR-code question filtering, and a trauma-symmetric frame that lets both audiences recognize their pain and be asked to recognize the other’s. The institutional design is the protection.
The pairing matters most. Hussein Ibish is the dialogue partner Myers’s coalition can credential. Ibish runs Gulf-state-funded analysis at AGSIW. He has opposed BDS publicly. He represents the Palestinian voice Myers’s network can host without forcing Myers off his liberal-Zionist position. Anti-Zionist Palestinians, Jewish Voice for Peace voices, the harder critics who would press Myers on the constitutive logic of Jewish statehood, none appear. The pairing forecloses the harder questions before the conversation begins. Myers cannot do this work alone without losing standing on one side. Ibish supplies the symmetric counterpart that allows the work to proceed.
The trauma-symmetric framing carries the analytical weight. October 7 is “almost unimaginable shock and horror.” Gaza is “almost unimaginable devastation.” Two iconic images, dead Jews killed because they were Jews on one side, Palestinians fleeing with what they can carry on the other. The Holocaust meets the Nakba. The framing is humane. It also performs coalition work. The exact verbal parallelism produces moral parallelism. Asymmetries of agency, scale, intent, and military capacity dissolve into shared trauma. Myers’s Initiative to Study Hate operates on this premise. Hate is what enemies do, naming hate is what the coalition does. The framework lets him occupy the position from which both Hamas and the Israeli far right can be named as hate-driven while the dialogue partners on stage represent the reasonable middle.
The Balfour analysis is the cleanest example of the method. Myers and Ibish both note the asymmetry: national rights for Jews, civil and religious rights for the existing non-Jewish communities. The history is accurate. What they do not say is that the Balfour formulation reflected the state of national organization at the time. Ibish himself notes that Palestinians in 1917 were largely Ottoman subjects who only gradually came to view themselves as Palestinian. The Yusuf al-Khalidi letter to Herzl is presented as early Palestinian national consciousness, but Khalidi identified as Palestinian by country and Ottoman by state, which is not a national identity in the sense Zionism had developed. The Balfour asymmetry could be framed as the British recognizing two different stages of national organization. Myers and Ibish frame it as colonial favoritism. The frame they choose serves the symmetric narrative their coalition needs.
The 1929 treatment is the most instructive. Myers presents Hebron through “agitators on both sides.” The Mufti gets his share, the revisionist Zionists get theirs. Then “entire communities of Jews as in the holy city of Hebron are eliminated.” The passive voice does work. Sixty-seven Jews were murdered, including unarmed yeshiva students, by Arab mobs incited by the Mufti’s al-Aqsa propaganda. The murderers were specific. The killings were specific. The passive construction obscures who killed whom. Myers then moves to the British coming down hard on the Arab population and to Zionist conclusions about needing a Jewish majority. The structure suggests Jewish reactions to Arab massacres rather than the massacres themselves as the historical event.
Settler colonialism receives the Myers treatment. Patrick Wolfe gets named. Arthur Ruppin’s own use of “colonization” gets cited. The case for is documented honestly. Then the case against: Zionism as ideology of survival, ideology of escape, ideology of exotism. Then the close: do not reduce to a one-dimensional formula. The structure is the recovery pattern. Take the position seriously, document its grounds, complicate it, refuse to land. The position never gets endorsed or rejected. Ibish’s contribution helps. He concedes that the term applies clearly to the post-1967 settlements while breaking down inside Israel proper. Myers can agree on the post-1967 occupation without endorsing the broader frame. The division of labor protects the joint position.
The Q&A on anti-Zionism shows the same method. Myers cites Jerry Nadler’s congressional speech and the Haredi anti-Zionist tradition. Anti-Zionism has a long Jewish pedigree. The history is accurate. What Myers does not address is whether contemporary leftist anti-Zionism functions analytically the same as historical Haredi anti-Zionism. The Satmar position holds that Jewish sovereignty is theologically forbidden until the Messiah. The contemporary leftist position holds that Jewish sovereignty is politically illegitimate as settler nationalism. These are different arguments resting on different premises. Myers’s American Shtetl work showed him fully aware of the Satmar position’s specifically theological grounding. Citing Haredi anti-Zionism as precedent for contemporary anti-Zionism conflates the two while keeping them historically distinct. The conflation produces the rhetorical effect his coalition needs. Anti-Zionism gets a Jewish pedigree without examining whether the pedigree applies.
The closing image performs the moral parallelism the whole event has been building toward. “The Jewish story is a movement from exile to homeland and the Palestinian story is the story of the movement from homeland to exile.” The line sounds wise. It is also analytically thin. The Jewish movement from exile to homeland required expulsion of others. The Palestinian movement from homeland to exile followed violent rejection of partition and military defeat. The clean parallel obscures the violent agency on both sides and the asymmetries of demographic momentum, military preparation, international legitimacy, and political organization. Myers’s coalition needs the parallel. The parallel does coalition work.
The Fordham event is a credentialing ritual. Magda Teter hosts. The Catholic-Jewish dialogue tradition supplies the institutional context. Ibish supplies the credentialed Palestinian counterpart. Myers supplies the credentialed Jewish historian. The four-part format produces a documented record that protects participants from coalition attacks. The questions arrive through QR code, filtered, no open mic. The format generates collective effervescence, in Collins’s sense, around the shared frame. Audiences leave with a sense that they have engaged the difficult questions, when in fact the structure ensured the difficult questions never reached the stage in their hardest form.
Myers’s coalition cannot reproduce itself through formation in the way Kiryas Joel does. It depends on continuous performance of dialogue, conferences, initiatives, and institutional credentialing. The Fordham series is one such performance. The Luskin Center for History and Policy is another. The Initiative to Study Hate is another. The New Israel Fund presidency was another. Myers spends his career generating these performances because the coalition he serves cannot do without them. The Satmar community produces similarly-formed Jews through controlling the conditions of formation. Myers’s coalition produces similarly-aligned Jews through repeated participation in events like this one. The first method works through environment, the second through ritual. Both are coalition technologies. Only one is sustainable across generations without continuous effort.
Myers consistently occupies the position from which the Zionist outcome can be acknowledged as historically dominant while its costs are flagged for the audiences his coalition needs to keep. The position is narrow. It is also stable. October 7 might have destabilized it. The Fordham series shows Myers’s coalition method holding under pressure. The position narrows but does not break. Pair with the right interlocutor, host at the right institution, frame in trauma-symmetric language, validate enough of each side’s grievance to keep both audiences, refuse to land on the harder questions. The method works because the method is what the coalition is.
The Q&A response Myers gives Ibish on the term “conflict” captures the method in miniature. The term is contested. Some argue it implies symmetry where asymmetry exists. Myers acknowledges this. Then he defends the term anyway through a historical argument about shifting power dynamics, frequent violence, and constitutive cyclical violence over 120 years. The defense is reasonable. It is also strategic. “Conflict” is the term his coalition can use without losing either audience. “Occupation” picks one side, “war on terror” picks the other, “ethnic cleansing” picks one, “Jewish liberation” picks the other. “Conflict” preserves the position. The same logic governs the rest of the event. The terminology, the framing, the historical emphasis, the closing image, all serve the position. The position is what makes Myers useful to his coalition. The Fordham event is the position performed at length under conditions that should have broken it. The performance held.
Part II: How Did We Get Here? A Deep Dive into the History of Israel and Palestine: 1948-1967 (Jan. 23, 2024)
Fordham is a Jesuit university, and the host invokes Pope Francis on globalizing hope and unity against polarization. The framing establishes the event as a peace-and-understanding endeavor, with the implicit message that any approach falling outside the dialogue framework would violate the institutional ethos. The two presenters are positioned as ideal exemplars of the framework, the Jewish historian and the Arab analyst working together to model the dialogue the institution wants to encourage. The framework precommits both speakers to a particular kind of presentation. Anything that would disrupt the dialogue model becomes structurally difficult to say.
What is striking about Ibish across the transcript is how often he is the one performing the corrective interventions on factual matters. He pushes back on Myers’s account of expulsions to note that they began before April 1948 and that there was a triangulated conflict involving the British. He pushes back on the suggestion that Nasser specifically threatened to throw Israelis into the sea. He frames the new historians’ work as a difference in interpretation rather than in facts. He provides the granular detail about Palestinian refugee experiences in Lebanon. The structural effect is that Ibish does much of the historical heavy lifting while Myers provides the sympathetic Jewish framing that authorizes the conversation for the Jewish audience.
Myers presents the 1948 Plan Dalet question through the standard new historian framing, with Morris on one side and Pappe and Masalha on the other, and emphasizes that they share the factual record while differing on interpretation. This allows Myers to gesture at the more radical interpretation without endorsing it. The careful gesture is itself the political position. A historian operating outside the framework might argue that the textual evidence of Plan Dalet does not support the master plan reading, that Morris’s interpretation is closer to what the evidence will bear, that the more dramatic claim has been advanced largely by scholars with prior political commitments to delegitimizing Israel’s founding. Myers does not make this argument. He presents the two interpretations as if they are roughly equivalent scholarly positions.
Myers reports that Morris said in 20024 that expulsion was the price of independence and that Morris affirmed the hard realpolitik view. He does not report Morris’s broader argument in that interview, which was that Ben-Gurion erred by not completing the expulsion, and that the partial expulsion produced the long-term demographic problem Israel now faces. The selective reporting positions Morris as a scholar who became more honest about the violence in the founding while avoiding the more uncomfortable elements of Morris’s actual position. The selectivity serves the audience’s preferences. The audience wants to know that Israel committed expulsions. The audience does not want to know that the leading historian of those expulsions thinks they should have been more thorough.
The population transfer comparison section reveals the framework’s preferred move on this question. Myers introduces the parallel to Indian-Pakistani partition and other postwar population movements, notes that population transfer was widely accepted in the 1940s, and then pivots to note that the Fourth Geneva Convention made it unlawful afterward. Ibish jumps in to make this point sharper. The pivot does political work. It allows the comparison to be made while implying that what happened in 1948 is now retrospectively illegitimate by standards developed after the fact. A more rigorous treatment would consider the legitimacy of applying retrospective standards, the fact that no other postwar population transfer has produced ongoing demands for return after seventy-five years, and the asymmetry between how the Indian-Pakistani case is treated in international discourse versus how the Palestinian case is treated. These considerations would complicate the framework’s preferred conclusion. They are not raised.
The Jewish dispossession from Arab countries section is where Myers’s framework shows itself most clearly. He acknowledges that 600,000 Jews left Arab countries, mentions the Farhud and rising antisemitism in Arab states, and then arrives at the question of population exchange. His position is that the two dispossessions are parallel but move in opposite directions, with Palestinians moving from homeland to exile and Mizrahi Jews moving from exile to homeland. He concludes that the Palestinian case is in most urgent need of redress.
The framing characterizes the Mizrahi Jewish experience as movement from exile to homeland, which adopts the Zionist theological framework that Myers usually treats with scholarly distance. When the framework requires it, the Zionist theological language becomes useful because it allows the Jewish dispossession to be reframed as homecoming and therefore as not really dispossession in the same sense. The Mizrahi Jews lost everything, faced violence and expulsion, were stripped of citizenship and property, and arrived in Israel often with nothing. Calling this movement from exile to homeland accepts the Zionist theological framing in order to avoid having to treat it as an injustice with the same standing as the Palestinian case.
The actual symmetry is that two populations were displaced in the same period, one through Israeli action against Palestinians and one through Arab state action against Jews. Both populations lost homes, property, and communities they had lived in for centuries. Neither population has been compensated. The Jewish dispossession is treated by Myers as essentially resolved through the absorption of the displaced into Israel, while the Palestinian dispossession is treated as ongoing and demanding resolution. The asymmetric treatment is a political choice, not a scholarly conclusion. A scholarly treatment would note that the Mizrahi displacement is historically more analogous to other twentieth-century population transfers, where displaced populations were absorbed into states associated with their ethnicity or religion, while the Palestinian case is the unusual one where the displaced population has been maintained as refugees across multiple generations rather than absorbed into the surrounding states with which they share language, religion, and culture.
The discussion of 1967 is more straightforward and contains less of the framework’s operation, partly because the basic narrative of Nasser’s escalation, the Israeli preemptive strike, and the rapid Israeli victory is too well documented to permit much reframing. Ibish provides the sharper analysis here, particularly on the Arab psychological consequences and the long-term impact on Arab nationalism. His description of Nasser as a demagogue whose propaganda hypnotized the Arab world is more critical than what Myers offers about any Israeli leader in the entire transcript. This pattern persists throughout. Ibish criticizes Arab leaders including Nasser, Shukeiri, the Mufti, and various Palestinian factions with directness and without softening. Myers criticizes Israeli leaders and policies with repeated softening qualifications, contextual framings, and sympathetic explanatory moves.
When Myers mentions the Mufti of Jerusalem in connection with Iraq, Ibish jumps in to say his reputation is “not mixed” but “horrendous,” and that no Palestinian organizations name anything after him. Myers had used the phrase “mixed reputation,” which is the careful academic phrasing for someone whose record is one of collaboration with Hitler, support for the Holocaust, and incitement of antisemitic violence. Ibish does not let the careful phrasing stand. He provides the corrective. Myers’s careful phrasings on the Israeli side do not get corrected because there is no one in the conversation positioned to correct them. Ibish’s careful phrasings on the Arab side do get corrected because Ibish himself corrects them or supplies the harder version.
Myers proposes the David and Goliath shift, with Israeli self-understanding moving from the small embattled David to the powerful Goliath after 1967. The framing accepts the standard progressive Jewish narrative about Israeli self-understanding, namely that 1967 produced a moral problem because Israel could no longer authentically claim to be the underdog. The framing implies that the David self-understanding was authentic in 1948 and the Goliath reality became the reality after 1967, with Israeli Jews retaining the David self-understanding inappropriately. This positions the moral critique of Israel as a critique of incongruence between self-image and reality.
A more rigorous treatment would consider that the David and Goliath frame is itself a Western Christian biblical category that may not actually capture the security situation either side faces. Israel after 1967 was indeed militarily stronger than its immediate neighbors. Israel after 1967 also faced a coalition of states formally committed to its destruction, faced the Soviet Union arming and training those states, faced terrorism from non-state actors, faced the demographic challenge of ruling territories with large Palestinian populations, and faced the long-term strategic challenge of a regional environment in which most actors did not accept its legitimate existence. Whether this situation makes Israel a Goliath depends on the unit of analysis. Compared to a single Palestinian village or to an unarmed Palestinian family, Israel is a Goliath. Compared to the broader regional alignment of forces over decades, Israel is a small state with a precarious position that has required constant military preparedness to survive. The Goliath framing is rhetorically powerful because it produces the moral condemnation the framework wants. It is analytically partial because it picks the unit of analysis that produces the desired conclusion.
Ibish’s closing about Palestinians as the victims of victims is sharp and contains the most analytically interesting move in the conversation. He acknowledges that Palestinians have struggled to access their own agency, that they have been constituted as a people through their confrontation with Zionism, that their nationalism is unusually intense partly because it has been so frustrated. The “primitive Palestinian sense of tribal identity” phrase he attributes to Said is striking and would be impossible for Myers to say. Ibish can say it because he is Arab. The framework permits self-criticism from inside but not external criticism. The asymmetry persists.
There is no serious engagement with the Hamas charter, with Iranian regional strategy, with the actual content of contemporary Palestinian political education, with the ways the Palestinian refugee status has been maintained as a political weapon by Arab states, with the role of UNRWA in perpetuating the refugee population, with the religious and theological dimensions of the conflict that have grown more salient since the 1980s, with the actual security situation Israeli civilians face and have faced, with the demographic and strategic considerations that make the two-state solution politically difficult on both sides. These topics would complicate the framework’s preferred narrative. They are absent.
The Catholic university setting may also be doing more work than is immediately visible. Catholic intellectual tradition has had a complicated relationship with Jewish nationalism since the establishment of the State of Israel. Vatican policy was explicitly anti-Zionist for decades, only fully normalizing relations with Israel in 1993. Catholic theological reflection on the State of Israel has often emphasized concern for the Palestinian population, support for Palestinian self-determination, and critique of Israeli policies. The Pope Francis quote at the opening, with its emphasis on globalizing hope and avoiding polarization, sets the tone for a conversation in which strong positions are themselves suspect and dialogue itself becomes the highest value. This framing tends to produce analyses that emphasize moral equivalence between Israeli and Palestinian violence, that treat the conflict as fundamentally a tragedy of two peoples rather than as a political conflict with specific political solutions, and that center Catholic concerns about peace and reconciliation over the harder questions about which political arrangements would actually work.
Myers operates skillfully within these institutional constraints. His presentation is careful, balanced in tone, sympathetic to Palestinian suffering, and gentle in its criticism of Israel. The carefulness is itself a coalition position. A historian without coalition commitments would not need to be this careful. He could simply present the historical evidence with whatever conclusions it supports, accepting that some conclusions would discomfort some audiences and others would discomfort other audiences. Myers’s carefulness reflects his sense of which audiences must be accommodated and which can be discomforted. The Palestinian audience can be told that Plan Dalet was not necessarily a master plan of expulsion, since the audience that needs the master plan reading is small. The Jewish audience must be told that systematic violence happened in 1948, since the audience that wants this acknowledgment is large and includes Myers’s own coalition.
This is what calibration looks like when a scholar is operating inside multiple coalition pressures simultaneously. The presentation has to be acceptable to the Jesuit institutional setting, to the Jewish progressive coalition Myers belongs to, to the broader academic Jewish studies field, to the Catholic concern for Palestinian suffering, and to the Palestinian audience represented by Ibish. Each of these pressures pushes the presentation in a slightly different direction. The result is the careful, qualified, dialogue-oriented mode you see in the transcript. The mode is professionally accomplished. It is also analytically thinner than what a less constrained scholar could produce.
Ibish is willing to say harsh things about Arab leaders, Arab political failures, the destructive role of Hamas, the ways Palestinians have been let down by their own institutions and by Arab states. His willingness to say these things highlights what Myers does not say about Israeli leaders, Israeli political failures, the destructive role of Israeli right-wing factions in their own parallel ways. The asymmetry is not in the willingness to criticize. It is in which criticisms each speaker is positioned to make. Ibish criticizes Arabs because his coalition position permits and even encourages it. Myers criticizes Israel because his coalition position permits and even encourages it. Each man stays within his coalition’s permission structure. The structure of the conversation reproduces the asymmetry of the broader political moment, where progressive Jewish criticism of Israel is welcome in liberal institutional settings while critical Arab self-examination of similar depth is more rarely heard because the institutional infrastructure for it is weaker.
Part III: How Did We Get Here?: A Deep Dive into the History of Israel and Palestine, 1967-2023 (Feb. 20, 2024)
Part III shows the Myers method maturing across the series. Where Part I established the trauma-symmetric frame, Part III applies it to the period where the symmetric frame is hardest to maintain: the post-1967 occupation, the failed peace processes, the suicide bombings, the rise of Hamas, the Netanyahu era, and the road to October 7. Myers presents Yitzhak Rabin as the Jewish leader who might have done the necessary work, killed by the same right-wing religious-Zionist forces that now run the country. The Rabin recovery serves the same function as the earlier ones. It documents a road not taken. It chastens the winning side. It supplies a usable hero for the coalition’s preferred trajectory. Whether Rabin actually committed to a Palestinian state remains, by Myers’s own account, an unresolved question. The myth of Eitan Haber’s pocket note functions as the secular-Zionist equivalent of Hasidic hagiography. The community that needs the saint produces the saint.
Ibish carries more of the analytical weight as the period grows harder for Myers’s coalition. Ibish names specifics Myers will not. The Sabra and Shatila enabling. The first Lebanon war as choice not necessity. Sharon as bulldozer. The siege of Arafat. The Gaza disengagement as occupation by other means. The settler project as colonial in a meaningful sense. Myers agrees with these characterizations when Ibish names them but rarely volunteers them himself. The division of labor protects Myers’s standing in the American Jewish institutional world. He can endorse what Ibish says without having said it first. Ibish performs the same function in reverse on the Palestinian side, naming Hamas religious-political ambition, the second intifada radicalization, the PLO’s failure to call Olmert’s bluff, Abbas’s strategic errors. The two interlocutors give each other cover. Each can say things that would be costly to say alone, because the symmetric structure absorbs the cost.
Olmert becomes the second Rabin. He made the most generous offer ever made. He was politically compromised, ill, under investigation, surrounded by hostile cabinet members. The Palestinians failed to call his bluff. The road not taken stays open as a chastening fact. The frame produces a familiar coalition outcome. Israel was generous. Palestinian leadership failed. But the offer was real and the failure was tragic rather than damning. The coalition position holds. Myers can criticize the failure of generosity by the Israeli right while preserving the larger narrative of Israeli good-faith negotiation. Ibish concedes the Palestinian leadership failure while preserving the Palestinian moral position. Both audiences leave with their core narrative intact.
Watch what each speaker says about the asymmetric letters of mutual recognition in 1993. The PLO recognized Israel’s right to exist as a state. Israel recognized the PLO as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. The asymmetry is enormous. Myers names it. Ibish names it. Neither presses the point to its conclusion. The Palestinian negotiators in 1993 surrendered the strongest card their movement held in exchange for procedural recognition that did not include statehood. This was a coalition decision by Arafat that bound future Palestinian negotiations. The decision can be defended or criticized. Myers and Ibish let it sit as an asymmetry without rendering judgment on whether it was strategic genius or strategic catastrophe. The unrendered judgment is the coalition product. Render it either way and you alienate part of the audience.
The 1982 peace-now demonstration of 400,000 Israelis after Sabra and Shatila. The 2023 anti-judicial-overhaul protests of hundreds of thousands every week for ten months. Myers presents these as evidence of a vibrant Israeli liberal civil society pushing back against ethnonationalist consolidation. What produces the formation that makes these movements possible? They depend on a particular Israeli middle and upper-middle class secular liberal Jewish formation, concentrated in Tel Aviv and certain neighborhoods of Jerusalem, with deep roots in the Ashkenazi labor-Zionist founding generation. That formation has been demographically declining for decades. The Haredi and religious-Zionist sectors that resist the protest movements have been demographically expanding. The protest movements look impressive at any given moment. The trend lines suggest they are losing the demographic war. Myers’s coalition needs the protest movements to register as Israel’s true face. Turner’s framework suggests they register as one face of a society whose other faces are growing faster. The conversation does not pursue this.
Ibish notes that Hamas pushed the Palestinian national movement toward religious framing during the second intifada and that even Fatah, to avoid being outflanked, briefly adopted quasi-Islamist rhetoric. The competition for the religious vocabulary between secular nationalists and Islamist nationalists is exactly the Pinsof Alliance Theory frame from the Satmar succession discussion in our earlier work. Coalitions compete to control the legitimating moral language. Whoever owns the language owns the movement. Hamas pulled Fatah toward religious vocabulary because the religious vocabulary commanded broader Palestinian assent. Fatah followed because the alternative was being defined as secular betrayal. The same logic governs the Satmar succession. The same logic governs the Israeli right’s competition with the religious-Zionist movement. The same logic governs Myers’s own coalition. None of this gets named as a general pattern. Each instance gets treated as particular. The pattern repeats across cases the conversation does not connect.
Myers identifies Netanyahu’s project as illiberal democracy in Orban’s image, names the 2018 nation-state law as the constitutional expression of the project, lists the specific legal moves against Arabic, against the Muslim call to prayer, against progressive NGOs. The analysis is sharp. The framing is not just symmetric anymore. It tilts. Then immediately the conversation turns to the protest movement and to the brief Bennett-Lapid coalition that included Mansour Abbas. The tilt gets corrected by recovering the alternative Israel that resisted Netanyahu. The coalition method holds even when the analysis presses against it. The recovery operation is reflexive. Wherever the analysis threatens to land on a hard verdict against Israel, the recovery of an alternative Israel preserves the symmetric frame.
The Abraham Accords analysis confirms the pattern. Ibish presents the Accords as the UAE saving the two-state solution from Netanyahu’s annexation plans, then concedes immediately that nothing in the Accords advanced Palestinian interests. Both framings get aired. Neither lands. The audience receives the recognition that the Accords were both strategic Emirati interest and convenient cover for Israeli annexation deferral. The conversation moves on. The unresolved characterization is the product. A definitive characterization either way would cost Ibish or Myers credibility with one of their audiences. The dual framing protects both.
The “resistance versus terrorism” question at the end deserves its own attention. Magda Teter raises it as the closing question because it is the question the framework cannot finally answer. Ibish gives the structurally honest response: Israelis treat all Palestinian active resistance as terrorism, Palestinians treat all violence against Israelis including the October 7 massacres as resistance, and both framings flatten human beings behaving like human beings in a structured relationship of dominance and subordination. The diagnosis is correct as far as it goes. What it does not name is that the framework Myers and Ibish have built across three sessions cannot adjudicate between these framings without becoming partisan. The coalition position requires that both framings remain in tension. Adjudicating either way breaks the dialogue. The conversation closes on the irresolution because the irresolution is the position.
Part IV: How Did We Get Here?: A Deep Dive into Israel and Palestine: October 7th and Its Aftermath (Mar. 19, 2024)
The opening framing by Magda Teter sets the emotional register. Her language is “anguish and desperation,” “vulnerability and fear,” “self-righteousness rather than finding solutions.” This is the standard liberal academic register for discussing the conflict, which treats both sides as caught in a tragedy where the appropriate moral response is grief and reflective humility. The framing is sincere. It also performs a particular operation. It positions strong moral judgments as themselves part of the problem. The audience is invited to feel sad and confused rather than to draw clear conclusions about which side did what and why. This emotional register suits the framework’s needs because the framework cannot sustain clear moral judgments without exposing its own commitments.
Ibish’s framework is more sympathetic to Saudi-UAE Gulf positioning than to either Israel or Hamas. He calls the Trump peace plan “gibberish” but the Abraham Accords “good diplomacy” and credits the UAE with a clever maneuver. The Gulf framework assumes that the conflict can be managed through deals between regional powers without resolving the Palestinian question, which is exactly what the UAE government wanted to demonstrate. Ibish is sympathetic to this approach while critical of its consequences. The framework lets him criticize Israel for blocking Palestinian self-determination while accepting the UAE’s strategic decision to normalize without that condition. The asymmetry is structural to his analytical position.
The judicial reform discussion is presented through the standard progressive frame. Myers calls it a “judicial coup” without much qualification, accepts the protest movement’s self-description as defending democracy, and connects it to Netanyahu’s broader illiberal project alongside Orban. The framing is one-sided in ways that would not survive serious scholarly engagement. The Israeli judicial system as it existed before 2023 was unusual among democracies in its scope of judicial review, its self-selection of judges through the bar association, and its use of a “reasonableness” standard that gave the court extraordinary discretion to overturn government decisions. Whether the reforms proposed were a coup or a normal democratic adjustment depends on which democratic theory one holds. There are serious arguments on both sides. Myers presents only the protest movement’s framing. The audience receives the conclusion without encountering the debate.
The “elephant in the room” petition discussion is where the framework’s commitments become explicit. The argument is that the protest movement should have linked its democratic demands to opposition to the occupation, because the occupation is the deeper threat to Israeli democracy. This is the position of Myers’s faction within the broader American Jewish progressive coalition. Presenting it as the obviously correct analytical conclusion rather than as one position among others does the work the framework requires. A historian operating outside the framework might note that the protest movement’s strategic decision to focus on judicial reform was entirely defensible on its own terms, that the occupation question would have split the protest coalition and weakened it, and that not all protesters shared the view that the occupation is the primary threat to Israeli democracy. These considerations would complicate the presentation. They are absent.
Ibish takes Hamas seriously as a political actor with its own internal logic. His description of Hamas as primarily focused on capturing the Palestinian national movement rather than primarily focused on Israel is sharp and largely correct. His description of October 7 as part of a strategic plan to delegitimize Fatah and the PA, to provoke an Israeli response that would generate footage of Palestinian suffering, and to position Hamas as the only authentic Palestinian national movement, is the analysis that has been suppressed by most American discourse on the conflict. Ibish can present this analysis because his Gulf-aligned framework opposes Hamas as an Iranian proxy and as a Muslim Brotherhood organization that the Gulf regimes consider an existential threat to their own legitimacy.
Ibish’s analysis directly contradicts the framework Myers operates in. The progressive Jewish framework wants to treat October 7 as a response to occupation and despair, with Hamas as a regrettable but understandable expression of Palestinian suffering. Ibish presents Hamas as a calculating political actor pursuing a strategic plan, with October 7 as a deliberate provocation designed to produce particular political outcomes. These two framings are incompatible. Myers does not push back on Ibish’s analysis because the format of the conversation does not permit it. The two framings sit side by side without confrontation. The audience receives both without being asked to recognize their incompatibility.
The Netanyahu-Hamas symbiosis discussion is where the framework recovers its preferred narrative. Both Ibish and Myers emphasize that Netanyahu propped up Hamas as a way of dividing the Palestinian movement and preventing a Palestinian state. The framing makes Netanyahu primarily responsible for October 7, with Hamas as the instrument he created and could not control. The framing is partial. Hamas has its own agency, its own ideology, its own strategic decisions, and its own funding sources from Iran, Qatar, and the broader Muslim Brotherhood network. Netanyahu’s policy of allowing Qatari funds to enter Gaza was one factor among many. Treating it as the master variable lets the framework center Israeli responsibility while treating Hamas as primarily a creature of Israeli policy. This is analytically thin. It is also politically convenient for the framework.
The October 7 description by Myers provides accurate factual content about the breach of the border, the operational success of the Hamas attack, the failure of Israeli intelligence and military response, and the brutality of what occurred. The description is comparatively brief. He spends more time on Israeli political failures than on the actual events of the day. The proportion is the operation. October 7 functions in the framework as the trigger for the Israeli response that becomes the main subject of analysis. The events themselves are acknowledged with appropriate gravity and then bypassed in favor of discussion of Israeli reactions, Israeli political dynamics, and Israeli moral responsibility.
Ibish notes that 72 percent of Palestinians polled supported the attack, that the breaching of Israeli invisibility produced a sense of pride, and that the Gaza refugees experiencing statelessness for one day affected many of them. The Frantz Fanon framework, with violence as cleansing for the colonized, is invoked to make the Palestinian response intelligible. This is the standard postcolonial framework applied to the conflict. The framework treats Palestinian violence as a response to colonial conditions and treats the Palestinian psychological experience of October 7 as understandable within those conditions. The framework cannot quite engage the alternative possibility, which is that the celebration of October 7 across the Arab and Muslim world reflects ideological commitments that are not reducible to colonial response, including antisemitic ideology, religious commitments, and the political programs of organizations like Hamas that operate with their own logic.
Myers references Cornell professor Russell Rickford’s “exhilarating” comment as evidence of how some American academics greeted October 7 as a moment of liberation. He does not use the moment to interrogate the framework that produced Rickford’s reaction. Rickford operates within the same postcolonial framework that Ibish is invoking through Fanon. The framework valorizes anticolonial violence as liberatory. October 7 fits the framework’s valorization. American academics in this framework reacted predictably to October 7 because the framework prepared them to react that way. Myers treats Rickford’s comment as a disturbing individual case rather than as a manifestation of the framework that organizes much contemporary academic discourse. The treatment lets the framework off the hook while treating Rickford as an outlier. He is not an outlier. He is a typical product of his intellectual environment.
The Robert Pape report finds that 56 percent of Jewish students and 52 percent of Muslim students felt unsafe on campus, and that 70 percent of Jewish students understood “from the river to the sea” as eliminationist while only 14 percent of Muslim students did. Myers frames the gap as a problem of communication, suggesting that students should have conversations about what the slogan means. The framing treats the gap as a misunderstanding to be resolved through dialogue. An alternative reading is that the slogan operates differently in different communities, that it carries eliminationist connotations for Jews because of the actual political history of the slogan, that Muslim students who understand the slogan in non-eliminationist terms are operating within a framework that has detached the slogan from its actual political content. The framework treats the question as one of mutual understanding because the framework cannot recognize that some political claims are simply incompatible with each other.
The generational analysis Ibish offers is sharper than Myers’s contribution on the same question. Ibish notes that Biden’s generation is “born and bred” into a special relationship with Israel, that the middle generation has accepted the relationship as strategic without emotional investment, and that the younger generation is rethinking everything from the founding forward. The analysis is accurate as far as it goes. What it does not address is why the younger generation has the particular framework it does, which is the framework supplied by their educational environment. The framework does not arrive in their heads spontaneously. It is taught, reinforced, and rewarded by the academic and media environments that shape young liberal Americans. The framework is the same framework Myers operates in, transmitted to younger generations with sharper edges than the middle generation maintains.
Walzer’s argument is that Israel has the right to respond to October 7 but must conduct the war justly. The argument supports a moderate Israeli operation rather than a maximal one. Myers presents the argument fairly and then moves to the genocide framework as an alternative. The juxtaposition lets the audience choose between the two framings without working through the actual question of which framing fits the actual conduct of the war. A more rigorous treatment would engage the empirical question of whether Israeli conduct in Gaza meets just war criteria, which would require examining specific decisions about targeting, proportionality, distinction, and humanitarian access. Such examination would produce a complex picture with genuine criticisms of Israeli conduct alongside genuine acknowledgments of the difficulty of fighting a war against an enemy embedded in civilian infrastructure. Myers does not undertake this examination. The genocide framing is presented as one option among others, with the audience left to decide which they prefer.
The Mamdani citation at the end is significant. Myers invokes Mamdani’s Neither Settler Nor Native to argue that legal accountability often reinscribes winners and losers, with consensus politics offered as an alternative. Mamdani is the leading academic theorist of postcolonial accountability and his framework has become central to progressive thinking on transitional justice. Myers’s invocation of Mamdani positions his analysis within a particular intellectual lineage that has clear political implications. The lineage favors political reconciliation over legal accountability, which in this context means favoring frameworks that do not require Israeli legal accountability for actions in Gaza or for the broader conduct of the occupation. The framework also implicitly opposes Israeli legal action against Hamas leaders. The Mamdani framework is presented as an alternative to revenge cycles. It is also a framework that produces particular political outcomes by foreclosing other approaches.
The Myers vision of the future is the standard American Jewish progressive position. New leadership on all sides, a second-term US president of the right kind, continued Saudi-UAE engagement, and a confederation model with open borders and significant Palestinian return. The vision is presented as the reasonable middle position between unworkable extremes. It is also a position that requires Israeli concessions on issues that have proven politically impossible for Israeli leaders across decades, that requires Palestinian leadership transformations that have not occurred despite decades of pressure, and that depends on US political configurations that are themselves contingent. The vision is what the framework produces when asked to envision a future. It is not a serious political analysis of what is achievable given actual conditions. It is the framework’s preferred outcome presented as a path forward.
Ibish’s vision is more substantive and more honest about the obstacles. He insists that Israel must formally recognize Palestinian self-determination, which it has not done, before any progress is possible. He proposes that Hamas should be allowed to join the PLO on Fatah’s terms, accepting prior Palestinian commitments to recognize Israel and renounce violence. He notes that the Saudi normalization track can be leveraged toward these goals. The vision retains the Gulf framework’s commitments while offering specific steps that could be taken. It is more grounded than Myers’s vision because Ibish is operating from a framework that has actual political stakes in regional outcomes rather than from a framework that primarily generates American Jewish progressive talking points.
The closing question about hard truths each side must face is where the framework’s selectivity is most visible. Ibish lists specific Palestinian failures, including bad leadership, missed opportunities, totalizing demands, and refusal to recognize that Israeli Jewish nationalism is real and authentic. He also lists specific American failures around the politics of Middle East policy. His list is concrete and includes claims that would be controversial within Palestinian communities.
Myers’s response is abstract. He talks about both peoples being victims and victimizers, about the importance of recognizing the multidimensionality of both sides, about resisting reductionist frameworks. He does not list specific Israeli failures. He does not name particular Israeli political decisions, particular Israeli policies, or particular Israeli leaders whose conduct has contributed to the current situation. The asymmetry between Ibish’s specificity and Myers’s abstraction is the operation. Ibish can criticize Palestinians specifically because his framework permits it. Myers cannot criticize Israelis specifically because doing so would require him to take positions that would alienate parts of his audience and his coalition. The abstraction is the framework’s protective mechanism.
Wissenschaft des Judentums | Dr. David Myers (July 16, 2024)
Myers says says Wissenschaft des Judentums reclaimed Jewish sources from “traditional rabbinic scholars and Christian scholars.” The pairing is striking. The traditional rabbinic scholars become structurally equivalent to Christian supersessionist scholars in his framework. Both are obstacles the Wissenschaft scholars had to overcome to produce legitimate scholarship. The traditional scholars are not allies in the project of preserving Jewish thought against Christian hostility. They are themselves an adversary whose hold on the sources had to be broken. This framing accepts the Wissenschaft self-understanding completely. It does not consider the possibility that traditional rabbinic scholarship might have been doing something the Wissenschaft scholars could not do, or that the Wissenschaft project’s hostility to traditional scholarship was itself a coalition position rather than an objective intellectual judgment.
The Steinschneider line about giving Judaism a decent burial gets quoted and then softened. Myers calls it an overstatement and says it should not be reduced to that, but he reproduces the line because it captures something the field has had to live with. The line is the most honest description of what some Wissenschaft scholars actually thought they were doing. They believed Jewish religious vitality had ended. Their job was to chronicle the corpse with appropriate scholarly care. Myers cannot fully embrace this because he wants to preserve Wissenschaft as a generative tradition, but he also cannot disown it because Steinschneider was a major figure who said the thing in plain words. The softening move is the apologetic move that the field has been performing for two hundred years.
Myers presents Samson Raphael Hirsch as a critic of Wissenschaft who “swam in the same cultural seas” but “departed from them not merely in methodological conceptual terms but really in theological terms as well.” The framing places Hirsch as someone who shared the Wissenschaft scholars’ world but chose a different theological position. Myers describes the difference as Wissenschaft scholars understanding Judaism as “a cultural tradition that was constantly evolving historically” while Hirsch understood Judaism “as an essence as an essential condition whose core features remained the same.”
This is a coalition framing dressed as descriptive history. The Wissenschaft view is not described as a position. It is described as the view of a “cultural tradition.” Hirsch’s view is described as a position about an “essence.” The first sounds like normal scholarship. The second sounds like a metaphysical commitment that requires defense. But both are positions. The Wissenschaft view that Judaism is a cultural tradition that evolves historically is itself a metaphysical commitment that needed defending. It was contested by Hirsch, by traditional rabbinic scholars, by figures who believed the historicization project misdescribed what Judaism is. Myers’s framing makes the Wissenschaft view sound like the obvious correct view and Hirsch’s view sound like a stubborn metaphysical holdout. The framework’s commitments are presented as descriptive scholarship while the alternative commitments are presented as theological positions.
Myers says Wissenschaft scholars “were committed to rendering Judaism acceptable to the wider world as a way of re-engaging the process of emancipation” and that “what you can’t say about them is that they were detached from Jewish life.” The defense is that the scholars were embedded in Jewish life, founded Jewish institutions, served as rabbis, and so on. This defense is correct on its own terms. The scholars were not detached from Jewish life.
The defense also misses Scholem’s point. Scholem’s criticism was that the project’s orientation was apologetic and assimilationist, oriented toward making Judaism acceptable to non-Jews rather than toward sustaining Jewish life on its own terms. The fact that the scholars were embedded in Jewish institutions does not refute this. The institutions themselves were part of the same apologetic project. The Reform synagogues and the modernized seminaries and the new style of rabbinate were all attempts to render Judaism presentable. Scholem’s criticism was that this presentability project came at the cost of Jewish religious vitality. The criticism stands or falls on whether the cost was real, not on whether the scholars personally remained inside Jewish life.
Myers says Scholem and his cohort “regarded themselves as post-assimilatory Jews” and that “this was a key driver toward their Zionism.” Myers then immediately calls this contrast “overly simplistic” and emphasizes that the Hebrew University founding generation “emerged out of that very tradition” of Wissenschaft. The move is the standard academic move of reabsorbing Zionism into the German liberal Jewish intellectual tradition rather than treating it as the rupture Scholem and his cohort understood it to be.
Scholem was a post-assimilatory Jew who saw the Wissenschaft project as a failure. His 1944 essay, which Myers cites and dismisses, is one of the most important pieces of self-criticism the field has ever received from inside its own ranks. Scholem saw what we have been describing across this conversation. The Wissenschaft project had served particular coalition needs of German Jews seeking emancipation. It had produced scholarship that fit those needs. It had not produced scholarship that served Jewish life as Jewish life. Scholem moved to Jerusalem because he believed Jewish life needed a different setting and a different scholarly orientation. Myers’s softening of Scholem’s critique by emphasizing Scholem’s continuity with Wissenschaft methods misses what Scholem was actually saying. Scholem said the methods continued. He also said the orientation needed to change. The methodological continuity does not refute the ideological rupture.
Myers describes Kurzweil as the literary scholar at Bar-Ilan who attacked Scholem for his interest in the demonic and for his “apotheosis” of science as a substitute for the divine. Myers reports the attack but treats it as an interesting moment in the history of the field rather than as a serious critique that deserves engagement. Kurzweil’s charge that Scholem made science into a form of avodah zarah is the kind of religious-philosophical critique the academic field cannot really process. The field’s framework treats Kurzweil as a curious figure with strong opinions. Kurzweil’s actual point, that the historicizing project requires elevating historical method into a religious authority that displaces traditional religious authority, is a serious point that survives scholarly attention. Myers reports it without engaging it. The reporting is itself the deflection.
Myers describes Hoffmann as having “treaded this very delicate line between critical approaches to the study of the Jewish past and ongoing commitment to the belief in the divine origins of the written and oral Torah.” His critical capacities, Myers says, “could be directed at sources other than the oral law but he actually tried to argue on historical grounds that it would be a mistake to reduce the Torah she’b’al peh the oral Torah to a series of contextual contexts that failed to get at its divine origins.”
Myers describes Hoffmann’s position with a slight but unmistakable distancing. The phrase “tried to argue” rather than “argued” places the position as an attempt rather than an achievement. The phrase “failed to get at its divine origins” puts the critical reading on the side of failure to get at something, which assumes the something is there to be gotten at, but the framing keeps the position attributable to Hoffmann rather than affirmed by Myers. The whole sentence is constructed to report Hoffmann’s view without endorsing it, and to mark the distance between Hoffmann’s view and what Myers’s audience is presumed to accept. This is the standard academic move. The traditional position is reported as a position. The critical position is described as scholarship.
Myers quotes Scholem’s line that “the ticket of admission for Jews to European culture was conversion” and modifies it to say “the ticket of admission was to strip down one’s sense of Jewish collectivity rid oneself of sort of the vestigal forms of Jewish clannishness in order to make one’s way into a polite society.”
The word “clannishness” is doing serious work here. Myers is using a word that European antisemites used to describe Jewish particularism. He is using it in scare-quote mode as something the European Christian society demanded Jews shed, but he is not pushing back on the framing. He is reporting that Jews were asked to shed their “clannishness” as the price of admission. The framing accepts that Jewish particularism is a form of clannishness in the first place. The framing does not consider that Jewish particularism might be something other than clannishness, or that calling it clannishness is itself an antisemitic move. The word slides into the conversation as if it were a neutral description.
American academic Jewish studies has internalized European liberal categories so thoroughly that the categories appear as neutral description rather than as a position. The scholar uses “clannishness” because the word is available in his scholarly inheritance. The word’s antisemitic origins are forgotten. The word’s continued role in marking Jewish particularism as a problem to be overcome is accepted as the standard framing. The scholar does not notice that he is reproducing the antisemitic frame because the frame has become invisible through its institutionalization in his field.
The fascination with Geiger and his “evolutionary approach” that moved beyond “rigid legalism” is another tell. The phrase “rigid legalism” is the standard Reform-era characterization of traditional halakhic Judaism. The phrase has been used for two hundred years to position halakhic life as primitive, backward, and in need of being superseded by something more spiritual. Myers reports Geiger’s view in Geiger’s own terms without marking the distance between Geiger’s polemic and historical accuracy. Halakhic Judaism is not primarily characterized by rigid legalism. It is characterized by careful attention to ritual practice grounded in textual interpretation. Calling it rigid legalism is the move that the Reform movement made to delegitimize the tradition it was breaking from. The phrase carries the polemic intact. Myers uses it without comment.
Myers acknowledges that Jews were excluded from professorial positions in German Jewish studies and notes that this drove the creation of the rabbinical seminaries as alternative institutions. He frames this as an effect of “lingering anti-jewish expression and belief” which is correct but incomplete. The deeper point is that the German university structure that excluded Jewish scholars from its faculties is the same structure that the Wissenschaft scholars were trying to gain admission to. Their scholarly project was oriented toward an institutional environment that did not want them. The whole project carries the marks of this oriented-but-rejected position. The scholarship is shaped to please an audience that ultimately would not include the scholars in its membership.
The acknowledgment that Wissenschaft was extinguished “literally” by the Nazi destruction of German Jewry is the moment where the framework should be most uncomfortable. The Wissenschaft project oriented Jewish scholarship toward integration into German cultural and intellectual life. The German cultural and intellectual life then murdered the Jewish community whose integration the project had aimed at. The whole orientation of the project was toward an audience and an environment that proved capable of genocide against the producers of the scholarship. A serious reckoning with Wissenschaft would have to consider whether the orientation toward integration was itself a category error, whether the energy spent on rendering Judaism acceptable to German audiences was energy stolen from the development of Jewish life on its own terms, whether the failure of the integration project should reflect backward on the wisdom of the project itself.
Myers treats the destruction as an external interruption of an otherwise productive project. He then describes contemporary Jewish studies as the continuation of the Wissenschaft project, with the project’s “essential precondition” status for current work cited as evidence of its value. The destruction is a tragedy that happened to the project rather than a verdict on the project’s wisdom. The continuation in America and Israel is presented as vindication. The framework cannot ask whether the project’s basic orientation was wise because asking the question would call into doubt the framework’s own legitimacy as the inheritor of the tradition.
The closing question about which Wissenschaft figure Myers would dine with elicits [Heinrich] Graetz, and the question Myers wants to ask Graetz is “where do you think the future of German Jewry lies” in the late 1870s as antisemitism is rising. The question is a perfect closing for the framework. Myers wants to ask Graetz, in 1880, where German Jewry is going, knowing that the answer will be Auschwitz. The question carries the framework’s central tension without resolving it. The Wissenschaft scholars believed in the future of German Jewry. They oriented their scholarship around that future. The future ended in catastrophe. Myers wants to ask Graetz what he thought the future was, perhaps to give Graetz the chance to articulate the hope that history would betray. The answer to the question would be tragic. The framework cannot quite metabolize the tragedy because doing so would require revising the framework itself.
The honest assessment of Wissenschaft would have to engage Scholem’s 1944 critique seriously. It would have to ask whether the project’s orientation was wise. It would have to consider whether traditional scholarship had access to something the Wissenschaft scholars lacked. It would have to confront the implications of the destruction of the project’s audience. It would have to ask why Jewish religious vitality outside the Wissenschaft tradition, in the haredi world, in the Hasidic courts, in the Sephardic traditions that maintained themselves apart from German modernization, has continued and even flourished while the Wissenschaft tradition’s institutional descendants in Reform and Conservative Judaism have struggled with declining adherence and intellectual fragmentation. These questions would call the framework into doubt. The framework cannot ask them without endangering itself. So the questions remain unasked, or are deflected when they are asked from outside the framework.
Hebrew Union College LA Graduation – May 19, 2025
The Myers address at HUC graduation reveals merit that the hyper-moralized op-eds obscure.
First, the register shift is real. Myers delivers a thoughtful address that combines memorial tribute to David Ellenson, personal disclosure about his own prayer practice, historical material on the Amida and on Oneg Shabbat-type spiritual resistance in the ghettos, a call for dissent balanced with engagement, and a closing appeal to dialogue across difference. The register is still moralized but it is more textured than the op-eds. He is operating in a different situation with different audiences and different stakes, and the situational calibration produces different output.
The HUC audience is particular. Reform Jewish clergy and educators at graduation. The institution has hired Andrew Rayfeld as president, whose opening remarks condemned Hamas, named 1,200 Israelis slaughtered on October 7, and also named tens of thousands of Palestinians killed. Rayfeld’s framing sets the coalitional floor. Myers does not have to establish that Jewish suffering matters. Rayfeld has already done that. Myers can therefore spend his time on different work.
Myers frames the address around the Hebrew word Amida with three meanings: the prayer, the spiritual resistance of the ghettos, and standing alongside. Each meaning does work. The prayer meaning lets him disclose his own prayer practice, which establishes that he prays daily, engages the Amida as religious discipline, takes the traditional liturgy seriously as spiritual resource. This is an authority move. He is not a critic of Jewish religious life from the outside. He prays. Daily.
The ghetto resistance meaning lets him connect dissent to Jewish historical precedent. He invokes the Oyneg Shabbos circle (he says Oakaba, probably a transcription error for Oneg Shabbos) and Mark Dvorjetski. Amida as the comprehensive name for Jewish nonconformism against the Nazi assault. This supplies the Jewish warrant for dissent that the popular pieces often assert without grounding. Here he grounds it. The ghetto scholars who coined Amida for nonviolent Jewish resistance did so in conditions that make the current American and Israeli conditions look less extreme by comparison. Myers is careful to mark this distance: “We are far from the unimaginable suffering of our forebears.”
The standing-alongside meaning lets him make the dialogue-across-difference argument without the register sounding thin. Dialogue is not a universal kindness platitude. It is standing alongside in the Jewish sense of Amida. The three meanings converge to support the central claim: we must both resist and engage.
David Ellenson gets extensive tribute as mentor, brother, soulmate, conversation partner. Ellenson died in late 2023. This is Myers’s first major address since losing him and the emotional content is visible. Ellenson was a Reform scholar at HUC with views about liturgical innovation that Myers credits. Leonard Beerman gets invoked as “eternal dissident” with his 1948 HUC sermon quoted. This gives Myers an HUC lineage for his dissent claim. Beerman was Reform, HUC-trained, founding rabbi of Leo Baeck Temple. The lineage Myers constructs is Reform rabbinical from within HUC tradition. He is not importing dissent from outside.
Martin Luther King closes the address. Mara Benjamin gets cited on the obligated self. Kwame Anthony Appiah gets cited on dialogue not requiring persuasion. Jamil Zaki gets cited on kindness as practice. The Julia Angwin and Ammi Fields-Meyer New Yorker piece on dissent gets recommended. Pope Francis and Pope Leo get invoked on universal love. This is Myers deploying his intellectual networks to construct an argument. The sources span academic philosophy, social psychology, Catholic social teaching, contemporary journalism, and Jewish liturgical and historical material. He is not preaching from one tradition. He is assembling resources from multiple traditions to support a position.
The HUC graduation situation has features that produce output of a different character. Rayfeld has hired Myers knowing his controversial popular profile. Giving him the honorary doctorate and the graduation address signals HUC’s willingness to absorb the coalition costs of associating with his positions. The audience includes Reform Jewish professional leadership, which is aligned with Myers’s general orientation but not necessarily with his sharpness. The graduates are entering Jewish professional life in a period when the jobs they will hold require calibration between dissent and institutional loyalty. Myers is addressing exactly that problem.
The conundrum he acknowledges is real. How to resist and engage simultaneously. He does not resolve it. He says each person must find the right balance.
Myers prays daily. He engages the Amida as religious practice, not just as historical artifact. He describes blessings that activate imitatio dei for him (the sixth blessing on mercy, the eleventh on justice). He mentions that the matriarchs have been added to the first blessing in Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist prayer books, which is the liturgical modification that his own Yom Kippur liturgy work extends. He is locating himself within the modern Jewish liturgical reform tradition. This contextualizes the Al Chet additions which continue a Reform tradition of liturgical modification that has been adding content since the nineteenth century.
The moralized register is still present but grounded. The historical material is more carefully deployed. The acknowledged conundrum about resistance and engagement is more honest than the op-eds manage. The personal disclosure about prayer practice establishes authority that the op-eds assume without establishing. The lineage construction through Ellenson, Beerman, and Reform rabbinical tradition supplies warrants that the op-eds assert without grounding. The institutional setting (HUC, Reform Jewish professional community) produces writing that operates at a different level than the LA Times op-ed.
This is Myers in the situation where his abilities are best deployed. Graduation address for a friendly institution during a difficult moment, with time to develop an argument, with authority derived from both the address invitation and the daily prayer practice he discloses, with historical and intellectual resources arrayed in support of a calibrated position, with the central conundrum honestly acknowledged rather than rhetorically papered over.
What you see in this address versus what you see in the Forward pieces. This Myers has time to construct. The op-ed Myers has to strike. The address Myers has a lineage to claim. The op-ed Myers has to assert his warrant in a few hundred words. The address Myers can acknowledge conundrums. The op-ed Myers must resolve them to end with a call to action. The differences between the two Myerses are produced by the different situations.
Myers’s daily Amida practice is not performance. He cannot be faking that. The blessings he names as activating for him are concrete. The observation about the mental-list-making broken only by frequent lapses of memory as he turns to his computer is the observation of someone who prays daily and notices his own distraction. This grounds everything else. Myers is a scholar whose dissent emerges from within Jewish religious practice rather than from outside it. The liturgical innovations he authors are extensions of practice he engages daily rather than theoretical interventions.
The address does something the op-eds cannot. It lets you see what Myers is doing when his situation permits more than moral intervention. He is constructing a Reform Jewish position that combines daily religious practice, historical lineage, acknowledged epistemic conundrums, deployment of intellectual resources across traditions, and calls to action that honor the complexity of the situation. This is the deeper project the op-eds serve but do not reveal.
This address stays within the Reform coalition comfort zone. Myers does not push Rayfeld’s framing. Rayfeld said Gaza suffering is from Hamas’s barbarism, which is consistent with mainstream Reform positioning. Myers does not contest this in his address. He speaks of the “tragic and increasingly brutal cycle of violence in Israel Palestine, especially now in Gaza” without naming Israeli policy or Jewish agency in the way his op-eds do. The situational difference is that the HUC address audience is broader than his op-ed audience. Pushing harder on Israeli responsibility would cost coalition capital he cannot afford to spend at this event. He therefore delivers a calibrated address that works for the Reform audience while his sharper positions remain in the op-ed venue for his aligned readers. This is skilled coalition management. It also means the address is less radical than the popular writing. The framework identifies this as the standard pattern of public intellectual work where different venues require different calibrations and the same person produces more and less radical versions of his positions depending on where he is speaking.
Myers has a lineage he is claiming and resources he is deploying.
David Myers in Conversation with Michael Sfard – October 26, 2025
The hosting setup tells you almost everything about the coalition position before the conversation begins. The event is co-sponsored by Smol Emuni US, the New Israel Fund US, Los Angeles Friends of Standing Together, Unxeptable LA, and IAJ, the progressive home for Israeli Americans. These are the organized vehicles of American Jewish progressive opposition to the Israeli government, with funding networks, donor bases, and institutional staffs. The event takes place in the home of Lisa and Josh Greer, a Hollywood philanthropic couple known for hosting events for progressive Jewish causes. Myers’s introduction names everyone explicitly. The framing situates the entire conversation inside a particular wing of American Jewish institutional life, the wing whose commitments include opposition to the occupation, support for two-state outcomes, criticism of Netanyahu, and alignment with the broader American progressive coalition on Israel-Palestine questions. Myers is not just a UCLA professor here. He is a former president of the New Israel Fund board. He is operating as a coalition figure speaking to his coalition.
Sfard’s role in this coalition is the legal-moral authority who can speak from inside Israel with credentials the American audience finds compelling. He is a working human rights lawyer in Tel Aviv, the grandson of Zygmunt Bauman, articulate in English, fluent in the international human rights vocabulary, willing to use words like apartheid and genocide in public. The audience needs someone like Sfard to authorize their own positions on these questions. Sfard provides the authorization. Myers provides the platform and the framing. The exchange is symbiotic in the standard coalition way.
Myers establishes Sfard as the grandson of Zygmunt Bauman, who is described as an important social theorist of the late twentieth century, a critic of modernity, a thinker who saw the Holocaust as continuous with modernity rather than as an aberration. The lineage is then connected to Sfard’s current work. Sfard is positioned as the heir of a distinguished critical-theoretical tradition. This lineage authorization is the same operation we have been describing across other figures in this conversation. The lineage is real. The work is real. The lineage is also doing the work of authorizing the figure for an audience that values such lineage. Sfard’s legal arguments would be the same with or without Bauman as his grandfather. The presence of Bauman in the introduction tells you that the audience needs the lineage to properly weight the figure.
The Bauman framework also organizes the political analysis. When Sfard talks about Israel’s current trajectory, his categories are Bauman’s categories. Modernity produces totalitarianism. The orderly state produces the camp. The bureaucratic apparatus produces genocide. These are Bauman’s signature moves applied to contemporary Israel. The application is intellectually serious but also coalition-bound. The framework was developed for a particular European context and is being mapped onto a different context with different historical features. Whether the mapping fits is a question that does not get asked because the framework supplies the conclusions.
Sfard comes from a Polish Jewish family deported from Poland in 1968, formed by Shulamit Aloni’s introduction of human rights vocabulary into Israeli political discourse, and shaped by his grandfather’s critical theory. He grew up in Jerusalem with Palestinians as 40 percent of the city’s population without learning Arabic, learning French as his third language instead. He acknowledges this with appropriate self-criticism. The self-criticism is real and admirable. It is also limited. He does not ask why French was offered as the third language in his school. The answer is that European cultural orientation was the default of secular Israeli educated society in his generation. The same European orientation that shaped the Wissenschaft scholars we discussed in the previous conversation continues to shape secular Israeli intellectual life. Sfard’s framework is recognizably the late descendant of that orientation. He is doing his work in the European critical-theoretical idiom because that is the idiom his formation provided.
Sfard is right that the Israeli mainstream media has not provided adequate coverage of Palestinian suffering during the Gaza war. He is right that voices like his have been excluded from mainstream commentary since October 7. The structural point about media collapse during wartime is well taken. What is striking is the implicit standard against which Israeli media is being measured. Sfard’s standard is the international human rights media consensus, which has a particular set of commitments and a particular framing of the conflict. The Israeli mainstream media’s failure, in this analysis, is its failure to align with this international consensus. An alternative analysis would note that the international consensus itself has its own coalition position and its own framings, that Israeli media operates inside a community at war whose perceptions of events differ from those of distant observers, and that the question of which framing is correct is a substantive question rather than something to be resolved by reference to international media norms. Sfard does not consider this alternative. He treats the international human rights framing as the obviously correct framing and Israeli media as failing to meet that standard.
The South Africa apartheid analogy is the load-bearing comparison throughout the conversation. Sfard returns to it repeatedly. The Israeli media is compared to South African media during apartheid. The Israeli system between the river and the sea is described as apartheid. The international civil society pressure that ended South African apartheid is presented as the model for what should now be done about Israel. The comparison is doing serious political work. It places contemporary Israel in the category of regimes that the international consensus has already condemned and ultimately defeated. It positions Sfard’s audience as the current generation’s equivalent of the anti-apartheid activists of the 1970s and 1980s. The framing is flattering to the audience and damning to Israel. It is also a framing rather than a settled fact. Whether the apartheid analogy is correct, whether it captures the actual structure of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, whether it accounts for the Hamas charter or for Iranian regional ambitions or for the security situation Israel actually faces, are all questions that the framing forecloses rather than addresses.
Sfard’s discussion of October 7 is brief, qualified, and structured to redirect attention. He says the Israeli right of self-defense is real. He says October 7 was a horrific atrocity. He says he raised the question of whether Hamas committed genocide on that day. Then he immediately pivots back to discussion of Israeli conduct in Gaza and the West Bank. The October 7 question is treated as preliminary throat-clearing before the real conversation, which is about Israeli responsibility. The proportion of attention reflects the framework’s priorities. The framework treats Israeli conduct as the primary subject of analysis and Hamas conduct as a contextual fact that has been adequately acknowledged.
The October 7 acknowledgment is the price of admission to the conversation, paid quickly and perfunctorily, before getting to the substance. A reader looking for serious engagement with what Hamas did, with what the broader rejectionist coalition has been doing for decades, with what Iranian regional strategy entails, with what the genocidal intent expressed in the Hamas charter and its leaders’ statements means, will not find that engagement here. The framework treats those questions as settled or as someone else’s concern. The framework’s concern is Israeli conduct, and the conversation operates within that concern.
Sfard’s discussion of the genocide convention’s narrow definition versus Lemkin’s broader original conception is accurate and well-presented. He correctly notes that the convention adopted a narrower definition than Lemkin proposed. He notes the high standard of proof required for the special intent element. He notes that the South Africa case faces serious legal hurdles. He then concludes that Israel has been committing genocide on the broader Lemkin definition while acknowledging that the legal case under the narrower definition is uncertain. This is having it both ways. The Lemkin definition is invoked for the moral conclusion. The narrow legal definition is invoked when the legal case looks weak. The audience absorbs the moral conclusion without having to grapple with the legal weakness.
The Lemkin move expands the concept of genocide to include cultural destruction, displacement, and damage to infrastructure. On this expanded definition, many wars throughout history would qualify as genocide, and the term loses its analytical sharpness as the designation for the most extreme crime. Sfard knows this. He knows that the narrow definition was adopted precisely to maintain the term’s force. He uses the broad definition anyway because it produces the conclusion the audience wants. The use is rhetorical rather than analytical. It allows him to make the genocide claim while preserving deniability about the legal case.
Sfard says Palestinians need independence as part of the path to healing. He treats Palestinian independence as the obvious correct outcome that international law requires. He does not discuss the question of what kind of Palestinian state, what governance structure, what relationship to Israel, what protections against future attacks. The independence is presented as a normative requirement rather than as a political problem with its own difficulties. The audience is positioned to support Palestinian independence in the abstract without having to think through the specifics.
The reference to the future Palestinian state being important to the Palestinian diaspora “just like Palestinian communities in the diaspora are important for the future Palestinian state or the current Palestinian state” is the kind of phrasing that reveals the framework’s commitments. Sfard speaks of “the future Palestinian state or the current Palestinian state” as if these are settled facts. The current Palestinian state in his usage refers to the Palestinian Authority’s governing institutions in the West Bank, which most observers do not actually consider a state. The phrasing collapses the political question into a normative assumption. The framework treats Palestinian statehood as a current or imminent fact rather than as a contested political project.
Sfard acknowledges that the ceasefire has produced relief and the return of hostages. He immediately criticizes the deal because it was reached “without any involvement of Palestinian delegates.” His framework requires Palestinian self-determination at every stage, including the negotiation that ended the war Hamas started. The framework cannot recognize that Palestinian self-determination is itself a contested concept, that Hamas claims to embody Palestinian self-determination while pursuing aims most observers consider catastrophic, that the Palestinian Authority’s legitimacy is itself questioned, and that the framework’s insistence on Palestinian agency at every step requires choices about which Palestinians have legitimate agency. The framework presents these as settled questions. They are not.
The “Jewish supremacy” framing in the West Bank discussion is the political language of the moment. Sfard uses it repeatedly as the description of the Israeli system between the river and the sea. The phrase has been adopted by progressive Jewish discourse as the preferred description of what was previously called occupation, settler violence, or asymmetric rule. The phrase carries particular rhetorical force because it places Israel in a category alongside white supremacist regimes. The political work the phrase does is to make Israel legible to American progressive audiences whose categories include racial supremacy as the central category of injustice. Whether the phrase accurately describes the actual structure of Israeli rule, given the formal citizenship of Israeli Arabs, the role of Druze and Bedouin in the IDF, the complex situation of Palestinians in different legal categories, is a question the phrase forecloses. The phrase is doing political work. It is winning rhetorical battles by category placement rather than by detailed analysis.
The settler violence section is, by contrast, well-supported by Sfard’s legal practice. He has cases. He has clients. He has documented court orders that the police refuse to enforce. The granular legal documentation he provides is the most credible part of the conversation because it draws on his actual professional knowledge. The settler violence problem is real, the legal system’s failure to address it is documented, and Sfard is doing serious work on it. Where his framework holds up best is where his evidence is most direct and his political conclusions most modest. Where the framework holds up least is where he extrapolates from documented violence to system-wide claims about Jewish supremacy and apartheid. The extrapolation is doing political work that the documented violence alone does not require.
Myers introduces Mahmood Mamdani as the father of the soon-to-be mayor of New York and as a theorist whose critique of retributive justice is persuasive. The reference is doing several pieces of work. It establishes Myers’s progressive bona fides through reference to a major postcolonial theorist. It links the Israel-Palestine conversation to broader American progressive political concerns through Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral candidacy. It positions retributive justice as the wrong frame for thinking about post-conflict resolution, which conveniently aligns with the political position that opposes Israeli military responses to terrorism. The Mamdani reference is the kind of progressive intellectual gesture that signals coalition membership. The audience knows what the reference means. The reference does the work of establishing the speaker’s position without requiring detailed argument.
The closing question about whether the occupation is the logical outcome of Zionism rather than an aberration produces an interesting answer from Sfard. He says nothing inherent in Jewish self-determination requires the current outcome. He says Zionism had different streams. He then says the direction of Zionism was “frozen” on the trains to Auschwitz. This is the Bauman move applied to Zionism. The Holocaust is presented as the formative trauma that locked Zionism into a particular psychology. The psychology is the victim-victimizer binary. Israeli Jews chose to be victimizers because they had been victims and did not want to be victims again.
This account treats Israeli Jewish behavior as primarily explicable through the psychology of trauma response. It does not engage the security situation, the rejection of Israeli sovereignty by surrounding states for decades, the rocket attacks and suicide bombings and October 7 atrocities. It does not consider that Israeli Jewish behavior might be a response to actual conditions rather than primarily a psychological echo of past trauma. The framework prefers the psychological account because the psychological account locates the problem inside the Jewish-Israeli mind. If the problem is psychological, the solution is therapeutic, which is to say it requires Israeli Jews to overcome their trauma-driven worldview through education, pressure, and confrontation with their conduct.
The alternative analysis, that Israeli Jewish security concerns are responses to ongoing threats and that the conduct the coalition criticizes is the imperfect response of a small state to persistent enemies, is not entertained because it would make the coalition’s project look different. The coalition project would no longer be helping Israeli Jews transcend their trauma. It would be helping them with the problem of how to live with neighbors who include actors with genocidal aims. The latter project is harder and offers less rhetorical satisfaction.
The closing call for international civil society pressure is the operational conclusion of the framework. The coalition exists to pressure Israel from outside while progressive Israelis pressure from within. The combination is supposed to produce political change. The model is South African anti-apartheid activism. The audience is reassured that they are doing important historical work analogous to the work that ended apartheid. The ray of light Sfard offers is the growth of international civil society pressure on Israel.
What Sfard does not address is whether the international civil society pressure is moving in directions that serve Palestinian or Israeli wellbeing or whether it is producing different effects. Some of the pressure has produced campus encampments featuring chants for Palestinian liberation that, taken seriously, mean Israeli Jewish elimination. Some of the pressure has produced harassment of diaspora Jews. Some has produced the kind of moral confusion in which October 7 atrocities are celebrated by people calling themselves anti-imperialist. Sfard acknowledges these phenomena briefly and dismisses them as exploitation of the just cause. He does not consider that the framework producing them might be the same framework he is operating in, with different members of the same coalition reaching different conclusions from shared premises.
Myers is fully a participant in this framework, both as a scholar and as a coalition figure. His presence as the host, the framing of the introduction, the questions he asks, the references he draws on, the way he positions Sfard for the audience, all of these confirm his coalition membership. The conversation is not a neutral intellectual exchange. It is a coalition event in which two figures inside the same framework reinforce each other and the framework for an audience inside the same framework. The reinforcement is competent and well-presented. It is also the operation we have been describing throughout this conversation, namely the production of coalition consensus through the deployment of intellectual authority for political purposes.
What the conversation does not do, what it cannot do given the framework, is engage seriously with the alternative views that exist within Israeli society, within the broader Jewish world, and within the actual political situation. The center-right Israeli majority that elected the current government, the religious Zionist communities that view their settlement as religiously significant, the Mizrahi Jews whose families were expelled from Arab countries and who view the conflict differently from European-descended Israeli leftists, the haredi communities whose relationship to the state is its own complex matter, the Palestinian voices that are not represented by Hamas and not represented by the Palestinian Authority either, the Sunni Arab states whose actual positions on the Palestinian question are more complex than the framework allows, the Iranian regime whose role in the conflict is structural rather than incidental. None of these enter the conversation in ways that would complicate the framework.
The framework is built for moral judgment of Israeli conduct from the standpoint of international human rights law. It is good at that. It is bad at the political analysis of the situation Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs are living in, with all of its constraints, threats, opportunities, and irreducible difficulties. The framework treats the political analysis as either solved by the moral judgment or as someone else’s problem.
The moral judgment without the political analysis produces calls for outcomes that ignore the conditions under which any outcome would have to be achieved. Palestinian independence would have to be implemented in conditions that include Hamas, the Palestinian Authority’s legitimacy crisis, Iran’s regional ambitions, the security situation Israeli Jews face, and the political views of Israeli Jewish voters. This does not engage the political conditions. So the moral conclusion remains the rhetorical satisfaction of a coalition that produces conferences and demonstrations and pressure campaigns, and the political situation continues to produce its own responses to its own conditions, often in directions the coalition deplores.
Interaction Rituals Chains by Randall Collins
Myers chairs boards, edits journals, runs initiatives, speaks at conferences, and teaches graduate students. Each of those activities is an interaction ritual producing emotional energy in participants. The graduate student who studies with Myers does not just acquire historical methods. He absorbs a particular way of being a Jewish intellectual, a set of charged symbols around pluralism, diaspora, and ethical history, and he carries that energy into his own career and teaching. The ideas travel not primarily through the books but through the ritual encounters the books make possible.
When progressive American Jews gather around Myers’ frameworks, they experience emotional energy. The encounter with binationalism, with with the argument that Jewish thought always contained more than what triumphed, produces real solidarity, real enthusiasm and real feeling of moral seriousness. Feeling part of a community that takes the past seriously and refuses easy nationalism is energy that the interaction ritual generates and distributes.
Post-October 7, the interaction rituals sustaining progressive Jewish liberalism came under severe strain. The shared focus fractured. Emotional energy drained. The charged symbols, pluralism, dialogue, applied history, historical complexity, lost some of their capacity to generate solidarity because the encounters in which they were reproduced became contested rather than reinforcing. Myers’ public writing in that period reads partly as an attempt to repair damaged interaction rituals, to restore shared focus and recharge the symbols his coalition depends on.
The truths that would cost Myers his status are not just politically inconvenient conclusions. They are ritual pollutants. To say that liberal Jewish pluralism is a consoling diaspora narrative, or that applied history is advocacy with footnotes, would not merely anger his coalition. It would destroy the emotional energy the interaction rituals produce. It would drain the encounter of its sacred charge.
Stephen Turner’s Tacit Knowledge Framework
Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi opens Zakhor by mourning a rupture. Memory, the living transmission that bound Jewish generations, has given way to history, the critical reconstruction performed by scholars who stand outside the chain. Myers absorbs the diagnosis but rejects the elegy. Across his career he tries to show that critical history, done well, can supply something like what memory once supplied. Stephen Turner’s work on tacit knowledge denies him the social ontology that move requires.
Turner’s argument is not that tradition lacks reality. His argument is that what gets called tradition has no transmitted substance. The continuity Yerushalmi mourns and Myers tries to repair was always a distribution of similarly trained individuals producing similar responses to similar materials, held in alignment by repeated exposure to common environments, common rituals, common signals. Once those environments dispersed, the alignment dispersed with them. No critical history can rebuild the alignment because critical history travels as proposition, and proposition cannot do what conditions did.
In 1992 Myers wrote a super-commentary on the Yerushalmi-Funkenstein exchange that frames the rest of his career. Yerushalmi placed memory and history in opposition. Amos Funkenstein introduced “historical consciousness” as a mediating term, a continuous capacity that linked pre-modern liturgy and modern scholarship. Myers sided with Funkenstein and pushed for the work Funkenstein had not done, the work of showing what the continuous consciousness consists of.
Turner removes the ground for that work. There is no continuous historical consciousness. There are people trained to handle the past in particular ways, and the training conditions change over time. The medieval Jew who recites Eichah on the ninth of Av and the modern historian who reads Eichah as a literary artifact are not exhibiting different stages of the same consciousness. They are products of different formation regimes. The first is held in a community whose ritual calendar inscribes the destruction of the temples into bodily life. The second sits in a seminar room. The continuity Myers wants to anchor in historical consciousness names what scholars perform when they organize the past for their own coalition. The substance never existed.
Re-Inventing the Jewish Past examines the Hebrew University historians of the interwar period who used European historicist methods to construct a Jewish national past. Myers treats their project with sympathy. They were aware of the constructed character of national history and tried to do it with discipline. Turner sharpens what they accomplished. They produced a cohort of similarly trained scholars, formed in similar institutions, reading similar archives with similar protocols, and calling the result a recovered national consciousness. The cohort was real. The training conditions were real. The continuity with prior Jewish self-understanding was not.
What looked like recovery was production of a new tacit formation organized around the institutional logic of the modern research university and the political logic of Zionist state-building. The continuity narrative was retrospective stitching. Myers’s subjects took diverse and incompatible Jewish materials, selected what served the national project, smoothed the edges, and presented the result as recovered consciousness. The stitching was good scholarly work. It was not transmission.
Myers performs the same stitching one level up. He gathers Dinur, Baron, Klausner, Halkin, and the rest into a coherent generation with a shared project. They were not a coherent generation. They had bitter disputes about method, scope, and political alignment. Myers organizes them the way they organized their sources. The reader receives a Hebrew University historiographical movement with a discernible character. What existed was a set of men with overlapping training, divergent commitments, and institutional dependencies that pushed them toward similar outputs without producing similar minds.
Resisting History tracks German-Jewish thinkers who pushed back against the historicizing tendency Myers had earlier described. Rosenzweig, Strauss, Breuer, the Krochmal-influenced thinkers all produced bodies of work that resist reduction to historical context. Myers wants to honor their resistance without endorsing it as anti-modern reaction.
Turner’s tacit framework cuts harder than I acknowledged in the first draft. Tacit knowledge is a site of fracture. The thinkers Myers groups did not share a Jewish tacit knowledge that grounded their resistance. They did not even share a framework while disagreeing within it. Their unstated assumptions diverged at the foundations. Strauss read Maimonides through a German philosophical apparatus that no medieval reader had and that Rosenzweig did not share. Rosenzweig wrote out of an experiential crisis processed in Hegelian categories that Strauss found suspect and Breuer would not have recognized as Jewish thinking. Breuer’s neo-Orthodoxy depended on a Frankfurt institutional setting and a halakhic seriousness that Hermann Cohen treated as parochial. Cohen’s ethical monotheism, in turn, looked to Strauss like a Kantian Judaism that had given the game away.
These men did not understand each other. The points of incomprehension between them were as constitutive of their work as the points of agreement. They wrote past one another, citing common sources to incompatible ends. What looks like a tradition of resistance is a set of formation accidents that produced individuals whose written outputs could be grouped after the fact by a scholar willing to do the curatorial labor.
Myers does the labor. He selects which figures count as German-Jewish discontents. He decides which writings stand for their resistance. He smooths the incompatibilities so that a reader can hold the group in mind as a current. The current does not exist outside Myers’s organization of it. All historiography constructs its objects. The point Turner forces is that Myers’s project depends on the constructed continuity reading as a recovered object, because the applied work he wants to do, the transmission of historical insight to present coalition fights, requires that there be something to transmit.
The Rawidowicz recovery shows the same pattern. Myers brings Simon Rawidowicz back into the conversation as the major theorist of non-statist Zionism, the diasporist whose Hebrew nationalism did not require sovereignty. The recovery serves a present coalition. It licenses American Jewish liberal critique of Israeli statism without anti-Zionist commitments. Myers can position himself as a scholar reopening a closed argument rather than a partisan attacking a present arrangement.
Turner asks where the Rawidowicz position came from in the first place. Rawidowicz was formed in interwar Eastern European Jewish life, in a Hebraist intellectual culture that took for granted the linguistic, communal, and textual density of a population numbering in the millions and concentrated in towns where Yiddish carried daily life and Hebrew carried scholarship. That formation produced the man and the position. The formation no longer exists. The towns are gone. The communal density is gone. The linguistic environment is gone. Rawidowicz’s position is the output of a training that the Holocaust ended. No institutional choice in the present can reproduce the formation. The position can be cited, taught, even revived as a slogan. The judgment that gave the position its weight in Rawidowicz’s hands cannot accompany the citation. Myers’s policy-adjacent readers receive the conclusions without the formation that made the conclusions credible to their author.
The same problem haunts Myers’s reading of the Gerson Cohen address. Cohen argued in 1966 that Jewish survival depended on assimilating external forms while preserving an inner core. Myers organized a JQR forum to honor the address fifty years later. Turner reads the Cohen thesis as a coalition narrative produced by a JTS chancellor describing the position his institution embodied, with the Conservative movement as the historically accurate carrier of healthy assimilation and Orthodoxy coded as fossilized. The fifty years since have shown Conservative Judaism declining sharply and Orthodoxy growing. The framework misidentified what reproduces a community. Reproduction depends on formation conditions, and the Orthodox communities Cohen coded as fossilized had the conditions while the Conservative movement was building institutions that could not produce the next generation in similar form.
American Shtetl presents the case that vindicates Turner most uncomfortably for Myers. Kiryas Joel sustains itself because it controls the conditions that produce the next generation of Satmar Hasidim. The community does not transmit Satmar identity through argument. It produces Satmar identity through exhaustive control of children’s environments, language, schooling, marriage, work, dress, and ritual rhythm. Myers documents this with care and some ambivalence. The Satmar achievement contradicts the liberal pluralist Jewish formation Myers prefers. It also confirms his analytical framework. Formation requires conditions. Argument cannot substitute for conditions.
The pluralist alternative Myers wants to defend faces the reproduction problem his own analysis identifies. Liberal Jewish institutional life produces conferences, books, applied history initiatives, Shalom Hartman fellowships, philanthropic programs. It does not produce the next generation of similarly formed individuals. The children of liberal Jewish institutional figures often leave Jewish life or assimilate into ambient American culture without distinct Jewish formation. The grandchildren rarely return. Kiryas Joel produces the next generation by controlling the conditions. The pluralist alternative has nothing comparable. Argument and institutional engagement cannot substitute for formation conditions, and Myers knows this in American Shtetl even as the rest of his project depends on the substitution holding.
Myers’s applied history initiative at the UCLA Luskin Center exposes the same gap. The premise of applied history is that scholarly historical judgment can travel from the archive to the policy-maker and improve outcomes. Turner is skeptical of every claim of this form. Tacit historical judgment, the trained capacity to read a present situation through accumulated archival exposure, does not move through summary or argument. What moves is content. The judgment stays with the formed scholar. The policy-maker receives the conclusion without the trained capacity that made the conclusion credible. The conclusion then circulates as ammunition in policy fights, taking on a life that has nothing to do with historical understanding.
Myers might reply that even this circulation is an improvement over policy made without historical input. Turner’s point is that the circulation does not transmit history. It transmits historical-sounding propositions that participants on all sides will deploy as needed. Applied history does not extend the historian’s judgment outward. It produces documents that policy actors use the way they use any other document, in service of coalition aims they brought to the encounter.
Myers is a custodian of a particular formation, a scholarly-political stance that emerged in postwar American Jewish institutional conditions, and that has produced an accomplished practitioner. The custody is real. The work is serious. The continuity claims that license the work, the implication that the work transmits or revives a tradition, do not survive the critique. The traditions Myers narrates are the products of his stitching as much as of any prior coherence in their materials. The community of similarly formed scholars who can hear the stitching as recovery is the community whose conditions are now in question.
What remains is the work as a record of the formation that produced it. Myers writes well, reads carefully, organizes intelligently, and serves a coalition whose interests he understands. That is a great deal. It is not the recovery of Jewish memory that Yerushalmi mourned. It is the output of one man trained in particular conditions, doing what those conditions trained him to do, while the conditions themselves slip out from under the next generation.
Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity
Myers works at the intersection of several competing trauma constructions. The Holocaust functions in his intellectual world as the paradigmatic case of successful trauma construction, the event that reorganized modern Jewish identity, created new obligations, and established new boundaries around what Jewish collective life must protect and commemorate. Yerushalmi’s Zakhor is partly a response to that construction, an attempt to ask what relationship critical historical consciousness can have to a past whose traumatic weight now dominates Jewish memory. Myers inherits that question and tries to answer it without either instrumentalizing the trauma or being paralyzed by it.
But Alexander’s framework reveals a tension in Myers’ project that runs deeper than Myers acknowledges. The carrier groups that construct and maintain trauma narratives require the trauma to remain foundationally destabilizing. Its power depends on its wound remaining open. Myers’ applied history initiative, his pluralism, his recovery of lost alternatives, all work toward what Alexander would call routinization, the process by which trauma is absorbed into stable institutional frameworks and loses its raw social force. Myers wants the Holocaust and other Jewish historical wounds to inform ethical practice and policy without becoming either propaganda or paralysis. Alexander would say that is a very difficult position to occupy because the social uses of trauma pull in the opposite direction. Carrier groups need the wound fresh. Routinization serves stability but weakens the trauma’s capacity to generate solidarity and enforce boundaries.
This explains something about Myers’ public role post-October 7 that Collins alone cannot fully account for. The event reactivated trauma construction at a massive scale across multiple competing carrier groups simultaneously. Each group claimed the event as a wound to its collective identity, each demanded recognition of its claim as prior and more fundamental, and each used the trauma framework to enforce new boundaries and delegitimize competing claims. Myers found himself inside that competition without a stable position from which to adjudicate it. His pluralism and his applied history were calibrated for a lower-intensity environment where the trauma constructions were more settled. When trauma construction intensifies and competing carrier groups harden their claims, the middle ground does not become more valuable. It becomes uninhabitable.
Myers presents the binational alternative Rawidowicz imagined as a lost political option that history foreclosed prematurely. Alexander would ask what trauma narrative foreclosed it. The answer is that the Holocaust trauma construction, as it solidified in the 1950s and 1960s, made the sovereign state feel not like one option among several but like the only adequate response to demonstrated vulnerability. Diaspora nationalism and binational arrangements looked, in the light of that trauma construction, like the political naivety that had failed to protect Jews when protection was most needed. Myers recovers Rawidowicz as an intellectual exercise. Alexander explains why the recovery cannot achieve political traction.
Every use of historical suffering in present discourse is a move within a trauma construction competition. There is no view from outside that competition available to the historian who enters public discourse. When Myers invokes historical Jewish suffering to argue for pluralism and against exclusive nationalism, he participates in the one that reads Jewish historical experience as generating obligations toward universalism, minority rights, and democratic pluralism rather than toward sovereign self-protection. That construction is as socially produced as the one it opposes.
Watergate as Democratic Ritual
Myers writes for a Jewish institutional world that contains two competing civic religions sharing many of the same sacred symbols. The first centers on the survival of the Jewish people, the Holocaust as foundational trauma, and the Israeli state as the answer to two thousand years of Jewish vulnerability. Its sacred figures include David Ben-Gurion, the Israeli soldier, the Zionist thinkers from Herzl through Jabotinsky to the religious-nationalist rabbis of the settlement movement. Its priests are the federation officials, AIPAC organizers, Orthodox rabbis aligned with the Israeli right, and the historians and political theorists who guard the founding narrative.
The second civic religion centers on Jewish ethical universalism, the prophetic tradition, the lessons of exile, and the application of Jewish moral memory to the protection of all vulnerable peoples. Its sacred figures include Hillel, Maimonides, Hermann Cohen, Hannah Arendt, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Martin Luther King walking with Heschel at Selma, and a particular reading of Simon Rawidowicz on diaspora nationhood. Its priests are the liberal rabbis of the Reform and Conservative movements, the social-justice professionals at HIAS and T’ruah, the academic historians of the diasporic tradition, and the donor class supporting the New Israel Fund and J Street.
Both civic religions claim continuity with traditional Judaism. Both treat their version as the authentic one. Both treat the other version as either a partial truth needing correction or, in sharper moments, as a polluting deviation. The institutional center where Myers works contains both. The Center for Jewish History, the major Jewish studies departments, the federation system, the rabbinical seminaries, and the Jewish press all sit at the contested boundary.
Myers is a priest of the second civic religion who insists on continued recognition by the first. His scholarly credentials, his Tel Aviv training under Anita Shapira, his Harvard year with Twersky, his Columbia work with Yerushalmi, position him inside the institutional center the first civic religion controls. His New Israel Fund presidency, his Jewish Voice for Peace sympathies, his recovery of Rawidowicz, place him in the second. The career sits on the seam.
The fight over Myers’s appointment to the Center for Jewish History reads as a textbook Alexander case. The Zionist Organization of America, the Middle East Forum, and Israeli political figures attempted ritual purification. They tried to declare Myers polluting and to use the declaration to remove him from a structurally central position.
The structure of the attack matches Alexander’s pollution-transfer logic. The argument was not that Myers was incompetent or that his scholarship was poor. The argument was that his contacts with NIF and his sympathies for JVP fellows had transmitted pollution to him, and that his presence at the center of the Jewish institutional world would transmit the pollution further. The remedy was separation. Remove him from the position. Mark the boundaries of legitimate Jewish institutional leadership. Reaffirm the sacred frame of the first civic religion through a public expulsion ritual.
The defense was a counter-ritual. Jonathan Sarna, David Ellenson, and hundreds of Jewish historians signed letters certifying Myers as a member in good standing. The defense did not argue that Myers’s Israel positions were correct. It argued that he stood within the sacred center, that his work was legitimate scholarship, that his positions sat within the boundaries of acceptable internal Jewish argument. The signatures performed boundary maintenance. They certified the second civic religion’s claim to continued recognition by the first.
Myers stayed about a year and returned to UCLA. The episode resolved nothing. It revealed the fault line. Both rituals worked for their respective audiences. Neither succeeded in expelling the other from the institutional center. The contested boundary remained contested.
Alexander’s most useful concept for Myers might be the cooling-out attempt the Nixon administration ran. The administration tried to keep Watergate at the level of ordinary politics, the technical rationality of campaign operations, the reasonable behavior of administration officials acting as anyone might act. The cooling out failed because the symbolic context overran it.
Myers spends much of his public career on a particular cooling-out operation directed at the first civic religion. He wants Israeli government policy read at the level of ordinary politics, contestable, criticizable, subject to standard tools of historical and political analysis. He resists the generalization upward the right-Zionist coalition demands, where criticism of Israeli policy gets framed as sacred violation, betrayal of the Jewish people, contact with antisemitic enemies. The cooling out has worked for some audiences and failed for others.
The reversal worth noting: Myers performs the inverse generalization upward at a different point. The occupation, settler violence, the judicial overhaul, the silencing of Israeli internal critics, the Gaza casualties, all of these he treats as sacred violations. He wants them read at the civic-religious level, where they register as betrayals of Jewish moral tradition, threats to the soul of Judaism, corrosions of the prophetic legacy. He performs the upward move toward the second civic religion’s sacred values while resisting the upward move toward the first civic religion’s sacred values.
Every priest of a contested civic religion performs both moves. The skill of the work shows in which generalizations succeed for which audiences and which cooling-out operations succeed for which audiences. Myers is skilled. His audience reads his upward generalizations toward Jewish ethical universalism as faithful prophetic witness. The same audience reads his cooling-out operations on Israeli government criticism as careful scholarship. The right-Zionist audience reads both moves as enemy work performed in academic clothing.
Alexander’s five conditions for civil renewal map onto the post-October 7 fight over American Jewish civic identity. Both sides are racing to satisfy the conditions on their own terms.
Consensus that something polluting has happened. The first civic religion locates the pollution in October 7 itself, in Hamas, in the Iranian regime, and in the campus and progressive coalitions that fail to condemn the pollution sharply enough. The second civic religion locates the pollution in the Israeli government response, in the Gaza casualty count, in the judicial overhaul, in settler violence, and in the silencing of Israeli human rights organizations. Each side has produced massive consensus within its own audience.
The first reads threat from Hamas axis attacks, from American campus antisemitism, from the progressive coalition’s tolerance of anti-Zionist rhetoric. The second reads threat from Israeli democratic backsliding, from American Jewish institutional capture by the right, from the use of antisemitism charges to silence legitimate criticism.
Activation of social controls. The first has activated anti-BDS legislation, Title VI complaints, university discipline of pro-Palestinian protesters, donor pressure on universities, congressional hearings. The second has activated Jewish institutional procedures, scholarly professional norms, NIF and J Street advocacy, and the slow internal pressure of donor disagreement.
Both sides are mobilized. The right has the ZOA, Heritage Foundation antisemitism work, AIPAC, the Republican Jewish Coalition, the Israel-aligned donor class, the Orthodox political organizations. The Myers coalition has NIF, J Street, Americans for Peace Now, T’ruah, the academic Association for Jewish Studies, and the UCLA-style civic-religious institutes.
Each side performs its own rituals of purification. The right has Title VI rituals against universities, public denunciations of academics who sign open letters, donor withdrawal ceremonies. Myers’s coalition performs scholarly statements, op-eds in Jewish papers, conference resolutions, and the slow ritual machinery of academic professional bodies.
The fight has not resolved. Alexander’s framework predicts it will not resolve through argument. The fight is over whose ritual machinery successfully performs the generalization upward. Whichever civic religion succeeds in placing the other’s positions in the polluted category for the working majority of the institutional center will win the period. Neither has succeeded yet.
Myers’s UCLA institutional building since 2018 reads through Alexander as the construction of ritual architecture for the second civic religion. The Luskin Center for History and Policy, the Bedari Kindness Institute, the UCLA Initiative to Study Hate, the Dialogue Across Difference Initiative are not primarily research operations measured by scholarly output. They are ritual sites. They perform the civic-religious work of certifying kindness, dialogue, and pluralism as sacred values, of marking hate as polluting, of providing institutional space where the boundaries get redrawn under academic authority.
Alexander helps clarifies what otherwise seems puzzling about these projects. Their empirical productivity is modest by social-science standards. Their funding sources are private foundations rather than the major federal grants that mark research-heavy social science. Their public output runs heavily to op-eds, panels, and convenings rather than peer-reviewed publication.
Myers’s role matches the priestly position Alexander locates in his Watergate senators. The credentialed insider performs civic-religious work outside the ordinary register of his discipline. The work depends for its authority on credentials accumulated for a different purpose. The senators’ authority for the priestly role came from their political tenure, not from theological training. Myers’s authority for the kindness role comes from his scholarly tenure, not from training in ethics or peace studies. The borrowed authority is the point. The civic religion needs its priests to come dressed in the certifying credentials of the larger institutional center.
Rawidowicz argued for Jewish nationhood without territorial sovereignty, for the Hebrew language as carrier of peoplehood, for the diaspora as a permanent and legitimate condition rather than a way station to statehood. Myers presents the recovery as an epistemic intervention. Here is a voice that was not heard. Here is an option foreclosed too quickly. Restoring it to the archive of Jewish political thought might reopen what closed prematurely.
The people who closed it were not ignorant. The Zionist mainstream understood diaspora nationalism and binational alternatives clearly enough to reject them on grounds that had nothing to do with insufficient exposure to the arguments. They rejected them because sovereign statehood, particularly after the Holocaust trauma construction solidified, answered a need that no amount of sophisticated diasporic theorizing could address. The recovery is also selective. Other diaspora nationalists existed. Dubnow, the Bundists, Ahad Ha’am in his anti-political moments. Myers chooses Rawidowicz because Rawidowicz serves the contemporary coalition that needs intellectual ancestors who were both serious Jewish thinkers and not Zionist.
The Stakes of History runs the same operation at the methodological level. The book argues that history can be used ethically, that the boundary between usable past and propaganda can be maintained by a scrupulous historian, and that getting this right shapes Jewish communal life and Israeli democracy. The implicit audience is people who have been using history badly, instrumentalizing it for nationalist purposes, allowing memory to overwhelm critical judgment. The book addresses them as people who might be corrected by a better account of what history is for. Pinsof’s frame says that audience will not be corrected because their use of history is not a mistake. It is coalition service. The nationalist who mobilizes a selective past is not confused about the proper relationship between history and memory. He does what his coalition needs him to do, and a sophisticated epistemological argument about the ethics of historiography will not alter that because it addresses the wrong level of causation.
The Luskin Center for History and Policy makes the misunderstanding myth an institutional commitment. The center rests on the premise that policy makers who understood the relevant historical causal chains might make better decisions, that the gap between historical knowledge and policy practice is a problem of transmission rather than a problem of competing interests. Stephen Turner’s tacit knowledge framework already puts pressure on the transmission assumption. Pinsof’s misunderstanding myth puts pressure on the interest assumption. Policy is the exercise of power among coalitions with conflicting material and symbolic stakes. A better historical argument does not dissolve those stakes. It becomes ammunition for whichever coalition finds it useful and is ignored by the coalitions that do not.
The Initiative to Study Hate compresses the misunderstanding myth into a category. Calling intergroup competition “hate” converts a structural conflict into a psychological pathology. Once the conflict is a pathology, the intellectual becomes the treating physician. The funding follows. The research agenda follows. The toolkits and rapid-response infrastructure follow. There is no neutral study of hate because the framing presupposes the conclusion. The category is the move. Students who sort ideologically, faculty who view rival coalitions as threats, communities that derogate competing groups, all become subjects of an explanatory frame that locates the trouble in their cognition rather than in their accurate perception of conflicting interests.
The Initiative to Study Hate sits inside the Bedari Kindness Institute. Kindness is not a neutral virtue in elite American academia. It marks coalition membership in the therapeutic-progressive sector against the perceived hardness of nationalist and traditionalist rivals. The Compassionate Conversations programming, the speaker series featuring the Parents Circle, the framing of social conflict as a kindness deficit, all convert coalition signaling into infrastructure. The setup names the rivals without naming them. To object to kindness is to mark oneself as cruel. To question the dialogue frame is to mark oneself as closed.
Myers chairs the board of the New Israel Fund. The fund supports a particular cluster of Israeli civil society organizations associated with a particular political position within Israel. The board chairmanship is a coordinating role within a coalition that has positions, donors, and rivals. His scholarly emphases on diaspora legitimacy, on the constructed character of Zionist exclusivity, on the ethical use of history against nationalist mobilization, track the coalition’s positions. The misunderstanding myth lets the alignment present as coincidence. The coordination presents as scholarly conviction that happens to align with institutional commitment. Pinsof’s frame collapses the distance.
The Center for Jewish History episode tested whether the misunderstanding myth could absorb critique. Myers’ tenure there ended in controversy over his perceived political positioning. Critics argued that his liberal commitments shaped institutional decisions, that the center under his leadership tilted toward a particular vision of American Jewish identity. The standard liberal account treats this controversy as a misunderstanding driven by right-wing bad faith. The critics did not understand what the center was for. The critics were operating in bad faith. The critics were importing political conflict into a scholarly institution. Pinsof’s frame says the critics understood correctly. They saw a coalition operator and named him as one. The misunderstanding myth was deployed against their accurate perception, casting it as ignorance or malice.
The post-October 7 writing shows the structure plainly. Myers writes as though the Israeli government and its supporters are making errors that clearer historical and ethical argument might correct, that the slide toward illiberalism reflects a failure of understanding that scholarship and public discourse might address. Pinsof might say the people Myers addresses understand the situation as well as he does and have concluded differently because their coalition calculus differs from his. The settlers, the religious Zionist coalition, the voters who support the current government, are not waiting for a more sophisticated account of Jewish historical pluralism. They have weighed the options and chosen. The choice reflects interests, fears, and trauma constructions that Myers’ historical argument does not touch.
Pinsof gives an account of why Myers cannot fully accept this. To accept it is to accept that his life’s work, the recovery of lost alternatives, the ethical application of history, the cultivation of a morally serious pluralism, operates primarily as coalition vocabulary for American Jewish liberals rather than as a truth-seeking enterprise that might change outcomes through persuasion. That conclusion is available to him. He has the analytical tools to reach it. The cost of reaching it is the deflation of the project that sustains him. UCLA, the New Israel Fund, the Luskin Center, the Bedari Kindness Institute, the Los Angeles Times op-ed page, the elite Jewish Studies network from The Center for Jewish History to the donor class that funds applied history at major universities, all rest on the premise that understanding moves outcomes. Natural selection designed us to not pay the cost of seeing through that premise. The misunderstanding myth is the cognitive technology that makes not paying it feel like epistemic responsibility.
Myers’ own scholarship on the Hebrew University historians makes the same point about other people. He shows that those scholars believed they were doing science when they were doing nation-building, that their commitment to European historicist methods coexisted with a project of collective self-fashioning they could not acknowledge.
Re-Inventing the Jewish Past (1995) does to the Hebrew University founders what Pinsof says cannot be done from inside the misunderstanding myth: it names their nation-building project as a project, not as scholarship that miscarried. Dinur, Baer, Klausner believed they were doing science. Myers shows they were also serving a coalition that needed a usable past. The book is Myers’ sharpest application of coalition analysis to other scholars. He sees in 1995 what Pinsof would later argue applies to all of us, that the moral vocabulary of disinterested inquiry coexists with, and often masks, coalition service. The asymmetry is that Myers applies the analysis to a generation safely dead. The Jerusalem School is a permitted target. American Jewish liberal scholarship of his own moment is not.
Resisting History (2003) intensifies the asymmetry. Cohen, Rosenzweig, Strauss, Breuer resist historicism on grounds Myers takes seriously. Each protects a domain from historicist colonization. Cohen protects neo-Kantian ethics. Rosenzweig protects revelation. Strauss protects pre-modern political philosophy. Breuer protects Halakhic existence. Myers acknowledges that he cannot escape the historicist mode that defines his professional being. He names the predicament. He does not resolve it. Pinsof would say the predicament is the misunderstanding myth in its philosophical register. The four resisters identified a problem, that historicism dissolves the conditions that produce moral seriousness. Myers grants the problem and continues to operate as a historicist. The continued operation requires a story about why one can have it both ways. The story is that a sufficiently scrupulous, ethically attuned historian can do critical history without dissolving what critical history dissolves. Pinsof would call that story the misunderstanding myth in its most refined form. Resistance to historicism is real, the costs of historicism are real, and yet the practice can continue because the practitioner understands the problem. Understanding is the warrant for continuing. The resisters are recovered as ancestors who saw the problem clearly. Myers writes from a position that says, in effect, I see what they saw, and yet.
Between Jew and Arab (2008) tightens the screw. Rawidowicz wrote a sympathetic essay on Palestinian refugees and removed it from Bavel vi-Yerushalayim under Israeli state-building pressure. Myers recovers the suppressed essay. The recovery presents itself as scholarly, a textual reconstruction of what Rawidowicz thought. It is also a coalition move. Rawidowicz suppressed the essay because his coalition position required suppression. Myers publishes the essay because his coalition position requires publication. Both moves are coalition service. This is what intellectual work looks like when you stop pretending coalition service is incidental to scholarship. Myers’ frame says the suppression was a mistake Rawidowicz made under pressure, and the recovery corrects the mistake. The frame requires the asymmetric premise that suppression is coalition service while recovery is truth-telling.
The Stakes of History (2018) is the methodological capstone of the misunderstanding myth. Myers argues that the historian can mediate between memory and history, between communal need and critical distance, between the past as resource and the past as fact. The book addresses people who have been doing this badly, instrumentalizing memory, weaponizing history, allowing communal need to overwhelm critical judgment. Pinsof’s frame says the people Myers addresses are not doing it badly. They are doing what their coalitions need them to do. The book proposes a balance the misunderstanding myth requires us to believe is achievable, scrupulous use of the past for present purposes that does not collapse into propaganda. The use of the past is coalition service all the way down. The category “ethical use” is itself a coalition vocabulary deployed by people whose coalition rewards them for sounding ethical. Myers internalizes the vocabulary. The vocabulary does the coalition work the misunderstanding myth requires it to do.
Myers shows that Scholem constructed a narrative of Wissenschaft neglect that served Scholem’s scholarly-political purposes despite Scholem’s knowledge of contrary evidence. Adolphe Franck, Landauer, Jellinek, Joel, Bendavid, Molitor, all of them engaged Kabbalah seriously in the nineteenth century. Scholem minimized them to cast himself as the heroic rescuer. Myers names this. He stops short of the harshest possible formulation but the argument supports it.
Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction (2017) compresses the periodization that runs across the corpus. The narrative moves from rigid Zionist closure through resistant German-Jewish alternatives through American Jewish critical recovery to the moment of liberal Zionist self-criticism in which Myers writes. The shape of the periodization is the misunderstanding myth at the level of historical narrative. Earlier generations got it wrong because they did not have the critical distance Myers’ generation has. The wrongness is cognitive. The corrective is improved understanding. Pinsof’s frame says earlier generations did not have a coalition problem they failed to solve. They had different coalition needs that produced different historiographical outputs.
American Shtetl (2022) is the strongest case for the misunderstanding myth’s limits showing up inside the work itself. Myers and Stolzenberg document a community that succeeds at exactly what the misunderstanding myth says is unnecessary. Kiryas Joel transmits a way of life by controlling environments, not by improving understanding. The Satmar do not produce loyal members by recovering lost alternatives or by ethical applied history. They produce loyal members by enclosure. The book documents this with evident scholarly fascination. The conclusion the documentation supports is that the conditions for transmitting a tradition are not cognitive but social and material. Myers does not draw the conclusion. The conclusion would deflate his applied history project, his pluralism, his recovery of lost alternatives. Pinsof predicts exactly this stopping short. Natural selection designed us not to draw conclusions that dissolve the projects that sustain us.
The Yerushalmi inheritance is the line that runs through all of it. Yerushalmi argued that critical history broke the link between Jewish people and Jewish memory and that the break could not be repaired. Myers argues throughout his career that the break can be repaired by sufficiently ethical, sufficiently pluralist, sufficiently institutionally engaged historical practice. The argument requires the misunderstanding myth as its enabling premise. If the break is structural, as Yerushalmi suggested and as Pinsof’s coalition theory implies, no amount of careful practice repairs it. Myers’ applied history initiative is the premise made institutional. The Luskin Center exists because Myers believes the break can be repaired. Pinsof says the break cannot be repaired because it is not a misunderstanding. It is the dispersal of the conditions that produced what looked like shared Jewish memory. Conditions cannot be argued back into existence.
The pattern across the corpus is consistent. Myers applies coalition analysis to figures distant enough not to threaten his project, the Jerusalem School, the German-Jewish resisters of historicism, Scholem on Kabbalah, Rawidowicz under state-building pressure, the Satmar managing American legal architecture. The closer the figure gets to Myers’ own coalition, the more the analysis softens. American Jewish liberal scholarship is the ground on which he stands and from which he sees. The misunderstanding myth is what lets him not turn the analytical apparatus on the ground.
Myers does not have the mass charisma of a public performer or a political leader. He has the charisma of the credentialed mediator, the person who appears to have solved the problem of how to be a serious Jewish intellectual in America without either surrendering critical judgment to nationalist loyalty or abandoning communal identity to detached universalism. That problem is real and felt acutely by his primary audience, the educated American Jews who are alienated from Israeli policy, uncomfortable with both uncritical Zionism and anti-Zionist activism, and in need of a framework that honors complexity without requiring them to abandon their Jewish identification. Myers embodies a solution to that problem. His career, his archival seriousness, his pluralism, his institutional leadership, all signal that the solution is livable, that someone has built a life on it and made it work.
This charisma depends on the problem remaining the kind of problem that the mediating intellectual can appear to solve. When the problem shifts from one of interpretation and framing to one of raw political survival and coalition warfare, the credentialed mediator’s embodied solution stops looking like a solution and starts looking like a luxury. October 7 and its aftermath accelerated exactly that shift. The problem for American Jews stopped being how to think about Zionism with appropriate complexity and became how to act under conditions of intense social pressure, communal fracture, and threat. Myers’ kind of charisma was calibrated for the former problem. The latter problem calls for a different kind of figure, one who offers not complexity but clarity, not mediation but solidarity. His public presence in that period registers the strain of a charismatic attribution losing its conditions of possibility.
The social paradoxes paper adds a different layer. Pinsof’s argument there is that the features of human psychology that make cooperation possible also make it systematically self-defeating at scale. We are designed to cooperate within coalitions and to defect against outsiders, to signal virtue to coalition members and to attribute vice to opponents, and to believe sincerely in the moral vocabularies that serve these functions. The paradox is that the same capacities that allow us to build the cooperative institutions we depend on also generate the conflicts that threaten those institutions, and that no amount of good faith reasoning can escape this because the reasoning is shaped by the coalition logic it would need to transcend to see clearly.
Applied to Myers, the social paradoxes paper explains why his project faces a ceiling that his own framework cannot identify. He wants history to serve as a resource for what he calls ethical and democratic life, a way of expanding the range of considerations available to people making decisions about collective futures. But the social paradoxes paper says the people receiving that historical resource will process it through coalition logic regardless of how carefully Myers has calibrated its ethical intentions. The binational arguments, the pluralist frameworks, the recovered alternatives, enter a cognitive environment already structured by group loyalty, threat perception, and motivated reasoning. They do not expand that environment. They get sorted into it. The American Jewish liberal who reads Myers finds confirmation of a position already held. The Israeli nationalist who encounters him finds confirmation of a threat already perceived. Neither is changed by the encounter in the way Myers’ applied history model requires.
The deeper implication of the social paradoxes paper for Myers is about the structural impossibility of the position he occupies. He wants to stand for intellectual honesty against coalition capture, for archival complexity against motivated simplification, for ethical use of history against propaganda. The paper says that position is a coalition position with its own moral vocabulary, its own boundary enforcement, and its own motivated reasoning about who counts as a serious interlocutor. The commitment to complexity is a value held with the same coalition loyalty that the commitment to nationalist simplicity is held on the other side. Myers experiences his commitment as epistemically justified. Pinsof says that experience is what coalition membership always feels like from the inside.
Myers has spent his career arguing that Jewish political thought contains more possibilities than the ones that triumphed, that foreclosed options deserve recovery, that the archive is richer than the dominant narrative allows. That argument requires an audience willing to consider alternatives. But the social paradoxes paper says the conditions under which audiences become willing to consider alternatives are precisely the conditions under which the existing coalition logic is under stress, which are also the conditions under which people retreat further into coalition loyalty rather than opening to complexity. Myers’ project is most needed when it is least receivable and most receivable when it is least needed.
The charisma essay explains why he matters to his audience in a way that goes beyond the content of his arguments. He embodies a solution to a problem they feel. The social paradoxes paper explains why that embodied solution cannot achieve what his applied history model claims for it. The solution is real as a coalition resource and as an identity anchor. His charisma organizes the people who already agree with him. The paradoxes paper explains why that is all it can do, and why that conclusion is one Myers, like all charismatic intellectual figures whose self-understanding depends on the misunderstanding myth, cannot absorb without dissolving the conditions of his own project.
David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory
Myers presents himself as someone who uses the archive to resist coalition capture, to recover complexity against motivated simplification, to hold open a space for honest historical judgment against the pressure of nationalist loyalty. Alliance Theory says that project is tribal work, and that its anti-coalition framing is the moral vocabulary that makes it effective coalition work for the audience it serves.
The coalition Myers serves is identifiable and its contours matter. It is the network of progressive American Jewish intellectuals, institutional leaders, policy-adjacent thinkers, and educated liberal Jews who need a framework for remaining connected to Jewish collective identity while dissenting from Israeli government policy and from the communal pressure to subordinate critical judgment to solidarity. That network has material infrastructure: the universities, the journals, the foundations, the cultural institutions that fund and platform the kind of work Myers produces. It has symbolic infrastructure: the moral vocabulary of pluralism, complexity, ethical history, and democratic values that distinguishes its members from both uncritical Zionists and anti-Zionist activists. And it has emotional infrastructure, in Collins’ sense, the conferences, the editorial boards, the graduate seminars, the public lectures that recharge its members’ sense of purpose and belonging.
Myers’ scholarship produces the primary intellectual vocabulary this coalition uses to understand itself. Re-Inventing the Jewish Past tells the coalition that Zionist historiography was always a construction, which means the current construction can be revised. Between Jew and Arab tells the coalition that alternatives to exclusive sovereignty were always available, which means their dissent from current Israeli policy is historically grounded rather than a betrayal of Jewish tradition. The Stakes of History tells the coalition that critical history and communal identity can coexist, which means they do not have to choose between Jewish belonging and intellectual honesty. American Shtetl tells the coalition that even the most apparently anti-modern Jewish community is a sophisticated modern actor, which means liberal engagement with Jewish diversity is analytically serious rather than naive. Each book solves a problem the coalition faces in maintaining its identity and justifying its position.
Rawidowicz serves the coalition because his binationalism and diaspora nationalism provide historical precedent for the positions the coalition currently holds. The Hebrew University historians serve the coalition because their story demonstrates that Zionism was always a construction subject to revision. Figures who would complicate the coalition’s self-understanding, thinkers whose archived positions cut against progressive Jewish liberalism rather than supplying its historical roots, do not receive the same recovery treatment. Coalition members develop scholarly interests that happen to align with coalition needs.
The New Israel Fund supports progressive Israeli civil society organizations, many of which work on issues, minority rights, judicial independence, and democratic norms, that align precisely with the moral vocabulary Myers’ scholarship deploys. His scholarship and his institutional affiliation are not merely consistent. They are expressions of the same coalition logic operating at different levels, one through the archive and one through direct funding. The coalition alignment shapes which questions get asked, which archives get opened, and which conclusions feel like intellectual honesty rather than motivated reasoning.
October 7 destabilized the coalition he serves by fracturing its consensus on what progressive Jewish liberalism requires. Some members of the coalition moved toward stronger solidarity with Israel under conditions of threat. Others moved toward sharper criticism of Israeli military conduct. The moral vocabulary that had held the coalition together, complexity, pluralism, ethical engagement, suddenly had to do more work than it was designed to do. Myers’ public writing in that period reflects the strain of trying to maintain coalition coherence through a vocabulary calibrated for lower-intensity disagreement. A coalition under existential stress will either harden around a more demanding loyalty test or fracture into sub-coalitions with competing vocabularies. The progressive Jewish intellectual network has done both.
Myers believes in pluralism, in the ethical use of history, in the recovery of lost alternatives, with the full force of conviction. That makes him a more effective coalition member than he would be if he held those positions strategically. The coalition he serves is strengthened by having members who have internalized its values so thoroughly that they experience them as intellectual discoveries rather than as group loyalties.
Myers Under Hugo Mercier and John M. Doris
Myers writes for several distinct audiences with different stakes. His scholarly work on German-Jewish intellectual history reaches a specialized academic audience of Jewish studies scholars and modern European intellectual historians. His more public-facing work on contemporary Jewish politics and Israeli-Palestinian questions reaches engaged American Jewish readers and the broader commentariat on these questions. His institutional positions at UCLA Center for Jewish Studies and in various liberal Jewish organizations reach funders, community members, and organizational colleagues.
The scholarly audience runs operational vigilance on Myers’s historical claims. His work on Rawidowicz, on German-Jewish approaches to Jewish history, on the historiographical tradition, face specialist readers who check archival claims, interpretive moves, and engagements with other scholarship. The work has been generally well-received within specialist communities, which is evidence that the empirical claims survive the operational checks that specialist readers apply. Myers’s scholarly reputation rests on this work surviving specialist vigilance, and the survival has been real.
The public audience on Israel-Palestine questions operates under different stakes structures. American Jewish readers engaging questions about Israeli politics have strong coalitional commitments that predate and shape their engagement with Myers’s arguments. Readers sympathetic to liberal Zionism and critical of Israeli right-wing politics find Myers’s public positions congenial. Readers committed to more defensive postures on Israel find his positions adversarial. Readers positioned to the left of liberal Zionism find his positions insufficiently critical of Zionism. None of these audiences are being persuaded by Myers’s arguments. Each is engaging his work through prior commitments that his arguments confirm or contest.
His public writing on Israel does not convert readers. It provides resources to readers whose prior commitments already align with his positions and faces resistance from readers whose commitments run the other way. The public writing operates as coalition infrastructure rather than as persuasion.
Myers’ public influence operates within his hero system coalitions. He contributes to the liberal Zionist coalition that supports organizations like the New Israel Fund, opposes Israeli right-wing policies, and argues for positions on Palestinian rights and Israeli democracy. His work provides intellectual resources to this coalition but does not shift readers in other coalitions. The coalition’s influence on American Jewish politics and on Israel-related policy depends on its own coalitional balance, which Myers’s work contributes to without transforming.
Take Myers’s institutional positions. He has directed the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies and has held various institutional positions within liberal American Jewish organizations. These positions operate under institutional stakes that discipline some behavior and give latitude on other behavior.
The UCLA position operates under academic stakes that disciplined his scholarly work. His claims faced operational checks. His institutional success at UCLA depended on maintaining scholarly reputation that the claims could sustain.
Myers’s scholarly credibility from his academic work does not transfer to authority on the political questions his public writing addresses. His expertise on nineteenth and twentieth century Jewish intellectual history is real and established. His positions on contemporary Israeli politics are informed by that expertise but are also shaped by the coalitional commitments his institutional positions serve. Readers who extend his scholarly credibility to his political positions are doing the standard reputation-on-credit operation that Mercier’s framework identifies as common but analytically unwarranted.
This does not mean Myers’s political positions are wrong. They may well be right on the questions he addresses. But their correctness has to be evaluated on the evidence for the claims, not on Myers’s scholarly credentials. Readers who absorb his political positions because his scholarly work is reliable are conflating domains that require separate evaluation.
Take Doris’s contribution. Myers’s behaviors as a public intellectual are produced by the situation of operating from institutional positions at a historical moment in American Jewish politics. His public positioning reflects what his situation rewards and what his coalition expects. A Myers at a different institution, in a different period, with different coalitional alignments, would produce different public positioning. The Myers we have is the product of the match between his capacities and the situation his career has constructed.
This has implications for how his work should be read. Treating his public positions as expressions of a stable Myers-character imports the dispositional framing that Doris’s framework complicates. The positions are produced by the situation. If the situation shifts, the positions will shift. The positions are legitimate expressions of what the specific situation produces through the specific person holding the institutional positions, but they are not timeless expressions of analytical truth.
His writing reaches multiple populations with different stakes. Jewish communal readers with vital interests in how Jewish life gets represented run operational vigilance. Progressive academic readers have different operational stakes. Right-wing Jewish critics run hostile vigilance. General LA Times readers engage reflectively. Myers’s writing must be calibrated to survive all of these simultaneously. The calibration is visible in the rhetorical moves: invoking Jewish tradition and liturgy (ingroup markers that satisfy Jewish communal vigilance), using reckoning and responsibility language (moral markers that satisfy progressive vigilance), maintaining distance from BDS and anti-Zionism (markers that avoid complete expulsion from institutional Jewish life).
This calibration requires skill at tracking what each audience’s vigilance will accept. The second analysis names this as “narrow path” and “calibrated” writing. The framework identifies why the calibration is necessary: each audience is running hard vigilance on whatever bears on its vital interests, and claims that fail any one audience’s vigilance produce coalition costs Myers cannot absorb without losing his institutional position.
Myers’s niche depends on the continued willingness of his coalitions to tolerate the calibration. If Jewish communal institutions decide his criticism crosses into hostile territory, they withdraw institutional support and his platform diminishes. If progressive academic networks decide his continued affirmation of Jewish frameworks makes him complicit in Zionist politics, they withdraw their support. The position exists in a window whose boundaries are enforced by multiple audiences simultaneously. The window has been narrowing since October 7, 2023. Myers is working to keep it open by producing writing that maintains his standing with both sides.
The skill is in knowing precisely what each coalition will tolerate and producing writing that stays within the joint boundary. A scholar who miscalibrates loses the ability to speak to both sides. Myers has generally not miscalibrated, which is an achievement.
The Myers we see in the archive of popular writing and interviews is produced by his institutional situation combined with historical circumstances. The post-Oct 7 moment requires interventions that Myers is positioned to make. UCLA’s turmoil around campus protests requires responses from senior Jewish faculty that Myers is positioned to provide. The LA Times needs voices that can address Jewish issues with authority, and Myers fills that slot. The Forward needs writers with his profile. The combination of situations has produced the output we observe. A Myers without the Center for Jewish History presidency, without the UCLA tenure, without the history of institutional positions, would produce different work because the situation would be different. The output is situational rather than dispositional.
Adding new Al Chet confessions that name sins committed “in our name as Jews” including “bringing death and devastation upon our neighbor” and “stealing another’s land” is participation in the construction of Jewish religious practice. Myers is making an authority claim. He is saying that historical and scholarly expertise combined with Jewish communal embeddedness gives him standing to shape how Jews confess their sins to God on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar.
Orthodox Jewish authorities would reject his standing to modify liturgy. Many Conservative rabbis would accept the spirit while wanting rabbinic sign-off on formulations. Reform communities would likely embrace it. Progressive Jewish communities like IfNotNow would celebrate it. Right-wing Jewish institutions would treat it as evidence of his hostile intent toward Israel. The liturgical intervention therefore produces predictable coalition responses. Communities whose vital interests align with the intervention accept it operationally. Communities whose vital interests run against it reject it operationally. The neutral reflective audience that might absorb it as mere commentary is smaller than the engaged coalitions on either side.
Myers is running a high-stakes bet that authority claims of this kind can be sustained without rabbinic ordination. The bet depends on conditions continuing to hold. His UCLA tenure provides protection. His institutional networks provide support. The existence of progressive Jewish communities willing to adopt these liturgical innovations provides demand. If any of these conditions shift, the bet’s viability changes. A Myers without UCLA tenure would not produce these interventions at this frequency because the coalition costs would be prohibitive. A Myers in a different historical moment where progressive Jewish communities were smaller or less institutionally embedded would face different reception conditions. The timing of the interventions is calibrated to the moment when they can find their audience.
The Seidler-Feller co-authorship is structurally important as Seidler-Feller is a rabbi. He has ordination. He has served Hillel communities. His signature on the liturgical innovation supplies the rabbinic warrant that Myers alone would lack. The co-authorship is coalitional positioning that lets the intervention claim rabbinic legitimacy through its rabbinic co-author while carrying Myers’s scholarly weight through his contribution. This collaborative structure is necessary for the authority claim the piece makes. A solo Myers piece could not do the same work because it would lack the rabbinic warrant. A solo Seidler-Feller piece could not do the same work because it would lack the scholarly weight. The combination accomplishes what neither could alone.
The Tisha B’av piece invokes Hyrcanus, Purim, and Abba Kovner as precedents for Jewish violence in a historiographical move that works against the dominant Jewish self-narrative of being perpetual victims. Myers constructs a counter-narrative that supplies historical resources for the moral argument he is making. Without these precedents, his argument that Jewish violence is within Jewish tradition would be vulnerable to the rejoinder that it is importing external framings onto Jewish experience.
The Alexander reading that the second analysis supplied is accurate about what Myers is attempting. He is trying to recode Gaza as part of Jewish moral trauma rather than leaving it external. The liturgical and historical interventions are both part of this recoding project. The framework adds that the recoding has audience-stakes consequences. Jewish communities whose operational stakes include maintaining a trauma narrative about Oct 7 will resist the recoding because it implies their trauma cannot be experienced purely as victimhood. Jewish communities whose operational stakes include accountability for Israeli policy will welcome the recoding because it supplies Jewish historical resources for positions they already hold. The recoding cannot be neutrally persuasive because the stakes are operationally engaged on both sides.
Bedari Kindness Institute and Dialogue Across Difference. These are institutional investments that accomplish work beyond their stated missions. They give Myers platforms that are not dependent on Jewish communal institutions. They let him build coalitions that include non-Jewish partners, which provides insurance against Jewish communal isolation if his positions continue to become more controversial. They produce kinds of cultural legitimacy (kindness, dialogue, empathy) that are hard to attack without appearing partisan. The institutional investments are part of the same long-term coalition engineering the second analysis identified.
Myers’s situational trajectory has been moving toward interventions that require more institutional backup. The 2003 Resisting History book required only academic tenure. The very short introduction required Center for Jewish History positioning. The current liturgical interventions require Bedari Institute institutional presence, UCLA protection, Seidler-Feller rabbinic cover, and media relationships at LA Times and Forward. The later work is more institutionally supported because it requires more institutional support. The ambitions of the interventions scale with the institutional capacity Myers has built.
Groups under threat do tend to close ranks, punish internal critics, revert to simpler narratives. Myers is betting that the Jewish community is not going to follow this pattern or that enough of it will not follow this pattern to sustain his position. The bet could go either way. The evidence so far suggests he is sustaining it, but also that he has had to work harder to sustain it as the post-Oct 7 environment has made internal critique more costly. The Yom Kippur liturgy piece from September 2025 is more radical than the July 2025 Tisha B’av piece, which is more radical than the November 2023 Marshall Plan piece. The escalation could reflect either Myers responding to deteriorating conditions with sharper interventions or Myers probing how far the calibration can go before breaking. The framework cannot distinguish these without more evidence about what reception the pieces have generated.
The observation that Myers frames himself as “situational pessimist and congenital optimist” is the characteristic self-description of someone whose intellectual analysis points one direction and whose personal temperament points another. The pessimism reflects what his historical analysis produces. The optimism reflects what his life situation has supplied. The two can coexist because they operate on different levels. He can expect worst-case outcomes analytically while maintaining personal capacity to continue acting under the assumption that better outcomes remain possible. This dual stance is functionally useful for his role. Pure pessimism would make sustained public intellectual work exhausting and eventually impossible. Pure optimism would produce commentary that does not take seriously the dangers his work addresses. The combination lets him sustain the work.
Myers attempts to construct a kind of Jewish moral and religious life suited to the conditions of substantial Jewish power (American political access, Israeli sovereignty) combined with the moral failures that power has enabled. The liturgical innovations are the most distinctive piece of this because they address Jewish religious practice directly rather than just political commentary. The institutional investments at UCLA are the infrastructure for sustaining this work long-term.
“Building Edifices of Jewish Knowledge: Michael Berenbaum and the Third Encyclopedia Judaica.” In Building Bridges among Abraham’s Children: A Celebration of Michael Berenbaum (2025)
The genre does most of the work here. This is a Festschrift chapter. The form requires praise. Myers cannot write anything critical about Michael Berenbaum without breaking the contract of the form. What the essay reveals, he reveals by choice of what to celebrate.
Berenbaum is the ideal type of the American academic Jewish studies coalition. Ordained rabbi. Jewish theologian. Holocaust scholar. Institution builder. Each credential does coalition work. The rabbinic ordination signals Jewish-religious authenticity without requiring Orthodox practice. The theologian title signals thought without requiring philosophical commitment. The Holocaust scholarship places him at the coalition’s emotional center. The institution building places him at its material base. Few Orthodox scholars fit the profile. Few secular Jewish scholars do either. The fit is precisely what the coalition rewards.
Notice what Myers celebrates as worthy additions in EJ III. The digital transformation. The opening of Soviet Jewry. The rise of Israel as a military and economic power. The women’s movement and feminist scholarship, with Judith Baskin appointed to oversee the sub-field. New ethnic, racial, and feminist consciousness in American universities. Holocaust studies expansion. Contemporary American Jewry “living in a world with few barriers.” Major conceptual transformations in Bible and rabbinic literature informed by the latest critical theories.
Now notice what he does not list. The astonishing demographic growth of Haredi and Chabad populations. The rise of Religious Zionism in Israeli intellectual and political life. Settler scholarship. The Artscroll revolution in liturgical and rabbinic publication. The collapse of the Conservative movement that Gerson Cohen led and that Myers cited favorably in the Six Theses essay. The continued vitality of yeshiva-based scholarship outside the university. These are the big Jewish intellectual developments of 1970 to 2005, and his list passes over them. Expansion, in the coalition’s dictionary, means the items the AJS consensus approves. Orthodox and traditional growth, however large, is something else, perhaps invisible, perhaps embarrassing.
Myers notes that Benzion Netanyahu was appointed editor-in-chief in 1963, taught at Dropsie, and “had to step down from the EJ work” in 1965, at which point the project moved to Israel. The phrase “had to step down” conceals a great deal. Benzion Netanyahu was a Revisionist Zionist close to Jabotinsky and later to the Likud-adjacent right. His scholarly thesis on the Spanish Inquisition argued for a proto-racial rather than religious motivation, a position that drew sharp academic dispute. His politics clashed with the Labor Zionist Jerusalem establishment gathering around the EJ project. His exit was political. Myers knows this. The Festschrift genre and his own coalition position prevent him from saying it.
The brief parenthetical identifying Benzion as “father of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu” is the only pointer to the son. For a reader who follows Israeli politics, the identification does work the prose does not. Benzion’s son became the longest-serving prime minister in Israeli history, leading the political coalition that Myers’s academic coalition has spent decades opposing. The father got edged out of the encyclopedia in 1965. The son now runs the country. Myers lets the sentence pass.
Myers opens by linking the Jewish encyclopedic impulse to Diderot’s Encyclopédie, which he describes as “a self-conscious attempt to overturn a previous paradigm of knowledge beholden to ecclesiastical authority.” The move is jurisdictional. An encyclopedia transfers authority from the religious institution to the compiling scholars. The EJ performs the same transfer for Jewish knowledge. It stands as a parallel architecture to the yeshiva and the bet midrash, and in Myers’s coalition it stands as the authoritative one. Orthodox Jewish epistemology, rooted in Torah transmission and rabbinic interpretive chains, does not appear in the essay as a competing knowledge system. It appears as the prior paradigm that the encyclopedic project supersedes.
The Rosenzweig Bauleute citation sits awkwardly. Rosenzweig wrote the piece in 1923 as a polemic, partly against Buber’s more freestyle approach to tradition, partly against the secular-academic Wissenschaft des Judentums that Rosenzweig thought had severed scholarship from lived Jewish commitment. Rosenzweig’s builders had to be, in his view, traditionally learned and religiously serious. Myers deploys the term to honor a category of institution-builder Rosenzweig might have found questionable. The academic Jewish studies coalition has taken possession of vocabularies originally directed against it.
Follow the money. EJ I drew on Weimar-era German Jewish cultural patronage. EJ II drew on Claims Conference money (German reparations), Rassco construction, and the Israel Program for Scientific Translations. EJ III came from Thompson Gale, a commercial publisher. Berenbaum’s adjacent institution-building drew on federal funding (USHMM), Spielberg (Shoah Foundation), and the Ziering family (Ziering Institute at American Jewish University). The coalition runs on state money, reparations money, commercial publishing money, and wealthy donor money. It does not run on Orthodox synagogue membership dues or yeshiva tuition. The material substrate is as distinct from traditional Jewish communal finance as the intellectual substrate is distinct from traditional Jewish learning.
The Association for Jewish Studies grew from 47 members in 1969 to roughly 2,000 in 2020. Myers presents this as unambiguous success. The number also tells you the coalition’s scale. Each AJS member is a status-and-income node tied to the liberal academic framework of Jewish studies. The growth is the coalition’s growth. The essay Luke is reading is a product of that growth, is read by members of that coalition, and reinforces the coalition’s self-understanding as the legitimate heir to the encyclopedic tradition.
The closing framing calls Berenbaum “a perfect equipoise between tradition and modernity.” The language echoes the Six Theses piece. Equipoise is the coalition’s preferred self-description. Not Orthodox rigor on one end, not secular assimilation on the other, but balance. The balance is always the coalition position. The honoree of the volume embodies it. The author of the chapter practices it. The encyclopedia records it. The Festschrift affirms it.
Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression
Rony Guldmann’s book tracks an operation: the coalition that holds cultural power presents its formation as the neutral background of legitimate thought, and positions that reject the formation get re-coded as pathology rather than engaged as argument. Myers runs this operation at full strength across his entire career.
The earliest evidence sits in the 1986 Scholem-Kurzweil essay. Baruch Kurzweil was the serious Orthodox critic of Wissenschaft des Judentums in mid-twentieth-century Jewish scholarship. He argued the whole academic-critical enterprise was a continuation of assimilationist collapse by other means. Young Myers engaged Kurzweil with stated generosity but reached a settled conclusion: Kurzweil’s position was untenable, the scholarship had to go forward, the middle space between critical method and communal identity was the only livable option. The conclusion was not wrong because it was unconsidered. It was produced by the coalition formation Myers had already entered. Guldmann’s observation is that this is how the operation works. The critic gets a hearing. The hearing concludes that the critic’s position cannot be adopted. The critic is treated respectfully while being excluded substantively. Myers has run this move on every Orthodox or traditionalist position he has engaged across forty years.
The move has features. First, the coalition’s methodology appears as the default. Historicism, critical edition, contextualist reasoning, source criticism, the treatment of tradition as data rather than binding commitment, the assumption that scholarly consensus approximates truth: these are not advanced as positions requiring defense. They are the background against which positions get advanced. An Orthodox scholar who rejects them does not disagree with claims. He rejects the ground on which claims get made. Myers treats this as a refusal to enter scholarship rather than as a rival epistemology. The Orthodox position becomes, in Guldmann’s phrase, a symptom to diagnose rather than a thinker to engage.
Second, the coalition’s values get presented as the universal Jewish inheritance. Myers’s work articulates commitments: pluralism, ecumenism, balance, porous boundaries, the blessing of assimilation, the legitimacy of civil law over religious law, equipoise between tradition and modernity. These are coalition positions with institutional constituencies. In Myers’s prose they become the mature form of Jewish thought itself. An Orthodox reader encounters the prose and discovers that his position is not even represented. The representational move excludes him before argument begins.
Third, the critics who get to speak are the critics already inside the coalition. The historicism essay names Cohen, Rosenzweig, Yerushalmi as representatives of the critique of historicism. Each of these men was a product of Wissenschaft or its Columbia-Harvard descendants. The Lithuanian yeshiva critique of Wissenschaft does not appear. The Hirsch critique does not appear. The Chatam Sofer’s refusal to accept Zacharias Frankel’s Breslau project does not appear. The coalition permits internal critique as long as the critic stays inside the family. The serious external critic is absent from the record. Guldmann identifies this as the meta-equal protection problem in its pure form. The categories within which the critique gets entertained exclude the positions that would make the critique severe.
Fourth, when Orthodox positions appear at all, they appear as psychological states. The Six Theses essay is the clearest case. Non-Orthodox Jews practice elasticity, interpretation, tradition as living engagement. Muslim participants, functioning as proxies for the Orthodox position, feel less at liberty to reinterpret, appear committed, remain untroubled by modern questions. The first group has agency and reasoning. The second group has a condition. The condition is describable but not arguable. The Orthodox position does not have content in the essay. It has only affect. Guldmann calls this conservaphobia. The position gets re-coded as the expression of a psychological type that the field can discuss rather than as a rival argument the field must answer.
Fifth, the coalition’s institutional infrastructure presents itself as the natural home of Jewish scholarship. The PAAJR essay tells the founding legend. Three postwar institutions, the Akademie, YIVO, the Hebrew University, constituted the marketplace of Jewish studies. Three languages, three ideologies, productive competition. The Orthodox institution-building of the same period produced Merkaz HaRav, Telz, the Mir, the Chofetz Chaim’s yeshiva system, Yeshiva College under Revel, all of them established during the window Myers describes. None of them appears in the marketplace. The marketplace has been defined so that they cannot appear. Wolfson at Harvard in 1925 enters the narrative. Revel founding Yeshiva College in New York the same year does not. This is the neutral facade Guldmann identifies. The marketplace presents as open because it admits German integrationists, Diasporist Yiddishists, and Hebraist Zionists. The apparent openness conceals the boundary that determines what counts as a participant. Yeshiva scholarship is not admitted.
Sixth, the one-directional burden. Myers has spent his career writing across multiple formats without demonstrating familiarity with Brisker methodology, without engaging halakhic lomdus as reasoning, without taking rabbinic interpretive chains seriously on their own terms. Nothing in his professional life requires that familiarity. An Orthodox scholar who wants to engage academic Jewish studies must master all of Myers’s equipment, historical-critical method, source criticism, contextualist reasoning, post-colonial theory, the whole toolkit. The Orthodox scholar must be bilingual. The academic scholar may be monolingual. The burden only runs one way. Guldmann identifies this as the structural feature of a dominant formation that treats its own idiom as the necessary condition of legitimate discourse while treating the rival idiom as parochial.
Seventh, the coalition members experience their own position as the absence of position. Myers does not think he is suppressing Orthodox voices. He thinks he is writing Jewish history. The suppression is invisible to him because the tacit knowledge that defines his field treats the inclusion as unnecessary. When the American Shtetl book on Kiryas Joel shows that Haredi communities can use liberal legal tools to sustain illiberal communities, Myers reads this as a paradox within the liberal legal order. He does not read it as evidence that his own methodological assumptions about which forms of Jewish life are viable might be wrong. The coalition boundary is durable because it does not appear as a boundary at all. It appears as the natural contour of what counts as serious scholarship.
The Stolzenberg collaboration shows the alternative pattern Guldmann’s framework predicts. When Myers works with a partner from outside his coalition who brings different tools, his engagement with Haredi life becomes serious. Stolzenberg’s legal pluralism supplies what Myers’s own formation lacks. The collaboration produces work that treats Kiryas Joel on its own terms rather than as a foil. It is rare in the Myers corpus because cross-coalition scholarship is rare in the broader field. The rarity is the evidence. Guldmann’s point is that the dominant coalition does not need to refute its external critic because the institutional arrangements make the refutation unnecessary. The critic is handled by absence rather than by argument.
The Guldmann move that names what the coalition framework could not name: the asymmetry is not merely empirical but structural. Even a Myers who wanted to engage Orthodox positions seriously would encounter difficulties. His journals might not publish the engagement without requiring it to be framed in coalition idiom. His colleagues might not credit engagement on Orthodox terms as scholarship. His institutional position might not reward the work. His funders might not support it. The categories of professional success in academic Jewish studies have been constructed over a century to reward the work Myers has done and to mark other work as outside the field. An Orthodox scholar who wanted to produce what Myers produces would have to first accept the frame Myers accepts. A Myers who wanted to produce what an Orthodox scholar might produce would have to leave his coalition. The exit would be costly. The coalition holds through the cost of exit, not through the refutation of alternatives.
The sharpest case is the Resisting History book. Myers chose four thinkers who pushed back against historicism: Cohen, Rosenzweig, Strauss, Breuer. Three of them were firmly inside the German-Jewish academic formation. Breuer was the exception, the Orthodox thinker who theorized halakhic existence as Metageschichte. The inclusion of Breuer was the closest Myers has come to engaging the serious Orthodox alternative. The thought experiment the previous document sketched, a 2026 Resisting Defeat book on contemporary Orthodox thinkers, is the test Guldmann’s framework names. Myers has the capacity to engage Berman on biblical criticism, Saiman on halakhah as distinct mode, Sacks on science and ethics, Ross on progressive revelation, Soloveichik on Jewish particularism, Hazony on Biblical philosophy, Koppel on traditional community. He has not done the work. The not-doing is the evidence. The coalition position rewards engagement with Cohen and Rosenzweig. It does not reward engagement with Sacks or Saiman. The reward structure is the coalition operation. The operation is invisible to its participants because the operation has successfully presented itself as the natural shape of scholarship.
Guldmann supplies the vocabulary for the experience of the Orthodox scholar who would engage Myers on equal terms and discovers that the categories of academic Jewish studies have been constructed so that the engagement cannot occur as argument. The operation Myers performs across his corpus is the successful maintenance of a cultural formation whose dominance shows up in what its participants take for granted. Myers has internalized the formation with full intellectual force. His work is sincere. His sincerity is what makes the operation effective.
Philosopher Charles Taylor distinguishes the porous self of pre-modern conditions from the buffered self of modern conditions. The porous self experiences meaning, significance, and causal force as coming from outside the individual. Spirits, demons, blessings, curses, holy objects, sacred places act on the porous self from outside and shape interior experience in ways the self does not control. The buffered self is insulated. Meaning is internally generated or constructed. External forces can be acknowledged intellectually but do not penetrate the buffered interior the way they penetrated the porous interior. The buffered self can choose which meanings to credit and which to bracket. The porous self could not choose because the meanings were not experienced as optional.
Charles Taylor’s distinction has consequences for historical writing that most working historians have not internalized, partly because internalizing them would make the work harder to perform with confidence.
The buffered self stands outside the events it studies. The boundary that allows critical distance is the same boundary that prevents reactivation of what is studied. The historian compares sources, weighs evidence, reconstructs context, judges plausibility. The judgment is performed by a self the past cannot reach. The past is data. The historian is the analytic apparatus. Truth emerges from the relation between properly trained apparatus and properly handled data.
This works well for certain kinds of claims and poorly for others. The buffered historian can establish with high confidence when documents were composed, what their philological features indicate about transmission, what economic conditions prevailed, what demographic patterns the records support, which battles were fought on which days, which alliances held, which broke. These claims belong to what one might call the operational layer of historical truth. They concern the external arrangements of past life. The buffered method handles them well because the buffered method was designed to handle them.
The trouble begins when the historian moves from the operational layer to what the past meant to those who lived it. Meaning is not data in the same sense. A medieval Jew reciting the Shema before bed was not producing a fact the buffered historian can recover by reading more sources. He was inhabiting a relation to God’s unity that organized his nervous system, his marriage, his fear of death, his sense of time. The buffered historian can describe the recitation. He can compile sources on its history. He cannot recover the recitation as the reciter held it, because his own self does not hold anything that way. The Shema for the buffered historian is a literary-historical object. The Shema for the porous reciter was the structure of his world. The translation between these is not perfect, and the imperfection is asymmetric. The buffered historian loses something of the reciter that the reciter could not have lost.
This has direct consequences for what historians can claim and what they should claim about religious history, ritual practice, popular belief, mystical experience, communal solidarity in conditions of porosity, martyrdom, vow-making, taboo, sacred geography. In all of these areas, the operational layer is recoverable and the experiential layer is not. Honest history of these subjects describes the operational layer with confidence and the experiential layer with appropriate diffidence. Most history fails this test. Historians describe the experiential layer with the same confidence they describe the operational layer because the buffered method does not equip them to distinguish the two cleanly.
A second consequence concerns retrospective projection. The buffered historian projects his own self-structure onto past actors without noticing the projection. He attributes beliefs to medievals where premoderns inhabited the relations beliefs are abstractions of. He treats medieval halakhic discourse as a contest of propositions when the discourse occurred inside a textual world participants entered rather than evaluated. He reads medieval miracle accounts as reports of events that either happened or did not, when the relation between the porous self and the miraculous was not a question of whether the event occurred in the buffered sense but of how the sacred had become present and what was now demanded. Funkenstein’s “historical consciousness” is exactly this projection. He finds buffered cognition in premodern materials because his buffered method cannot register the difference between what he is doing and what they were doing.
The standard historian’s reply to this critique is that we have no choice. We are buffered. Our tools are buffered. Buffered history is the only history available, and the alternative is not unbuffered history but no history at all. The reply is correct as far as it goes. It does not however license the confident projection of buffered categories onto porous materials as if no translation were occurring. The honest version of the standard reply concedes the translation, names its limits, and writes accordingly. The dishonest version proceeds as if the buffered category set were universal and the porous self a colorful variant within it. Most academic history operates on the dishonest version, not from bad faith but from the absence of a vocabulary that would force the alternative.
A third consequence concerns the politics of historical writing. The buffered historian is institutionally embedded in coalitions that have their own present-tense uses for the past. He writes for editors, peer reviewers, donors, and institutional patrons whose interests shape what counts as a productive historical question. The buffered self that produces critical history is the same buffered self that runs the coalition fluency McEnerney teaches. Historical truth in this register tends toward the truths the coalition can absorb. Truths the coalition cannot absorb are not produced. They are not produced not because they are false but because the production conditions select against them.
A buffered historian of fifth-century Persian administration produces work whose biases are mainly methodological. A buffered historian of nineteenth-century Zionism, twentieth-century Palestine, the Holocaust, slavery, colonial expansion, or any other contested formation produces work whose biases run through the methodological into the coalition layer. Both kinds of historians believe themselves to be pursuing truth. Both are. The coalition layer cannot be eliminated by good faith. It can sometimes be partially exposed by historians willing to write against their own coalition, but such writers face the costs Sell describes, and the costs select for writers who do not write against their own coalitions, which means most writers, most of the time.
A fourth consequence concerns what historical truth claims can do in present argument. Buffered scholars often deploy historical material in present coalition fights as if the deployment transmitted historical understanding to lay audiences. Turner says it does not. The audience receives a conclusion without the trained capacity to evaluate it. McEnerney says the deployment works rhetorically because it appeals to readers who recognize the historical reference as a coalition signal, not because the readers understand what they are receiving. Taylor adds that even the historian’s own grasp of the historical material is buffered, which means the deployment transmits a buffered scholar’s reconstruction of porous past life as policy ammunition for a buffered audience. Each layer of translation loses something. The result reaches the policy fight as a slogan or a frame, and operates there as slogans and frames operate.
A fifth consequence concerns the specific challenge of writing about porous subjects without flattening them. Some historians manage this. They tend to share several features. They have firsthand experience of communities still operating partly in porous conditions, often through religious upbringing or fieldwork. They write with phenomenological attention rather than analytical reduction. They quote primary sources at length and resist paraphrase that translates the source’s structure into the analyst’s. They are slow to attribute beliefs and quick to describe practices. They are willing to record their own incomprehension as data rather than concealing it as methodological failure. Such writers tend not to dominate their fields. The fields select against them because the fields are buffered institutions producing buffered scholarship for buffered readers, and the porous-attentive writer disturbs the production by refusing to deliver buffered conclusions in buffered prose.
A sixth consequence concerns first-person experience of the past. The porous self related to the past not as object of inquiry but as continuing presence. The seder is not a representation. It is reactivation. The reciter at Lamentations is not commemorating a destruction. He is inside the destruction in a way the buffered historian cannot enter. Some traditions still preserve this, in the few communities that maintain the conditions of porosity. The buffered historian can document such communities ethnographically. He cannot inhabit what he documents. This is the structural reason why historical recovery of porous Jewish life will always feel partial to those who knew it from inside. Yerushalmi knew this. His elegy in Zakhor is the buffered scholar’s recognition that buffered scholarship cannot give back what porous life carried.
A seventh consequence concerns the limits of contextualization. Buffered scholarship contextualizes. It places ideas in their setting, beliefs in their pressures, texts in their networks. The contextualization is real work and produces real understanding. It also has a tendency the buffered method conceals from its practitioners. Contextualization treats the contextualized object as something the context produced, which is half right. The porous self did not experience itself as a product of context. It experienced itself as inhabiting a world the context partly described from outside. The buffered scholar contextualizes the porous self into a buffered self’s understanding of how selves are made, which is a particular metaphysics dressed as method. There is no neutral way out of this. There are only more and less honest acknowledgments that the contextualizing apparatus has its own metaphysical commitments that the porous self did not share and could not have recognized as the truth about itself.
The cumulative force of these points is not that history is impossible. History is possible and useful within the buffered method’s range. The cumulative force is that historical truth claims have a layered structure the working historian usually does not articulate. Some claims are reliable. Others are reliable only within the limits of buffered translation. Others are projections the method cannot see itself making. Others are coalition-shaped products of the production conditions under which the historian writes. The most disciplined historian sorts his claims into these layers and writes accordingly. The undisciplined historian, who is the typical historian, treats all his claims as belonging to the first layer and is surprised when the work fails to convince readers operating on different premises or to survive shifts in the coalition that produced it.
Two final implications follow.
For Myers and the Jewish case, this means his career produces excellent work on the operational layer (institutional history, scholarly biography, intellectual genealogy, philanthropic networks, legal-religious arrangements) and progressively weaker work as he moves toward the experiential layer (what Jewish memory was, what historicism cost, what Hasidic life produces in those formed by it). The weakness is not a failure of effort or talent. It is the structural consequence of buffered scholarship encountering subjects buffered scholarship cannot fully reach. Readers who grew up in porous Jewish conditions and now inhabit buffered scholarly ones are positioned to feel both layers. Most of his readership feels only the buffered one and registers his work as fully successful. The book that would expose the limit, written by a scholar formed in porous Jewish life and trained to buffered method who held both registers in productive tension, would be a different book and would face institutional headwinds Myers’s books do not face.
For historical writing, this means truth claims need to be calibrated to the layer they belong to, with explicit acknowledgment of the buffer’s range and its limits. The acknowledgment is hard because the institutions that produce historical writing reward confident claims in any layer and punish diffidence in either. The historian who writes “we cannot recover what this meant to those who said it; we can only describe what they said and the conditions under which they said it” produces less arresting prose than the historian who confidently reports what fourteenth-century French peasants believed about purgatory. The market rewards the second. Taylor’s frame, applied seriously, would produce more historians of the first kind and fewer of the second. The frame is therefore unlikely to be applied seriously, and most historians will continue to write as if the buffer were neutral, which is the working condition of the field and the principal limit on what the field can know.
Myers works on Jewish textual and ritual traditions that emerged from and operated within porous conditions. The Amida was composed by Jews for whom prayer was efficacious communication with a deity who acted in history. The Al Chet confession was developed by Jews for whom sin was spiritual contamination requiring ritual purgation. The Tisha B’Av liturgy was composed by Jews for whom the Temple’s destruction was divine judgment with metaphysical implications. Each element of the tradition Myers engages assumed porous selfhood operating within an enchanted cosmos.
Myers engages these materials as a buffered self. He prays the Amida daily. He does not, so far as his scholarly writing indicates, experience the Amida as efficacious communication with a God who hears and responds. He writes movingly about the three meanings of Amida: prayer, resistance-standing in the Warsaw ghetto sense, standing-alongside the vulnerable. Each meaning is available to the buffered self. The original meaning, prayer as communication with a personal God who acts, is the meaning that requires porous selfhood to function as intended. Myers includes this meaning without committing to it. The bracketing is characteristic of buffered engagement with porous materials.
Every modern Jew who engages traditional materials does so as a buffered self. What happens to tradition when it is transmitted through buffered selves whose engagement with it cannot reproduce the porous conditions that originally animated it. Taylor’s framework predicts certain outcomes. The tradition persists as cultural material. It does not reproduce its original phenomenological intensity. The rituals continue. The metaphysics recedes. The community remains. The cosmos thins. This is what modernity does to inherited tradition. It does not destroy the tradition. It changes what the tradition means to those who transmit it.
Myers’s career can be read as sustained effort to keep tradition alive within buffered modernity. He does not pretend to porous engagement he does not have. He does not abandon the tradition because the porous engagement is unavailable. He performs intermediate work. He teaches the materials. He writes new liturgy, the Al Chet additions, that speaks to buffered concerns such as Jewish responsibility for Palestinian suffering in the ritual forms porous Jews developed for different purposes, individual and communal confession of sin against God. The forms carry. The content shifts. Myers is skilled at this shifting. He knows which forms can accept new content without rupturing. He knows which content requires new forms. The craft is considerable.
Taylor’s framework also predicts what this work cannot accomplish. It cannot produce porous selves where none exist. It cannot reproduce the phenomenological intensity that the porous tradition originally possessed. It can produce buffered engagement with porous materials that keeps the materials present in cultural circulation. This is what modernity permits for traditional religious inheritance. It is also limited. Readers who experience Myers’s liturgical innovations as spiritually nourishing are typically buffered selves finding buffered nourishment in buffered engagement. Readers who are more porous, Haredi Jews for instance, will not find Myers’s work spiritually available because it does not speak to their porous condition. The tradition splits. The buffered branch produces Myers’s kind of work. The porous branch produces different work that buffered readers cannot access with the same immediacy.
Myers’s Al Chet additions and Tisha B’Av reframings operate within buffered modernity. The sins named are sins the buffered modern liberal conscience recognizes: complicity in suffering, failure of moral imagination, indifference to human rights violations. These are buffered moral categories. Traditional Al Chet names porous sins, violations of divine commandments that produce spiritual consequences. The forms are the same. The contents differ. A porous Jew reciting traditional Al Chet engages in ritual purgation that affects metaphysical status. A buffered Jew reciting Myers’s Al Chet engages in moral articulation that affects political consciousness. Both matter. Neither reduces to the other. Both use the same liturgical form.
The buffered-porous distinction illuminates why Myers’s work lands differently with different audiences. Progressive American Jewish readers share Myers’s buffered condition. His liturgical innovations speak to them because his buffered reworking of porous forms matches their own buffered need for ritual expression of buffered moral concerns. Orthodox Jewish readers live closer to porous conditions. The same innovations do not speak to them because the buffered content does not fit their different engagement with the forms. The traditional content the forms were designed for still operates for them. They do not need buffered content inserted into the forms because the original content still works.
Myers operates in a narrow band. His audience is Jewish enough to care about the forms and buffered enough to need the forms filled with buffered content. This band is sizable in American Jewish life but smaller than Myers’s rhetoric sometimes implies. His work does not reach the more porous Orthodox because the porous Orthodox do not need the buffered translation. His work does not reach the fully secular because the fully secular do not need the forms at all. The band is the progressive observant and the progressive affiliated, the population that wants to remain Jewishly connected while operating within buffered modernity.
The Germans like Hans Freyer were buffered selves who had lost the porous conditions that made their inherited Protestantism function. They sought substitutes that buffered selves could access. History, community, and decision are available to buffered selves in ways that inherited Protestant faith was not. The substitutes varied in their consequences. Some substitutes (Heidegger, Schmitt, Freyer) led to catastrophic political alignments. Other substitutes (phenomenology, social theory, critical theory) led to productive intellectual traditions. The structural feature is shared. Buffered selves need substitutes for porous inheritances they can no longer access.
Myers belongs to a Jewish version of the same structural pattern. The tradition he engages was composed under porous conditions. He engages it under buffered conditions. The substitutes he offers, history as liberation, history as consolation, history as witness, are buffered substitutes for the porous functions the original tradition served. The substitutes are intellectually honest. They are also insufficient to do the full work the porous originals did. The tradition continues under buffered conditions because buffered Jews find meaning in the buffered reworking. It does not continue in its porous form through Myers’s work. That requires different transmission, which happens in different communities (Orthodox, Haredi, Chabad) that Myers does not primarily address.
Myers’s project depends on buffered selves finding buffered substitutes satisfying. Taylor’s framework suggests that buffered substitutes are less satisfying than porous originals because the buffered self is insulated from the phenomenological intensity the porous original produced. The tradition does not work as well in buffered transmission as it worked in porous transmission. Myers’s work can be impeccable and still fail to produce the Jewish vitality the work implicitly promises. The failure is not Myers’s failure. It is the failure of buffered modernity to reproduce the phenomenological conditions under which tradition originally flourished. Myers does the best work that buffered conditions permit. The best work that buffered conditions permit is less effective than the tradition at its porous height.
Readers who experience Myers’s liturgical innovations as satisfying are getting what buffered engagement with Jewish tradition can provide. Readers who find them thin or unsatisfying are registering the difference between buffered reworking and porous original. Both responses are accurate to what they respond to. The work is good at what it does. What it does is less than what the original tradition did under porous conditions. Myers knows this at some level. His scholarly work acknowledges the modern transformation of Jewish inheritance. His public work sometimes implies that the transformation can be reversed through skilled reworking. Taylor’s framework suggests the reversal is unavailable. The buffered self cannot become porous again through will or intelligence. The tradition continues in buffered form because that is the form available to buffered selves. Myers’s valuable work is to keep the buffered form as rich as possible. The porous form is not available through his kind of work. It is available, if at all, through different communities operating under different conditions.
Myers is buffered. His work operates on porous materials. The transformation from porous original to buffered reworking is what his work performs. The performance is skilled. The performance has limits that the buffered condition imposes. These limits are not Myers’s limits. They are the limits of what any buffered transmitter can do with porous materials. Recognizing the limits does not diminish the work. It calibrates what the work can and cannot accomplish. Readers who want more than buffered reworking can provide will be disappointed by Myers’s work. Readers who want the best buffered reworking available will be well served. The distinction clarifies what work Myers does and what audience the work reaches.
Grokipedia v Wikipedia (April 23, 2026)
Wikipedia frames Myers as a mainstream scholar who faced an ideologically motivated attack he survived. The Center for Jewish History episode gets structured around Sarna and Ellenson’s defense, Smotrich’s involvement as a flagging marker of the attackers’ politics, and hundreds of historians rallying behind him. Myers’ own quote closes the section on a note of equanimity: after two unpleasant months, he had a great time. The New Israel Fund presidency gets a single factual sentence. Views on Zionism receive no section at all. The reader meets a distinguished historian who does respectable work, briefly ran an archive, and sits on a liberal Jewish board.
Grokipedia treats the same life as a pattern of contested political engagement. The NIF section names specific grantees, Adalah, Breaking the Silence, B’Tselem, Peace Now, and cites NGO Monitor as a source documenting ongoing support for groups that critics say delegitimize Israel. The CJH controversy gets longer treatment with more critic voices preserved. A separate section on views covers the Haaretz interview, the Los Angeles Times op-eds on judicial reform, the post-October 7 commentary, and the UCLA Initiative to Study Hate with the “total systems failure” quote and the April 30, 2024 encampment attack. The Grokipedia Myers is a political actor whose scholarship runs alongside his advocacy.
Both descriptions point at real features of the public record. Myers does hold the Kahn Chair and chaired the history department. He did lead NIF for five years. He did give the Haaretz interview. He did write the op-eds. The question is which facts constitute the story.
Wikipedia’s silences. An encyclopedia entry on someone who chaired NIF through the 2023 judicial reform crisis, who runs a hate studies initiative at UCLA during the post-October 7 campus upheaval, and who publishes regular op-eds on Israeli democracy, cannot treat these as background color without making an editorial decision. The decision protects Myers from readers who might form independent judgments about his politics. Grokipedia makes the opposite decision and supplies the material for those judgments, which creates its own risks because some of the framing language, “accused by critics,” “post-Zionist narratives,” “asymmetric threats,” does work the sources cited cannot quite support.
The CJH episode is the clearest test. Wikipedia tells you Smotrich and ZOA attacked him, Sarna and Ellenson defended him, and he had a great time after two months. Grokipedia tells you the same thing and adds that he resigned after thirteen months amid reported tensions with the board over strategic direction. Both versions draw on the Forward coverage. Wikipedia selects the exoneration. Grokipedia selects the complication. A reader who wanted to know whether Myers succeeded as CEO gets more usable information from Grokipedia. A reader who wanted to know whether the attacks on him were legitimate gets a cleaner answer from Wikipedia.
Wikipedia’s Jewish studies entries pass through editors embedded in the field, and the field closed ranks around Myers during the CJH fight. The entry reflects that closure. Grokipedia draws on right-leaning source ecosystems that tracked Myers as a political figure. Each reference base produces its own Myers.
The Neutralization Theory of Hatred
The Sell paper does something Myers’s three UCLA initiatives (kindness, dialogue, hate) need and do not currently have. It supplies a functional account of hatred as a distinct evolved adaptation, separate from anger, designed to neutralize individuals whose continued existence imposes net fitness costs on the perceiver. The Dialogue Across Difference Initiative, the Initiative to Study Hate, and the Bedari Kindness Institute all proceed as if the hatred they target is a miscalibrated form of anger, correctable through better information, more dialogue, and prosocial reframing. Sell says hatred is precisely calibrated to its function. The function is neutralization. The adaptation resists the very interventions Myers’s institutes deploy.
Anger negotiates. Hatred eliminates. That distinction is the heart of the Sell paper, and it cuts through most of what Myers does at UCLA. Anger is a recalibration system. The angry party communicates a demand for better treatment, and a settlement becomes possible when the other party accepts a higher welfare tradeoff ratio toward the angry party. The exchange runs through signaling, escalation, and de-escalation. Hatred runs none of this. Hatred sets a negative intrinsic welfare tradeoff ratio toward the target and motivates strategies (avoidance, information warfare, low-cost surreptitious harm, predatory aggression) aimed at reducing the target’s capacity to impose costs. The hater accepts personal costs to inflict harm. Schadenfreude rewards the work. There is no bargaining counterpart in the architecture.
Myers’s Dialogue Across Difference Initiative presupposes anger. The premise of dialogue is that participants will recalibrate their tradeoff ratios through structured listening. Sell predicts the dominant emotion in many of the polarized encounters Myers tries to mediate is not anger but hatred. The participants are not in negotiation. They are in neutralization. Their refusal to engage, their walkouts, their efforts to prevent speakers from being heard, their hostility to mediators, all of it reads as malfunction or moral closure under Myers’s framework. The Sell framework reads it as the adaptation working as designed. Hatred suppresses interest in understanding the enemy because understanding generates sympathy and sympathy raises the target’s perceived welfare tradeoff ratio toward the hater. The dialogue Myers wants is functionally incompatible with the system the participants are running.
The Initiative to Study Hate gains operational precision from the paper. Myers’s institute studies hate as a sociological and historical phenomenon. Sell gives the subject an evolutionary and computational structure. The four hatred triggers (intentional or repeated harm, counterfactual reasoning that one’s life would be better without the target, social learning from similarly situated others, outputs from related systems like envy and fear and disgust) generate testable hypotheses about which historical conditions produce which patterns of group-based hatred. Antisemitism in Weimar Germany registered different triggers than antisemitism in 1190 York or in Hamas leadership today. The historical particularity Myers values is preserved. What gets added is a common architecture against which the particularity becomes legible.
Hate copying receives the same upgrade. Myers tracks the spread of hate narratives through cultural and institutional channels. Sell explains why copying works as an adaptation. Identifying toxic others through one’s own experience is slow. Inferring toxicity from the convergent reactions of similarly situated others is fast. The copier inherits the targeting at low cost. This explains why social media amplifies hatred more than anger. Anger requires the angry party to communicate a particular grievance. Hatred requires only the broadcast of a designation, and the designation copies frictionlessly across networks of people who share interests with the broadcaster.
The premise of The Bedari Kindness Institute is that kindness, empathy, compassion, and altruism can be cultivated as practices that humanize the other and dissolve hostility. Sell does not deny that this happens sometimes. He explains why it happens rarely and only under narrow conditions. Hatred deactivates when the target’s association value becomes zero or positive. That can occur through corrected misperception, recalibration of the target’s behavior, shifting alliance structures, new cooperative opportunities, or failure of all hatred strategies to neutralize. Of these, only corrected misperception can be addressed by kindness directly. The other routes require structural change in the relationship between hater and target, not changes in the hater’s emotional repertoire.
Kindness aimed at a hated target without addressing perceived association value does not deactivate hatred. The hater reads the kindness as weakness, as manipulation, or as evidence the target is more dangerous than supposed. The institute’s interventions might still produce gains. The gains will not come from kindness functioning as a general solvent. They will come from kindness operating in the narrow envelope where it changes calculations of association value.
Myers’s public positions, his philanthropic affiliations, his board memberships, his institutional alliances mark him as hostile in the perception of right-wing Zionist, settler, and Orthodox coalitions. He researches hatred from inside its target zone. The pattern of response he receives fits the hatred profile Sell describes, not the anger profile. Open physical aggression is rare because modern conditions make it expensive. Information warfare is constant. Reputation work, gossip networks, efforts to deprive him of platforms, honors, and institutional allies, all of it follows the predictable shape of hatred’s behavioral repertoire. Defenders of Myers find their own association values revised downward in the same coalitions, exactly as the framework predicts about defenders of hated targets.
Myers’s signature analytical move is the one hatred exists to suppress. He insists on engaging the motives of parties hatred wants to render unreadable: Satmar separatists, Palestinian nationalists, anti-Zionist Jewish intellectuals like Rawidowicz, dissenting minorities inside majority Jewish institutions. To coalition members who hate these targets, Myers’s generosity reads as sabotage. He dismantles the adaptation’s core prohibition on letting the enemy speak. The prohibition exists because letting the enemy speak generates sympathy, sympathy raises welfare tradeoff ratios, and rising tradeoff ratios threaten the coalition’s capacity for coordinated neutralization. His interlocutors run a system designed for neutralization. He communicates as if they were running a system designed for negotiation. The asymmetry persists because of the categorical mismatch.
This reframes the Yerushalmi problem in a way Myers does not pursue. Yerushalmi treated the break between Jewish memory and Jewish history as a loss. Sell’s framework suggests that what Yerushalmi called memory carried the social apparatus for identifying toxic others and coordinating hatred toward them. The memorial calendar, the liturgical curses, the Esther narrative, the rabbinic warnings, the haskalah polemics, all of it functioned in part as maintenance machinery for collective association value calculations. Modern Jewish history, by giving voice to those marked as toxic and by historicizing the markings, weakened the maintenance. Myers extends the weakening. He wants a Jewish self-understanding that retains the archival rigor and drops the functional hatred. The Sell paper suggests why that combination is harder to sustain than Myers supposes. Hatred is an evolved coordination device. Communities that abandon it lose competitive standing against communities that keep it.
Satmar maintains strong collective welfare tradeoff calibrations by maintaining strong collective hatreds, against the secular world, against Zionism, against modernity, against Jewish denominations that compromise with any of the three. The reproductive success Myers documents tracks the strength of the calibrations. The hatreds form part of the operational structure that keeps the formation conditions stable. Children raised inside the calibrations grow up with reflexive negative association values toward outsiders, and the reflexes maintain the boundary that keeps the formation reproducible. A liberal pluralist Jewish community cannot run that program. It loses the boundary. It also loses the reproductive performance.
The Israel-Palestine case becomes a textbook illustration of the framework. Each side perceives the other’s presence in contested territory as a net fitness cost. Land, water, demographic weight, sovereignty, security are reproductive variables in the evolutionary sense. A Jewish family in Tel Aviv and a Palestinian family in Gaza both calculate their children’s futures against the existence and power of the other group. The cues the hatred adaptation evolved to detect are present without elite manufacture. Several of Sell’s predictions track the conflict with eerie precision.
Information warfare runs constantly on both sides. The propaganda apparatuses portray each other as uniquely cruel, incapable of reciprocity, biologically or culturally disposed toward the destruction of the hater. The content varies. The functional shape is identical, and the truth value of the accusations is incidental to their coalition function. Defenders of the target on each side become hated. Israeli leftists who explain Hamas’s strategic logic without moralized framing face social sanction inside Israel. Palestinians who normalize relations with Israelis face sanction inside Palestinian society. Voices that model understanding of the other side get shouted down by their own coalition because understanding is incompatible with the hatred the coalition runs on. Predatory aggression appears in the conduct of both sides at intervals: no signaling, no escalation, continued aggression after the target’s submission, no monitoring of motives, willful violations of implicit combat rules. October 7 fits the profile. So does the conduct of some Israeli operations in Gaza.
Negotiated settlements keep failing because negotiation is anger’s behavioral strategy and the parties are in hatred. Anger bargains over welfare tradeoff ratios. Hatred neutralizes. If the dominant emotion on both sides is hatred, then the cognitive architecture of the negotiating parties is not set up to recalibrate ratios through agreement. It is set up to produce the appearance of agreement as a tactical move in a longer campaign of neutralization. Oslo read in this light becomes intelligible in a way the standard “missed opportunity” narrative cannot make it.
The deactivation conditions Sell lists are correspondingly hard to engineer in this case. Misperception is not the central problem. Each side reads the other’s intentions with reasonable accuracy. Recalibration through changed target behavior is blocked because the structural conflict over territory keeps generating new evidence of negative association value. Shifting alliance structures occasionally intervene (the Abraham Accords are a live test case) but do not touch the core dyad. New avenues of cooperation operate against the hatred gradient. Neither side has succeeded in neutralizing the other, and the spiteful behavior continues even when it imposes net costs on the hater. The hatred persists rather than deactivates.
Defusing this requires conditions Myers’s three UCLA initiatives are not designed to produce. Sell notes that having a stake in the other’s welfare can defuse hatred. Economic integration, shared institutions, intermarriage are the paths. The adaptation resists all three because it perceives them correctly as threats to its operation. Any peace project has to out-engineer an evolved system designed to defeat such projects. Dialogue, kindness research, and the study of hate as moral failure cannot do this work alone. They might support it. They cannot substitute for it.
Myers’s own reticence in his public writing reads, on the Sell framework, as adaptive prudence. He rarely names his enemies with the diagnostic clarity his analytical tools permit. The framework predicts this. Naming opponents openly is itself an act of information warfare that invites retaliation from a hatred-organized coalition with structural advantages over a single scholar. Myers’s coalition protection is thinner than his opponents’. His pen has functional reasons to stay careful. What looks like principled scholarly restraint also serves non-escalation against parties not deterred by reciprocal civility. The restraint serves Myers’s safety. It also limits what his analysis can do, because the analysis cannot apply to the present coalition fight without exposing the analyst.
Myers wants Jewish self-understanding without the apparatus of collective hatred that has historically maintained Jewish boundaries. He wants intergroup polarization addressed through cultivated kindness and structured dialogue. He wants the study of hate to deliver tools that mitigate its operation. None of these projects is impossible. All of them work against an evolved system designed to defeat them, and the design is older, more deeply written, and more reflexively executed than the institutional apparatus Myers builds against it. The institutes can produce real gains. The gains will be smaller and harder won than the public framing suggests, and the workers in the institutes are running on the same architecture they study, which means they will find themselves hating the haters in ways their stated commitments cannot accommodate.
In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:
My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.
If Mearsheimer is right, then the buffered identity is a fiction.
Myers’ work rests on a picture of the Jew as a rights-bearing man who can sustain Jewish identity through texts, liturgy, communal institutions, and inherited practice while declining the state-making that has defined Jewish collective life since 1948. Simon Rawidowicz becomes the Jewish thinker who saw that Zionism at its founding had already begun to sacrifice the full range of Jewish political possibility to the narrow logic of territorial sovereignty. Myers recovers Rawidowicz as a usable ancestor for a Diaspora-centered Jewish politics that remains committed, textual, serious, morally demanding, and untethered from the Israeli state’s decisions.
Mearsheimer’s account means that the man Rawidowicz invokes, and the man Myers requires, does not exist in the numbers his theory needs. Jews who organize identity without tribal instruments at the communal scale do not reproduce. American Jewish intermarriage outside Orthodoxy runs above seventy percent. Non-Orthodox fertility runs below replacement. The young American Jews who remain identifiably Jewish at thirty-five skew Orthodox.
Myers’ Diasporism did not emerge from the deep well of Jewish tradition. It emerged in the 1970s through the 1990s, in the American academy, at the moment when the Zionist utopia had hardened into statehood with all the compromises statehood required, and when the revolutionary utopias that had drawn secular Jewish energy for a century had also collapsed. Socialism, communism, Bundism, labor Zionism, Third World liberation: each had disappointed. Liberal Diasporism filled the hole the disappointments left. It offered Jewish intellectuals a morally charged project that did not require them to defend any Jewish polity. It allowed them to remain Jewishly serious without accepting what the Jewish state had become under the forces of its own survival. The position is a coalition product of a particular moment in Jewish intellectual history, and the timing tracks Moyn’s timing for human rights closely, because the two alliances drink from the same well of post-Marxist religious longing.
The Seventh-day Adventist parallel runs deep. Hiram Edson walked through the cornfield after 1844 and reported that Christ had entered the Most Holy Place to begin the Investigative Judgment. The event the Millerites had expected had happened invisibly, in heaven, and the delay confirmed that the work continued. Myers’ liberal Diasporism carries the same structure. The two-state solution, the liberal Israel, the reconciled Diaspora, the Jewish politics freed from ethnonationalism: each has been about to arrive for fifty years. Oslo. Camp David. The Geneva Initiative. The Saudi Plan. The Arab Peace Initiative. Each failure gets absorbed as a stage in the work. Netanyahu’s victories, the judicial reform crisis, the October 7 rupture, the Gaza war, the rise of Ben-Gvir and Smotrich: each counts as a setback rather than as evidence against the framework. The arrival recedes. The work continues. The specialists read the signs. The lay coalition members trust the specialists. The venue of decisive action remains inaccessible to the member, who reads the op-ed, signs the letter, makes the donation, and waits.
The Glacier View parallel names what happens when insiders test the doctrine against the evidence. My father Desmond Ford read the sanctuary doctrine against Scripture and concluded that the 1844 event could not bear the weight Adventism had placed on it. The church defrocked him. The doctrine survived. Myers’ coalition has its own versions of Desmond Ford. Peter Beinart read the liberal Zionist framework against the evidence of occupation and concluded that the two-state solution was dead and that the framework now required either one binational state or nothing honest. Shaul Magid has pushed further in The Necessity of Exile. Daniel Boyarin has argued from a different direction that Diaspora without sovereignty is the authentic Jewish political form. Judith Butler has taken the Jewish ethical tradition and argued from it against Zionism as such.
The coalition handles these dissents the way Adventism handled Ford. It does not engage the argument. It preserves the institution. The critics from the left who reject Zionism entirely become useful as extreme foils, invoked to make the liberal Diasporist center look reasonable. The critics from the right get read as parochial, illiberal, insufficiently cosmopolitan. The insider critics who accept liberalism but question whether Diasporism can bear the demographic and political weight Myers places on it get ignored, because engaging them would force the coalition to address evidence its instruments are designed to deflect.
Stephen Turner’s convenient beliefs framework reads Myers’ core positions as coalition-enabling rather than as conclusions driven by evidence. That Israel needs saving from itself. That American liberal Jewry holds the moral center of world Jewry. That ethnonationalism is the primary Jewish pathology of the moment. That antisemitism comes from the right. That the Orthodox world is a curiosity rather than the future. That textual seriousness, institutional complexity, and universalist ethical commitment can sustain Jewish communal life without demographic reproduction, without state power, and without the coalition discipline that every surviving Jewish community in history has required. Each belief makes the career possible. Each belief aligns Myers with the funders, the graduate students, the journals, the conferences, and the colleagues whose approval sustains the institutional position. None of the beliefs is stupid. All of them are convenient. They are the beliefs a man in Myers’ position needs to hold to remain the man he is.
Becker’s hero system reading follows. Myers does not write for money. He writes for meaning. His Rawidowicz project, his historicism project, his Kiryas Joel project, his Stakes of History project: each gives him and his readers a chain that connects present effort to a lineage of serious Jewish thought and forward to a Jewish future. The chain supplies cosmic significance on terms the coalition can underwrite. The liberal Diasporist Jew is the bearer of a tradition, the inheritor of Rawidowicz and the Wissenschaft scholars and Heinrich Graetz and Salo Baron, the builder of a Jewish future that refuses the compromises the Jewish state has made. Becker says every man needs such a chain or he collapses. The chain does the work the coalition needs it to do. The question is whether the chain describes reality or whether the chain is a coalition story that supplies members with the emotional goods coalitions always supply.
According to Alliance Theory, moral vocabulary functions as coalition technology. The words in Myers’ op-eds and keynote addresses sort more than they describe. Ethnonationalism. Supremacism. The Jewish democratic tradition. Prophetic Judaism. The obligation of memory. The universal ethical demand. A man who uses these words signals his coalition. A man who uses them incorrectly marks himself as outside. A man who refuses to use them at all declares war on the coalition. Myers’ lifework has added precision to this vocabulary, weighted it with historical examples, attached it to dignified ancestors, and made it available to a generation of graduate students and public intellectuals who now deploy it at the op-ed page, the synagogue board meeting, the faculty senate, and the donor breakfast.
The demographic contradiction is the part Myers’ framework cannot absorb. Liberal Diasporism requires a liberal Diaspora. The liberal Diaspora is shrinking. Orthodox Jewry, which Myers treats respectfully but does not regard as the center, is expanding, reproducing, building institutions, and accumulating demographic weight. Israeli Jewry, which Myers treats as needing correction by the moral resources the Diaspora can supply, is becoming more religious, more right-wing, more demographically robust, and less interested in what American liberal Jews think about its political choices. The Jewish future is coming from the populations his framework has marginalized. His scholarship remains valuable. His institutional position remains powerful. His readers remain influential in the venues that still matter to them. The coalition he has built his career inside is contracting. The contraction is a demographic fact the coalition has no instrument for addressing.
The Diasporist project, like the human rights project, supplies its members with the feeling of moral significance on terms that do not index to outcomes. Myers can spend a forty-year career publishing distinguished scholarship, signing important letters, delivering influential lectures, training exceptional students, and chairing consequential committees, without the trend lines of American Jewish life turning in the direction his framework predicts. The coalition will not read this as evidence against the framework. It will read it as a call for more work of the same kind. The work continues. The arrival recedes. The specialists read the signs. The lay members trust the specialists. The insider dissidents get marginalized by coalition procedures that do not need to engage their arguments.
The High-Status Male
The biology of high-status males in social mammals maps onto elite academic figures.
Start with the basic ethology of alpha males in primate troops. The alpha does not expend his energy on the signaling displays that subordinates must perform. He does not have to prove his position daily. His posture is relaxed, his movements unhurried, his gaze direct rather than averted. When he enters space, other group members adjust to him rather than he to them. His vocalizations receive responses more reliably than do those of subordinates. His mere presence structures the behavior of every animal within visual range. These displays are not effortful. They are the default state of an animal whose coalition position is secure. Frans de Waal’s work on chimpanzees in Chimpanzee Politics documents this precisely. The alpha does not rule through force primarily. He rules through the coalition that chose him and continues to choose him. His calm reflects the security of that backing.
Robert Alter at Berkeley, David Myers at UCLA, Caleb Smith at Yale, Jeffrey Alexander at Yale, and Jack Balkin at Yale all operate in this mode within their respective academic habitats. Their prose does not strain. Their claims do not hedge defensively. Their citation practices assume an audience that will receive them with appropriate respect. They write as men whose coalition position is secure and who do not have to perform for approval. The calm in their scholarship parallels the relaxed posture of the alpha in the troop. Neither is accidental. Both reflect coalition conditions that permit the relaxation. A young scholar producing the same sentences would be read as arrogant or unsupported. The same sentences from these men read as authoritative because the coalition has validated them in advance.
In primate groups, alpha males hold their position for variable lengths of time, with some tenures lasting months and others lasting a decade or more. The long-tenured alpha has a specific physiology. His cortisol levels are low. His testosterone is moderate rather than elevated. His immune function is strong. His reproductive success accumulates. The metabolic cost of dominance drops once the position is secure because the daily signaling work declines. Sapolsky’s baboon research documented this with particular clarity. The baboons who maintained high rank for years showed healthier stress profiles than either the striving subordinates below them or the recently deposed former alphas who fell.
Rawls held this position in political philosophy for roughly thirty-five years. From A Theory of Justice in 1971 until his death in 2002, his coalition centrality was uncontested within analytic political philosophy. The discipline organized itself around him. His critics defined themselves against his framework, which is itself a form of centrality. Students trained at Harvard carried his project outward into the profession. His successors, including Balkin in legal theory and constitutional scholarship, inherited a portion of the structural position. The long tenure shaped him. He could afford the slow, careful refinement that Political Liberalism and The Law of Peoples represent. His later work did not strain for breakthrough because breakthrough was unnecessary. He could tend his position rather than fight for it. The physiological calm of the long-tenured alpha expresses itself in academic work as methodical refinement rather than desperate innovation.
Alter at Berkeley has held comparable tenure in biblical studies and Hebrew literary translation. His position for fifty years has been secure enough that he could produce the complete Hebrew Bible translation at his own pace, with his own editorial choices, without having to accommodate the competing orthodoxies of departmental politics or disciplinary fashion. The translation itself reads as the work of a man who assumes his audience. He does not hedge. He does not explain his choices defensively. He makes them, and the discipline accepts them, and he continues. The work does not strain because the position does not require strain.
Caleb Smith at Yale sits earlier in his tenure arc but occupies a position that permits the same mode. The Wordsworth collection of essays he edited, his work on reading and attention, and his intellectual position at Yale English all reflect coalition security that younger scholars must fight for. His prose style carries this. He writes as if his sentences have already been received. Younger scholars imitate this style without realizing that it is a coalition condition. They reproduce the surface without having the underlying conditions that make the surface natural. The result is often strained prose that signals ambition without delivering the authority the prose attempts to claim.
Jeffrey Alexander’s trajectory shows the alpha pattern particularly clearly in his institutional work. His cultural sociology project at Yale assembles graduate students, visiting scholars, postdocs, and international collaborators around his theoretical framework. The Center for Cultural Sociology operates as a coalition-reproduction institution. Alexander’s own writing does not need to prove cultural sociology’s viability because the institutional apparatus proves it continuously through its existence. Students arrive at Yale having read Alexander, take courses with him, write dissertations in his framework, move into academic positions carrying his apparatus with them, and return to Yale periodically for conferences that reinforce the shared framework. Each generation of students reproduces the alpha’s coalition by occupying the positions his framework makes legible. The institutional apparatus is a form of what ethologists call lineage extension. The alpha’s influence persists through the carriers who bear his markers into new territory.
David Myers at UCLA occupies a related position in American Jewish history and historiography. His institutional role at The Center for Jewish History in New York, his editorship roles, his directorship of the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, his position on multiple editorial boards, his chairmanship of the Hillel International board, and his advisory roles with philanthropic foundations all constitute a distributed institutional presence. Myers does not have to defend his positions academically because the institutional apparatus defends them structurally. His writing, whether on the Kaplan family or on Jewish Diaspora thought or on Israeli politics, operates from a position of coalition security that permits the kind of claim-making younger scholars cannot match. His recent work on liberal Zionism and the Diaspora relationship to Israel reads as the work of a man who assumes his audience will treat his framing as serious even when they disagree with his conclusions. That assumption is itself a coalition product.
Jack Balkin at Yale Law operates similarly in constitutional theory. His blog Balkinization, his Information Society Project, his various edited volumes, his position as Knight Professor of Constitutional Law, and his role in shaping legal-academic conversations about constitutional interpretation all constitute a distributed coalition apparatus. Balkin’s theoretical claims, whether about living originalism or about the national security state or about the constitutional questions raised by platform governance, receive serious engagement regardless of their merits because Balkin is the person making them. This is the normal operation of academic coalition structure. The alpha’s claims receive attention because the coalition has validated the alpha in advance.
In primates, some alphas achieve their position through physical dominance, others through coalition politics, others through inheritance of kinship networks, and others through specialized skill that other animals value. The mixed-strategy alphas are often the most stable because their position rests on multiple supports. Myers, Alter, Alexander, and Balkin all combine substantive academic achievement with institutional coalition management. Their position rests on both the original scholarly work that earned them entry into elite academic standing and the ongoing coalition work that maintains and extends their position. This mixed strategy is more stable than pure scholarly achievement without coalition management, because the scholarly work alone does not defend itself. The alpha must also tend the coalition that defends the work.
The alpha in a stable primate group modifies the group’s environment to favor his continued rule. He cultivates coalition members who benefit from his rule, defeats potential rivals before they become threats, and shapes the resource distribution within the group to maintain loyalty. High-status academics do analogous work. They hire graduate students whose work reinforces their framework. They review manuscripts that cite them favorably and scrutinize those that do not. They serve on editorial boards that privilege their approach. They advise foundation officers and university administrators whose decisions shape the academic environment in ways that favor their coalition. This is coalition maintenance that primates perform instinctively and that senior academics perform in institutional form. The difference between the primate alpha and the senior professor is that the primate’s coalition maintenance is entirely transparent while the professor’s is disguised as normal academic process.
Research on status hierarchies in humans has documented a specific endocrine profile associated with stable high status. Testosterone is moderately elevated, supporting confident social performance without the reactive aggression that very high testosterone produces. Cortisol is low, reflecting the absence of chronic stress. Dopamine signaling is responsive, providing motivation for continued engagement without the compulsive drive that characterizes striving. Serotonin is elevated, supporting calm mood and social confidence. The combined profile is the neurochemistry of the settled alpha. The men named operate within this endocrine range. The calm in their public presentations reflects the baseline chemistry of stable high status. The striving younger scholar operates with different chemistry, which is why his prose strains in ways the senior scholar’s does not.
Robin Dunbar’s work on brain size and group complexity argues that primate brains evolved specifically to manage the coalition politics that dominance requires. The alpha must track who his allies are, who his rivals are, who might defect, who might be recruited, and who is watching whom. The cognitive load is enormous. High-status humans running large institutional apparatus face the same load with additional complications because human coalitions are larger than primate troops and the signaling is mediated by writing, institutional positions, and formal credentialing. Alter, Myers, Balkin, Alexander, and Smith are each carrying substantial coalition-management cognitive loads. The capacity to carry this load while producing scholarly work is itself a mark of high-functioning elite cognition. The men at this level are not just smart in the IQ sense. They are specifically well-equipped for the coalition work that their positions require.
Primatologists and neuroscientists have documented that winning status contests produces physiological changes that make subsequent winning more likely. Testosterone rises after a win. Confidence increases. Decision-making becomes bolder. Future contests become easier to win because the winner approaches them from a physiological state that favors success. The opposite happens with losses. The loser effect makes future losses more likely. Academic careers show this pattern. Early recognition, early tenure, early prestigious publication, early major grants all produce physiological and behavioral changes that make subsequent achievement easier. The men named received early recognition that set in motion a cascade of winner effects. By middle career, the cascade had produced the alpha position. By late career, the position had become self-sustaining. Reversing such a cascade is extraordinarily difficult because it requires overcoming the physiological and social capital that the cascade built up.
Kinship selection and alliance structure matter specifically in academic elite reproduction. In primates, high-status males often operate with specific coalition allies who benefit from the alpha’s position and in exchange support the alpha against rivals. The alliance is reciprocal. Academic elites operate similarly. Myers, Alter, Alexander, and Balkin each operate within alliance networks of colleagues, former students, editorial collaborators, and institutional allies who benefit from their centrality and who support their centrality in exchange. The alliances are visible in the dedication pages of books, the acknowledgment sections of articles, the conference invitation lists, the editorial boards, the dissertation committees, and the foundation advisory groups. Each mark of institutional participation reinforces the alliance. The alliance is the normal structure of elite academic life. Outsiders often mistake it for a conspiracy. It is simpler than conspiracy. It is coalition biology running on institutional infrastructure.
The concept of honest signaling from Amotz Zahavi’s handicap principle applies to the costly markers of elite academic status. The peacock’s tail is costly to grow and maintain. It signals genetic quality precisely because only a high-quality peacock can afford to grow such a costly ornament. Elite academic achievements serve analogous functions. A career-long series of books with major university presses, a bibliography in prestigious journals, endowed professorships, editorship of major series, service on important boards, all constitute costly signals that only scholars with substantial capacity can sustain. The signals are honest in the sense that they cannot be faked without the underlying capacity. They are also costly in the sense that maintaining them requires continuous effort even for men at the top of their coalition. The alpha does not stop grooming his tail. He just does it with less visible strain.
The ecological concept of carrying capacity shapes the pattern. A given academic field can sustain only a limited number of alpha figures. Once the positions are filled, new entrants must either find new subfields where positions are open, displace existing figures, or accept subordinate status within the existing structure. The fields Myers, Alter, Alexander, Balkin, Rawls, and Smith occupy have limited carrying capacity for top-tier figures. Each occupies a position that cannot be occupied by another while they remain. Their persistence shapes the field’s opportunity structure for younger scholars.
An animal that inherits status from kinship networks holds position differently than one who achieved it through demonstrated capacity. The former is more vulnerable to challenge because its position does not rest on demonstrated dominance. The latter is more stable because its position rests on proven capacity that rivals have already tested. The elite academics named occupy mostly achieved status positions. Their centrality rests on scholarly work that the profession has tested and validated. Had they inherited position without demonstrating capacity, the position would be contested continuously. Because they demonstrated capacity first and built coalition around the demonstration, the coalition reinforces rather than undermines the underlying claim.
The pattern across all these men is coherent. Early high achievement produced winner-effect cascades that led to coalition centrality. Coalition centrality produced the institutional apparatus that reproduces the framework and extends the alpha’s influence into subsequent generations. The institutional apparatus produces the stable endocrine profile that supports calm, unhurried, authoritative prose and public presentation. The calm presentation reinforces the coalition’s confidence in the alpha. The coalition’s confidence permits the further niche construction that cements the position. The loop closes. The alpha at maturity is a man whose biology, whose institutional position, whose coalition backing, and whose daily behavior all reinforce each other. Disrupting such a loop is hard even for hostile challengers because every piece of the loop supports every other piece.
Rawls operated as a philosopher without institutional empire-building on the scale Alexander has pursued at Yale’s Center for Cultural Sociology. Alter operated as a scholar-translator without the kind of political-cultural position Myers holds in Jewish Diaspora thought. Balkin combines legal scholarship with institutional entrepreneurship in ways Smith does not match at the same career stage. But the underlying biological pattern runs through all of them. They are socially dominant primates whose dominance expresses itself in academic form. The academic form is sophisticated, credentialed, and mediated by formal institutions rather than by direct physical display, but the underlying capacity is continuous with the capacities that make alpha primates successful in their troops. The adaptation runs deep and predates human culture by tens of millions of years.
The Craft of Writing Effectively
The McEnerney framework finds Myers at the level of craft, where Turner found him at the level of conditions and Sell found him at the level of evolved coalition emotion. The three layers fit together. Conditions produce a man, the man learns the craft of writing for the coalition the conditions formed him inside, and the coalition organizes itself partly through hatreds that determine who counts as a legitimate addressee. McEnerney teaches the craft. Myers is one of the master practitioners of his generation.
McEnerney’s core distinction is the horizontal versus the vertical axis. The horizontal axis is the writer’s own thinking process. The vertical axis is the community of readers and what changes their minds. Most academics develop the horizontal axis through decades of training and never fully transition to the vertical, because the training reproduces the conditions in which readers were paid to care about the writer. Real readers, the ones McEnerney calls readers not paid to care, are doing different cognitive work. They are scanning for problems they recognize, framed in their community’s codes, with stakes their community shares, structured to move their existing doubts toward resolution.
Myers makes the transition. His career is what success on the vertical axis looks like in Jewish intellectual history. The horizontal axis is fully developed too, but the work that defines him is keyed to readers and not to the writer’s own demonstration of mastery.
The 1992 super-commentary on Yerushalmi and Funkenstein is the early signal. Myers picked an exchange the field was already arguing about. He positioned himself as a third-order voice in a conversation his readers cared about. He gave them an instability they could feel as their own: Funkenstein had introduced “historical consciousness” as the mediating term and had not done the work the term required. Real readers leaned in because Myers had located a gap they had sensed without naming. The piece moved the conversation. McEnerney would describe the move as a textbook vertical-axis intervention.
Re-Inventing the Jewish Past worked the same way at book length. The Hebrew University historians were already an object of ambivalent fascination in the field. Their use of European historicist methods to construct a Zionist national past sat uncomfortably with both the political commitments of contemporary Jewish historians and the methodological commitments of contemporary Zionist scholars. Myers found the problem his readers carried and gave it shape. He did not import a problem from outside. He made visible an instability his readers were already living with.
Resisting History did this for the German-Jewish thinkers at a moment when post-Holocaust thought was peaking in coalition interest. The figures Myers grouped, Rosenzweig, Strauss, Breuer, the Krochmal-influenced thinkers, were the ones his readers had been wanting to think about together without quite knowing how. Myers gave them a frame. The frame was curatorial in the sense Turner identifies. It was also a perfect McEnerney move. It located the readers’ latent problem and offered a structure for moving it forward.
The Rawidowicz recovery is McEnerney mastery operating at the level of present politics. Myers found a figure his coalition could use. He framed Rawidowicz as the major theorist of a position the coalition wanted to occupy, non-statist Zionism with intellectual depth, with the marginalization presented as historical contingency rather than community judgment. The piece works on the vertical axis because it gives the coalition what it wants in a form the coalition recognizes as scholarship. The Cohen JQR forum did the same for the Conservative-adjacent academic readership at JTS and its satellites. American Shtetl did it for the legal-academic and Jewish-studies coalitions that had been circling Kiryas Joel without converging on a treatment.
Each move shares a structure. Myers reads the coalition’s existing concerns with precision. He locates a problem the readers feel without having articulated. He offers an account that resolves the problem in a direction the coalition can accept. He writes in the coalition’s prose register, with the right citation density, the right tonal balance between scholarly distance and engaged commitment, the right weight of acknowledgment to potential opponents inside the coalition. The work lands because every variable is keyed to what readers not paid to care nevertheless do care about. The mastery is total enough that it becomes invisible. The work reads as natural.
McEnerney’s framework also explains the discipline of Myers’s omissions. McEnerney teaches that writing succeeds when it solves a problem the readers recognize and fails when it presents the writer’s thinking on the writer’s own terms. Myers omits the moves that would be horizontal-axis self-display. He does not parade his theoretical apparatus. He does not show his work in the manner of the seminar paper. He does not introduce frames his readers do not already half-share. He keeps the architecture simple enough that the readers feel they are following an argument and rich enough that they feel rewarded for the effort. The aesthetic of his prose is the aesthetic of the cleared path.
Myers is not just embedded in a coalition that pays him status, income, and protection. He has internalized the coalition’s preferences as craft. The internalization is what the coalition selects for, and the selection runs through publication venues, peer review, conference invitations, fellowship awards, and the small allocative decisions that constitute professional standing. McEnerney describes this selection as an environment writers must learn to navigate. Pinsof describes it as alliance work. Turner describes it as tacit formation. Sell describes the affective enforcement that polices its borders. The four frameworks converge on the same object from different angles. Myers is the craftsman the object produces.
The Turner reflexive move now becomes specific and operational. Myers’s coalition formation is not just a set of social conditions that shape his views. It is a trained capacity to read what his coalition wants before the coalition tells him, and to deliver it in the coalition’s preferred register. McEnerney’s insight is that this capacity is teachable in principle, and its teaching reveals itself as practical wisdom rather than as ideology. Myers absorbed it through the seminar table at Columbia, the conference circuit through his thirties, the editorial relationships of his mature career, the slow tuning of forty years inside the institutional ecosystem. He cannot fully describe what he knows because the knowledge is the kind McEnerney calls vertical: it lives in the relation between writer and audience, not in the writer’s head as articulable rules.
This makes one critique of Myers harder to sustain and another easier. The harder critique is the charge of cynicism or calculation. McEnerney’s framework shows that what looks like positioning is craft, and craft is not bad faith. The successful writer in any expert community has internalized the readers’ preferences. The internalization is what success means. The easier critique is the implicit claim that scholarship is reaching a community of inquirers seeking truth. McEnerney removes the romance. The community is a coalition that selects for moves that work in its register. Truth is what the coalition currently treats as a productive instability. The coalition’s preferences shift over time, and the writers who succeed at any moment are the ones whose craft is keyed to the present preferences.
This has consequences for Myers’s three UCLA initiatives. The Dialogue Across Difference Initiative, the Initiative to Study Hate, and the Bedari Kindness Institute all proceed inside an academic coalition that rewards certain framings of intergroup conflict and punishes others. The work the institutes produce will be vertical-axis writing for that coalition, not for the populations it studies. The framings will track what the coalition can already half-articulate as concern. The hatreds the institutes target will be the hatreds the coalition recognizes as legitimate objects of study. The hatreds the coalition runs on, of which there are several, will be invisible to the project. McEnerney’s framework predicts this. The writers most fluent inside a coalition cannot direct their analytical tools at the coalition itself without breaking the relationship that gives the tools their leverage.
Myers might reply that engaged scholarship is supposed to operate inside a coalition while pushing it. McEnerney would agree, with a caveat. The pushing happens within a narrow band the coalition tolerates. Push past the band and the writer loses the audience. Stay inside the band and the writer can move the conversation incrementally. Myers stays inside the band. His incremental movements are real. They are also bounded by what the coalition can absorb. His three institutes will produce work that pushes liberal academic understanding of hate and dialogue at a rate the liberal academic coalition can absorb. The work will not produce framings that would cost him the coalition. McEnerney is the framework that explains why such framings cannot be produced from inside the coalition by writers whose craft is keyed to it.
The deepest connection between McEnerney and the rest of what we have built about Myers concerns the tacit. McEnerney’s craft is tacit in Turner’s sense. He can describe it well enough to teach it. The teaching takes years and most students never fully acquire it. What the students who succeed acquire is not a set of rules but a feel for what works in their community of readers. The feel is the formation Turner describes. It is also the coalition fluency Pinsof describes. It is the craft Myers exemplifies. The four frameworks are converging because they are looking at the same object, the trained sensibility of a man who knows his audience without being able to fully explain how he knows.
Myers is the test case where every framework fits. Sell explains why his enemies hate him in the architecture of an evolved adaptation. Turner explains how his trained capacity formed in postwar American Jewish institutional conditions. Pinsof explains the alliance structure his work serves. McEnerney explains the craft that makes the work land. The convergence is not an accident. It is what mastery in an expert coalition looks like when examined from four different theoretical angles by analysts not committed to any single one. Myers is what his coalition produces when the coalition is working well. The work he leaves behind is the record of the coalition’s intellectual operation across his career. It is also evidence of what such an operation can and cannot do, which is the question Turner, Sell, Pinsof, and McEnerney all answer in their different registers, and which Myers’s career illustrates more cleanly than any other current Jewish historian’s.
The Field That Eats Its Practitioners
If you devote your life to a topic, you will likely inflate its importance.
This conjecture is robust in psychology and well grounded in evolved cognition. Three forces converge to produce it, and the convergence is hard for the academic to resist from inside the career.
The first is the sunk cost effect, which operates below conscious deliberation and has been documented across decades of decision research. The mind treats prior investment as evidence that further investment is warranted, and treats the value of the object as scaling with what has been put into it. A scholar who has spent forty years on a topic does not retain the option, available to an outsider, of judging the topic’s importance from a position of low investment. His investment has already revised his estimate upward, and the revision has occurred in his perceptual apparatus, not just in his explicit reasoning.
The second is the niche specialization effect, which is sharper for academics than for most other professionals. The academic builds a career inside a particular subfield by becoming someone whose voice on that subfield carries weight. The weight depends on the subfield mattering. If the subfield does not matter, the voice does not matter. The academic therefore has a continuous interest, partly conscious and partly not, in maintaining the importance of the subfield, because his standing as a scholar depends on it. The man who could announce that his subfield is unimportant from a properly calibrated cosmic perspective would be announcing that his life’s work was a category error, which is not a thing most minds permit themselves to do.
The third is the coalition effect. The subfield is a community of similarly invested scholars who reinforce one another’s estimates of the subfield’s importance through citation, conference programming, peer review, and the small allocative decisions that constitute professional standing. The community is structurally incapable of producing a downward revision of its own importance because the production conditions select for upward revision. Anyone who tries to revise downward is either ignored or pushed to the periphery and replaced by someone who maintains the upward revision. The result is that the public discourse of the subfield always overstates the subfield’s importance, and the overstatement is invisible to participants because everyone they speak to is overstating in the same direction.
Robert Trivers’s work on self-deception adds the final layer. The academic does not need to lie about his subfield’s importance. He needs only to be sincerely persuaded of it, because sincere persuasion is more credible to readers and reviewers than calculated advocacy. The selection regime that produces successful academics produces sincere believers in the importance of their topics. The sincerity is the trait that makes the persuasion work. The honest critic from outside, who can see that the subfield has been collectively overestimated by its participants, has no way to convince the participants without simultaneously challenging their sincerity, which the participants experience as accusation rather than argument. The exchange does not converge.
These three forces, plus the Triversian fourth, mean the conjecture is not merely true on average. It is structurally true. The academic who has not overestimated the importance of his life’s topic is the rare exception, and the rarity is not random. Most such exceptions exit academia or move to broader synthetic work that integrates many subfields and thereby derives importance from breadth rather than from depth in any single one.
Applied to Myers, the implications are specific.
Myers has built a career on the premise that the writing of Jewish history matters in a way that warrants scholarly attention, public debate, philanthropic funding, and institutional infrastructure. The premise is not testable from inside Jewish historiography because the field selects for participants who hold the premise. The premise meets serious challenge only when one steps outside the field and asks whether the questions Jewish historians fight about would be visible at all, in their current shape and intensity, to a reasonable observer with no professional stake in their visibility.
Take the question of whether Yerushalmi was right about rupture, or Funkenstein was right about continuity, or Myers correctly mediates between them through Blumenberg. The question fills journals, generates conferences, structures hiring lines at Jewish studies centers, and organizes the careers of dozens of mid-rank scholars across the United States, Israel, and Europe. From inside the field, the question is fundamental. From outside the field, the question is not even legible. A serious philosopher of mind has no investment in whether premodern Jews experienced their relation to the past as memory or as historical consciousness. A serious sociologist of religion treats the question as a special case of the more general question of how modernity reshapes religious cognition, with Jews as one case among many, and the Funkenstein-Yerushalmi-Myers triangle as a parochial dispute that occupies a few hundred specialists. A serious historian of Europe treats Jewish historiography as a small subdiscipline whose internal debates do not move the broader history of nineteenth-century intellectual life. The debate Myers has spent his career inside is, from any of these external positions, important to a small community and otherwise of bounded significance.
The same is true of the Hebrew University historians whose project Myers reconstructs. Inside Jewish historiography, the question of whether Dinur and Baer’s work shaped Israeli national consciousness is large. Outside the field, the work of these men is one branch of the much broader nation-building scholarship of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the methods and tropes Myers identifies in them appear, with local variation, in dozens of other national projects across Europe and the postcolonial world. Treating the Hebrew University historians as worth a book-length study is a defensible scholarly choice. Treating that book as a major contribution to general intellectual history is a coalition judgment, not a judgment any neutral observer would render.
American Shtetl works the same way at higher resolution. Kiryas Joel is a small village in upstate New York. Its legal struggles produced one Supreme Court case, generated a body of administrative law in school district formation, and supplied a vivid example for scholars interested in religious accommodation. The question of whether Kiryas Joel reveals something important about American pluralism is answered yes inside the field and at most modestly inside the wider literature on American religious diversity. Myers treats the village as a window onto the deepest tensions in American constitutional life. Outside readers find a careful study of an unusual case. The gap between the two readings is the overestimation effect operating at book scale.
The Rawidowicz revival shows the same pattern. Inside Jewish intellectual history, recovering Rawidowicz as the major theorist of non-statist Zionism is an important move with present coalition uses. Outside the field, Rawidowicz is a minor twentieth-century Jewish thinker whose work was always going to be read by a few hundred specialists and a few interested rabbis, and whose recovery does not reorganize anyone’s understanding of Zionism, of nationalism, or of twentieth-century Jewish thought from any position other than the position of someone already inside the field’s current arguments.
There are three further points worth pressing.
The first concerns applied history. Myers’s Luskin Center initiative rests on the premise that historical scholarship can usefully inform present policy. The premise inflates the practical importance of historical work to a degree the historical work cannot bear. Policy is made by people responding to incentives, constituencies, budgets, and institutional pressures the historian’s training does not equip him to navigate. The historian’s contribution, when it lands, is rhetorical rather than substantive. He provides framings policy actors use to advance positions the actors had already chosen. Applied history therefore overestimates the practical leverage of historical scholarship by approximately the amount that makes the initiative worth funding from the perspective of donors who like the idea of history mattering. The initiative is the inflation institutionalized.
The second concerns the three UCLA institutes. The Initiative to Study Hate, the Dialogue Across Difference Initiative, and the Bedari Kindness Institute all rest on the premise that scholarly attention to hatred, dialogue, and kindness can produce socially significant outcomes. The premise is partially defensible and significantly overstated. Hatred operates on architecture older than the institutes can reach. Dialogue requires conditions the institutes cannot create. Kindness, as the Sell paper indicates, deactivates hatred only under narrow conditions the institutes do not control. The institutes do real work and produce real research. They produce considerably less change in the conditions they study than their public framing suggests they will. The discrepancy between framing and likely impact is the overestimation Myers brings to his administrative role, and the discrepancy is structurally sustained because donors, university administrators, and the institutes’ own staff all benefit from the framing being maintained.
The third concerns the comparison to other lives. Myers has spent four decades on Jewish historiography, applied history, and intergroup repair. A man with comparable energy and intelligence who spent four decades on cancer research, or on energy infrastructure, or on the cognitive science of decision-making, or on the development of artificial intelligence, would have contributed to questions whose answers reshape how billions of people live and die. Myers has contributed to questions whose answers refine how a few thousand specialists and a somewhat larger number of educated readers think about Jewish history, intergroup conflict, and dialogue. The comparison is not a moral indictment. People make career choices for many reasons, and the reasons need not include maximizing global impact. The comparison is a measurement of the gap between Myers’s likely lived sense of the importance of his work and the importance an external observer with no stake in Jewish historiography would assign to it.
Myers cannot perform this comparison from inside his career. Almost no one can. The comparison requires the specific posture the academic life trains out of its practitioners, namely the posture of viewing one’s own field’s importance from a position that does not benefit from the field’s importance being high. The few academics who can perform the comparison usually do so late in life and treat the resulting recognition with rueful humor rather than career-altering action. By that point, the career is mostly over and the recognition costs little to acknowledge.
The honest statement of the situation is that Myers has built a respectable career inside a field whose importance is real and modest, that the importance is consistently overestimated by participants in the field for predictable structural reasons, that Myers shares the overestimation in proportion to his investment in the field, and that nothing in his position or training equips him to correct the overestimation in his own case. The man is the career, and the career has its own gravity.
The opening sentence stacks five institutional positions: Distinguished Professor, Kahn Chair, Director of the Luskin Center, Director of the Initiative to Study Hate, Director of the Dialogue Across Difference Initiative, Director of the Bedari Kindness Institute. The sequence is not random. It moves from the disciplinary credential outward through the institute affiliations, ending on Kindness. The progression encodes the career trajectory the rest of the document confirms. He started inside Jewish historiography and has moved outward into administrative custody of expanding institutional projects. The bio places the most recent institutional acquisitions first, which is unusual. Most academic bios lead with the chair and disciplinary identity and treat administrative roles as supporting material. Myers reverses the priority. The reversal is a tell. The institutes have become the primary professional identity. The chair is now in service to them rather than the other way around.
The New Israel Fund presidency is given a sentence of its own at the end of the opening paragraph. Its placement is careful. It comes after the academic positions but before the biographical narrative. This signals the role’s importance to him without burying it in the body of the bio where it might read as one item among many. It also signals it to the kind of reader who tracks institutional Jewish politics. The reader who knows the NIF reads this line as a coalition marker. The reader who does not know the NIF reads past it without registering the marker. The placement serves both readerships at once, which is McEnerney mastery in miniature.
The Scranton opening is a deliberate move. He grew up in “the rich ethnic patchwork of that Middle Atlantic city,” which is a specific code. Scranton in the 1960s and 1970s had a Jewish population, an Italian Catholic population, an Irish Catholic population, an Eastern European Catholic population, and a Black population, layered into the residential and parochial structure of a declining anthracite town. Calling this a “rich ethnic patchwork” rather than what it also was, namely a city of segmented and often mutually wary ethnic communities, is the work the bio is doing. The patchwork frame establishes Myers as someone formed in pluralism, prepared by upbringing for the dialogue and kindness work that now occupies him. The framing is not false. It is selective. The same upbringing could be described in language that emphasized the boundaries between groups rather than the patchwork that contained them. Myers chooses the patchwork register because the register matches the institutional mission he now serves.
The Yale undergraduate degree is presented as cum laude. This is accurate. It is also notable in what it does not say. He did not get summa or magna. The cum laude credential at Yale is the lowest honors tier, which means he was a strong student but not at the top of his class. The bio includes the credential because cum laude at Yale signals seriousness, and omits the qualifier that would let a careful reader place him on the gradient. This is standard self-presentation. It is also a small instance of how the document selects details that elevate without making elevatable claims that careful readers would discount.
The post-Yale move to Israel is described as “Following graduation, Myers moved to Israel where he began his graduate studies in modern Jewish history at Tel Aviv University.” The move is presented as a graduate study decision. What is omitted is whatever Zionist commitment, family pressure, or post-college searching produced the move. The teachers named (Anita Shapira, Yaakov Shavit, Saul Friedländer) are the major figures of Tel Aviv’s Jewish history department in that period. Friedländer’s name in particular tells a knowing reader something. Friedländer was the leading Holocaust historian working in Israel at the time, the figure whose work most insistently kept the Holocaust at the center of modern Jewish historiography. Studying with Friedländer marks Myers as having been formed inside a particular methodological and political register. The bio drops the name without making the formation explicit, which lets the knowing reader register it and the unknowing reader not.
The Harvard year with Isadore Twersky is similarly coded. Twersky was the major figure in medieval Jewish intellectual history at Harvard, an Orthodox rabbi from a major Hasidic dynasty (the Talner Rebbe), who held the Littauer chair and who insisted on reading medieval Jewish thought from inside its halakhic and theological premises rather than only from the outside scholarly perspective. Studying with Twersky for a year signals exposure to a kind of traditional learning Myers was not getting in Tel Aviv or would later get at Columbia. The bio includes this year without explaining why he interrupted his Tel Aviv studies for it. The interruption suggests something was being sought that Tel Aviv did not provide. The bio leaves this implicit.
Yerushalmi at Columbia is described as “his revered teacher.” The word “revered” is doing real work. It is the only adjective in the educational sequence that registers personal feeling. The dates of Yerushalmi’s life are given parenthetically, which is unusual in a self-bio and suggests Yerushalmi is treated as a figure deserving the formal acknowledgment one gives to important historical figures rather than simply as a teacher. The reverence is also a positioning move. By marking Yerushalmi as revered, Myers locates himself inside a particular scholarly lineage and claims standing as Yerushalmi’s heir. The claim is implicit. The lineage is the line of modern Jewish historiography that runs from Salo Baron through Yerushalmi to whatever comes next, and Myers is claiming the next position by marking the previous one as revered.
The dissertation completed “with distinction” is another credential carefully selected. Most Columbia dissertations are completed without such designations. “With distinction” is a real honor. The bio includes it.
The narrative of the move to Los Angeles is the document’s only attempt at humor. “Armed with all of the stereotypes of a self-respecting East Coast person, he expected to find a vast empty wasteland in Los Angeles. Instead, he found a rich, diverse, and exciting urban environment.” This is the only paragraph that breaks the formal academic register. The break is calculated. It humanizes the bio. It also signals coastal cosmopolitanism, the awareness of stereotypes about Los Angeles, and the willingness to have one’s expectations revised by experience. The same paragraph mentions his wife taking up a position at USC Law School. Nomi Stolzenberg is a legal scholar. The bio mentions her here in the context of his move to Los Angeles. She reappears at the end as the mother of his daughters and as co-author of the Kiryas Joel book. She does not appear as a scholarly partner whose work shaped his intellectual development, even though the Kiryas Joel project was as much hers as his and grew out of her legal-academic engagement with religious accommodation cases. The framing keeps Myers as the protagonist and Stolzenberg as the supporting figure. This is conventional in male academic bios. It is also a choice.
The list of UCLA administrative positions is given without commentary. He directed the Center for Jewish Studies for ten years across two stints. He chaired the History Department for five years. He spent a year as President and CEO of the Center for Jewish History in New York. These positions are the conventional academic administrator’s portfolio and place him securely in the institutional class of his discipline.
The scholarly works paragraph is structured carefully. The five sole-authored books are listed: Re-Inventing the Jewish Past (1995), Resisting History (2003), Between Jew and Arab (2008), Jewish History in the Oxford Very Short Introductions series, and The Stakes of History (2018). Then American Shtetl (2021) is appended as the most recent, with Stolzenberg credited. The list is accurate but the framing is selective. It treats the books as a unified scholarly output. It does not register that Between Jew and Arab is a focused recovery project, that Jewish History in the Oxford series is a short popularization rather than a scholarly monograph, that The Stakes of History is an essay collection rather than an integrated study, and that American Shtetl is in important respects Stolzenberg’s project that Myers joined. Smoothing these distinctions makes the bibliography read as a sustained scholarly trajectory rather than as a more varied body of work that includes shorter, more popular, and more collaborative pieces alongside the major monographs.
The edited volumes are listed selectively. Twelve are mentioned. Five are named. The five named are the ones most likely to register with the institutional Jewish coalition: The Jewish Past Revisited, Enlightenment and Diaspora, The Faith of Fallen Jews (the Yerushalmi memorial volume), The Eternal Dissident (the Beerman volume), and the Rawidowicz selected writings. The Beerman volume is particularly telling. Leonard Beerman was the Reform rabbi of Leo Baeck Temple in Los Angeles, a major figure in the liberal Jewish establishment of the West Coast, known for radical political commitments that pushed at but did not break with mainstream Jewish institutional life. Editing his volume locates Myers inside a particular tradition of liberal-Jewish-establishment-with-edge that he occupies in his own career. The selection is a coalition marker.
The visiting positions list (École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Russian State University for the Humanities, the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem, the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies in Philadelphia) traces the international circuits of Jewish studies. The mention of Russian State University is the most surprising and signals engagement with the post-Soviet academic world that few American Jewish historians of his generation pursued. The mention is included, which suggests Myers wants the cosmopolitan range registered.
The Jewish Quarterly Review co-editorship is mentioned as continuous since 2003. JQR is the major Jewish studies journal published by the University of Pennsylvania. Co-editing it for over two decades places Myers at the center of the field’s gatekeeping apparatus. The bio mentions this without commentary on what such a long editorial run means for the field’s selection of what counts as good Jewish scholarship. Myers has shaped the field through this position more than through any individual book. The bio does not press the point.
The closing paragraph mentions “contemporary Jewish affairs, particularly Israel/Palestine,” and the Wexner Heritage Foundation. Wexner is the most influential program in liberal American Jewish leadership development. Its alumni populate the boards of major Jewish organizations, the donor classes of major Jewish philanthropies, and the policy circles where American Jewish institutional positions get formed. Teaching for Wexner places Myers inside the formation circuit for the next generation of liberal American Jewish leadership. This is not visible to readers outside the institutional Jewish world. It is highly visible to readers inside it.
The final sentence about the Pico-Robertson neighborhood and the three daughters is a Jewish geographical and family signal. Pico-Robertson is the Orthodox neighborhood of West Los Angeles, where Myers and Stolzenberg chose to live and raise their daughters. This signals a particular kind of liberal Jewish family life that maintains substantive connection to tradition.
What is conspicuously absent.
There is no mention of his father, mother, or family of origin beyond the city of birth. Most academic bios include parental occupations or family circumstances when relevant. Myers omits these. The omission is a choice and probably reflects either modest origins he prefers not to highlight or family circumstances he prefers to keep private. Either way, the omission is consistent with a presentation strategy that focuses on adult achievement and institutional location rather than on the formation conditions that produced the adult.
There is no mention of his religious practice or denominational affiliation. Most bios of academics working on Jewish topics either state or imply such information. Myers leaves it out. The omission is consistent with the McEnerney rule that an author should not give readers information that does not advance the author’s purposes with the readers. Stating denomination would commit Myers to a position that some of his readers would discount him for. Leaving it implicit lets each reader place him where the reader’s coalition expects him to be. The Pico-Robertson address does the same work indirectly without forcing the issue.
There is no mention of the political work the New Israel Fund presidency entails. NIF is a major funder of progressive Israeli civil society organizations and is regularly attacked from the Israeli and American right as anti-Israel. Five years as president of its board is a substantial political commitment. The bio names the position without describing what the position involves. This lets the position function as a coalition marker without requiring Myers to defend the political content. The reader who tracks NIF politics knows what the position means. The reader who does not know moves past it.
There is no mention of the public controversies his political work has produced. NIF has been the target of campaigns by Israeli right-wing organizations, by American Jewish institutional defenders of the current Israeli government, and by various pro-settler groups. Myers’s presidency exposed him to such campaigns. The bio mentions none of this. The omission is appropriate for a formal academic bio. It also smooths a career that has been more politically contested than the document admits.
There is no mention of the recent expansion of institutional commitments. The bio names the directorships of the four UCLA initiatives but does not date them or describe their growth. The reader cannot tell from the bio whether these are mature programs or recent additions. Three of them are recent, in their first or second cycles of operation, and represent a pivot from Jewish studies into general intergroup-conflict and well-being research. The pivot is the feature the bio most carefully smooths into the standard scholarly progression.
The bio is well written. It does what self-presentations should do. It also rewards the kind of close reading the McEnerney framework recommends. Every detail included is doing work. Every detail omitted is doing different work. The work is consistent with the institutional position Myers occupies and with the coalition his institutes serve. The document is a small instance of the larger pattern Turner, Pinsof, Sell, and McEnerney converge on when they look at the work of an embedded scholar near the peak of a successful career. The author is the career. The bio is the career’s self-description for its various readerships, calibrated to land with each of them in the way each reader’s coalition expects.
Myers as Argument: A Pinsof Reading
David Pinsof’s framework asks whether the form of an intellectual activity fits the function of persuasion or whether it fits some other function. The diagnostic checks for tribal rallying, rationalization, verbal sparring, status defense, status attack, and concealment of all of the above. Applying the framework to Myers produces a verdict that requires careful work, because Myers operates across registers that produce different outputs and because his institutional position carries pressures that the framework predicts will shape the form of the work in particular ways.
Begin with the academic monographs. Re-Inventing the Jewish Past and Resisting History are works of intellectual history produced under the discipline of academic peer review and reviewed in the major journals of Jewish studies and modern European intellectual history after publication. The first book traces the formation of Zionist historiography through the work of figures including Ben-Zion Dinur, Yitzhak Baer, and Gershom Scholem. The second traces a counter-tradition of German-Jewish thinkers, including Franz Rosenzweig and Isaac Breuer, who resisted the historicizing impulse that dominated nineteenth-century Wissenschaft des Judentums. Both books take their subjects at their strongest. The Zionist historians whose project Myers complicates are presented in their full intellectual seriousness before the complications are introduced. The anti-historicist thinkers whose project Myers recovers are presented in their full strangeness before the recovery is performed. The work engages opposing positions at their strongest forms and offers criticism that addresses those forms rather than weakened versions arranged for easy demolition.
Pinsof’s framework reads this as the basic marker of real argument. A work that engages opponents at their strongest is performing inquiry. The framework also reads the willingness to recover positions that Myers’s own institutional milieu has reasons to dismiss, including Breuer’s Orthodox separatism and Rawidowicz’s Diaspora nationalism, as a marker of the kind of intellectual seriousness that pseudoargument cannot perform. Pseudoargument filters out positions that complicate the coalition’s preferred narrative. Myers filters them in. Resisting History in particular gives sympathetic treatment to thinkers whose conclusions Myers does not share, and the sympathy is the kind of sympathy that real argument requires. The reader finishes the book with a more complicated understanding of the historicist debate than he came in with, and the complication is the result of evidence and reasoning Myers has supplied.
The Rawidowicz book performs a similar operation on a more politically charged topic. Simon Rawidowicz was a Diaspora nationalist whose unpublished writings on the Palestinian refugee question complicated the standard Zionist account of 1948. Myers’s recovery of these writings put into circulation material that the dominant Zionist historiography had not engaged. The book did not present Rawidowicz as a polemical instrument. It presented him as a thinker whose positions deserved engagement on their own terms. Readers who came to the book with Zionist commitments found themselves reading a careful presentation of a Diaspora-nationalist alternative that Zionist historiography had marginalized. Readers who came with anti-Zionist commitments found themselves reading a thinker who was deeply committed to Jewish national life even as he criticized particular Israeli policies. The book performed the function Pinsof’s framework identifies as real argument. It gave readers the materials they needed to evaluate the question on the merits rather than the materials they needed to confirm prior commitments.
The Stakes of History engages directly with the question of how Jewish history should be written and used. The book addresses the long debate within Jewish intellectual life between historicism and its critics, taking up Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s Zakhor as the central modern statement of the problem. Myers neither defends the historicist project against its critics nor abandons historicism for memory. He engages the tension itself, and the engagement does not resolve in a way that flatters either coalition within the field. The book is a model of the kind of work Pinsof’s framework registers as real argument. It identifies a hard problem, presents the strongest cases on multiple sides, and offers an analysis that complicates rather than ratifies the reader’s prior commitments.
American Shtetl, co-authored with the legal scholar Nomi Stolzenberg, is the most sustained recent example of the inquiry standard in Myers’s body of work. The book examines the establishment of Kiryas Joel, the Satmar Hasidic village in upstate New York, and the legal and political questions the village’s existence has raised about American religious accommodation. The community Myers and Stolzenberg study is a community whose values diverge sharply from the values of the academic readership the book is addressed to. The Satmar are anti-Zionist, religiously separatist, gender-traditional, and politically organized in ways that the secular liberal academic milieu has reasons to find uncongenial. The book takes the community at its strongest. The Satmar reasoning about the requirements of religious life, the community’s political strategy, and the legal arguments the community’s lawyers have advanced are all presented in their fullest forms. The book criticizes some of the community’s arrangements, but the criticism is criticism of the strongest case rather than of caricatures arranged for easy dismissal. The book has been recognized within both Jewish studies and legal scholarship as a model of how to engage a community whose values one does not share. Pinsof’s framework reads the book as a clear case of real argument operating at high craft on a topic where the structural pressures push toward pseudoargument and where the form has resisted the pressures.
The academic work, taken as a body, passes the diagnostic for real argument with unusual clarity. The strongest opposing views are engaged. Counterexamples are addressed. The author shows curiosity about cases that complicate his framings. The work does not perform sustained status attack on figures the field’s coalitions treat as enemies. It does not perform sustained status defense for figures the field’s coalitions treat as friends. It does not engage in deflection when pressure points emerge. It revises in response to criticism. It produces understanding rather than coalition consolidation. The pattern holds across nearly three decades of monographs, edited volumes, and scholarly articles.
Now consider the public writing. Myers contributes to The Forward, Jewish Currents, Haaretz, and other publications that reach a Jewish public readership rather than only the specialist scholarly audience. The public writing addresses contemporary questions in Israeli politics, American Jewish life, and the relationship between Jewish history and present concerns. The register shifts from the academic register, but the structural features that produce real argument in the academic work largely carry over.
The public writing engages the strongest versions of opposing positions. When Myers writes about Israeli policy, he engages the strongest defenses of the policies he criticizes rather than caricatures of those defenses. When he writes about American Jewish institutional life, he engages the strongest cases for the institutional arrangements he questions rather than reduced versions of those cases. When he writes about the relationship between American Jews and Israel, he engages the strongest forms of the various positions in the debate rather than positions selected for easy dismissal.
The public writing shows the same curiosity about counterexamples that the academic work shows. Myers’s writing on Israeli democracy and the question of Palestinian rights does not minimize the security considerations that Israeli officials have raised, even as Myers criticizes responses to those considerations. His writing on American Jewish institutional life acknowledges the contributions of institutions whose direction he questions, and the acknowledgment is not pro forma. It does work in the writing. The reader who follows Myers’s public commentary across years can see him modifying positions in response to events, acknowledging where his earlier framings have been complicated by subsequent developments, and accepting the burden of revising rather than reframing when the evidence requires it.
The public writing does not treat opposition as confirmation. When critics from various positions have engaged Myers’s public commentary, the engagement has produced exchanges that look like real exchanges. Myers responds to substantive points with substantive replies. He concedes where concession is warranted. He maintains positions where the criticism does not require revision and explains why the criticism does not require revision. The structure remains open. A reader following the exchanges can see argument occurring rather than performance of argument occurring.
A complication is worth dwelling on, because it bears on whether the framework’s verdict is fair. Myers writes from a position. He is identified with a particular tendency in American Jewish life that combines deep commitment to Jewish continuity with criticism of certain Israeli policies, support for certain progressive positions on questions of religious pluralism and democratic norms, and skepticism toward certain Orthodox and right-wing political formations within Jewish life. The position is real, and it shapes the topics Myers chooses to address, the questions he asks, and the framings he finds illuminating. A reader who shares Myers’s position will find the public writing confirming in some respects, and a reader who disagrees will find it irritating in some respects.
Pinsof’s framework does not require that authors lack positions. It requires that the form of the work fit the function of inquiry rather than the function of coalition performance. The relevant question is whether Myers’s positions inform his inquiry without distorting its form. The structural diagnostic produces findings that bear on this question.
The public writing operates within parameters that Myers’s coalition has set. The legitimacy of Zionism as a political project is a parameter. The two-state solution as the horizon of legitimate aspiration is a parameter. The basic structure of American Jewish institutional life, with its denominational divisions and its philanthropic arrangements, is a parameter. The public writing does not engage these parameters at their roots. It engages questions inside the parameters with the methods of real argument, but the parameters themselves are largely treated as given. A reader who wants to see the parameters interrogated has to look elsewhere, including to writers whose positions Myers does not share and whom Myers’s public writing does not extensively engage.
This is a significant qualification. Pinsof’s framework distinguishes argument from pseudoargument by the form’s fit with the function of persuasion, and the framework recognizes that argument can occur within parameters even when the parameters themselves are not engaged. A historian of medieval Christianity does not need to engage the question of whether Christianity is true to do real argument about medieval Christian thought. The parameters define the topic rather than predetermining the conclusions on the topic. Myers’s public writing operates with parameters of this kind. The questions inside the parameters are engaged with the methods of real argument. The parameters set the topic.
The qualification matters because it identifies a limit on what the framework’s verdict can claim. The framework does not classify Myers’s public writing as comprehensive inquiry into all the questions a reader might raise about the topics he addresses. It classifies the writing as real argument on the questions the writing engages. A reader who wants to interrogate the parameters of liberal Zionism, or the parameters of contemporary American Jewish institutional life, or the parameters of the historiographical traditions Myers operates within, has to look beyond Myers’s writing to writers who engage those parameters directly. The framework can register Myers’s work as real argument within its scope without claiming that the scope exhausts the relevant questions.
The Kiryas Joel book is worth returning to here, because the book performs an operation that the public writing rarely performs. American Shtetl engages a community whose parameters are radically different from the parameters of Myers’s coalition. The Satmar reject the legitimacy of Zionism. They reject the basic structure of American Jewish denominational life. They reject the gender norms that the academic readership takes for granted. They reject the educational arrangements that the academic readership treats as basic to a defensible community. The book engages these parameters at their roots, taking the Satmar reasoning seriously and presenting the strongest case for the community’s arrangements. The book is the case where Myers’s inquiry crosses the parameters that his public writing operates within, and the crossing demonstrates that Myers can perform the operation when the genre and the topic call for it.
The pattern that emerges is variation across registers, with the academic monographs operating most clearly within the inquiry standard, the public writing operating with real argument inside parameters the writing does not engage at their roots, and the Kiryas Joel book operating as a kind of bridge case where the inquiry standard extends across parameters that the public writing typically holds constant. This is the kind of variation Pinsof’s framework registers in Cofnas’s case as well, though the variation runs in different directions. Cofnas’s academic work passes the diagnostic and his Twitter exchanges fail it. Myers’s academic work passes the diagnostic and his public writing largely passes it within its scope, with the qualification that the scope is bounded by parameters that the public writing does not interrogate.
The institutional position is worth examining for its bearing on the diagnostic. Myers has held senior positions at major American Jewish institutions for decades. He has directed three institutes at UCLA. He has served on the boards of philanthropic and political organizations. The institutional position carries pressures that the framework predicts will shape the form of work produced under those pressures. An author whose work depends on continued standing within American Jewish institutional life will experience pressures to operate within the parameters those institutions have set, and the pressures will tend to keep the work inside the parameters even when the inquiry standard would call for engaging the parameters at their roots.
Pinsof’s framework reads this kind of structural pressure as one of the conditions under which real argument can drift toward pseudoargument over time. The drift is not inevitable, and the framework’s diagnostic does not predict drift in any particular case. What the framework predicts is that authors operating under such pressures will produce work that engages the questions inside the parameters with the methods of real argument while leaving the parameters themselves largely unengaged. Myers’s public writing fits this prediction. The academic work fits the prediction less, because the academic genre permits and rewards engagement with parameters that the public-facing genre does not reward. The Kiryas Joel book is the exception that proves the rule, because the book is co-authored with a legal scholar whose discipline permits the kind of cross-parameter engagement that Myers’s primary discipline of Jewish history does not require him to perform on contemporary questions.
A point of contrast with the cases that have come before clarifies what is distinctive about Myers. Duke, Jones, Napolitano, Marantz, and Goldberg produce work that fails the diagnostic for real argument across the relevant body of their writing. Cofnas produces work that passes the diagnostic in his academic register and fails it in other registers. Muller produces work that passes the diagnostic across his body of work because his academic discipline permits engagement with the parameters that the public-facing work in foreign-policy journalism cannot easily engage. Myers’s case sits between Muller and Cofnas. The academic work is closer to Muller’s pattern of consistent inquiry across the body of work. The public writing is closer to Cofnas’s pattern of register-dependent variation, though the variation is less extreme than in Cofnas’s case because the public writing remains substantially within the inquiry standard rather than crossing into clear pseudoargument.
What is distinctive about Myers’s case is the level of craft at which the inquiry standard is maintained across an unusually broad range of registers and an unusually broad range of institutional commitments. Most authors who hold the kind of institutional positions Myers holds produce work in their public-facing registers that fails the diagnostic more clearly than Myers’s public writing fails it. The pressure to perform coalition consolidation is heavy on authors in such positions, and the form of the work usually drifts in response to the pressure. Myers’s public writing has resisted the drift to a substantial degree, even as it has not crossed the parameters his coalition has set. The resistance is itself a kind of achievement that the framework registers, because the framework predicts drift and the resistance to drift requires effort the framework can identify as the effort to maintain the inquiry standard against structural pressures that work against it.
The framework’s verdict on Myers, then, is positive on the academic work and substantially positive on the public writing within its scope, with the qualification that the scope is bounded by parameters the public writing does not engage at their roots. The verdict is the verdict that real argument receives when real argument occurs, and the qualification is the qualification that any author working within institutional parameters receives when the parameters are not directly engaged. The framework does not require that all argument cross all parameters. It requires that the form fit the function of inquiry within whatever scope the work claims. Myers’s work fits the function within its claimed scope, and the claimed scope is real argument on questions of Jewish history and contemporary Jewish life conducted within the parameters that Myers’s institutional position and intellectual commitments have set.
The applied verdict is that Myers’s body of work, taken as a whole, is real argument of unusual quality across an unusually broad range of registers and topics. The historical erudition, the engagement with opposing views at their strongest, the openness to criticism, the absence of sustained tribal performance in the registers that produce real argument, and the willingness to engage hard cases including cases that complicate the coalition’s preferred narratives, are all parts of an inquiry that produces understanding rather than coalition consolidation. The institutional setting in which the work appears supports the inquiry rather than determining its conclusions, and the craft is at the level required for the inquiry to reach audiences both inside and outside the academy without compromising the standards of either.
Myers operates across overlapping but distinct expert domains, each with its own peer network and its own tests, and his authority depends on the relations among them.
Myers holds the standard peer-checkable certifications of academic Jewish history. He earned a doctorate at Columbia under Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi. He has chaired the UCLA history department. He has held the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Chair in Jewish History at UCLA. He has served as president of the Center for Jewish History. He has published widely cited monographs on German-Jewish historiography, Wissenschaft des Judentums, and twentieth-century Jewish thought. The peer network of academic Jewish history grants him standing on tests it can apply: command of the sources, methodological care, contributions to the field’s ongoing arguments, productivity in the formats the discipline recognizes. He passes these tests. Turner’s framework treats this as the peer-checkable authority of a successful academic in a recognized discipline.
But Myers operates simultaneously in at least three other domains, each with its own expert authority structure, and the four roles he holds do not always run in the same direction.
The first additional domain is the Jewish public intellectual sphere, where Myers writes for Jewish Currents, Forward, Haaretz, and similar publications addressed to a politically engaged Jewish readership. Authority here is granted by an audience rather than by a peer network. The audience tests for argumentative force, for ethical seriousness, for fit with the values the publication’s readership shares, for the rhetorical capacity to make complex issues legible to general readers. These tests are real but they are not the tests his academic peer network applies. A piece that scores well in Jewish Currents might or might not score well at a peer-reviewed conference. The two networks ask different things of the writer.
The second additional domain is institutional leadership in Jewish communal life. Myers served as director of the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies, then as president and CEO of the Center for Jewish History, then in various advisory capacities for organizations including the New Israel Fund. Authority in this domain runs through procedures that have little to do with substantive scholarly merit. It runs through donor confidence, board governance, the politics of philanthropic networks, and the capacity to manage institutions that depend on continued financial support from constituencies with their own interests. Turner’s framework treats institutional authority of this kind as expertise of a different type from disciplinary expertise. The skills overlap but do not coincide. A first-rate historian can be a poor institutional manager. A skilled institutional manager can have only a moderate academic record. Myers holds both, but the procedures that grant him standing in each are not the same.
The third additional domain is political advocacy, particularly through his work on Israel and on liberal Zionist projects. He has been associated with the New Israel Fund, with various critical engagements with current Israeli policy, and with broader projects of liberal Zionist self-criticism. Authority here is granted by a political-ideological coalition rather than by a peer network or a general audience. The coalition tests for fit with the coalition’s positions, for usefulness in the coalition’s ongoing arguments, for the willingness to speak in venues the coalition has built. Turner’s framework treats this as another form of audience-recognized authority, with the relevant audience being the coalition rather than the general public. The tests the coalition applies are even less rigorous in disciplinary terms than the tests the general Jewish readership applies, because the coalition has stronger reasons to grant standing to figures who serve its needs and stronger reasons to withhold standing from figures who do not.
The four standings Myers holds are not independent. They reinforce each other in ways that make his overall position more stable than any one of them alone would be. The academic standing underwrites the public-intellectual writing, because the readership of Jewish Currents and similar publications wants writers who hold serious academic credentials. The institutional standing underwrites the political coalition work, because organizations like the New Israel Fund want figures whose academic prestige lends weight to their advocacy. The public-intellectual presence underwrites the institutional leadership, because boards of organizations like the Center for Jewish History prefer leaders who can speak in public forums beyond the academy. The political coalition standing underwrites the academic standing in less direct ways, by signaling to the academic peer network that the figure is in good standing with the political constituencies many academic Jewish historians share. The four standings form a network that mutually supports each role.
Turner’s framework presses the question of what tests are actually being applied across this network of standings. The tests applied at any one node are not tightly constrained by the tests applied at any other node, but the standings do communicate. The political coalition cannot grant Myers academic standing, but it can amplify or undermine the academic standing he already holds. The academic peer network cannot grant him institutional authority, but it can lend prestige that helps boards trust him. Each node operates by its own procedures, but the procedures are not blind to what is happening at the other nodes. The result is a configuration in which authority earned in one domain travels with the figure into other domains, and the other domains apply their own tests in ways that are partly shaped by what they know about his standing elsewhere.
Turner’s analysis of “good-bad” theories applies here. A good-bad theory is one that performs useful functions for its holders without meeting the standards other theories in the field have to meet. The functions might be coalitional, institutional, or pedagogical. Myers’s body of work contains theories of this kind, particularly his arguments about the relation between memory and history, about the ethical use of the past, about the obligations of historians to communal need. These arguments do work for the constituencies he addresses. They give liberal Zionist Jewish readers a frame for thinking about their own tradition that respects critical scholarship while preserving political commitment. They give the academic peer network a model for engaged scholarship that does not feel like advocacy. They give the institutional networks he leads a vocabulary for explaining what they do that satisfies multiple constituencies. The arguments are useful in all these ways. Whether they meet the standards a more demanding peer network might apply is a separate question. For the constituencies that grant Myers his authority, the usefulness is sufficient.
Turner’s harder question is whether the academic peer network of Jewish history is itself applying genuine substantive tests or whether it has settled into a pattern that selects for fit with the broader liberal academic culture in which it operates. The discipline of Jewish history in American universities operates in an environment where certain political and ideological positions are favored and others are penalized. The peer network of the discipline has internalized some of these preferences, with consequences for whose work gets published in the major journals, whose books get reviewed favorably, whose arguments get cited approvingly, whose appointments get supported across institutions. Myers’s positions on the major questions of the field tend to align with the positions favored by the broader academic culture. His critical engagement with Israel, his liberal Zionist orientation, his framing of Jewish history in ways that emphasize cosmopolitan rather than exclusivist tendencies, all fit comfortably with the prevailing academic consensus. Turner’s framework asks whether the alignment indicates that Myers is right on these questions or whether it indicates that the peer network is rewarding alignment regardless of the merits.
The answer is probably both. Some of his positions are well supported by the historical evidence, and the peer network’s agreement reflects accurate substantive judgment. Some of his positions are coalition-friendly in ways that exceed what the evidence requires, and the peer network’s agreement reflects the comfortable alignment of substance and convenience. Turner’s framework does not let us separate these cleanly from inside the network. The peer network cannot certify itself. The figure cannot certify himself either. The substantive question of where the alignment is well-grounded and where it is convenient runs through procedures of evidence assessment that operate at a different level from the procedures of expert recognition.
Myers’s specific scholarly contributions illuminate this. His work on Wissenschaft des Judentums and on figures like Yitzhak Baer and Gershom Scholem is widely respected within the discipline and tracks features of nineteenth and twentieth-century Jewish historiography that other scholars have confirmed. The peer-checkable substance is real. His more popular work on memory and identity, on the obligations of history to the present, on the relation between scholarship and advocacy, operates in a register where the tests are softer and the conclusions more easily reached. The framework Pinsof developed about misunderstanding applies here. Myers’s accounts of how earlier generations of Jewish historians went wrong tend to produce an asymmetry where his own generation, and his own positions, look like the corrective rather than another instance of the same pattern. Turner would say this is what audience-recognized authority does when it is not adequately constrained by peer-checkable testing. The figure produces accounts that flatter the figure’s own position by casting prior positions as confused, and the audience grants standing to the account because the account serves the audience’s needs.
Compare Myers to Yerushalmi, his teacher, and the contrast sharpens in instructive ways. Yerushalmi held primarily peer-checkable academic authority of the highest order. His Zakhor is a work that the discipline tests by demanding standards and finds to hold up. Yerushalmi did not pursue the public-intellectual or institutional-leadership or political-coalition tracks Myers has pursued. He wrote books, taught students, and remained largely inside the discipline. His authority was concentrated in one node rather than distributed across four. The concentration made his standing more vulnerable to disciplinary verdicts but also more closely tied to the kind of authority disciplinary peer networks can certify. Myers has chosen a different path, distributing his authority across nodes that mutually reinforce each other but that individually do not test as rigorously as Yerushalmi’s single-node concentration did. Turner’s framework treats this as a strategic choice with both benefits and costs. The benefits are reach, influence, and stability across multiple constituencies. The costs are that no single node tests the work as rigorously as a more concentrated career might be tested.
The reception pattern fits Turner’s predictions. Myers is a respected academic, a sought-after public commentator, a successful institutional leader, and a recognized voice in liberal Zionist circles. He has not been criticized seriously in any of these roles, because the criticism that might come from any one of them is muted by his standing in the others. The political coalition does not criticize his academic work because his academic work serves the coalition’s interests. The academic peer network does not criticize his political work because his political work aligns with the network’s prevailing sympathies. The public audience does not criticize his institutional management because the institutions he has led are doing what their constituencies expect. The institutional networks do not criticize his public writing because his public writing supports the institutional missions. Each node validates the others, and the absence of friction produces a stability that masks the question of whether any one node is testing the work as rigorously as a more skeptical environment might.
Turner’s framework also illuminates what is at stake when a figure operates across nodes that do not share tests. The figure who holds peer-checkable standing in academia and audience-recognized standing in public life can sometimes import the prestige of one into the other in ways that exceed what either domain warrants. A public-facing piece that draws on the writer’s academic standing can claim more authority than the piece itself, considered as a piece of public writing, would deserve. An academic piece that draws on the writer’s public visibility can attract more attention than the piece itself, considered as a piece of academic writing, would generate. Myers operates in this configuration regularly. His public pieces benefit from his academic prestige even when they are not making peer-checkable arguments. His academic work benefits from his public visibility even when it is not breaking substantive new ground. Turner’s framework treats this as a standard pattern of cross-domain authority transfer, neither uniquely problematic to Myers nor entirely innocent in its effects.
The question that Turner’s framework leaves open with Myers is what happens to authority of this kind when the supporting structures change. Myers’s standing depends on the continued cooperation of multiple constituencies that currently align in his favor. The academic peer network of American Jewish history shares broadly liberal political commitments. The institutional networks of American Jewish life depend on philanthropic support from constituencies that fund liberal-leaning organizations. The public audience for liberal Jewish commentary continues to exist and to value the kind of voice Myers provides. The political coalition of liberal Zionists holds standing in significant Jewish institutions despite recent pressures. If any of these structures shifts substantially, the configuration of authority Myers holds will shift with it. A more conservative academic peer network might apply different tests. A different philanthropic landscape might support different institutional leaders. A changed political environment might marginalize liberal Zionist voices or render them less central to ongoing arguments. Turner’s framework predicts that authority distributed across multiple supporting structures is stable when the structures align and vulnerable when they diverge.
The contrast with Maccoby is instructive. Maccoby held audience-recognized authority for one constituency and was rejected by the academic peer network. Myers holds standing in both. The reason is partly that the academic peer network of Jewish history, unlike the academic peer network of New Testament studies, has overlapping interests with the constituency Myers serves in his other roles. Maccoby was working against the institutional and coalition interests of his peer network. Myers is working with them. Turner’s framework predicts that figures whose substantive positions align with their peer networks’ coalition interests will be granted standing more readily than figures whose positions cut against those interests. The alignment does not mean Myers is wrong. It means his standing is being granted in part on grounds that go beyond pure substantive merit. The same was true in reverse for Maccoby, whose positions were partly judged on grounds that went beyond pure substantive merit, with the difference that the grounds ran against him rather than for him.
What Turner’s framework finally lets us see in Myers is a scholar who has built a successful career by distributing his authority across multiple domains in ways that produce mutual reinforcement. The substance of his peer-checkable academic work is real. The substance of his other roles is mixed. His standing across all four nodes exceeds what his strongest substantive contributions would underwrite if those contributions had to stand alone before the most demanding peer tests. The configuration is not unusual for senior academics in fields like Jewish studies, where the multiple domains of activity are common and where the cross-domain authority transfers are well established. Myers is a representative case rather than an exceptional one. His success illustrates how the social structures of academic Jewish life produce the kind of authority figures it produces, and how those figures hold standing that the underlying substance alone might not generate.
This is the discipline Turner imposes. The figure cannot certify his own authority from inside the configuration that produces it. The institutions that reward him cannot certify it. The coalition that needs him cannot certify it. The audience that grants him standing cannot certify it. What is left is the slow work of disinterested observers, with no skin in the game, applying the procedures of inquiry from outside the structures of reward. Such observers are rare in fields like Jewish studies, where almost everyone has skin in some game. The verdict of disinterested observers, when it can be reconstructed, is more cautious than the verdict the configuration produces from inside itself. The cautious verdict is that Myers is a competent academic historian, an effective institutional leader, a capable public commentator, and a reliable coalition voice, but that the standing he holds across all four roles exceeds the substantive contribution any single role can certify. The configuration is stable because the structures that support it are aligned. The substance is real but partial. Turner’s framework lets us see both at once, without collapsing one into the other and without pretending that the configuration is more transparent to itself than it actually is.
Turner’s logic gives a way to read Myers that strips out a great deal of the rhetoric his work depends on.
Start with the central category Myers uses across his career: Jewishness, or more precisely, the Jewish tradition. Myers writes as if this names something with content. The tradition has commitments. It has values. It speaks to current questions. It has been distorted by some and recovered by others. The tradition, in Myers’ usage, is the kind of thing that can be honored or betrayed.
Turner’s question lands hard here. Where is the tradition? In which head? Transmitted by which route? Held in identical form by which set of persons? If Myers cannot answer those questions, the tradition is not a cause. It is a label. The label gets attached to whatever Myers wants to defend at a given moment.
This is not a cheap shot. Myers is a careful historian. He knows that Jews have disagreed about everything for as long as there have been Jews. The Mishnah records disagreement. The Talmud records disagreement about the disagreement. Medieval rabbinic literature is a fight. Modern Jewish thought is a fight. Zionism was a fight from the start, and remains one. Myers knows all of this. He has written about it.
Yet his public writing keeps reaching for a singular tradition that supports the positions he prefers. The tradition opposes the occupation. The tradition values the stranger. The tradition rejects ethnic supremacy. The tradition embraces democracy. The tradition stands against the current Israeli government. Each claim posits a shared possession in the heads of past and present Jews that grounds a contemporary political position.
Turner’s critique cuts the cord. There is no shared possession. There are texts, which different men read differently. There are practices, which different communities perform differently. There are arguments, which different parties win and lose at different moments. The tradition Myers invokes is an explanatory construct he assembles for the use to which he wants to put it. The construct is not illegitimate. It becomes illegitimate when treated as a hidden essence that settles disputes by its mere invocation.
Myers’s book on the founders of academic Jewish historiography in Germany, Re-inventing the Jewish Past, shows the men who built the field. Each had a project. Each shaped the past to serve a present. Myers reads them with a sharp eye for the political work their scholarship performed. The book is a fine demonstration that Jewish history, as a category, is not a stable object recovered by neutral inquiry. It is an artifact of particular men with particular goals at a particular moment.
The interesting move comes when Myers writes in his own voice. The same sharp eye softens. His own version of Jewish history acquires the gravity of a tradition recovered rather than a project assembled. The reflexive turn that his historiographical work demands does not get applied to his own use of the same categories. Turner’s logic asks why the exemption holds. The answer is coalition. Myers writes for an audience that wants the tradition to be real and to support a liberal Zionist or post-Zionist politics. The construct earns its keep by serving that audience.
Apply Turner to Myers on Israel. Myers has written, often, that the current direction of Israeli politics betrays Jewish values. The phrasing assumes a stable object called Jewish values that current Israeli politics has departed from. Turner asks where the object lives. The answer cannot be in the texts, because the texts support many readings, including readings that endorse the current Israeli government. The answer cannot be in past practice, because past Jewish practice in conditions of sovereignty is thin and contested. The answer cannot be in current Jewish opinion, because current Jewish opinion is split. The Jewish values Myers names are the values Myers and his coalition hold, projected backward and outward as a shared possession. The projection does political work. It does not do explanatory work.
Once the projection is exposed, the argument has to be rebuilt on different ground. Myers cannot say the tradition opposes the occupation. He can say he opposes the occupation, that he reads certain texts as supporting his opposition, that he locates himself within a strand of modern Jewish thought that opposed similar things, and that he hopes other Jews will join him. That argument is honest. It is also weaker, because it stands on his judgment rather than on a hidden essence. Turner’s logic forces the weaker, honest version. Myers prefers the stronger, dishonest version. Most public intellectuals do.
The same critique applies to Myers’ treatment of antisemitism. He writes about antisemitism as if the term names a stable object with a continuous history. The antisemitism of the medieval Church, the antisemitism of nineteenth-century race science, the antisemitism of Nazi Germany, the antisemitism of Soviet anti-Zionism, the antisemitism of contemporary American campuses. Each gets folded into a single category with a continuous identity. Turner asks what the category names. Hostility to Jews? The hostilities have nothing in common at the level of cause. The medieval Church hates Jews for theological reasons. Race science hates Jews for biological reasons. Nazis hate Jews for racial-political reasons. Soviets hate Jews for ideological reasons. Campus activists, where the charge applies, hate Israel for political reasons that may or may not extend to Jews as such. Lumping these into a single object called antisemitism produces rhetorical effect at the cost of explanatory clarity.
Myers, again, knows this. As a historian he can produce careful accounts of each particular hostility. As a public intellectual he draws on the unified category because the category does work for the coalition he addresses. Turner’s logic asks for the careful account in every case, not the unified essence.
The deepest application of Turner to Myers concerns the category of the American Jew. Myers writes for and about American Jews. He treats them as a community with shared values, shared anxieties, and a shared trajectory. Turner asks where the community lives. American Jews disagree about religion, politics, Israel, intermarriage, education, and what counts as Jewish at all. The pattern of disagreement is the basic fact. Any unity is the achievement of particular institutions, particular publications, particular donors, and particular leaders who keep the circuit running. Myers is one of the men who keeps the circuit running. His writing is a public object that helps reproduce the convergence he then describes as the community’s shared concern.
This last point is the sharpest. Myers does not describe American Jewry. He helps produce a version of American Jewry, in coalition with other men who write for the same outlets, sit on the same boards, and share the same donors. The product is then offered back to readers as a description of what they share. The circuit is the cause. The shared possession is the effect, and a partial one at that.
Turner’s contribution to reading Myers is therefore double. It exposes the essentialist habit that lets Myers move from his own political preferences to claims about what the tradition holds, what Jewish values demand, and what the community thinks. It also redirects attention to the public objects, institutions, and circuits of correction that produce whatever convergence American Jewish life shows. The first move strips rhetoric. The second move points at the actual causes.
A limit caveat. Myers is not a charlatan. His scholarship is real. His commitments are sincere. His judgments are often sound. The critique is not that he lies. The critique is that he writes within a register that requires hidden essences to do the rhetorical work, and that the register fails Turner’s test. A more honest Myers would write in his own voice, defend his own judgments, name his own coalition, and drop the appeal to a tradition that no transmission story supports. That Myers might be less effective in the current marketplace. He might also be more useful to readers who want to think clearly.
When Myers writes that Jewish tradition demands X, the Turner-trained reader asks: which Jews, holding which texts, trained by which teachers, corrected by which feedback, anchored to which public objects, hold the demand? If the answer is many Jews, holding many texts, trained by many teachers, corrected by many feedbacks, anchored to many public objects, hold many demands, then Myers has not stated a fact about Jewish tradition. He has stated a preference and dressed it in borrowed authority. Turner gives the reader the tools to undress the preference. What remains is a man with views, writing for a coalition, using the available rhetoric. That is the honest level. Most public intellectual work avoids it. Myers is no exception.
Each move is a cross. Yale to Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv to Harvard. Harvard to Columbia. The breeding populations are distinct. The Yale literary-humanist sensibility crosses with the Israeli Labor Zionist establishment. The Israeli establishment crosses with traditional rabbinic scholarship at Harvard. The traditional textual training crosses with the Yerushalmi memory-history framework. By the time Myers arrives at UCLA, he carries genetic material the standard American Jewish-studies graduate cannot match. He reads Hebrew sources at a level few of his American contemporaries reach. He has watched the Israeli historiographical fight from inside its key institution. He has Twersky’s textual rigor. He has Yerushalmi’s framework and the institutional capital that comes with it.
The first books deliver what heterosis predicts. Then work on American Hasidic exceptionalism. The output runs broad, written across periods and genres, crossing national historiographical traditions. That breadth is hybrid vigor at work.
Heterosis does not stay open forever. Productive crossings get institutionalized. Once institutionalized, they become niches. Myers built his niche at UCLA across three decades. He directed the Center for Jewish Studies. He founded the Luskin Center for History and Policy. He held the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Chair from 2007. He served as president of the New Israel Fund from 2018 to 2021. He sits on boards across the progressive Jewish philanthropic network. He directs an initiative on religion in public life. He participates in academic projects on kindness, dialogue, and the study of hate.
This is niche construction as the biology defines it. The organism modifies the environment in ways that alter selection pressures on itself and its descendants. Myers has helped engineer a UCLA Jewish-studies environment, and a broader American Jewish progressive academic environment, where his approach reproduces. The next generation of Myers students operates inside the niche he helped build. They write critical history of Zionism from inside Jewish-studies chairs. They participate in NIF-adjacent philanthropic infrastructure. They direct centers for kindness and dialogue. They keep the apparatus running.
The biology predicts what happens to niches built around an initial cross. The niche selects for the traits the cross produced and against the traits that might generate a new cross. The Tel Aviv year was productive because Myers was an outsider in that environment. The Harvard year was productive because Twersky’s circle was alien to him. The Columbia years were productive because Yerushalmi’s framework forced him to develop tools he did not arrive with. None of those crossings happen at UCLA. The UCLA niche is the one the heterosis built. It does not require the next cross. It rewards continuity with the established line.
American Jewish studies as a discipline raises its own question. A small population of programs, a small set of approved methods, a narrow band of acceptable political positions, a tightly co-adapted complex of progressive Jewish institutional life and critical Jewish-studies scholarship. Myers’s career has tracked the closing of that population. The 1990s offered more variety. The 2000s and 2010s narrowed. The post-October 7 moment has revealed how closed the population has become. The disciplinary response to October 7, including statements from Jewish-studies organizations and prominent Jewish-studies scholars, exhibited the homogeneity inbreeding depression predicts. A field that contains the full range of Jewish historical experience has produced a near-uniform institutional voice on the central event of contemporary Jewish life.
Myers occupies a careful position inside that homogeneity. He has signed letters. He has written essays. He has avoided the most extreme positions while staying inside the mainstream of progressive Jewish-studies opinion. His prose register is calibrated. He criticizes Israeli state policy while affirming Jewish nationhood. He recovers diaspora alternatives while declining to break with statist Zionism altogether. The careful calibration signals a closed population. The traits the niche selects for are the traits Myers has cultivated. He fits.
Myers has spent significant intellectual energy recovering diaspora nationalist alternatives to statist Zionism. Rawidowicz is the central case. The argument is that diaspora Jewish life produces intellectual and cultural vigor the Israeli concentration sacrificed. The hybrid vigor framework supports the historical claim. The Babylonian Talmud was longer, more elaborated, more dialectically sophisticated, and more generative than the Jerusalem Talmud. Crossings with Persian legal culture, Zoroastrian theology, and Mesopotamian commercial practice produced material the homeland communities did not produce. The diaspora won that round.
The current empirical picture inverts the parallel. The American Jewish population shrinks and assimilates. The Israeli Jewish population grows and produces the densest concentration of Jewish intellectual, religious, and cultural output in the world. The yeshiva system in Israel is the largest in Jewish history. The Israeli book market in Jewish thought outproduces the American market. The most generative Hasidic communities have built their American outposts by importing material from Israeli centers, not the reverse. Jerusalem is no longer the cryptic, undeveloped Talmud. Babylonia is. The diaspora nationalist program Myers has recovered is the program of a population that lost its bet on the diaspora as the productive site.
This suggest the political program riding on the scholarship is in trouble. The diaspora nationalism Myers describes is not the diaspora American Jewry inhabits. It is a diaspora nationalism that lost its constituency and has been kept alive through academic translation projects rather than living communities.
The crypsis framework explains the calibration. Critical Zionist scholarship from the most prestigious chairs requires camouflage in two directions. The progressive Jewish coalition has detection apparatus for insufficient solidarity with diaspora liberal positions. The mainstream Jewish institutional world has detection apparatus for hostility to Zionism. Myers has cultivated a coloration that reads as friendly to both. He affirms Jewish peoplehood. He criticizes Israeli policy. He participates in mainstream Jewish institutional life. He directs initiatives on kindness, dialogue, and the study of hate that signal harmlessness to the progressive coalition. He holds chairs and runs centers that signal seriousness to the establishment.
The kindness initiative is a costly signal. Running an academic project on kindness requires real time, real philanthropic capital, real institutional energy. The signal runs expensive. What it purchases is membership in the progressive Jewish coalition at a level above mere membership. It says he is the kind of scholar who builds infrastructure for kindness. The same logic applies to the dialogue work and the hate-studies infrastructure. These are not cynical performances. They are functional in the biological sense. They identify Myers to the relevant detection apparatus as a member of the coalition whose approval he requires. The cost is the proof.
The hybrid vigor framework carries its own warning. Outbreeding depression occurs when crossing disrupts co-adapted complexes. Applied to American Jewish institutional life, the question is whether the recovery of marginalized diaspora positions disrupts the co-adapted complex that has sustained American Jewish continuity. The traditional American Jewish settlement combined synagogue affiliation, philanthropic support for Israel, ethnic-religious identity, and political liberalism. That complex co-adapted across the twentieth century. The progressive critical-Jewish-studies project Myers has helped build challenges several of those components at once. It questions philanthropic support for Israel. It questions the ethnic-religious package. It promotes a diaspora nationalism that lacks living institutions to support it.
The empirical evidence on American Jewish demographic decline suggests outbreeding depression is happening. The complex breaks down. The replacement program, diaspora nationalism plus progressive politics plus academic Jewish studies, lacks the reproductive vigor of the package it replaces. Orthodox communities, which have maintained the older co-adapted complex with adjustments, grow. Reform and Conservative communities, where Myers’s program has the most influence, shrink. The hybrid vigor program at the institutional level might be running outbreeding depression rather than heterosis.
Niche construction theory predicts that the interesting story moves to the successors. They inherit the constructed environment. They face the question of whether the niche persists, modifies, or breaks down. Myers’s students and the Jewish-studies cohort he has helped train will inherit a UCLA niche, an NIF infrastructure, a Luskin Center, a kindness initiative, and the broader progressive Jewish-studies apparatus. They will inherit it in conditions different from the conditions that built it. October 7 has changed the environment. The American Jewish demographic picture has darkened. The Israeli intellectual and cultural output has accelerated. The diaspora nationalism program lacks living constituencies to organize.
The successors face a choice the biology has already mapped. They might continue inside the niche, accumulating the deleterious recessives that closed populations accumulate, until the environment shifts enough that the niche collapses. They might attempt their own crossings, leaving the niche to take training in fields the niche has not co-adapted with, returning with new material that disrupts the existing complex. Or they might stay inside the niche while the niche reorganizes around the new environment, adapting at the margin without the structural change a real cross would supply.
Myers himself is not the case for the framework’s conclusion. The trajectory ends earlier. He completed the heterosis program. He completed the niche construction. The diaspora nationalism recovery is finished as a scholarly project. The institutional apparatus runs. He sits at the top of the structure he helped build. The conclusion of the framework runs through the people who inherit the structure.
The hybrid vigor framework predicts that the Jewish intellectual and institutional production of the next fifty years will come disproportionately from communities forced into new crossings rather than from communities settled inside niches their parents built. Myers’s career documents one such niche at full maturity. The successors might break out of it. They might also reproduce it. The biology says nothing about which path they take. It only says the niche, left to itself, accumulates weakness the population that built it cannot detect.
The Set
David N. Myers sits at the center of a set that overlaps three worlds: the academic discipline of Jewish history, the institutions of liberal American Zionism, and the progressive Jewish public life of Los Angeles. Mapping the people around Myers shows what the set rewards and what it fears.
The intimate circle starts at home. His wife, Nomi Stolzenberg, teaches law at the University of Southern California and co-wrote American Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic Village in Upstate New York with him, the study of Kiryas Joel that won a National Jewish Book Award. His intellectual father is Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (1932-2009), the Columbia University historian who trained him and whose questions about Jewish memory and history Myers carries forward. His public partner on Israel and Palestine is Hussein Ibish, the Arab-American commentator he tours with for paired lectures, a partnership stretching back years and revived after October 7, 2023. From 2018 to 2023 he chaired the board of the New Israel Fund, where Daniel Sokatch runs the organization and Talia Sasson preceded Myers as board president.
The academic peers form the next ring: Todd Presner at the University of California, Los Angeles, the German-Jewish historian Michael Brenner, David Ruderman and the orbit of the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Elisheva Carlebach at Columbia, John Efron at the University of California, Berkeley, and the late Steven Lowenstein. Since 2003 he co-edits the Jewish Quarterly Review alongside Natalie Dohrmann and the late Elliott Horowitz, which keeps him at the gate of his field's most established journal. Then the cross-disciplinary humanists he shares a platform with on questions of memory and victimhood: Judith Butler (b. 1956), Marianne Hirsch (b. 1949), Cheryl Greenberg, and Robin D. G. Kelley (b. 1962). The donors and patrons anchor the structure from above: the Kahn family, whose endowment names his chair; the Bedari Foundation behind his UCLA Bedari Kindness Institute; and the Luskin money behind his UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy. And the local progressive Jewish world rounds it out, the IKAR congregation, Valley Beit Midrash, the old liberal Jewish Journal, and the late Israeli legal scholar Ruth Gavison (1945-2020), whom he eulogized as a friend.
The foils give the set its edges. In 2017 hawkish activists, the Zionist Organization of America under Morton Klein among them, campaigned to remove Myers from the Center for Jewish History over his New Israel Fund ties; the political operative Hank Sheinkopf called him an enemy of the Jewish state. The Middle East Forum's Campus Watch ran similar attacks. These men supply the enemy, and the enemy supplies the shape.
What the set values is complexity over slogans. Pluralism. A two-state horizon or some binational settlement as the moral goal. The right to criticize Israel from inside a love of it. History as a solvent for myth. The prophetic line, justice, justice shall you pursue, read as a charge toward universal human equality rather than tribal defense. Dialogue across difference, which Myers turned into the name of a UCLA initiative. Above all the set prizes the scholar who steps into public life. The engaged intellectual. The bridge-builder. Sophistication and the refusal of the easy answer, and the set treats that refusal as a moral accomplishment.
The hero in this world is the dissenting insider. The Jew who loves Israel enough to tell it hard things and stays in the family while he does. Yerushalmi stands as the founding saint, the historian who held memory and history in tension and gave the discipline its conscience. To earn standing here a man must produce serious scholarship and then spend its prestige on public causes. The pairing earns the honor. Scholarship without engagement reads as cowardice. Activism without scholarship reads as thin. The hero fuses both, and his immortality comes through the book that outlasts him, the students he trains, the institutions he founds, the moral record that survives the man. Myers built the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy, the UCLA Initiative to Study Hate, the UCLA Bedari Kindness Institute, and the policy podcast. He builds because the hero in this world leaves structures behind.
Status flows along familiar channels. Endowed chairs, named lectureships, prize committees, festschrift volumes, journal mastheads, and the invitation to speak at the right synagogue, the right campus, the right donor's living room. The National Jewish Book Award for American Shtetl is a chip. Co-editing the Jewish Quarterly Review is a chip. The honorary doctorate and graduation address at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in May 2025 is a chip. Proximity to Yerushalmi's lineage runs deepest of all, a kind of apostolic succession within Jewish history. Inside the set men compete over who holds the most defensible position on Israel: critical enough to keep progressive credibility, loyal enough to keep communal standing. Drift too far left and the federations and donors cut you off. Drift too far right and the graduate students and the journals stop citing you. The game rewards the man who holds the narrow center and makes it look like nerve.
There is a second game, the game of being attacked by the right enemies. When the campaign against him peaked, Myers dismissed his attackers as bothersome summer gnats he could swat away, men who do not compel life decisions. That dismissal raised his standing inside his own coalition. The attack from the Zionist Organization of America functioned as a credential. To be hated by the hard Zionist right confirms a man's place among the principled dissenters, and the cool dismissal performs the confidence the set admires.
The normative claims are stated and public. Israel ought to be a liberal democracy with full equality for Arabs and Jews. The occupation wounds the moral health of the state. American Jews owe Israel honest criticism rather than silence. Antisemitism is real and must be named, and the cynical deployment of antisemitism charges to silence Palestinian speech must also be named. Scholars ought to enter public life. Kindness and dialogue carry political weight.
The essentialist claims run quieter and deeper. The set holds that a true Judaism exists, and that its core lies in prophetic justice and care for the stranger rather than statist power. It holds that the diaspora forms an authentic and rich mode of Jewish life, against the Zionist claim that only the state completes the people. It treats the liberal, pluralist, justice-seeking Jew as the rightful heir of the tradition and the militant nationalist as a deviation from it. Myers's scholarship supplies the academic scaffolding for the claim. The recovery of Simon Rawidowicz (1896-1957) and his diaspora nationalism, the suspicion of state-centered historiography in Re-Inventing the Jewish Past: European Jewish Intellectuals and the Zionist Return to History, and the study of historicism and its discontents in Resisting History: Historicism and Its Discontents in German-Jewish Thought, all furnish a learned account of what Jewishness has been and therefore of what it ought to be.
The set’s universalism rests on a particular reading of a particular tradition. Its members claim to speak for what Judaism truly is, and their opponents claim the same ground with equal conviction. Both camps essentialize. The set reads its own version as recovery and the other side's as distortion, and the conviction that one has recovered the authentic tradition rather than chosen a faction within it is the quiet faith that holds the whole world together.