Part Two.
David N. Myers, born in 1960 in Scranton, Pennsylvania, holds the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Chair in Jewish History at UCLA. His career spans more than three decades and encompasses Zionist historiography, German-Jewish thought, diaspora nationalism, and American Hasidic exceptionalism. His work keeps returning to a single underlying problem: how a people narrates and justifies itself once it is exposed to modern power, modern criticism, and modern politics.
That problem reaches him through Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (1932-2009), under whom Myers completed his doctorate at Columbia in 1991. Yerushalmi’s Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (1982) drew a stark line between memory and history, treating the former as the authentic Jewish mode of transmission and the latter as a modern rupture that replaced living tradition with critical distance. The argument ended on a note of elegiac finality. Something had been severed, and historical scholarship could not restore it. Myers absorbs this framework but refuses its conclusions. Across his career, he works to soften Yerushalmi’s boundary, to make history usable again without collapsing it into propaganda.
His first book, Re-Inventing the Jewish Past: European Jewish Intellectuals and the Zionist Return to History (Oxford University Press, 1995), examines the cohort of European-trained scholars who gathered around the Hebrew University’s Institute for Jewish Studies in the interwar period. These historians used the methods of European historicism to construct a national past capable of sustaining a modern political future. Myers points out the incentives that drove the story.
Resisting History: Historicism and Its Discontents in German-Jewish Thought (Princeton University Press, 2003) examines four German Jews — Hermann Cohen (1842-1918), Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929), Leo Strauss (1899-1973), and Isaac Breuer (1883-1946) — who pushed back against the totalizing claims of historicism with arguments for enduring truth. Myers treats this resistance with sympathy but does not join it. He positions himself between camps, acknowledging the danger of historicism while refusing the retreat into transcendence.
Between Jew and Arab: The Lost Voice of Simon Rawidowicz (Brandeis University Press, 2008) recovers a forgotten Hebrew thinker who imagined a Jewish future not culminating in sovereign exclusivity but in diasporic coexistence and binational arrangement. Rawidowicz (1896-1957) wrote an unpublished essay addressing the Palestinian refugee question at a moment when such questions were foreclosed. Myers’ recovery of him is part of a broader post-1990s move in Jewish studies to pluralize Zionism without fully breaking from it, to reopen political options in theory that history has sealed in practice.
The Stakes of History: On the Use and Abuse of Jewish History for Life (Yale University Press, 2018) says history must serve communal life without becoming propaganda. It must remain critical without withdrawing into sterile detachment. He argues against the rigid history-memory binary he inherited from Yerushalmi, insisting that the historian can forge a new connection between past and present. Yerushalmi had suggested that the critical historian severed the link between Jewish people and their past. Myers argues the historian can reforge it. Critics might call this whig history for Jewish liberalism, an attempt to believe one can have critical history and communal identity at the same time. The very need to articulate such a position reveals how unstable the balance is. Once history is mobilized for present purposes, instrumentalization always wins out.
American Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic Village in Upstate New York (Princeton University Press, 2022), co-authored with his wife and legal scholar Nomi Stolzenberg and recipient of the National Jewish Book Award, carries this work into new territory. Kiryas Joel, the Satmar Hasidic enclave in upstate New York, looks at first like a relic of pre-modernity, a community that refused the terms of liberal society. Myers and Stolzenberg argue the opposite. The community’s leaders have exploited the tools of American law, zoning, and political organization with sophistication to carve out a space of communal autonomy. Haredi separatism is not outside modernity but a hyper-modern legal and political strategy. The implications extend beyond Jewish studies. If a liberal legal framework can sustain and empower a highly illiberal community, then liberalism’s relationship to its internal dissidents is more complicated than standard theory allows.
Myers’ institutional career is stunning. He directed UCLA’s Center for Jewish Studies, chaired the History Department from 2010 to 2015, co-edited the Jewish Quarterly Review (JQR) for more than two decades, and served as President and CEO of the Center for Jewish History in New York. From 2018 to 2023 he chaired the board of the New Israel Fund, an organization supporting progressive causes in Israel. He founded and directs UCLA’s Luskin Center for History and Policy, which argues that historical scholarship can provide causal analysis to help address present policy problems.
That last institutional commitment represents a turn toward applied history, and it deserves scrutiny Myers would probably welcome. When history is mobilized for policy, the historian moves from critic of power to source for it. That is not necessarily illegitimate, but it raises a question about whether applied history slides toward advocacy, particularly when tied to specific institutional causes. Myers’ scholarly commitments and his institutional affiliations align closely. Supporters read this as principled consistency. Critics see ideological capture. The point is not to resolve that dispute but to recognize that Myers operates inside it, not above it.
His primary audience reflects this positioning. He writes for academics, policy-adjacent intellectuals, and leaders within institutional Jewish life. His influence is indirect but real. He shapes how the past is taught and mobilized by people who in turn shape broader discourse. That is intellectual power that depends on the authority of the archive but extends well beyond it.
Myers is drawn to moments when Jewish actors confront the limits of their frameworks, whether historiographical, philosophical, or political. Zionist historians trying to turn a past into a nation. German-Jewish thinkers resisting the flattening force of historicism. Rawidowicz imagining alternatives to sovereign closure. Hasidic communities using liberal law to sustain separatism.
To see what Myers does, compare him to the scholars who could have done it and did not. Jonathan Sarna (b. 1955) is the leading historian of American Jewish life. His corpus is enormous and institutionally central. He chairs at Brandeis, sits on every major board, shapes the field. His method is empirical and narrative. He assembles archival material, traces institutional development, tells the story of American Jewish communal life in the mode of standard social history. When Sarna writes about Jewish history mattering for the present, he does it through the implicit pedagogy of well-told history rather than through explicit methodological argument. He does not write books arguing that history should serve communal purposes. He writes books that serve communal purposes. The method stays underground.
Hasia Diner (b. 1946) works similarly at NYU. Her books on Jewish immigration, foodways, and American Jewish ethnicity operate within social history conventions. When she makes public interventions, she does so as a historian speaking from expertise rather than as a theorist of what that expertise authorizes. She recently wrote sharply on post-October 7 questions. Her authority comes from her archival work. She does not theorize the connection between archive and argument. She performs it.
Susannah Heschel (b. 1956) operates in a different register. Her work on Abraham Geiger (1810-1874), on the Aryan Jesus, on Jewish-Christian scholarly entanglement, is theologically charged and methodologically sophisticated. But her innovation is in content, not in method. She takes established historical-critical tools and applies them to material others had not examined carefully. The framework within which she writes is standard academic history. She does not argue for a new mode.
Michael Brenner (b. 1964) works on German-Jewish history from a conservative methodological position. His books on Weimar Jewish culture, on the prophets of Zionism, on the history of Israel, are high-quality academic synthesis. He does not produce a theory of what German-Jewish history is for beyond what the scholarly community already assumes it is for. He writes within conventions rather than arguing for them.
Deborah Lipstadt (b. 1947) is a different case. She fights the Holocaust denial battle. Her public position is institutional, as the U.S. envoy on antisemitism. Her scholarship is narrower than Myers’s. Her public role is louder. She is a polemicist with academic credentials rather than a theorist who extends into public writing. The theorization of why the historian should be doing public polemic is not her project. The polemic is.
None of these scholars occupies Myers’s niche. Myers is the scholar who has made the theoretical defense of engaged Jewish history his explicit subject. The Stakes of History is the book none of them has written. The Rawidowicz introduction theorizes why the scholar should recover figures for contemporary purposes. The Stolzenberg collaboration theorizes how legal-historical scholarship serves communal questions. The Akademie piece theorizes how institutional history illuminates current institutional conditions. Myers has built his reputation on the explicit defense of what the others do implicitly.
This matters because the explicit defense is a riskier position than the implicit practice. Sarna’s authority is protected by the archival work. If someone challenges him, he points to the documents. Myers’s authority is exposed because his theoretical commitments are on the page. If someone challenges the Stakes of History framework, Myers has to defend the framework, not just the historical claims. He took the risk. The others did not.
The risk matters because the Yerushalmi problem is real. Zakhor was not a casual intervention. Yerushalmi argued that modern Jewish historiography represents a rupture from traditional Jewish memory and that the rupture cannot be healed by better scholarship. The historian in Yerushalmi’s account stands in the rubble. Traditional memory passed through liturgy, ritual, and communal practice. The historian substitutes archive and critical distance. The substitution is not equivalent. Something was lost that scholarship cannot recover. Yerushalmi ended the book on this note and meant it. The argument is not trivially refutable. It rests on an observation about the difference between memory as embodied communal practice and history as professionalized scholarly work. The observation is partly empirical and partly philosophical. Either way, it has teeth.
Most scholars in Myers’s position have not engaged the argument directly. They have absorbed the book as a classic, cited it respectfully, filed it under “important provocations the field has moved past,” and continued their work. The field moved past Zakhor the way fields often move past difficult arguments, by incorporating the citation without processing the challenge. Yerushalmi’s claim that the historian cannot substitute for traditional memory got folded into general awareness that history and memory are different categories. The sharper edge was dulled.
Myers refused the dulling. The Stakes of History is the book where he says that Yerushalmi was wrong on this point and argues for the alternative. The argument runs through the three modes of engaged history: liberation, consolation, witness. Myers claims that the historian can do memory-work through the archive, that critical distance and communal service can coexist, that the middle space between Yerushalmi’s poles is livable and productive. The argument rests partly on the personal example of scholars Myers admires rather than on a theory that could be applied independently of those examples. It underweights the social conditions Yerushalmi identified as the real loss.
The coalition path would have been to absorb Yerushalmi’s authority, cite Zakhor reverently, and write around the difficulty. Myers did something different. He told his teacher, while the teacher was still alive, that the teacher was wrong on a central question. Yerushalmi “sharply and unequivocally disagreed,” as Myers notes in the Stakes of History. The disagreement was substantive. It was not a coalition move. It was a student telling his teacher that the teacher had given up too early.
The Rosenstock-Huessy phrase, the historian as physician of memory, is what Myers has been trying to make work for forty years. If the historian is a physician, then the historian has a therapeutic function. The archive is the medicine. The community is the patient. The question is whether the medicine heals or merely palliates. Yerushalmi’s answer was palliation at best. Myers’s answer is that the medicine can heal if administered properly.
Whether Myers’s solution works is a substantive question with substantive considerations on both sides. The Kiryas Joel case he studied with Stolzenberg tells against the solution. Haredi communities transmit memory through social conditions, educational structures, community boundaries. They produce individuals with shared formation. The liberal engaged historian produces books and articles that circulate among already-formed individuals. The Haredi model is transmitting memory. The Myers model is curating a coalition’s self-understanding.
Myers has misidentified what his work accomplishes. He thinks he is doing memory-work. He is doing coalition-maintenance work that resembles memory-work.
The counter-case for Myers is that he has kept the problem live as a problem rather than as a settled answer. Zakhor is the intellectual challenge. Myers has spent his career responding to the challenge across multiple genres and multiple registers. The responses do not always succeed. They sometimes fail, but the ongoing engagement with the challenge is a scholarly contribution. It is the thing Myers does that Sarna and Diner and Heschel and Brenner do not do. He has made the philosophical question of what Jewish history is for central to his scholarly life. The centrality is unusual. Most historians avoid this kind of sustained philosophical commitment because it is easier to do the empirical work without arguing for its significance.
The comparison with Friedlander (b. 1932) matters here. Saul Friedlander (b. 1932) is the model Myers invokes. Friedlander produced the two-volume Holocaust history that combined empirical mastery with theoretical sophistication and moral commitment. Friedlander is the scholar who shows that the three can coexist at the highest level. Myers has aimed at the Friedlander position without producing the Friedlander book. His historical work is good but not at the Friedlander level of empirical mastery. His theoretical work is good but not at the Friedlander level of philosophical depth. His moral interventions are present but not backed by the empirical authority Friedlander’s Holocaust work supplies.
Myers was drawn to Columbia by Zakhor. He studied with Yerushalmi from 1984 to 1991. The dissertation on Jerusalem scholars was supervised by Yerushalmi. The teacher’s influence was formative. The subsequent disagreement with the teacher’s central argument is the kind of intellectual move that defines serious scholarly inheritance. A student who absorbs the teacher completely is a weak student. A student who rejects the teacher completely has not understood him. Myers occupies the mature position: he has absorbed Yerushalmi deeply enough to disagree with him on a central question while continuing to honor the teacher’s broader project. The Faith of Fallen Jews (2013) volume honors Yerushalmi. The disagreement coexists with the honoring. This is how scholarly filiation is supposed to work when it works.
The Myers project works partially and fails partially. The partial success is in the scholarly reconstructions: Rawidowicz, Täubler (1879-1953), the Akademie history, the Jerusalem school, the Scholem-Kabbalah correction. These works recover material for contemporary purposes while meeting specialist standards of scholarship. They do not collapse under specialist vigilance. The partial failure is in the broader theoretical argument that scholarship can substitute for the social conditions of memory transmission. Stephen Turner’s tacit framework shows this failure clearly. The Kiryas Joel case shows it empirically. The progressive Jewish communal structures that Myers’s work serves do not produce the next generation the way Haredi communities produce theirs. The historian can feed a coalition but cannot build a community. Myers wants the first to substitute for the second. It does not.
Myers made the failure visible by trying. Most scholars do not try.
Myers tries to hold open a space for a morally serious, pluralist Jewish modernity that neither collapses into uncritical nationalism nor dissolves into detached critique. He uses history as his tool to engage the present.
The Voice
Myers writes and speaks in the register of the liberal Jewish public moralist. The voice belongs to a man who has spent forty years inside the seminar room and the synagogue board meeting, and it carries the marks of both. He reaches for the high diction of the pulpit and the careful hedging of the academic in the same breath.
Start with how he opens an argument. The Daily Bruin op-ed begins: “Our campus has been riven by sharply opposing perspectives on the unfolding disaster in Israel-Palestine.” Note “riven.” Note “unfolding disaster.” He favors elevated, slightly literary verbs and a vocabulary of crisis. He does not write “split” or “divided.” He writes “riven,” and he likes “chasm” and “combustible” in the next sentence. The diction climbs. He wants the reader to feel the stakes as grave and historic, and he signals this through word choice before he makes a single claim.
His characteristic move is the two-handed structure. He builds arguments as balanced pairs held in tension. “This stance of clarity rests on two propositions.” First the massacre, which all must condemn. Second the humanitarian catastrophe, which all must oppose. He erects the scaffolding of formal argument, the proposition and the counter-proposition, and he asks the reader to hold both at once. The op-ed’s whole purpose is to refuse the choice between sides. That refusal is his deepest reflex. “What happens if there is moral virtue on both sides, or conversely, if there is a grave moral failing in both episodes?” The man thinks in symmetry. He distrusts the single answer.
Yet he can drop the symmetry for a hammer blow when he wants moral force. After describing the Hamas killings he writes two words on their own line: “Full stop.” A historian who quotes Bialik and footnotes Fanon also knows the power of the abrupt declarative. He alternates the ornate and the blunt. The long sentence that winds through clauses and citations, then the short verdict that lands. This is a practiced rhetorical rhythm, learned from preaching and from the courtroom register of the public intellectual.
The diction draws constantly on a shared canon. He cites the Hebrew poet Bialik and the pogrom at Kishinev. He invokes the rabbinic teaching that to save one life is to save the world, and he pairs it at once with the Muslim source for the same idea. He closes with Lincoln’s “better angels.” His references are the furniture of an educated liberal Jewish reader who also went to a good college. He assumes that reader. He writes for the person who recognizes the allusion and feels flattered to be addressed in its terms.
His manner is hortatory. He does not merely analyze. He exhorts. “We must demand.” “We desperately need an alternative.” “Might we dare to imagine the possibility of coming together as a community, mourning together, insisting on the dignity of all human life together?” The triple repetition of “together,” the rhetorical question that is really a plea, the first-person plural that folds writer and reader into one congregation. This is sermon cadence. He served as president of a major foundation and directs a Kindness Institute and a Dialogue Across Difference initiative, and the prose matches the institutional vocabulary. He believes in conscience, in decency, in the better angels, and he names these things without irony.
The hedging belongs to the same temperament. “in my view,” “perhaps in the form of a vigil,” “it is hard to avoid the tendency.” He qualifies. He softens. He marks his own claims as claims rather than facts, which is the academic’s habit and also the conciliator’s. He wants to persuade without bullying. The result reads as earnest and a little soft at the edges, even when the underlying judgment is firm.
In the interview register, talking to a friendly outlet, the same patterns hold but loosen. “We have seen the consolidation of one vision of Israel which is the idea of Israel as an ethnocentric Jewish state.” Here the academic shows. He nominalizes. “Consolidation,” “vision,” “the idea of.” He thinks in abstractions and historical processes, and his spoken sentences carry the same nouns his written ones do. He frames the present as a question history will answer. “The question before us is which Israel will emerge as history unfolds.” The historian cannot stop seeing the moment as a chapter in a longer story, and his rhetorical power comes from placing the listener inside that long arc.
He calls himself an optimist, and the prose confirms it. Even the darkest op-ed ends on the vigil, the better angels, the imagined community mourning as one. He will not close on despair. The structural optimism, the refusal of the zero-sum frame, the faith that dialogue and conscience can hold against the chasm, runs through everything. A reader who shares the faith finds him moving. A reader who does not may find the symmetry too neat, the “both sides” too comfortable, the moral clarity he claims more like a managed balance than a stand.
That is the core of the voice. Elevated diction, balanced pairs held in tension, sermon cadence breaking into blunt verdict, a shared liberal-Jewish canon, and an unshakable optimism about reconciliation. He is a historian who writes like a rabbi, and a rabbi who reasons like a historian.
The German Question
Late nineteenth and early twentieth century German university students arrived at Berlin, Heidelberg, Tübingen, Leipzig from Protestant homes. Confirmation in the Landeskirche had been a social fact. The university encounter with historical-critical method erased beliefs. Strauss (1808-1874) and Bauer (1809-1882) on the Gospels. Wellhausen (1844-1918) on the Pentateuch. Ranke (1795-1886) on the Reformation treated as historical rather than providential event. Harnack (1851-1930) on dogma as historical development rather than divine deposit. The students lost their Protestant faith in the first year or two and had to find something to do with the emptied structure. The pattern was common enough that it has its own historiography.
The substitutions varied. Hans Freyer (1887-1969) went through Weberian sociology toward community theory, then toward Volksgemeinschaft, then toward the Revolution from the Right in 1931. Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) went through canon law and constitutional theory toward political theology as category, toward the decision as the locus of the political, and eventually toward the Kronjurist role under the Nazis. Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) took the phenomenological route toward being-historical thinking and the Black Forest rootedness that aligned with the regime. Friedrich Gogarten (1887-1967) took a theological route and ended up aligned with the German Christians. Martin Niemöller (1892-1984) went the other way and ended up in Dachau. The range is wide. The structural feature is shared. The collapse of inherited Protestant faith under historical-critical method produced a need for a replacement object of commitment. History was often the replacement. Community was often the replacement. Decision was often the replacement. Some cases combined all three.
Freyer has the clearest trajectory. He lost his Pietist Protestant faith at Leipzig. He trained in sociology under Karl Lamprecht (1856-1915). He wrote Theorie des objektiven Geistes in 1923 arguing that objective spirit is the historical form in which meaning becomes real for individuals. He wrote Der Staat in 1925 arguing that the state is the historical crystallization of a people’s will. He wrote Revolution von Rechts in 1931 calling for a revolution that would restore the unity of people, state, and history against the fragmenting forces of bourgeois liberalism. The theoretical scaffolding was elaborate. Each step followed from the previous step. The destination was fascism. Freyer survived the war, had a rehabilitation at Leipzig under the East German regime, and ended his career writing about the modern predicament of rootless individuals seeking meaning in historical collectives.
Schmitt is harder to categorize because his Catholicism never fully dropped out. His political theology argument denied the Protestant pattern. He argued that modern political concepts are secularized theological concepts and that the secularization is incomplete. The argument cuts against the substitution pattern by naming it. But Schmitt’s own trajectory ran the pattern. His Catholic inheritance loosened into a theory of sovereignty and decision that could be filled with any content. Nazism filled it. Schmitt filled Nazism. The political-theological vocabulary became a technology for legitimating the regime. The post-war Schmitt tried to recover the Catholic ground. The recovery was partial at best. He had built a structure that could not be walked back.
These smart men understood that the inherited religious structure had collapsed. They understood that the collapse had left a vacuum. They understood that the vacuum needed filling. Their choices about what should fill it were made with full philosophical awareness of the stakes. The choices were nevertheless disastrous. The smartness did not prevent the disaster. It may have enabled the disaster by producing elaborate justifications for commitments that simpler minds would have declined to make.
Franz Rosenzweig is the Jewish case of the same pattern, considered in the opposite direction. According to legend, Rosenzweig was on the verge of converting to Protestantism in 1913. The famous Berlin Yom Kippur night turned him back. The Star of Redemption is the book of the turning. What Rosenzweig saw at that moment was the Protestant pattern he was about to enter. He saw his cousins and friends passing through the same university encounter with historical-critical method and arriving at either liberal Protestantism emptied of content or secular substitutes for the emptied content. He refused both. The Star argues that revelation breaks into history from outside.
Myers belongs to a different generation and a different religious starting point, but the structural position is recognizable. He left Orthodoxy as a young man. He did not move to pure secularism either. He built a position in the middle space. The position treats Jewish history as the medium through which meaning is transmitted, Jewish communal memory as the object of scholarly service, engaged Jewish historiography as the vocation. The structure is the German pattern in softened Jewish form. The load-bearing function of history is the same. The theoretical scaffolding is less elaborate than Freyer’s but the direction is parallel. History has to do work that religious commitment used to do.
This works only in theory, never in practice. You can’t organize a community on the basis of intellectual and moral claims about the meaning of history. Only one form of Jewish identity transmits — the Orthodox one. The American Jewish population data from the major surveys (NJPS 2000-01, Pew 2013, Pew 2020) converge on the same picture. Orthodox Jews have fertility rates above 3.0, Haredi above 6.0. Conservative, Reform, and unaffiliated Jews cluster at or below replacement, usually well below. Intermarriage rates outside Orthodoxy run above 70 percent for non-Orthodox Jews married since 2010, and the children of intermarriages identify as Jewish at rates under half, often much lower, and reproduce Jewishly at rates lower still. The Orthodox share of American Jewry under 18 is somewhere around a third and climbing, while the Orthodox share of American Jewry over 65 is under ten percent. Extend the curves and the demographic composition of American Jewry in 2075 looks nothing like the composition Myers addresses.
The implications for Myers run on several levels.
His “dual loyalty” position presumes a Diaspora constituency that persists across generations as a distinct cultural-national entity while criticizing Israel from outside. Empirically, the non-Orthodox Diaspora that produces Myers’s kind of criticism does not persist. It secularizes, intermarries, and assimilates out within two or three generations. The grandchildren of Reform Jews who signed J Street petitions in 2010 are mostly not identifiably Jewish by 2070. The grandchildren of Satmar and Lakewood families are not only Jewish but more intensively Jewish than their grandparents. Myers writes for a coalition with a sunset clause.
The Orthodox who remain do not share Myers’s framework. They overwhelmingly support Israeli government policy, reject public Diaspora criticism of Israel, read Shamir’s 1988 Rosh Hashanah message (that his hardline policies had the full support of American Jewry) as correct, vote Republican in American elections at rates approaching ninety percent, and treat the Modern Orthodox-Haredi-Chabad spectrum as the operative center of Jewish life rather than the Reform-Conservative-secular center Myers assumes. His “we” in both the 1988 essay and the 1992 lecture excludes the population that will constitute Diaspora Jewry a century from now.
The Judah Magnes (1877-1948) case reads differently under this lens. Magnes built his Harmonious Jew on German-Jewish Reform and German-Jewish academic culture at Lehranstalt and Hebrew University. Both of those populations collapsed: the German-Jewish Reform world in the Shoah and the small Rehavia German-academic circle through demographic attrition and non-reproduction. The Eastern European Orthodox world Magnes patronized from above, treated with a mix of romanticization and disgust in his 1922 journal, and failed to bring into his university coalition, turned out to be the only Diaspora population that survived 1945 with its demographic engine intact. Satmar, Belz, Lubavitch, Lithuanian yeshiva culture transplanted to Lakewood and Brooklyn: these were the heirs. Not the Ahad Ha-am cultural Zionists. Not the Kehillah experimenters. Not the binational humanists.
The Ahad Ha-am (1856-1927) diagnosis looks wrong on its own terms. Ahad Ha-am predicted that political Zionism would sap Jewish cultural vitality and that a spiritual center in Palestine would reinvigorate Diaspora Jewish life. The opposite happened. Political Zionism produced Israel, which became the largest Jewish community in the world and the primary cultural engine of non-Orthodox Jewish identity, while the cultural-Zionist alternative Ahad Ha-am and Magnes championed produced no reproducible community anywhere. The Diaspora populations that reproduce Jewishly draw their authority from Torah, halakha, and rabbinic tradition, not from Ahad Ha-am’s secular Hebrew humanism. The populations that drew from Ahad Ha-am produced scholars, not grandchildren.
Myers’s own position at UCLA embodies the pattern. Secular Jewish studies as an academic discipline took off from the 1970s forward, produced impressive scholarship, and now faces a demographic crisis. The students who fill Jewish studies seats at elite universities are a shrinking pool. The Orthodox attend their own institutions. The intermarried children of Reform Jews increasingly do not identify as Jewish at all or do so weakly. The field has become a humanities subspecialty studying a population that, in its secular American form, is disappearing.
The deeper challenge to Myers: if the Orthodox are the only reproducing Diaspora, then Jewish continuity required the posture Myers treats as parochial, unsophisticated, and incompatible with modernity. Strong boundaries. Endogamy. Religious authority. Separation from general culture at key points. Submission to halakha. Deference to rabbinic leadership. Large families. Intensive day-school education. The “narrow spirit” Heine mocked and Myers quotes disapprovingly turned out to be the only spirit wide enough to cross five generations. Emancipation-era liberalism, which Myers treats as the precondition of modern Jewish life, has functioned as a solvent. Orthodoxy has functioned as a preservative.
Myers treats the Orthodox as a residual category, a holdover, a community to be respected but not emulated, while the center of Jewish creativity sits with the integrating, modernizing, humanistic strand. The demographic data inverts the picture. The integrating strand is the residual category on a century-long timescale. The Orthodox are the center of future Jewish creativity because they are the center of future Jewish existence. Everything else is a terminal branch.
Myers has a few possible responses, none adequate. He can say quality matters more than quantity, that the contributions of non-Orthodox Jews to civilization outweigh the demographic weight of the Orthodox. True, and irrelevant to the continuity question. He can say Orthodox demographic dominance is recent and may not last, that secularization eventually catches the most insulated communities. Possibly, but the off-the-derech rate is not close to the Orthodox fertility rate, and the trend has been intensification rather than defection. He can say Israel supplies the missing reproductive engine for secular Jewish identity, which is true, but Israel is the state Myers’s coalition spends its intellectual energy criticizing, and the critique flows in only one direction: American secular Jewish intellectuals scold Israeli policy while Israeli secular Jews continue to produce the Jewish demographic future that American secular Jews have stopped producing.
The “dual loyalty” essay’s argument that Diaspora Jews have a right, even a duty, to criticize Israel rests on the premise that Diaspora Jewry constitutes a durable partner in the Jewish national project. Take the demographic evidence seriously and the premise fails. The partner is disappearing. The critic chair is emptying out. The Orthodox who remain mostly do not want the chair. In 2075 the argument may still be written, but by a smaller and smaller circle of scholars defending a position with no constituency left to carry it.
Myers speaks for a class of American Jewish intellectuals whose cultural authority rests on a demographic base that is not reproducing. The theoretical sophistication increases as the population base shrinks. The conferences get grander as the grandchildren get fewer. Magnes, who built his Harmonious Jew on a German-Jewish foundation that the Shoah and secular drift both erased, is a fitting patron saint for the project. A saint for a vanishing world, canonized by its last theologians.
Tacit knowledge transmission requires social conditions, not intellectual arguments. The historian cannot reproduce what the yeshiva or the functioning liturgical community reproduces. The Satmar community transmits through controlled environments, shared practices, enforced norms. The Myers community reads books, goes to temple, attends conferences and subscribes to journals. The first produces the next generation. The second goes down the toilet of history.
The German comparison sharpens this. Freyer thought history could produce community. He was wrong in a catastrophic way. The community he theorized was fascism. He discovered this by watching what he had called for arrive and then doing it. Myers thinks history can produce Jewish community in a progressive non-Orthodox form. He has not discovered what he is wrong about because the stakes have not been tested at the Freyer scale. The progressive Jewish community he serves has not been asked to produce its next generation under pressure. It reproduces at below-replacement fertility. Its institutions lose membership steadily. Its rabbinical seminaries ordain fewer students than a generation ago. The collapse is slow rather than dramatic, which makes it harder to notice. The Freyer model collapsed fast and loudly. The Myers model is collapsing slowly and quietly. The direction is the same.
The load Myers puts on historiography is too heavy for what historiography can carry. Historiography can record, can analyze, can correct self-serving narratives, can recover forgotten figures. These are real contributions. Historiography cannot transmit. The transmission function requires the social conditions Turner identifies. The conditions are community structure, shared practice, enforced formation, barriers to exit. Progressive American Judaism has given up on each of these in the name of values it holds intrinsically important: individual autonomy, open boundaries, voluntary affiliation, pluralism. The same values that make the community attractive to its members make the community structurally unable to reproduce. Myers’s historiography is the intellectual face of a community that has chosen not to have the features that would let it continue. The historiography cannot compensate for the chosen absence. It can only register it.
This is where the German comparison becomes uncomfortable for Myers. Freyer saw the absence and wanted to fill it with something historical communities could produce under specific political conditions. The fill was fascism. Myers sees the absence and wants to fill it with historiographical recovery and liturgical innovation and applied history and institutional work at UCLA and the Luskin Center and Bedari. The fill is progressive Jewish intellectual life. The fill is more humane than Freyer’s. The fill is nevertheless unable to do the work the absence requires. Progressive Jewish intellectual life is downstream of the religious structure that has collapsed. It cannot rebuild the structure. It can at best maintain a class of people who do not want the structure but also do not want its full absence. The class exists for as long as it exists. It does not reproduce. The Freyer lesson is that when the class runs out of time, the vacuum pulls in something else.
The something else in early twentieth century Germany was fascism. The something else in twenty-first century America is less clear. It might be a return to some form of traditional Jewish life, which is what the Haredi and Modern Orthodox demographic numbers suggest is already happening. It might be a full assimilation into post-Jewish American life, which is what the intermarriage and non-affiliation numbers suggest for a different portion of the community. It might be something else that has not yet appeared in the data. What it is unlikely to be is the continuation of the progressive Jewish intellectual class that Myers serves. The class is a transitional phenomenon. It cannot be the destination.
Myers has sensed this. The American Shtetl book treats Kiryas Joel with an evident fascination that exceeds the stated analytical interest. The book registers that the Satmar community is doing something the author’s own community cannot do. The registering is honest. Myers does not pretend Kiryas Joel is his model. He also does not pretend his model does not face the reproduction problem Kiryas Joel has solved. The sitting with the tension is one of the more admirable moments in the Myers corpus. The tension does not resolve. The book ends with the tension intact.
Myers is another smart man raised religious who has placed a load on historiography that historiography cannot bear. The load is the work of producing and reproducing community when the underlying religious structure has collapsed. Historiography can illuminate the collapse. It cannot reverse it. The Germans ran the experiment to catastrophe. The American Jewish progressive experiment is running more quietly but the direction is the same. Myers is the most sophisticated theorist of the experiment. The sophistication does not save the experiment. It makes the failure more articulate than it would otherwise be.
Myers tries to hold together a liberal and pluralist position that loses members gradually rather than recruiting new ones through crisis. The liberal failure mode is quieter than the authoritarian failure mode. It is still a failure mode.
The Rosenzweig comparison is the one Myers might find most uncomfortable if he allowed himself to sit with it. Rosenzweig saw the pattern and rejected it. He turned back toward traditional Jewish life, not toward Orthodoxy exactly but toward a engaged commitment to Jewish practice and study that his emerging movement attempted to institutionalize in the Lehrhaus. The Lehrhaus was a partial success and then a political casualty. Rosenzweig died young. The counterfactual of what his later life might have been is not available. What is available is his diagnosis, which is that the historical-critical substitute for religious commitment cannot carry the weight its bearers want it to carry. Myers has spent his career trying to disprove Rosenzweig on this point. The evidence so far favors Rosenzweig.
The Four Questions
Who does this person rely on for status, income, and protection?
Who do they need to attract or retain as allies?
What beliefs and signals mark membership in their coalition?
What would they have to give up, in status, income, or belonging, if they changed their public position?
Myers depends for status and income on the American academic Jewish studies establishment and the institutional infrastructure of progressive Jewish liberalism. His positions at UCLA, his editorial role at the Jewish Quarterly Review, his funding networks, and his public platform all flow from that coalition. The New Israel Fund chairmanship signals where his material and reputational base sits.
He risks angering two groups if he speaks plainly. The first group is Zionists, who regard his binationalism and his New Israel Fund work as delegitimizing. He has already paid some of that cost and absorbed it. The second, less visible group is the progressive Jewish coalition that sustains him. If he concluded that liberal Jewish pluralism is a consoling narrative produced by diaspora comfort, or that Haredi separatism in American Shtetl exposes a fatal flaw in the liberal legal framework rather than a tension within it, his audience would contract sharply. He does not reach those conclusions. Is that restraint intellectual judgment or coalition rationality?
The people who benefit if his framing wins are American Jews who want to remain connected to a Zionist project while finding its current manifestations unrecognizable. His scholarship provides the intellectual architecture for that position. It tells them that Jewish political thought always contained more possibilities than the ones that triumphed, that critical history and communal identity can coexist, and that the archive vindicates a morally serious pluralism. That is an enormously useful story for an institutionally powerful audience.
The truths that would cost him his position are not hard to identify. That the binational and pluralist alternatives he recovers from the archive failed not because of bad luck or missed opportunities but because they lacked the political and social substrate to survive. That applied history, when practiced inside institutions with defined political commitments, is advocacy with footnotes. That the Haredi case in American Shtetl does not merely complicate liberalism but suggests it cannot sustain against determined internal adversaries. That the progressive Jewish institutional world he leads and serves is a coalition with motivated beliefs, not a community of disinterested ethical inquiry. None of these conclusions would destroy him, but each would cost him something real, and none appears in his work.
A professional Jew earns his income, status, and platform from Jewish institutional infrastructure. The income flow requires signals. The signals include observance of some ritual elements, use of Jewish vocabulary, demonstration of Jewish learning, participation in Jewish communal contexts. The signals do not require belief. They do not require full halakhic observance. They do not require membership in any denomination. They require visible performance of Jewish identity in forms that Jewish institutional funders recognize and reward.
The category is larger than most outside observers realize. Tenured professors of Jewish studies. Rabbis of all denominations. Hillel directors. Federation executives. ADL staff. AJC staff. Jewish communal relations professionals. Jewish day school administrators. Jewish philanthropic foundation program officers. Museum directors at Jewish museums. Editors at Jewish journals. Jewish communal journalists. Jewish studies adjacent academics whose work touches Jewish topics. Program directors at Jewish community centers. Staff at organizations like the New Israel Fund, J Street, the World Jewish Congress, the Conference of Presidents. This is a class with economic interests, status markers, career paths, and signaling requirements.
Myers holds multiple positions in this class. The UCLA Sady and Ludwig Kahn Chair in Jewish History is a Jewish institutional position. The chair was endowed by Jewish donors for a Jewish scholarly purpose. The Luskin Center for History and Policy was established by Jewish donors. The Center for Jewish History presidency was a Jewish institutional position. The New Israel Fund board chairmanship was a Jewish institutional position. The Jewish Quarterly Review editorship is a Jewish institutional position. Each position carries institutional expectations about the incumbent’s Jewish engagement. Each draws its funding from Jewish sources. Each selects for incumbents who perform Jewishness in ways the funders recognize.
The signaling requirements are well-documented within the class. The observer who knows the class can read the signals. The observer who does not know the class often cannot. The signals include appearing at Jewish communal events, using Hebrew and Yiddish vocabulary, referencing Jewish texts with appropriate familiarity, demonstrating pastoral concern for Jewish communal welfare, maintaining relationships with rabbis and Jewish leaders, writing occasionally on Jewish topics for Jewish publications, attending synagogues or minyanim, observing holidays publicly, using Jewish markers of time. The signals are not hard to produce if you have been trained in Jewish life. They are impossible to fake convincingly if you have not been.
Myers is paid to daven. Not in the sense that anyone hands him cash after Shacharit. In the sense that the institutional positions he holds require a Jewish profile that daily prayer practice contributes to. A Myers who did not daven would be a different professional Jew. He might still hold some positions. He could not hold all of them. The Jewish Quarterly Review editorship, probably requires the profile. The Center for Jewish History presidency required it. The Luskin Center deployment of his work requires the engaged Jewish scholarly identity. Without the observance, the profile thins, and with it the professional standing.
This does not mean Myers is insincere about his prayer practice. The signal is most effective when it is sincere. Myers may pray with feeling. The prayer is rewarded by his institutional position. The prayer and the reward coexist without the prayer being primarily motivated by the reward. The prayer would continue in some form without the reward. The intensity and public visibility of the practice is shaped by the institutional context that rewards it.
The professional Jewish class generally maintains some version of Shabbat. A Myers who publicly announced he did not keep Shabbat in any form would face professional costs.
The same analysis applies to kashrut, to life cycle observance, to holiday participation, to synagogue attendance, to Hebrew language competence, to Israel engagement. Each of these is a signaling domain. Each has minimum thresholds for professional Jews in different sub-categories. A professor of Jewish history needs different competencies than a Federation executive. Both need competencies that a fully secular Jewish American would not need to have. Both face costs if they fall below the thresholds their position requires.
What happens to professional Jews who deviate from the expected signaling? Ruth Wisse (b. 1936) at Harvard held conservative positions that cut against the progressive consensus in the academic Jewish studies subset of the professional class. Wisse paid professional costs for the deviation. She also gained compensating rewards from a different part of the professional Jewish class, the more conservative segment that includes the Tikvah Fund and its infrastructure.
Norman Finkelstein (b. 1953) provides a different case. Finkelstein deviated from the professional Jewish mainstream more sharply than Wisse did in the opposite direction. His positions on Israel and on Holocaust instrumentalization put him outside the mainstream professional Jewish class entirely. He lost his academic position. He has no institutional Jewish funding.
Shaul Magid (b. 1958) occupies an intermediate position. His work on Jewish theology and his recent positions on Zionism put him at the left edge of what the mainstream professional Jewish class can accommodate. He holds tenured positions at Dartmouth and Fordham. The institutional positions have accommodated his deviation. He has not been expelled from the class but he has moved to positions within the class that tolerate more deviation than Myers’s positions would tolerate. The sorting mechanism is visible in the institutional locations each scholar occupies.
Myers holds positions that require the center-of-coalition signaling. He performs the signaling effectively. The Al Chet additions are calibrated to push the edge of what his sub-coalition can accommodate without crossing into a different sub-coalition’s territory. The calibration is skilled. It maintains his position while producing the innovations that his sub-coalition requires for its ongoing self-differentiation from more conservative sub-coalitions.
Myers has held a membership in a Modern Orthodox shul for years, and he occasionally teaches classes in Orthodox settings, without becoming Orthodox.
Orthodox Jewish scholars are not members of the same professional Jewish class in most cases. They operate in parallel institutional structures. Yeshiva University is the bridge institution. Most Modern Orthodox scholars are in the professional Jewish class in some version. Most Haredi scholars are not. They operate in yeshiva and kollel structures that do not require or reward the signaling Myers performs. The absence of Orthodox scholars from Myers’s engagement is partly a class absence. They are in a different economic position. They signal to different funders. They face different status markers. Myers does not engage them because his professional class does not reward engagement with their professional class. The absence is structural.
Jews paid to observe a version of Judaism aka the professional Jews are aging and contracting. The Jewish donor base that sustains progressive Jewish institutions is aging. The next generation of progressive American Jewish donors is smaller than the current generation. The institutional infrastructure Myers’s class depends on is contracting at the rate of its donor base. The Orthodox donor base, by contrast, is growing with Orthodox demographics. The Orthodox professional Jewish infrastructure is expanding. The two trend lines are diverging. Myers’s class will be significantly smaller in twenty years than it is now. The signaling requirements of his class may also shift as the donor base ages and changes. The signals Myers has optimized for may not be the signals his successors optimize for. The class position is stable for Myers’s remaining productive career but won’t be stable for the generation after him.
French-German thinkers produce grand theories because their intellectual traditions reward grand theory. Freyer went from one grand theory to another because that is the move his tradition supplies when one coalition collapses and another one forms.
By contrast, Anglo social and historical thought clusters around empirical description, middle-range theory, and skeptical epistemology. The emblematic Anglo figures are Hume, Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments mode, Edmund Burke as practical conservative rather than systematic philosopher, Walter Bagehot, the Cambridge historians, the Oxford Idealists only briefly before the empiricist reaction, G. E. Moore and the analytic philosophers dismantling metaphysical claims, R. G. Collingwood on the inside of the historical method, E. P. Thompson and the Marxist historians who stayed closer to archive than to theory, the Cambridge contextualists around Skinner and Pocock, the Oxford moral philosophers in the Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot tradition. What connects these figures is resistance to totalizing systems. Hume dismantles rationalist ethics. Smith builds moral philosophy from observation of sentiments rather than from first principles. Burke attacks abstract rights theory as French disease. Bagehot describes the English constitution in terms of practical working rather than systematic design. Collingwood insists that historians think historically rather than philosophically. Thompson writes working-class history in thick archival detail rather than in Althusserian abstraction. The Cambridge contextualists refuse the canon of great books in favor of situated local debates. The style is skeptical, empirical, resistant to large claims, suspicious of Continental system-building.
This is a intellectual formation with costs and benefits. The benefits are that the Anglo style avoids the catastrophes the Continental grand theories produced. No Anglo sociologist wrote a Revolution von Rechts. No Anglo philosopher produced a doctrine of the Kronjurist. The refusal of grand theory was a moral accomplishment as well as a cognitive habit. The costs are that the Anglo style sometimes fails to see what grand theory can reveal. A Thompson working-class history reveals material conditions that a Marx theory predicts but also misses. A Hume critique of causation dismantles metaphysical pretensions but also produces the Hume problem about induction that no Anglo philosopher has fully solved.
Place Myers on this map. He is on the Continental side. The Stakes of History is a theoretical framework that organizes his empirical work. The liberation-consolation-witness triad is the kind of systematic categorization that Anglo historians generally avoid. The engagement with Benjamin, Nora, Yerushalmi, Cover, Casanova, Bhabha, Gilroy, Appiah, Chatterjee is Continental in its reading list. The willingness to write manifesto-adjacent theoretical books at regular intervals is Continental in its rhythm. The identification with prophetic modes, with Rosenstock-Huessy’s physician of memory, with Rawidowicz’s Lonely Man, is Continental in its self-understanding. A Cambridge contextualist historian would find the whole operation methodologically alien.
At the same time, Myers does substantial archival work. The Täubler piece is archival. The Jerusalem school piece is archival. The Scholem-Kabbalah correction is archival. The Stolzenberg collaboration includes substantial institutional history of American legal conflicts. When Myers is at his best, the Anglo empirical impulse disciplines the Continental theoretical impulse. The Täubler essay works because Myers stays close to the archival material. The Kiryas Joel book works because Stolzenberg and Myers ground legal theory in documentary evidence. The theoretical register is present but it is disciplined by the empirical register.
When Myers is at his worst, in the post-October 7 op-eds, the Continental theoretical register runs without the Anglo empirical discipline. The prophetic mode generates the prose. The claims do not get grounded in evidence that could be checked. The moral urgency substitutes for the scholarly apparatus. The op-ed is a Continental form. Anglo historians generally do not write op-ed in the prophetic register. Their op-ed look more like thick descriptions of situations with modest conclusions.
Myers is Continental in ambition, Anglo in his archival training, Continental in his public performance, Anglo when the material forces him to stay close to it. When the Continental ambition dominates, the work produces the Rawidowicz-as-present-voice frame that Pinsof’s framework names as coalition work. When the Anglo discipline dominates, the work produces the recoveries that do not depend on the coalition frame to be valuable. The Myers corpus contains both because Myers is formed by both traditions and his institutional position rewards both modes at different moments.
Columbia in the 1980s, where Myers trained, was a hybrid institution. Yerushalmi had been Salo Baron’s (1895-1989) student at Columbia. Baron was the Galician-born, Vienna-trained, European-Jewish scholar who built American Jewish studies at Columbia starting in 1930. Baron’s A Social and Religious History of the Jews is the archetype of the Anglo-style discipline applied to Jewish material. Eighteen volumes, heavily documented, deliberately anti-lachrymose, resisting the Graetz tradition of national-tragic narrative. Baron was an Anglo thinker who happened to have had European training. Yerushalmi inherited the Baron discipline but added the Continental sensibility that produced Zakhor. Myers inherited the Yerushalmi synthesis, which is already a hybrid of Anglo discipline and Continental ambition.
Brenner is a useful comparison. Michael Brenner at the University of Munich and at American University does German-Jewish history in a mode that is more Anglo than Myers. Brenner’s books on Weimar, on the prophets of Zionism, on Israeli history, stay closer to the archival material and produce less theoretical elaboration. Brenner does not write manifestos. He writes histories. The histories are good. They do not generate public intellectual controversy because they stay in the Anglo mode. Brenner is what Myers might have been if the Continental pull had been weaker.
Moshe Rosman is another comparison. Rosman at Bar-Ilan does Polish-Jewish history in an archival mode. How Jewish Is Jewish History is methodological, but the methodology is Anglo-analytical rather than Continental-theoretical. Rosman dismantles rather than builds. He shows how claims in Jewish historiography cannot be sustained by the available evidence. The work is rigorous. It does not produce public intellectual claims because the Anglo mode does not support the kind of public intellectual work the Continental mode enables.
Now for the question of where Myers would sit if the Anglo discipline were stronger. The op-eds would not exist. The Al Chet additions would not exist. The theoretical manifestos would not exist. What would exist is the archival work, the institutional histories, the recoveries of forgotten figures. The public intellectual profile would be much smaller. The scholarly reputation would rest entirely on the archival accomplishments. The reputation would probably be more durable because it would not depend on the survival of a coalition’s political positions. Thirty years from now, the Täubler piece will still be read by specialists. The 2024 LA Times op-ed will not. The durable work is the Anglo-disciplined work. The ephemeral work is the Continental-theoretical work.
But the ephemeral work is what makes Myers a figure in contemporary American Jewish intellectual life. Without the Continental theoretical elaboration, without the prophetic mode, without the public performance, Myers would be one of several serious scholars of German-Jewish intellectual history. He would not be the theorist of engaged Jewish history. He would not be the target of right-wing Jewish criticism. He would not be the writer of the Yom Kippur liturgical additions. The Continental elements are what make Myers distinctive. The Anglo elements are what make his work durable.
The irony is that the Continental mode is epistemically weaker and socially more powerful. The Anglo mode is epistemically stronger and socially less powerful. Myers has chosen to balance both because both pay dividends. The Continental performance gives him the public role. The Anglo discipline gives him the scholarly standing. Neither alone would produce the position he occupies. The hybrid is what the position requires.
Freyer made a different choice. He went fully Continental. The grand theory in 1931 was Revolution von Rechts. The grand theory in 1955 was secondary systems. The grand theory in 1965 was the historical conscience of the West. Each grand theory served an alliance. The alliance gave the theory its temporary plausibility. When the alliance collapsed, the theory collapsed. Freyer is now read by specialists in Nazi-adjacent sociology and by Carl Schmitt scholars looking for context. His work was not disciplined by archival constraint. It was all ambition. The ambition is what gave the work its cultural force in each moment. The ambition is also what made the work disposable when the moment passed.
The Anglo discipline in Myers’ corpus protects parts of his work from the coalition-dependent fate. The Täubler piece will outlast the coalition that currently reads Myers. The Rawidowicz translation will outlast it. The Scholem-Kabbalah correction will outlast it. The Yom Kippur Al Chet additions will not outlast the coalition. They are coalition-dependent. They perform coalition work that the coalition needs now. When the coalition shifts or dissolves, the additions will be forgotten.
Myers sits on the hybrid. He uses Continental theoretical ambition to generate the public intellectual role and Anglo empirical discipline to generate the scholarly work. The ratio varies across his corpus. The archival pieces are mostly Anglo with a thin Continental frame. The theoretical books are mostly Continental with selective Anglo substantiation. The op-eds are almost entirely Continental. The institutional histories are mostly Anglo. A reader who wants what is durable should read the Anglo-disciplined pieces. A reader who wants what is culturally consequential in the current coalitionenvironment should read the Continental-theoretical pieces. The two audiences get different Myers because the two modes are present in different proportions in different parts of the corpus.
The Anglo tradition’s value in the present moment is that it resists exactly the failure mode Pinsof’s framework named. Anglo historians generally do not claim that their archival work reveals moral truths that transcend coalition. They claim to describe what happened, to establish what can be established, to dispute what cannot be established. The modest claim leaves coalition conflict outside the archival work rather than running it through the archival work. The Continental mode, by contrast, invites coalition conflict into the archival work. Myers’s Continental elements are the elements that Pinsof’s framework identifies as coalition operations dressed in moral vocabulary. The Anglo elements do not supply the vocabulary. They do the scholarship.
On the continental-anglo axis, Myers sits closer to the continental pole than his training would predict. Columbia under Yerushalmi was hybrid, as the previous exchange established. Baron’s A Social and Religious History of the Jews was Anglo in its empirical ambition and European in its learning. Yerushalmi shifted the balance toward the continental with Zakhor but kept the archival substrate intact through the Cardoso biography and the Spanish Inquisition work. Myers inherited the hybrid and has shifted it further toward the continental pole across his career. His first book in 1995 was Anglo in method, an institutional history of scholars in specific positions producing specific work. By 2018 the Stakes of History is fully continental, a theoretical manifesto. The arc runs from archive toward theory, from specific case toward general framework, from Anglo empiricism toward continental system-building.
On the coalition axis, Myers sits at the center of the progressive American Jewish academic coalition. Not the left edge. Not the center-right edge. The center. The left edge is occupied by Shaul Magid, Judith Butler (b. 1956), Peter Beinart (b. 1971) in his current position, the Jewish Voice for Peace network, the IfNotNow activist layer. The right edge is occupied by Steven Zipperstein (b. 1950), Derek Penslar (b. 1958) before his recent sharper positioning, David Ellenson (1947-2023), Jack Wertheimer (b. 1948), Steven Bayme (1950). The center of the coalition is occupied by Myers, Deborah Lipstadt, Jonathan Sarna, Hasia Diner, Susannah Heschel. These are the figures who anchor the coalition’s institutional and scholarly infrastructure without pushing toward either edge.
Within this center, Myers occupies a sub-position. Sarna does American Jewish history. DinerDiner does American Jewish social history. Heschel does theology and feminism. Lipstadt does Holocaust and antisemitism. Myers does engaged Jewish historical theory. His sub-position is the theorist of what the center is doing. The others are practitioners. Myers is the methodologist. This is a niche. The coalition has one such position and Myers holds it.
On the generational axis, Myers was formed in the post-1967 emergence of American Jewish studies as a self-conscious academic field. The founding generation is Baron and Yerushalmi at Columbia, Jacob Katz (1904-1988) at Hebrew University, Michael Meyer (b. 1937) at HUC, Arthur Green (b. 1941) at Brandeis. Myers is the second generation, the one that inherited institutional Jewish studies as an established field and extended it. The third generation, Naar and his cohort, are positioned to challenge the inherited framework from within the field. Myers belongs to the inheritor generation, which receives the field as given and extends it without fundamentally questioning its founding premises.
On the religious axis, Myers is a post-Orthodox Jew who maintains some traditional practice. Not Orthodox in belief and dominant affiliation. Not Reform in the classical sense. Not Conservative in the movement sense. He is a specific type that became more common in his generation, the intellectually serious post-Orthodox Jew who prays daily, studies seriously, and operates institutionally in Reform or progressive contexts. The type has features. The Orthodox formation provides textual literacy and ritual familiarity. The post-Orthodox position provides freedom from halakhic authority. The combination produces the capacity to innovate liturgically while claiming continuity with tradition. Myers is an articulate instance of this type. Ellenson was another. The type exists in numbers and has institutional homes.
On the political axis, Myers supports Jewish self-determination in Israel. Critical of Israeli government policy across multiple governments. Opposed to settlements, to occupation, to the treatment of Palestinian citizens of Israel. Aligned with the New Israel Fundd position. Opposed to BDS while sympathetic to Palestinian grievances. Opposed to anti-Zionist Jewish positions that deny the legitimacy of Jewish collective self-determination. Aligned with American progressive politics in domestic matters. Opposed to Trump, to right-wing populism, to Christian nationalism. This is a political location. It is the location of the New Israel Fund donor base, of the J Street supporter class, of the progressive wing of American Jewish Committee.
On the institutional axis, Myers is at the center of a particular network. UCLA tenure provides the material base. The Luskin Center for History and Policy provides a platform. Bedari Kindness Institute provides a humanitarian platform. The New Israel Fund board provided political leadership. The Center for Jewish History presidency provided national institutional leadership. The Jewish Quarterly Review editorship provided scholarly leadership. Together they constitute a portfolio of platforms that permit certain kinds of public intervention. The portfolio is unusually large for a scholar of Myers’s productivity. Most historians with his publication record do not hold these kinds of institutional positions. Myers has made institutional work a part of his career in ways that Sarna and DinerDiner have not.
On the collaborative axis, Myers is defined by the Stolzenberg partnership. Thirty years of collaboration. Resisting History dedicated to her. American Shtetl co-authored. The partnership gives Myers access to legal theoretical tools that his own training did not provide. The partnership also shapes what Myers does. Without Stolzenberg, Myers is a German-Jewish intellectual historian with specific interests. With Stolzenberg, he has access to legal pluralism, constitutional law, contemporary American Jewish communal-legal questions.
On the geographic axis, Myers is in Los Angeles. Not New York. Not Boston. Not Jerusalem. Los Angeles. This matters. Los Angeles Jewish life has specific features. The community is large, affluent, diverse, religiously varied, politically split. UCLA is his institution. The American Jewish University, the University of Judaism before it renamed, is the rabbinical training ground. HUC Los Angeles is the Reform seminary. The Simon Wiesenthal Center is the Holocaust institution.
On the temperamental axis, Myers is a scholar who combines archival patience with moral earnestness, filial piety with intellectual independence, coalition loyalty with individual judgment, public intellectual ambition with private religious practice.
On the epistemic axis, Myers operates within limits. His scholarly range is bounded by his training. He works German-Jewish intellectual history with confidence. He works American Jewish communal-legal history through the Stolzenberg collaboration. He writes general Jewish history with the limits the Very Short Introduction revealed. He does not work Sephardic or Mizrahi material. He does not work Eastern European Jewish material in any sustained way. He does not work Israeli Jewish material at specialist depth. The range is German-Jewish and American-Jewish, with extensions into specific other areas through collaboration or public intellectual work. The op-eds speak to Jewish history in general. The scholarly work is bounded.
On the scale axis, Myers operates at a size. Below the scale of the field-defining figures. Above the scale of the specialist historian. The field-defining figures are Yerushalmi, Jacob Katz, Scholem, Baron. These figures reshaped what Jewish studies is. Myers has not reshaped the field. He has extended lines of inquiry within the field. The specialist historians are the figures who produce monographs on specific topics and do not extend into theory or public intellectual work. Brenner is closer to this category than Myers. Myers is between. He is a scholar with field-wide ambition who has not achieved field-reshaping impact but who has produced theoretical and institutional contributions that are larger than any single specialist monograph would represent.
On the historical axis, Myers is located at a moment in the field. American Jewish studies has gone through phases. The founding phase under Baron and Katz and the first cohort. The consolidation phase under Yerushalmi and Mendelssohn and the second cohort. The extension phase under Myers and his cohort, in which the field extended geographically, methodologically, and topically. The challenge phase, under Naar and Magid and the third cohort, in which founding premises are being questioned. Myers is at the end of the extension phase and the beginning of the challenge phase. He is senior enough to represent what the field has been. His work will be read by historians of the field rather than by field practitioners.
On the Pinsof coordinate, Myers is at a point on the tribal-universal continuum. Pinsof’s framework says no one can occupy the universal pole because morality is coalition cognition. The question is which coalition and what relationship to the coalition. Myers is a sincere member of a coalition who believes his coalition’s positions approach moral truth. The belief is what coalition membership feels like from the inside. He is a believer who has found his coalition’s positions so consonant with what he understands as moral reasoning that he experiences them as discoveries rather than as commitments. This is the relationship to coalition that produces the most effective coalition members. They believe the propaganda because they wrote it.
On the succession axis, Myers is a case of intergenerational inheritance. His teachers were Yerushalmi, Band, Mendes-Flohr. His collaborators are Stolzenberg, Feiner, Pianko. His students are the current generation of American German-Jewish historians and adjacent scholars. His inheritors will determine how his work is received after his productive period ends. The inheritors are partly within his direct lineage and partly within competing lineages. The Naar challenge comes from outside his lineage. The challenge will target the Ashkenazi-centric framing that Myers’s work reproduces. The challenge has substantive force. Myers’s response to the challenge has been moderator-mode rather than substantive engagement. This suggests that Myers’s own generation will not fully answer the challenge. The challenge will be answered, if at all, by the next generation, which will produce different work that does not reproduce the Ashkenazi-centric framing.
The full location, reduced to a sentence, is this. David N. Myers is a hybrid scholar occupying the center of the progressive American Jewish academic coalition, with continental theoretical ambition disciplined by Anglo archival capacity, working within geographic and institutional and collaborative networks, at a specific cohort position in the field’s development, with temperamental and religious and political features that are consistent across his career, whose work will divide in durability between the archival recoveries that will last and the theoretical and public intellectual productions that will not last beyond the coalition moment that produced them.
The Anglo mode of empirical scholarship does not generate the signals the professional Jewish class requires. An archival historian producing monographs on German-Jewish institutions does not signal engaged Jewish identity in the way the professional Jewish class requires. The continental mode, with its theoretical ambition and its moral register, generates the signals. Myers’s shift toward the continental pole across his career is partly a function of the professional Jewish class’s signaling requirements. The more institutional positions he has taken on, the more theoretical and public his output has become, because those positions require the signals the continental mode produces. A Myers who stayed closer to the Anglo mode would have held fewer institutional positions. The positions he has held have pulled him toward the continental mode because the positions require what the continental mode supplies.
Myers’s career is not just an intellectual trajectory. It is an economic trajectory. The economic trajectory has incentive structures that shape the intellectual outputs. The intellectual outputs are real and have intellectual merit but they are produced by a person whose economic position rewards certain intellectual outputs. A Myers who had taken a specialist Anglo-mode career would have produced different work because he would have occupied a different economic position. The different work would have been Anglo-mode archival work that did not generate the professional Jewish class signals. That Myers would have had fewer platforms, less public impact, and a smaller institutional footprint. The work he produced is the work his economic position called for.
Myers is a professional Jew. The professional Jewish class has signaling requirements. Myers performs the signals effectively. The signals include forms of observance that secular Jews of his intellectual profile would not generally perform. The observance is both sincere and rewarded. The sincerity and the reward coexist. A Myers without the observance would have had a different career.
“The Scholem‑Kurzweil Debate and Modern Jewish Historiography.” Modern Judaism (October 1986)
This is Myers before Resisting History, before Between Jew and Arab, before The Center for Jewish History presidency, before the current public intellectual phase. This is graduate-student Myers working out the scholarly commitments that structure everything else.
Gershom Scholem defended Wissenschaft des Judentums and modern critical scholarship as serving Zionist cultural renewal. Baruch Kurzweil (1907-1992) attacked Scholem and the whole enterprise of modern Jewish scholarship as a continuation of assimilationist illusion by other means. Myers maps the 1965 debate carefully, showing that both men were responding to the same crisis — the collapse of the nineteenth-century Wissenschaft project’s apologetic function — but drew opposite conclusions about what critical scholarship could accomplish.
Scholem’s narrative of heroic rescue from Wissenschaft neglect has shaped how the field understands its own origins. Generations of scholars have absorbed the story. The story is self-serving. Myers shows that Wissenschaft scholars engaged Kabbalah. Adolphe Franck (1809-1893) produced the first systematic modern account in 1843. Meyer Heinrich Landauer (1808-1841) argued against Moses de Leon authorship of the Zohar decades before Scholem did. Adolph Jellinek (1821-1893) debated Zoharic composition with Scholem publicly in 1925 and produced substantial Kabbalah scholarship at Leipzig and Vienna. David Joel (1815-1882) wrote from Breslau. The Vienna rabbinical seminary taught Kabbalah courses. The institutional record shows engagement. Scholem’s narrative of neglect minimized or erased each of these figures. Scholem knew they existed. He had debated Jellinek personally. His construction of the neglect narrative was not oversight. It was strategic self-positioning that served his program of placing himself as the rescuer of a Jewish resource.
Yerushalmi revered Scholem. Myers’s scholarly formation comes through a line that treats Scholem as canonical. Myers nevertheless shows that Scholem constructed a self-serving narrative. The scholarship survives because the counter-evidence Myers assembles is solid. Franck did write the 1843 book. Landauer did publish his Zohar-authorship arguments. Jellinek did debate Scholem. The seminary curricula did include Kabbalah. These are checkable claims and they check out. Myers produces the scholarly record that makes Scholem’s narrative untenable as history while acknowledging it remains powerful as rhetoric.
Myers shows that the narrative Scholem constructed minimized scholars from rabbinical seminaries like Breslau and Vienna. These were the institutions of Frankel’s positive-historical Judaism, the ancestor of Conservative Judaism. They were not Orthodox and not assimilationist. They occupied the middle-space that Myers occupies. The Scholemnarrative erased the middle-space institutions to make space for the heroic individual scholar working against Wissenschaft as a whole.
Can critical historical scholarship serve Jewish purposes, or does the scholarly method corrode what it touches? Scholem said yes, scholarship can serve. Kurzweil said no, it corrodes. Myers in this early article already leans toward a position between them — more sympathetic to Scholem’s ambition but taking Kurzweil’s critique seriously enough to see that Scholem’s dialectical historiography might not fully solve the problem Kurzweil identified.
Kurzweil was Orthodox, religiously committed, opposed to both the secular academic establishment and to Scholem’s attempt to harness historical scholarship for Zionist cultural purposes. Myers does not adopt Kurzweil’s position but takes his critique seriously. The “debate” structure of the article allows Myers to let Kurzweil make hits against Scholemthat Myers finds persuasive even while Myers ultimately cannot accept Kurzweil’s conclusion. This is the same intellectual generosity Myers would later extend to Cohen, Rosenzweig, Strauss, and Breuer in Resisting History. Kurzweil appears to be a precursor figure for that later project. The anti-historicist element of Orthodox-traditional Judaism is the same problem.
Myers writes about Kurzweil’s “Ha-aretz” newspaper polemics and his scholarly essays but treats Kurzweil as a serious intellectual interlocutor rather than dismissing him. The article demonstrates Myers’s willingness to take seriously positions he does not share if they identify real problems. This early habit becomes the core methodological stance of his later work.
Can Jewish scholarship be both scholarly and Jewish? Can critical method and communal commitment coexist? Scholem said yes but produced a historiography critics (Kurzweil, later David Biale (1949-2024)) found tendentious. Kurzweil said no and retreated to traditional authority. Myers spent his career arguing that scholarship can be both, that the “middle space” is available and productive, that the tension is generative rather than destructive. The article is the first full statement of the problem. Everything else is Myers working out instances of the same problem.
Myers credits Biale’s work as illuminating Scholem’s counter-historical method. Biale’s work on Scholem is foundational for Myers’s later engagement with the same questions. The Biale citation shows the scholarly community Myers was forming within — Berkeley and Columbia scholars working on modern Jewish intellectual history in the 1980s who took Scholem seriously as a historian and as an object of historiographical study. This community produced a way of reading Jewish intellectual tradition that Myers has carried forward.
The article is impressive for its analytical clarity and its even-handed treatment of both sides. It is also the work of a young scholar establishing credentials through close study of a canonical debate. Graduate students and junior scholars write this kind of article. It demonstrates mastery of the sources and the ability to frame a significant debate clearly. It does not yet have the fully formed authorial voice of Myers’s later work. The later Myers knows what he wants to argue. This Myers is mapping a debate that has structured his field. The mapping is a precondition for the later authorial voice.
Review of Hitler and the Armenian Genocide by Kevork Bardakjian. Holocaust and Genocide Studies 2, no. 1 (1987).
The review is competent and does what a review should do. Myers summarizes Bardakjian’s (b. 1942) argument about the Obersalzberg speech, tracks the chain of transmission from Canaris through three intermediaries to Lochner, identifies the reason the prosecution chose the sober versions over L-3 at Nuremberg, and notes where Bardakjian overreaches on the Talaat Pasha body-return question. That last move is real criticism and shows Myers can push back when the evidence warrants. The point that the 1943 decision to return the body might reflect the state of German military forces rather than anti-Armenian bias is a good observation.
Myers reviews a book on the Armenian genocide in a journal co-published by Yad Vashem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, edited by Yehuda Bauer (1926-2024) with Elie Wiesel (1928-2016) as editorial board chair. The house position on Holocaust uniqueness is strong. Bardakjian’s book pushes against that uniqueness by placing the Holocaust in a chain of systematic butcheries. Myers handles the tension carefully. He quotes Bardakjian calling the Nazi crime “the most horrendous in the history of mankind” to defuse the uniqueness problem, then endorses the larger comparative project.
He takes a sharper line against Bernard Lewis (1916-2018) than the prose announces. Lewis argued that “real issues” made the Armenian genocide understandable in a way the Holocaust was not. Myers characterizes this as a “respectable academic rationalizing the murder of their people.” That is a serious charge against a senior historian, and Myers delivers it while calling Lewis distinguished. The move is careful. He also goes after the 1985 New York Times advertisement signed by academics who objected to the congressional genocide resolution, and he goes after Reagan by name for refusing a national day of remembrance out of deference to Turkey.
The closing gesture is the one that places the review inside the coalition. Armenian researchers and Holocaust researchers are “partners in a tragic, dismal and yet essential enterprise.” The memory of the Armenian genocide “should not have to compete with that of the Holocaust for a corner of the world’s consciousness.” This is the solidarity position. It admits that competition exists, names the institutional asymmetry (base, financial support, living witnesses), and proposes partnership as the solution. The structural position of Holocaust studies as the senior partner is preserved.
What Myers does not examine: why Holocaust studies has the institutional base and funding that Armenian studies lacks. The answer involves American Jewish philanthropy, the USHMC, Yad Vashem, and the network of chairs and centers established since the 1970s. The partnership he proposes is generous on the senior partner’s terms. Armenian genocide scholarship gets sympathy and rhetorical solidarity. It does not get access to the donor base or the institutional structure. The asymmetry he names is the asymmetry his own professional position will depend on.
The Lewis attack is the tell for where Myers is headed. Lewis was the senior Orientalist at Princeton, and defending Turkey against the genocide charge was part of his broader position on Islam and the modern Middle East. A young scholar who calls out Lewis in print in 1987 is positioning himself within Jewish studies and Middle East studies, and the position is the one he still occupies as JQR editor.
The prose is tighter and more workmanlike than the editorial introductions. The “brilliant and dearly departed” register has not arrived yet. The critical edge on Bardakjian’s overreach and on Lewis shows a scholar doing his job. Forty years later, editing the journal, Myers is still doing coalition work, but the work has shifted from reviewing books to curating forums and placing Tworek’s critique last so it gets absorbed rather than engaged.
Review of Fateful Months: Essays on the Emergence of the Final Solution by Christopher Browning. Holocaust and Genocide Studies 3, no. 1 (1988).
This is Myers a year after the Bardakjian review, still at Columbia, reviewing Browning’s (b. 1944) Fateful Months. The review is more sophisticated than the earlier one and shows a graduate student finding his footing in a major methodological debate.
The review places Browning inside the Historikerstreit frame. Myers opens with Habermas versus Nolte and Hillgruber, establishes that functionalism has been weaponized in Germany for apologetic ends, then works to separate Browning’s moderate functionalism from the compromised German version. The move is careful and correct. Browning does deserve the distinction. The review gets the methodological stakes right and summarizes the book’s arguments accurately: the 1941 dating, the vicious circle of deportation, the gas van as technology transferred from the euthanasia program, the Serbia case where local Wehrmacht commanders initiated the killing of Jewish men before Berlin supplied vans for the women and children.
The Serbia material is where Myers does his strongest work. He catches Browning’s point about the syllogism German commanders used: Jews are Communists, Communists are anti-German, therefore Jews are accountable for the insurgency. He catches the ratio of 100 Communists shot per German soldier killed. He catches that Gypsies filled the quota when Jews ran short. These are the details of coalition logic under war conditions, and Myers presents them cleanly.
The essay on the gas van is also handled well. Myers notes Browning’s two insights: that the van eased the psychological burden on Einsatzgruppen shooters, and that the division of labor among scientists, mechanics, and operators diffused responsibility. Both observations survive in the later Browning corpus, and Myers identifies them early.
Where the review closes reveals the coalition position. Myers says Browning’s inability to move from bureaucratic reconstruction to the “catalysing force of Hitler’s antisemitism” is a limitation of historical interpretation, not a failure of functionalism. He then calls the Final Solution an “enigmatic series of events” whose “grand design still eludes human comprehension.”
This is the same move he made in the Bardakjian review a year earlier, where he endorsed comparative genocide study while keeping Holocaust uniqueness intact via Bardakjian’s own concession that the Nazi crime was “the most horrendous in the history of mankind.” Both reviews show a scholar learning how to operate inside a field whose institutional donors and editorial board (Bauer, Wiesel) hold the uniqueness position, while still engaging work that pressures that position. He engages. He does not endorse the pressure.
Myers treats Habermas’s attack on Nolte and Hillgruber as settled ground. The reader is assumed to share the view that the German historians were doing apologetics. This was the consensus progressive position in 1988 and remains so, but it is a coalition position. Nolte’s comparative question about the Gulag and the camps was not simply apologetic. Hillgruber’s Zweierlei Untergang was more complicated than Habermas allowed. Myers cites Gordon Craig, Friedlander, and Kampe, all from the Habermas side. No footnote from the other side. A young scholar signaling which coalition he belongs to.
The prose shows care. “Psychological burden” in quotes. “Disappointing” results of the Einsatzgruppen in quotes. Myers is careful about Nazi euphemism and flags it for the reader. He has internalized the discipline’s ethical protocols.
The final sentence is the one that shows the most development from the Bardakjian review. “An exceedingly complex puzzle whose grand design still eludes human comprehension” is the register Myers will use for the rest of his career. The Holocaust as mystery. Functionalism as responsible partial reconstruction. The Jewish studies coalition as the custodian of what exceeds reconstruction. Forty years later he would be editing JQR and placing Tworek’s self-critique last in the forum. The intellectual posture is continuous.
What the review does not ask: why the catalyzing force of Hitler’s antisemitism is treated as a historical ultimate rather than a phenomenon with its own causes in German politics, economic crisis, the Versailles settlement, racial science, and the broader European anti-Jewish current. Those causes are available in the scholarship. Invoking them does not excuse Hitler. But treating his antisemitism as an irreducible given keeps the explanation inside a frame the coalition can manage. A more probing reviewer might have pressed Browning on exactly this point rather than granting him the limitation as a general feature of historical method.
The “historical ultimate” framing serves real interests and exacts real costs, and the interests are not symmetrical.
Take the production conditions of the framing first. Hitler is presented as a metaphysical eruption rather than a political product because three coalitions converge on wanting him presented that way, and because the alternative framing requires intellectual moves each coalition finds costly.
The first coalition is the postwar German political class and its successor generations. Treating Hitler as a singular monster permits Germany to integrate into postwar liberal Europe by externalizing the Nazi period as a discrete pathology rather than as the radicalization of available materials in German political life. Germans benefit because the alternative reading implicates the broader culture, the universities that hosted respected race scientists, the medical establishment that produced eugenic policy, the legal academy that supplied the legal architecture, the bureaucracy that executed the policy, and the millions of ordinary participants whose participation cannot be explained by Hitler’s pathology alone. The singular-monster framing limits the scope of inheritance. It permits the founding of the Federal Republic on a clean break rather than on a continuous reckoning. The framing’s German beneficiaries are not denying what happened. They are organizing what happened so that it remains containable as a discrete episode rather than dispersing into a story about how their grandparents’ professors, doctors, judges, and civil servants made it possible.
The second coalition is the postwar liberal-democratic order more broadly. The Allies needed an account of the war that legitimated the postwar settlement. A framing in which liberal democracy defeated metaphysical evil supports the moral architecture of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Nuremberg principles, and the postwar consensus on minority protections. A framing in which liberal democracy defeated the radicalization of intellectual currents, race-scientific assumptions, and nationalist anxieties present across the entire Western world, including the United States and Britain, complicates the moral architecture. The Tuskegee experiments, the Indian Removal logic, the Jim Crow legal regime, the eugenic sterilization laws upheld by Buck v. Bell in 1927 and explicitly cited by Nazi jurists, the British concentration camps in South Africa, the Belgian conduct in the Congo, and the broad acceptance of race-hierarchical thought across American and European elite institutions of the early twentieth century all become continuous with the materials Hitler radicalized. The singular-monster framing allows the postwar order to draw a sharp line between itself and Nazism. The contextual framing dissolves the line at multiple points and makes the postwar order’s self-understanding harder to maintain.
The third coalition is American Jewish institutional life and its Israeli counterparts. This is the layer Peter Novick (1934-2012) and Norman Finkelstein documented, with Novick’s The Holocaust in American Life doing the more careful work and Finkelstein’s The Holocaust Industry doing the more polemical version. The Holocaust as singular metaphysical evil supports a particular construction of Jewish identity, security politics, and institutional fundraising that emerged with full force after 1967 and consolidated in the 1970s and 1980s. If the Holocaust is the radicalization of available European materials, it stands in a series of comparable horrors, and the comparative frame opens space for analogies that institutional Jewish life finds threatening. Critics can deploy the analogies against Israeli policy in ways that the singular framing forbids by definition. The singular framing converts the Holocaust from historical event into moral resource and gives the institutional custodians of the resource standing to police its deployment. The custody is real institutional power. The framing supports the custody.
Each coalition has reasons that are not bad faith. Germans want to live as Germans without an inheritance that would unmoor the national project. Postwar liberals want to defend liberal democracy against revivals of fascism, and a clear absolute evil to point at helps the defense. Jewish institutional life wants to prevent another Holocaust and to protect the political and cultural conditions that have allowed Jews to thrive in the postwar West. The framings all serve goals reasonable people can endorse. The framings nevertheless distort historical understanding in ways that have costs.
The costs accrue to several parties, and again the distribution is not symmetrical.
Historical scholarship pays the largest analytic cost. Serious historians of the Nazi period, including Ian Kershaw (b. 1943), Richard Evans (b. 1947), Saul Friedlander, Christopher Browning, and Götz Aly (b. 1947), have long since rejected the singular-monster framing in favor of contextual accounts that integrate the Versailles humiliation, the inflation and depression sequence, the stab-in-the-back myth, the radicalization of nationalist coalition politics, the institutional embedding of race science across European and American universities, and the war-driven escalation from exclusion to deportation to extermination. Their books are taught in graduate seminars and assigned to advanced undergraduates. The popular framing nevertheless persists because the popular framing serves the coalitions named above and the scholarly framing does not. The result is a permanent gap between professional historiography and public understanding that historians have learned to live with by writing for one another in the technical register and accepting that the public will continue to receive the simplified version through films, museums, and political rhetoric.
Comparative genocide studies pay the next cost. The Armenian, Cambodian, Rwandan, and Bosnian cases share structural features with the Holocaust that become legible under contextual analysis and disappear under the singular-monster framing. Scholars who try to draw comparisons face institutional resistance. The resistance is partly principled, since the comparisons can flatten differences that matter, and partly defensive of the singular Holocaust position the institutional Jewish coalition has reasons to protect. The result is that early-warning frameworks for genocide prevention are weaker than they could be, because the most-studied case is institutionally cordoned off from comparative work that might generate transferable insight.
Jewish communities pay a cost the institutional custodians often overlook. Antisemitism existed before Hitler and has continued after Hitler in forms that the Hitler-as-ultimate framing makes harder to recognize. Medieval Christian antisemitism, modern Islamic antisemitism, contemporary leftist antisemitism, the various species of Russian and Eastern European antisemitism, the antisemitism that flourishes inside black nationalist circles and inside white nationalist circles in different forms, all run on architectures the Nazi case does not exhaust. A Jew formed by the Hitler-as-ultimate framing scans the present for swastikas and SS uniforms and misses the antisemitism that does not present in those iconic forms. Ruth Wisse and others have pressed this point against the institutional custodians, mostly without effect, because the institutional custodians have stronger incentives to maintain the singular framing than to refine the warning system.
The general public pays a cost in the loss of structural awareness. The lesson of Hitler-as-ultimate is moral vigilance against monsters. The lesson of Hitler-as-radicalization is structural attention to the conditions that radicalize ordinary politics into catastrophe. The first lesson is satisfying and largely useless because monsters of Hitler’s pathology are rare and usually fail. The second lesson is uncomfortable and operationally useful because the conditions are common, recur in many forms, and produce most of the actual political horrors of the modern period. Public history is dominated by the first lesson because the first lesson is what coalitions wanting the public to learn certain things have institutional reasons to teach.
There is one further cost worth naming. The framing weakens the moral category it claims to protect. When Hitler is the singular evil, every figure to whom Hitler is compared receives some of the moral weight. Every contemporary politician described as Hitler diminishes the term’s cutting force. The over-deployment is not accidental. The category was constructed to be deployable, and once deployable it gets deployed. The custodians of the category complain about the over-deployment without seeing that the construction conditions made the over-deployment inevitable. A category that exists to anchor present moral and political claims will be used to anchor present moral and political claims, and the use will exceed the cases that support the category’s original force.
This brings us to Myers, and the question of whether his career engages this charged terrain.
The short answer is that Myers operates in adjacent territory throughout his career and engages the central question only obliquely. The longer answer requires attention to what he writes about and what he keeps just outside his frame.
His scholarly work treats the production of Jewish historiography in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the German-Jewish thinkers who resisted historicism, the Hebrew University historians who built a Zionist national past, and Hasidic life in postwar America. The Holocaust is the unstated horizon of all of this. The Hebrew University historians wrote partly against and partly toward a catastrophe whose full shape was not yet visible to most of them. The German-Jewish thinkers Myers reconstructs largely escaped the destruction by emigration and lived their later careers in its shadow. The American Hasidim of Kiryas Joel are largely a postwar transplantation of communities the Holocaust nearly extinguished. Myers’s archive is saturated with the catastrophe. His prose is calibrated to keep the catastrophe at the edge of the frame while writing about the materials its arrival reorganized.
Myers is a historian of Jewish intellectual life, not a historian of the Nazi period. The decision to write about the production of Jewish self-understanding rather than about the destruction is a defensible scholarly choice. The choice has consequences. By writing always near the catastrophe and rarely about it, Myers contributes to and benefits from the framing the institutional custodians maintain. He does not have to take a position on whether Hitler is the singular monster or the radicalization of available materials. He writes for an audience that holds the singular framing as background assumption, and his work proceeds inside that assumption without challenging it.
When Myers does engage the Nazi period directly, he tends to engage it through the categories the institutional framing supplies. His public writing on antisemitism focuses on the postwar institutional categories: hatred as social pathology, dialogue as remedy, education as vaccine. The UCLA Initiative to Study Hate, the Dialogue Across Difference Initiative, and the Bedari Kindness Institute all operate inside the framing. They study hatred as something to be combated through understanding, dialogue, and the cultivation of empathy. They do not study hatred as a coalition adaptation that maintains group boundaries, as Sell’s neutralization theory describes, or as a form whose European anti-Jewish version is one regional case of a much broader human pattern. The institutes are constructed inside the framing the institutional custodians of Holocaust memory maintain, and they reproduce the framing in their public-facing work.
Myers does on occasion press at the edges. His work on Brit Shalom, on Rawidowicz, on non-statist Zionism, and on the German-Jewish thinkers who resisted political nationalism opens questions the dominant framing prefers to leave closed. The questions concern what Jewish life might look like if the Holocaust did not function as the unanswerable trump card in every internal Jewish argument about politics, sovereignty, and security. Myers cannot push these questions far without colliding with the institutional custodians, and his career suggests he understands the limits. He pushes far enough to be visible as a critical scholarly voice and not so far that the institutional custodians treat him as a defector. The line is not stated. He has internalized it through forty years of professional life.
His more recent public-facing work on dialogue and kindness operates well within the framing. The framing’s premise is that intergroup hatred is a moral pathology that responsive institutions can address through dialogue, education, and cultivated empathy. Myers’s institutes are built on this premise. The premise becomes harder to sustain if one takes seriously the contextual reading of the Nazi case, which suggests that the materials Hitler radicalized were continuous with mainstream Western intellectual life across multiple disciplines, that the radicalization required specific configurations of crisis and opportunity, and that the prevention of recurrence requires structural attention to those configurations rather than primarily moral attention to hatred as bad attitude. The institutes do moral attention to hatred as bad attitude. They do not do structural attention to the configurations. The framing they operate within forbids the latter, because the latter would implicate the postwar liberal order’s own intellectual genealogies in ways the order’s defenders, of which Myers is one, cannot easily absorb.
So Myers engages the territory throughout his career and engages the central question almost never. His public framing serves the institutional custodianship he is part of. His scholarly work moves inside the territory the framing reserves for nuanced internal debate while leaving the framing’s outer boundary intact. His applied initiatives reproduce the framing in their operational premises. The question of whether Hitler is the singular monster or the radicalization of available European and Western materials is a question Myers does not answer in print, because answering it either way would either commit him to the institutional position more explicitly than scholarly self-respect permits or commit him to a contextual position the institutional position cannot absorb. He works at the edges of a question whose center the institutional structure he serves keeps off the table.
This is the structural condition of an embedded scholar working inside a coalition that has made certain framings off-limits. Turner explains why he cannot see the framing as a framing, since the framing is the medium he works in. McEnerney explains why he cannot write past the framing, since writing past it would lose his audience. Sell explains why the coalition enforces the framing, since the framing serves the coalition’s adaptive interests. Pinsof explains the alliance work the framing performs. The four frameworks converge again, and Myers is again the case that fits all four.
What this answer leaves unsaid is what an honest contextual treatment of the Hitler case would look like in the present academic environment. The honest answer is that it would be hard to publish in the venues most likely to reach lay readers, since those venues are policed by editors and reviewers committed to the singular-monster framing. It would be available in scholarly monographs read by other specialists. It would not be available in the synthetic public-facing register Myers occupies. The custodians have built the institutional architecture to ensure that the contextual treatment stays in the technical literature where it does little public work, while the singular framing dominates the public space the institutes Myers directs are designed to operate in. The arrangement is stable. It will persist until the conditions that produced it change, which is not currently in prospect.
John J. Mearsheimer’s anthropology in his 2018 book The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities dismantles the singular-evil frame at its foundation, not just at its margins. The frame is not just analytically weak under Mearsheimer’s premises. It is incoherent.
The singular-evil frame assumes the very picture of human nature Mearsheimer is rejecting. The frame treats Hitler as an autonomous moral agent who chose evil, the German population as autonomous moral agents who chose to follow him or failed to resist, and the postwar liberal order as the proper response by autonomous moral agents who learned the right lesson. The architecture rests on liberal individualism the way a building rests on its foundation. Remove the foundation and the building does not stand.
Mearsheimer removes the foundation. Humans are social before they are individual, tribal before they are rational, and group-embedded before they are autonomous. The capacity to reason about right and wrong is real but operates downstream of socialization, group loyalty, and innate sentiments that the individual did not choose and cannot easily revise. Most of what a person believes about good and evil arrived in him through processes he did not direct, and most of his moral behavior tracks the demands of the groups he is embedded in rather than universal principles he has reasoned his way to.
Apply this to the Nazi case and the singular-evil frame becomes a category error.
Hitler is not a moral genius of evil. He is a man whose own socialization in late Habsburg Vienna, postwar Munich, and the trenches of the First World War produced a particular configuration of nationalist resentment, racial-scientific assumption, and apocalyptic political imagination. The configuration was unusual in its intensity and totalizing scope. The materials were not unusual at all. He read what other educated men of his class read. He absorbed what other defeated soldiers absorbed. He took the available racial-hierarchical thought, the available stab-in-the-back narrative, the available anti-Bolshevik panic, the available economic-conspiracy framing of Jews, and combined them with greater coherence and greater willingness to follow them to their conclusions than most contemporaries managed. The combination was distinctive. The ingredients were ordinary.
The German population that supported him is even less explicable on the singular-evil frame and more explicable on Mearsheimer’s. They were not autonomous moral agents who individually chose evil. They were Germans, embedded in a national community whose recent experience of defeat, humiliation, inflation, depression, and political fragmentation had produced an acute identity crisis the Nazi movement promised to resolve. They responded as Mearsheimer’s anthropology predicts groups respond under stress: by hardening boundaries, contracting moral concern to the in-group, accepting a leader who promised collective survival, and defining the threat in terms the available cultural materials made cognitively tractable. The Jewish minority, already coded across European history as outsider, parasite, conspirator, and threat in successive registers, was the available target the existing socialization made legible. The combination of crisis conditions and available targeting materials is what Mearsheimer’s framework would predict to produce something like the Nazi outcome under the right configuration of leadership and opportunity.
This does not exonerate the participants. Mearsheimer is not arguing that humans are unable to act morally because they are tribal. He is arguing that moral action is harder than the liberal frame supposes, that it requires institutional and cultural support the liberal frame underestimates, and that under conditions of group stress the support often fails. The participants in the Nazi project were morally responsible for what they did. The responsibility is just not the kind of pure individual moral responsibility the liberal frame assumes. It is the responsibility of group members whose group went into a configuration that produced the catastrophe, with most participants going along for reasons that have more to do with social embedding than with autonomous moral choice.
The singular-evil frame survives this analysis only as a postwar pedagogical and political device. It is what the liberal order required to maintain its self-understanding after 1945. The order needed an absolute negation to define itself against. The negation could not be located in conditions and materials continuous with liberal modernity, because that location would compromise the order’s claim to be the antithesis of what it defeated. The negation had to be located in a singular figure who represented evil’s intrusion from outside the liberal world, even though the figure had emerged from inside the liberal world and had built his movement from materials liberalism had not been able to keep marginal in its own intellectual life.
The singular-evil framing protects liberal self-understanding from a confrontation the frame’s underlying anthropology would force. The confrontation would require liberalism to acknowledge that its foundational assumptions about human nature are wrong, that humans are tribal and group-embedded in ways the liberal frame cannot accommodate, that liberal institutions work when they do because they channel and constrain tribal sentiments rather than because they elevate humans to a higher level of individuality, and that liberal triumphalism about defeating fascism rests on a misreading of what fascism was and where it came from.
Three further consequences follow.
The first concerns prevention. The singular-evil frame teaches vigilance against monsters. Mearsheimer’s frame teaches structural attention to group stress, identity formation, scapegoating dynamics, and the conditions that produce the configurations under which catastrophe becomes possible. The first lesson misses most of the actual cases because most of the actual cases do not present as monstrous. They present as ordinary politics radicalized by ordinary pressures. The Rwandan genocide, the Bosnian campaign, the Cambodian killing, the Armenian destruction, the various ethnic cleansings of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, all run on the architecture Mearsheimer describes and not on the architecture the singular-evil frame supposes. The first lesson produces moral satisfaction. The second lesson produces analytical traction. The first lesson is what most public Holocaust education delivers. The second lesson is what serious comparative genocide scholarship has been trying to deliver against the institutional headwinds the singular-evil frame has built up.
The second concerns liberalism itself. If Mearsheimer is right, liberalism is a contingent achievement of certain societies under certain conditions, not the default state of human nature. The conditions include strong institutional constraint of tribal sentiments, dense civil society, economic conditions that reduce the salience of zero-sum group competition, and a cultural inheritance that makes individual rights and impersonal procedure intuitive. These conditions can fail. When they fail, the underlying tribal architecture reasserts. The Nazi episode is what failure looks like in a society that had been on the European liberal trajectory and was knocked off it by the conjunction of defeat, economic shock, and political fragmentation. The lesson is not that liberalism is fragile and must be defended against monsters. The lesson is that liberalism is a particular configuration of social arrangements that requires constant maintenance and can fail under stress without producing monsters in the singular-evil sense at all.
The third concerns universalism. The liberal universalist project, the human rights regime, the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, the various humanitarian intervention frameworks, all rest on the premise that humans everywhere are individuals with inalienable rights, that violations of those rights by their governments are violations of universal principles, and that the international community has standing to intervene on the basis of those principles. Mearsheimer’s anthropology suggests that this is not how most humans experience themselves, that most humans understand themselves through their group memberships, and that universalist projects imposed from outside on populations whose tribal commitments differ are likely to be received as imperialism rather than liberation. The post-Cold War interventions that disappointed liberal expectations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and elsewhere are not just operational failures. They are the consequences of an anthropology that does not match the populations on whom it is being imposed. Mearsheimer’s The Great Delusion spends considerable time on this argument, and the Hitler-as-ultimate-evil frame is one component of the broader liberal delusion the book is dismantling.
Returning to the Nazi case with Mearsheimer’s frame in hand produces a different shape of analysis.
Hitler was a man socialized into the available cultural materials of his time and place, who configured those materials with unusual coherence and intensity, and who became the leader of a political movement under conditions that made his particular configuration unusually attractive to a population in acute identity crisis. The movement succeeded because the configuration matched the population’s tribal stress responses with greater precision than its competitors managed. The genocide that followed was the radicalization of the movement under wartime conditions, executed by a bureaucracy whose participants were largely ordinary Germans operating within institutional structures that diffused individual moral responsibility while concentrating practical complicity. The whole sequence is intelligible without recourse to metaphysical categories. The materials were European. The configuration was specifically German given particular postwar conditions. The execution was a bureaucratic catastrophe enabled by total war. The lesson is structural, not moral.
This does not diminish what happened. It changes the conceptual frame within which we understand it. The diminishment is felt only by those whose self-understanding requires the singular-evil frame, which includes the institutional custodians of Holocaust memory, the postwar liberal order, and the German political class that built itself on the discontinuity narrative. Each of these will resist the Mearsheimer reading because each has institutional interests in the singular-evil frame’s maintenance. The resistance is not bad faith. It is the predictable response of coalitions whose self-understanding depends on a particular framing.
The deeper irony is that the liberal anthropology Mearsheimer attacks produces the very conditions under which the catastrophe-prevention work the singular-evil frame ostensibly performs becomes harder. If the frame teaches that monsters are the threat and individual rights are the protection, the frame fails to equip populations to recognize the structural conditions under which their own group might radicalize. The next catastrophe will not present as a man with a small mustache giving speeches at Nuremberg rallies. It will present in whatever cultural register is available in the society that produces it, and the singular-evil frame will identify it only after it has gone too far to stop, because the frame is calibrated to recognize the previous case rather than the structural pattern.
Mearsheimer would say this is what happens when an empirically false anthropology is institutionalized as moral pedagogy. The pedagogy works to maintain the order that produced it and fails to perform the structural function it advertises. The work the singular-evil frame claims to do, which is preventing future catastrophes by teaching moral vigilance, is not the work the frame actually does, which is maintaining the postwar liberal order’s self-understanding by defining its founding negation in a way the order can absorb.
If Mearsheimer is right, the singular-evil frame is not just inaccurate. It is a component of the broader liberal delusion the book is written to dismantle. The frame survives because the order survives. The order survives because its participants have not yet absorbed the anthropology that would force the frame’s revision. Whether the order will absorb the anthropology in time to revise the frame before the next configuration produces the next catastrophe is the open question Mearsheimer’s book leaves on the table without answering, because Mearsheimer’s project is diagnostic rather than prescriptive, and because the prescription would require institutional changes the existing order is structurally incapable of making.
What this leaves us with is an honest acknowledgment that the singular-evil frame has served particular interests well for eighty years, that those interests are not bad faith, that the frame has nevertheless concealed more than it has revealed about what produced the Nazi catastrophe and what might produce future ones, and that the alternative frame Mearsheimer’s anthropology supports is harder to sit with because it implicates ordinary humans, including ourselves, in the architecture that produces such catastrophes when the configurations align. The harder frame is the more accurate one. The easier frame is the more institutionally sustainable one. The gap between accuracy and sustainability is the space the postwar liberal order has occupied for three generations, and the frame is one of the load-bearing structures of that occupation.
“History as Ideology: The Case of Ben Zion Dinur, Zionist Historian ‘Par Excellence’.” Modern Judaism (May 1988)
Ben Zion Dinur’s (1884-1973) scholarship served Zionist ends. He treated historical figures as proto-Zionists. He periodized Jewish history to support the Zionist teleology. He collected sources to document the bond between people and land. The ideological commitments and the scholarly practice were fused without concealment. Dinur was Minister of Education in Israel. The state and the scholarship were continuous.
Myers identifies problems with Dinur’s approach. The projection of modern values onto historical figures. The anachronistic treatment of Yehudah He-Hasid (1660-1700) as Zionist pioneer. The reading of Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise (1670) as manifestation of Zionist principles. The Palestinocentric framework that imposes a single center on a historical reality that had multiple centers. The collection-over-narrative method that anthologizes sources rather than analyzing them critically. The intellectual weakness Myers notes (“lacks the intellectual refinement of his colleagues”) combined with the ideological success (“succeeds in showing how ideology shapes historical vision”).
The framework Myers applies is a critical framework. He evaluates whether the fusion of scholarship and ideology produces good history. His verdict on Dinur is mixed. The scholarship is corrupted by the ideology. The ideology is served by the scholarship. The result is neither fully scholarly nor fully ideological but a hybrid that has costs and benefits. Dinur’s influence on Israeli historical self-understanding was substantial. The verdict is the kind of measured critical verdict a historian of historiography delivers on a predecessor whose legacy he is assessing.
Apply the same framework to Myers. What would Myers look like if examined the way he examines Dinur?
The parallels are real. Myers fuses scholarship and contemporary commitments. He recovers Rawidowicz to support contemporary positions. He reads German-Jewish anti-historicists to illuminate contemporary Jewish intellectual options. He argues in The Stakes of History that history-as-liberation, history-as-consolation, and history-as-witness are all legitimate scholarly practices. He treats historical figures as interlocutors whose positions bear on current questions. The methodology is explicit. The ideological-communal commitments are explicit.
Is this the same as what Dinur does? Myers would say no. Dinur was crude. Dinur projected modern values onto premodern figures without awareness. Dinur anthologized without analysis. Dinur served a state ideology directly. Myers’s version is more sophisticated. He engages his figures on their own terms. He acknowledges his own commitments rather than hiding them. He treats the middle space between history and memory as something to be navigated carefully rather than simply occupied. The methodology is reflective in a way Dinur’s was not.
The critic would say the difference is one of degree and style rather than kind. Myers still reads historical figures with contemporary purposes in mind. He recovers Rawidowicz because Rawidowicz’s positions support Myers’s current positions. He treats the anti-historicist thinkers in Resisting History as speaking to current debates about historical knowledge. He frames the whole scholarly project as contribution to contemporary Jewish life. The differences from Dinur are real but they may be smaller than Myers would want them to be.
Myers notices things in Dinur that he seems not to notice in himself. Dinur’s Palestinocentric framework imposed a ideological lens on historical material that resisted the imposition. Dinur’s periodization (Galut begins with the 7th century Arab conquest) served Zionist purposes rather than emerging from the historical evidence. Dinur’s treatment of medieval figures like Yehudah He-Hasid as proto-Zionists projected later categories onto earlier actors. Each of these is ananalytical failure that ideology produced.
Myers’s own work has analogous features. His framing of Rawidowicz as a proto-figure for contemporary progressive Jewish positions may project current categories onto a 1950s thinker who held a 1950s position. His recovery of the Sephardic halakhic tradition of extending concern to non-Jewish minorities as direct authorization for contemporary positions about Palestinians may treat Halevi and Ouziel in ways they might not have recognized. His reading of the German-Jewish anti-historicists may emphasize features that support his argument about middle space between history and memory while underweighting features that complicate the argument.
Every historian who takes historical figures as interlocutors for current debates runs some version of this risk. Dinur ran it more crudely than Myers does. But the risk is structural. If history is to serve contemporary purposes, history must be read in ways that make it serve. The reading is never neutral. The question is only whether the reading acknowledges its own positioning or hides it.
Myers acknowledges his positioning more than Dinur did. The Stakes of History is about the legitimacy of ideologically-informed historical practice. Between Jew and Arab is about applying Rawidowicz to current questions. The acknowledgments do specific work. They put readers on notice. They invite readers to evaluate the applications critically rather than absorbing them as neutral scholarly findings.
Whether Rawidowicz’s positions support what Myers wants them to support is a separate question from whether Myers admits he is making the connection. A reader convinced by Myers’s framing absorbs the connection. A reader who checks Rawidowicz against Myers’s framing may find features that complicate the use Myers makes. The question of whether the use is legitimate is substantive, not just methodological.
Myers has the analytical tools to evaluate the scholarly-ideological fusion he practices. He applies those tools to Dinur. He does not apply them to himself. If he did, the results would be uncomfortable.
Scholars operating within specific traditions often have sharp vision for the failures of earlier figures in those traditions while having dimmer vision for their own analogous failures.
Yerushalmi applied this frame to Scholem indirectly in Zakhor, suggesting that the modern historian could not substitute for Jewish memory in the way Scholem hoped. Myers has engaged Yerushalmi’s critique partially but has not fully absorbed it. The Stolzenberg collaboration on legal pluralism applies a similar critical framework to Jewish communal assumptions but does not apply it fully to Myers’s own scholarly-ideological fusion. The Dinur essay applies the framework to Dinur without applying it to Myers.
When critics of Myers’s public writing call it ideologically driven or insufficiently scholarly, they are making a version of the charge Myers makes against Dinur. Myers would presumably defend himself by pointing to the differences — acknowledgment of positioning, sophistication of method, engagement with figures on their own terms. The defense is partly right. Myers is not Dinur. But the defense does not fully answer the charge. The structural risk Dinur ran is a risk Myers runs in less crude form. Whether the less crude form avoids the problem or merely masks it is a substantive question.
The essay appears to be from the period when Myers was working on his first book, Re-Inventing the Jewish Past, about the Jerusalem scholars who established Jewish studies at Hebrew University. Dinur was one of those scholars. The essay is part of the foundational work for that book. Myers spent years studying historians whose scholarly work was fused with Zionist ideology. The critical apparatus he developed for that study is the apparatus he has available for self-examination. He has the tools. The question is the application.
“Dual Loyalty in a Post-Zionist Era.” Judaism (Summer 1989)
The argument has three moves. Shamir’s call for Diaspora silence serves his political interests and should be rejected. Modern Jewish identity since emancipation produces a necessarily dual self, so dual loyalty is the Jewish condition. Public criticism of Israel from the Diaspora proves the bond rather than breaks it.
He catches the double edge in Shamir’s greeting. Shamir wants unity, but the unity runs one way: the Diaspora defers while the Israeli government speaks. The distinction between the state and people of Israel on one side and the government of Israel on the other gives Diaspora critics a usable frame, and most American Jews now accept some version of it. His use of Shulamit Aloni’s (1927-2014) “rich and fat” line against the Conference of Presidents captures something about Diaspora leadership status that his own argument otherwise elides. The historical survey of Dubnow (1860-1941), Ahad Ha-am, Herzl (1860-1904), Ben-Gurion (1886-1973), and Klatzkin (1882-1948) competently establishes that the Diaspora has faced contestation from inside Zionism, not only from outside.
The weaknesses run deeper.
Myers treats Shamir’s call for silence as polemic, which it is, but his counter-argument runs on the same fuel. Both sides claim the high ground of authentic commitment. Shamir says public criticism damages the Jewish people. Myers says silence insults the people and produces an undignified posture. Each converts a political preference into a structural duty.
The claim that criticism proves the bond is tautological. It only proves the bond if critics from outside the community would not bother, which assumes the conclusion. A hostile outsider can write the same sentences Myers writes. Turner’s category of convenient belief covers this well. The belief produces a favorable standing for the person who holds it and resists disconfirmation.
“Post-Zionist era” in 1988-89 turned out to be a premature call. Oslo’s collapse, the Second Intifada, the rise of the Israeli right, and settlement expansion all ran against his read of the moment. The term later attached to a school of Israeli revisionist historiography (Morris (b. 1948), Pappé (b. 1954), Shlaim (b. 1945)) rather than to a coalition shift in American Jewry. Myers names a turn that did not turn.
The hero system he defends undercuts his case for pluralism. He wants the communal bond on his terms. The archaeological excavation of the edifice of Jewish national identity and the boat parable from Shimon bar Yohai assert a shared body with shared fate. If the body and fate are shared, Shamir’s point about security risk carries weight. Myers never addresses the asymmetry. Israelis bear the costs of the policies he wants the Diaspora to shape. The essay does not say how criticism without cost-sharing counts as partnership rather than interference.
Myers does alliance work for liberal American Jewry at a moment of strain. The Intifada made unconditional Israel support expensive in American civic and academic institutions, which is where Myers’s career sits. A Diaspora Jew who wanted to keep standing in both worlds needed theoretical cover for public criticism that did not forfeit Jewish identity. Myers supplies it. He converts a personal preference, the wish to criticize Israel without losing his Jewish standing, into a structural necessity, the inherently dual modern Jewish condition. Both memberships gain protection.
The “we” does a lot of silent work. Myers writes as if the Diaspora speaks through its intellectuals and liberal organizational elites, but he is a graduate student publishing in a small-circulation quarterly. The Orthodox, the AIPAC donors, the FIDF circles, and the right-leaning rabbinate belong to the same Diaspora and most of them sided with Shamir then and still do. The essay presumes a constituency rather than identifying one.
What reads well now: the state-government distinction, the critique of Diaspora leaders who claim to speak for American interests while advancing Israeli government positions, and the willingness to treat dual loyalty as unavoidable rather than shameful. What reads poorly: the “post-Zionist era” label, the claim that criticism proves bond, and the refusal to engage the asymmetry between those who carry the risks and those who advise from Manhattan.
Myers spent his career defending this position, took fire from the Israeli right, and ended up on the losing side of American Jewish organizational politics while winning the argument inside Reform and secular American Jewry.
“Community, Constitution and Culture: The Case of the Jewish Kehilah.” Michigan Journal of Law Reform 25 (Spring and Summer 1992)
Stolzenberg and Myers argue that the transformation of the kehillah from legal-corporate body to voluntary association is a structural consequence of liberal nation-state formation. The nation-state claims monopoly on law-giving authority. Groups that previously held juridical authority over their members lose that authority when the state asserts itself. They can continue to exist but only as voluntary associations within the state’s legal order, not as parallel legal orders.
Nomos and Narrative distinguishes between imperial law (the state’s law that claims universal application) and particular nomoi (the legal orders of communities with their own narratives and commitments). Cover’s essay is a defense of the particular against the imperial. Sometimes the particular is crushed (Goldman, the Jewish military doctor denied his yarmulke). The logic of the tolerations and crushings is not consistent. It depends on factors that have more to do with how the particular group appears to the state than with coherent legal principle.
Stolzenberg brings the legal theoretical framework. She is a legal scholar at USC. Her expertise is in law and religion, legal pluralism, group rights. Myers brings the Jewish historical framework. The Stolzenberg-Myers collaboration produces something neither could produce alone. Legal theory applied to Jewish communal history produces specific insights. Jewish communal history grounds legal theory in specific cases. The American Shtetl book on Kiryas Joel is the most developed product of this collaboration.
Jewish communities were juridical entities for most of Jewish history. The kehillah was not a voluntary association that Jews could join or leave. It was the legal order that governed Jewish life. Rabbis were not spiritual advisors whose guidance Jews could accept or reject. They were judges whose rulings had binding force backed by sanctions (herem, shunning, loss of community membership with all its practical consequences). The entire structure of Jewish religious-legal life presupposed this juridical reality. When the nation-state emerged and claimed monopoly on law-giving, the juridical basis of Jewish communal life was eliminated. What remained was voluntary affiliation, which is structurally different.
This matters because Orthodox Jewish life in the contemporary period continues to operate as if the juridical structure still obtained while existing within the voluntary-association framework. Rabbis issue rulings. Communities enforce norms. But the enforcement depends on voluntary acceptance by community members who could walk away without losing anything the state recognizes as theirs. Members of Orthodox communities are citizens of the state first and members of the community second. The community can only discipline those who want to remain members. The moment a member decides to leave, the community has no hold.
This is what creates the vulnerability of Orthodox Jewish life in the contemporary period. The internal authority depends entirely on members wanting to remain. When external conditions reduce that wanting — social mobility, educational access, economic alternatives, sexual options, peer groups outside the community — the community loses members because it has no way to hold them. The traditional enforcement mechanisms presuppose conditions that no longer obtain. The juridical-looking structure of halakhic life floats on voluntary assent that can be withdrawn without cost.
The New York Kehillah experiment Magnes led is important because it was a self-conscious attempt to recreate the kehillah structure in American conditions. Magnes understood that something was being lost in the transition from juridical community to voluntary association. He tried to build institutions that could perform kehillah functions within American law. The experiment failed. The reasons for the failure are what Stolzenberg and Myers analyze. Voluntarism cannot produce the binding authority the kehillah had. The container looks the same but the contents are different.
The epistemic defeaters (historicism, naturalism, biblical criticism) are only part of the challenge. The structural-legal defeat is deeper. Even if Orthodox intellectuals produced airtight rebuttals to every epistemic defeater, the juridical basis of traditional Jewish life would remain gone. The community cannot enforce its rulings. It can only persuade its members to follow them. Persuasion is a weaker tool than juridical authority. Haredi communities invest so heavily in social enclosure, educational isolation, economic dependence structures because they want to reproduce the conditions under which voluntary assent looks and feels like juridical authority. The strategy works for some but fails for others. The failures show the underlying structural vulnerability the epistemic rebuttals cannot address.
They treat this as a problem for contemporary Jewish life, not just as a historical fact to be documented. The question is not only “what happened” but “what can be done.” American Shtetl takes the question further. The Satmar community at Kiryas Joel deploys American legal tools (religious exemptions, local sovereignty, educational autonomy claims) to build what looks like a juridical community within the American legal order. The paradox Stolzenberg and Myers identify is that the tools are liberal-democratic tools used to build an illiberal community. The liberal order provides resources for its own contestation. Groups that know how to use the resources can build autonomous enclaves within the state. The state tolerates this because its own logic is committed to tolerating religious pluralism. The result is the kind of community Stolzenberg and Myers document at Kiryas Joel.
His public writing on American Jewish communal life makes more sense when you see the Stolzenberg collaboration behind it. He works from scholarly engagement with the legal-political structure of American Jewish community. The positions that look like progressive Jewish advocacy have scholarly grounding in legal theory and Jewish communal history. When he writes about antisemitism claims being weaponized, about academic freedom, about universities under federal pressure, about coalition strategy, he is applying the legal-theoretical framework the Stolzenberg collaboration develops. The op-eds are compressed application. The collaboration is the scholarly source.
Nomi Stolzenberg has been Myers’s wife and intellectual partner for decades. Resisting History is dedicated to her (“Nomi”). She read the manuscripts. She is co-author of American Shtetl. She is cited in acknowledgments across his books. The shape of Myers’s thinking about Jewish community, legal structure, and group rights is shaped by this partnership. Without Stolzenberg, Myers is a historian of German-Jewish thought with expanded interests. With Stolzenberg, he has access to legal theoretical frameworks that his own training did not provide. The collaboration is what makes many of his moves possible.
“Adaptation is not a harm.” This claim can be read two ways. Read one way, it is a defense of modern Jewish life against Orthodox-traditionalist complaint that adaptation is betrayal. Read the other way, it is an intellectual position that might undersell what has been lost. The essay appears to acknowledge the loss (voluntarism “eviscerates communal foundations”) while arguing that adaptation is nonetheless legitimate. If voluntarism eviscerates foundations, then the adapted community is thinner than the original. Calling the thinning “adaptation” rather than “loss” is a rhetorical choice. Stolzenberg and Myers want both to acknowledge the structural change and to affirm the adapted forms as continuous with the tradition.
The Orthodox critic insists that something has been lost that cannot be recovered by calling the change “adaptation.” The Stolzenberg-Myers response would presumably be that the alternative — refusing to adapt — is not available. The state does not permit juridical Jewish community. So adaptation is not a choice between tradition and modernity but between adapted Jewish community and no Jewish community. Given the choice, adaptation is the better option.
Orthodox communities that try to maintain the juridical structure through social enclosure resist the strategy. Progressive Jewish communities that fully embrace voluntarism fail to see that something structural has changed. The Stolzenberg-Myers position is a middle position that acknowledges the structural change while arguing for adapted forms. The position is defensible but contested from multiple directions.
The legal pluralism tradition (Sally Falk Moore, Santos, Macaulay) that Stolzenberg draws on argues that law is broader than state law, that social fields generate their own legal orders, that the state’s monopoly claim is partly fictional. This framework provides resources for thinking about Jewish community as a legal order that persists alongside and within state legal orders. But the framework also has limits. State legal orders have coercive power that social-field legal orders lack. The state can enforce its law. Social fields can only persuade or socially sanction. Legal pluralism acknowledges this but argues that the social-field law remains law despite its different enforcement mechanism. Whether this is right is a substantive question. Strict legal positivists say the state’s law is the only real law. Legal pluralists say multiple legal orders coexist. Stolzenberg and Myers operate within the pluralist framework and apply it to Jewish community. The application is productive but depends on the pluralist framework being right.
The material is more theoretically grounded than the op-eds reveal. The op-eds compress this kind of work into popular format. If you want to see what Myers thinks about the structure of American Jewish community, this is where to look.
“Remembering Zakhor: A Super-Commentary.” History and Memory 4 (Fall/Winter 1992)
In Jewish intellectual tradition, the super-commentary is a commentary on a commentary — a layered form that shows reverence for the primary text while creating space for the commentator’s own voice. Myers in 1992 is not writing directly on Yerushalmi but on Amos Funkenstein’s (1937-1995) commentary on Yerushalmi. He positions himself as a third-order voice in a tradition of engaged reading. The form is the move. Myers is claiming standing within the intellectual tradition that Zakhor established.
What the piece does is stake out the middle position Myers would hold for the rest of his career. Yerushalmi said history and memory are opposed. Funkenstein said they are not — he introduced “historical consciousness” as a mediating category. Myers in 1992 sides substantively with Funkenstein but pushes past both. His contribution is to argue that Funkenstein’s solution is under-developed. Funkenstein asserts continuity between pre-modern and modern historical consciousness without doing the work of showing what the continuity consists of. Myers pushes for a dialectical understanding that accepts both continuity and rupture — “the search for legitimacy is marked both by an urge to break radically with tradition and by an attendant revalorization of ‘traditional modes of activity.'”
The Blumenberg invocation at the end is important. Hans Blumenberg (1920-1996) in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1966) argued that modernity should be understood through “functional reoccupation” rather than secularization. Modern thought addresses premodern questions with modern answers, reoccupying the functional slots without inheriting the content. Myers applies this to Jewish historiography. Modern Jewish scholarship reoccupies functions that premodern Jewish memory served without inheriting premodern content. This lets Myers maintain both Yerushalmi’s insight about rupture (content has changed) and Funkenstein’s insight about continuity (functions persist). The Blumenberg framework is Myers’s own. Neither Yerushalmi nor Funkenstein deployed it. Myers brings it in to solve the problem the two of them could not resolve between them.
This is already the middle-space position of The Stakes of History, twenty-six years before The Stakes of History was published. The theoretical commitment is fully formed. Every subsequent book develops applications of the commitment.
Several features of the piece deserve attention.
The treatment of Baer (1888-1980) and Dinur shows Myers engaging their work at length. Baer’s celebration of Ashkenazic piety and Hasidei Ashkenaz and Dinur’s Palestinocentric periodization are instances of Zionist historiographical reshaping of Jewish memory. But Myers does not simply adopt Yerushalmi’s critique of these figures. He sees them as scholars who succeeded in forging new collective memory while maintaining substantive scholarship. The Dinur essay builds on this 1992 framework. Myers has been working with Dinur as case study of scholarly-ideological fusion for over thirty years.
The Funkenstein engagement is generous. Myers takes Funkenstein’s argument seriously, applies pressure to it, identifies where it needs development, and then develops it in his own direction. Funkenstein gets treated as important interlocutor whose insights are real but incomplete. Myers builds on the incompleteness rather than dismissing Funkenstein or accepting him. The intellectual generosity combined with critical pressure is the move Myers would deploy across his career.
Myers writes about Wissenschaft des Judentums scholars (Zacharias Frankel, Abraham Geiger) as engaged in memory-construction work despite their scholarly self-presentation as purely critical. The scholars claimed they were just doing objective historical work. The effect of their work was to forge a kind of nineteenth-century German-Jewish collective memory — liberal-bourgeois, denationalized, compatible with German citizenship. The scholars did not acknowledge what they were doing. Myers sees what they were doing. This observation is the template for everything he would subsequently write about scholarly-ideological fusion. Scholars construct memory whether they acknowledge it or not. The question is how self-aware they are about it and what they construct.
This is the productive insight that transfers to his critique of Dinur, to his reading of Baer, to his later reading of Yerushalmi, to his methodological position in The Stakes of History, and — here is the critical piece — to his own scholarly practice.
Myers already in 1992 knew that scholarly work constructs memory. He already knew this happens whether scholars acknowledge it or not. He already knew that the self-aware version is better than the self-unaware version. His subsequent commitment has been to operate the self-aware version. The Stakes of History is his most explicit articulation of why the self-aware version is legitimate. He argues for history-as-liberation, history-as-consolation, history-as-witness as legitimate modes. He acknowledges his own commitments rather than pretending to neutrality he does not possess.
But the 1992 insight applies to him too. He is constructing memory. His work on Rawidowicz, on the anti-historicist German-Jewish thinkers, on Yerushalmi’s legacy, on the Akademie — each piece constructs a memory of Jewish intellectual tradition that serves contemporary purposes. The self-awareness does not dissolve the construction. It only acknowledges it. The question the Dinur frame raises is whether the construction is adequate to its subject matter or whether Myers’s commitments produce distortions parallel to the distortions he identifies in Dinur.
This piece shows the tools Myers has for self-examination. He has the Blumenberg framework. He has the functional reoccupation concept. He has the critical apparatus for identifying when scholars construct memory without acknowledging it. The tools are powerful. They remain available for application to Myers’s own work.
If Yerushalmi was constructing memory when he claimed to be doing critical history, and if Funkenstein was constructing memory when he claimed to be engaging Yerushalmi, and if Myers was constructing memory when he wrote this super-commentary, then the whole enterprise of engaged Jewish scholarship consists of memory-construction dressed in scholarly apparatus. The scholarly apparatus is real. The memory-construction is also real. The combination is characteristic of the genre. Myers in 1992 sees this. He accepts it. He argues it is legitimate. But “legitimate” means something. It does not mean “objective.” It means “acknowledged, self-aware, serving purposes the scholar can articulate and defend.”
Does the op-ed work Myers produces meet even this weaker standard of legitimacy? Is it self-aware about what it constructs? Does it acknowledge its commitments? Does it serve purposes Myers can articulate and defend, or does it operate on pattern and coalition pressure?
Myers writes about Wissenschaft des Judentums scholars that “their tendentiousness, typical of early Wissenschaft des Judentums, complicates the issue of the relationship of nineteenth-century Jewish scholars to a new and popularly rooted collective memory.” Tendentiousness. He names the problem. The nineteenth-century scholars were tendentious. Their scholarship served purposes. The purposes shaped the scholarship.
Charles Taylor’s distinction between buffered and porous identities does specific work the Funkenstein-Yerushalmi-Myers triangle could not resolve on its own. The buffered self is enclosed. Its boundary holds against external force. Meanings are interpreted from inside, not received from outside. The porous self has no such boundary. Spirits, curses, blessings, sacred presence, ritual time, ancestral claim all enter the self without mediation. The shift from porous to buffered is not a change of beliefs. It is a change in the structure of the self that holds beliefs.
Read against this frame, Yerushalmi’s rupture is the porous-to-buffered transition. The Jew at the Pesach table reciting “in every generation a man is obligated to see himself as if he had come out of Egypt” is not enacting metaphor. The performative claim describes a porous relation to the Sinai-Egypt complex. The matzah is the bread of affliction. The cup is Elijah’s cup. The doorway is marked. The past is not represented. It is reactivated and enters the celebrant. Yerushalmi calls this memory. Taylor calls it porosity. The terms describe the same phenomenon at different levels of analysis. Memory names what the porous self does with the past. Porosity names the structural condition that makes such memory possible.
The modern critical historian is buffered by training and disposition. The Sinai event becomes a contested historical claim, the matzah a cultural artifact, the Haggadah a textual production of late antiquity reflecting particular communal pressures. The historian sits outside the events he studies. He can describe them, contextualize them, even teach them with sympathy. He cannot be reached by them in the way the porous celebrant is reached. The buffer holds. This is what Yerushalmi senses when he insists on rupture. The rupture is not just methodological. It is phenomenological.
Funkenstein’s “historical consciousness” tries to bridge the gap by finding sensitivity to historical context inside premodern halakhic discourse. Myers shows the bridge is not quite built. Taylor explains why it cannot be built. The medieval rabbi engaged in halakhic hiddush is not a proto-historicist who simply lacks Geiger’s tools. He inhabits a textual world where Maran Bet Yosef and Rashi and the Vilna Gaon are present interlocutors, not distant figures requiring contextualization. His relation to his predecessors is a porous relation. The text-world enters him and he enters it. Funkenstein redescribes this porosity in buffered language by calling it historical consciousness. The redescription flattens the structural difference Taylor names. Myers senses something is wrong with Funkenstein’s move and pushes back inside the essay. Taylor names what is wrong. Funkenstein cannot generate continuity by retroactively projecting the buffered self’s relation to the past onto premodern actors who stood in a different self-world.
The Wissenschaft des Judentums scholars Myers treats are the transitional figures the buffered-porous frame illuminates with particular force. They are buffered scholars writing for communities that partly inhabit porous selves. The tendentiousness Myers identifies in Geiger and Frankel is porosity surviving inside buffered methodology. They cannot help caring. The buffer is not yet fully sealed. Geiger’s Urschrift uses critical philological tools to make a religious-reform argument that presupposes the religious-reform argument can reach Jews who still partly stand inside the textual covenant. Frankel’s Darkhei ha-Mishnah writes in Hebrew because he hopes to address a more traditional readership inhabiting more porous conditions. The first generations of Wissenschaft scholars work in a world where the buffer is uneven. Their research is critical. Their addressees are not. Their own selves are partly buffered and partly porous in patterns that vary by topic, by family background, by Sabbath observance, by generation.
This explains the strange failures Myers documents. The scholars produce work that succeeds inside their own buffered seminar conversations and fails to reorganize the porous-leaning communities they thought they were addressing. Geiger reaches reform-minded readers already moving toward the buffer. Frankel reaches positive-historical readers in a similar transitional position. Neither reaches the porous Jew, because the porous Jew does not need or want what critical scholarship offers. The porous Jew is doing something else with the past, something that happens in the body and in the community calendar and in the way Hebrew pierces consciousness on Tisha B’Av in a way it cannot pierce a buffered consciousness.
Dinur and Baer at the Hebrew University attempt the most ambitious move the buffered self can attempt. They try to use buffered tools to manufacture a new collective memory dense enough to feel porous. Dinur’s “we must instill those 4,000 years into the heart of every person” is precisely this project. The new Jewish national subject is supposed to stand inside Jewish history the way the medieval Jew stood inside the covenant. The land is supposed to become sacred without the God who once made it sacred. Taylor’s frame says the project meets a structural ceiling. The buffered self can be moved by Masada. The buffered self can be educated to identify with Bar Kokhba, to feel a thrill at the Western Wall, to weep at Yad Vashem. The buffered self cannot be inhabited by these things in the way a porous self could be. The Zionist project produces strong commitments, effective political action, and considerable affective intensity. It does not produce porous selves. It produces buffered selves with manufactured patriotic content, which is something else.
The Hazaz character Yudka, the protagonist of “Ha-Derashah” who declares opposition to Jewish history, marks the moment when the project’s limit becomes visible to itself. Yudka is a buffered self trying to choose his way out of buffered history. He cannot. The choice itself confirms the buffer. Yerushalmi reads Yudka as emblematic of rupture. Myers softens this reading through Funkenstein and Blumenberg. Taylor sharpens it again. Yudka’s complaint is the buffered self’s complaint about the burden of inherited content the buffered self cannot quite shed and cannot quite inhabit. Porous selves had no Yudka. They had nothing to oppose because their relation to history was not the kind of thing one opposes from outside.
Myers proposes Hans Blumenberg’s “functional reoccupation” as a mediating frame. Modern thinkers answer medieval questions with postmedieval tools. Reoccupation produces continuity at the level of question and content. Taylor’s frame restricts what reoccupation can deliver. The reoccupation is real at the level of intellectual content. It cannot transmit the experiential structure that gave the original question its weight. The medieval question (what is the meaning of Jewish history?) was held inside a porous self that received the question as a problem of standing in relation to God’s covenant, the destruction of the Temples, the promise of redemption. The modern reoccupation answers the same question as a buffered problem of cultural identity, political belonging, intellectual coherence. The continuity at the level of content is genuine. The discontinuity at the level of self is also genuine. Myers’s mediating proposal preserves the first and elides the second. Taylor restores the second without canceling the first.
This restoration changes the assessment of Myers’s essay. The essay reads as Myers wanting Funkenstein to succeed without Yerushalmi quite failing. He is reaching for a frame in which critical Jewish scholarship and inherited Jewish memory can both be honored, with the scholar contributing to a new collective memory that connects continuously to the old. The reach is honorable. The reach is also constrained by what buffered scholarship can deliver. Buffered scholarship can deliver content. It can deliver organization of content. It can deliver education in content. It cannot deliver the porous self that once held the content with a different weight. Myers can teach UCLA students the Talmudic logic of zecher, the historiographical structure of Yerushalmi’s argument, the philological problems of Wissenschaft’s reading of rabbinic literature. He cannot teach them to stand inside the world the literature came from. The students leave his seminar more informed and just as buffered as they entered.
Taylor also illuminates the elegiac quality of Yerushalmi’s prose that Myers tries to soften. Yerushalmi was buffered, like all university-trained scholars of his generation. He registered the porous condition with greater intensity than most peers because he had seen, in his Sephardic family and in fragments of pre-Holocaust European Jewish life, what porous Jewish memory looked like. The elegy is not for tradition in some abstract sense. It is for the porous self, glimpsed at the edges of his upbringing, lost in his scholarly maturity, remembered as a structural absence the buffered self cannot fill from inside. His students, Myers among them, were formed almost entirely inside the buffered condition. They can argue with the elegy because they have not known what Yerushalmi knew. The Funkenstein-Yerushalmi debate, viewed through Taylor, is partly a generational marker of how far the buffer has progressed in academic Jewish life across two cohorts.
The Kiryas Joel question we have circled before reappears here with its sharpest formulation. The Satmar achievement is the partial maintenance of porous conditions inside a modern environment. The community does not just refuse modernity culturally. It refuses the buffer. The child raised in Kiryas Joel is not selecting his commitments from a menu. The commitments inhabit him. The community structures the conditions under which porosity persists. The Hasidic tale, the rebbe’s tisch, the Yom Tov rhythm, the Yiddish that carries a different cosmology than English carries, all of it operates not as cultural content for a buffered self but as the medium of a self that has not been buffered. Liberal Jewish institutions cannot replicate this because the institutions are buffered productions. Reading groups, conferences, applied history initiatives, kindness institutes, all operate within and reinforce the buffered condition. They produce buffered Jewish content for buffered Jewish selves. They cannot produce porosity because the production conditions for porosity are precisely the conditions buffered modernity has dispersed.
Bringing Taylor back to the 1992 essay specifically, three local clarifications follow.
The first concerns Myers’s call for “counter-memories” as a softening alternative to “rupture.” Counter-memories assume buffered selves selecting and constructing alternative narratives. The counter-memory framing is exactly the buffered self’s account of how memory works. Premodern porous Jewish memory was not a counter-memory in this sense. It was the medium the self lived in, not the content the self chose. Calling porous memory a counter-memory imports buffered categories into a domain where they do not apply. Myers’s frame is honest about what modern Jewish scholars do. It is not honest about what premodern Jewish memory was.
The second concerns Myers’s invocation of Blumenberg. Blumenberg’s reoccupation thesis describes how modern thought takes up positions left vacant by the breakdown of tradition. The thesis works at the level of intellectual problem-space. Taylor adds a level Blumenberg does not address: the structural condition of the self that holds the problem-space. The reoccupation can succeed at one level and fail at another. Myers reads Blumenberg as licensing the continuity claim he wants. Taylor would say the license has limits Blumenberg himself does not name and Myers does not press.
The third concerns the essay’s closing gesture. Myers writes that the dialectical understanding he proposes can mediate between Yerushalmi and Funkenstein, between rupture and continuity. The gesture is the move of a young scholar staking out the productive middle his generation will work. Taylor’s frame finds the middle inhabited and limited. The buffered scholar can hold both rupture and continuity in mind. The porous self could not, because the porous self did not stand outside its own past in the way required to take a position on continuity at all. The middle position is a buffered position. It is the only position available to a buffered scholar. It is not, therefore, neutral between rupture and continuity. It is what continuity looks like when described from inside the buffered condition, which is precisely the condition rupture names.
The 1992 essay is more interesting through Taylor than through its own internal terms. It is a buffered scholar’s attempt to negotiate the terms of his buffered relation to a tradition he cannot inhabit and will not relinquish. The negotiation produces a serviceable frame for the work Myers will do across the next thirty years. The frame holds while the work is performed inside the institutional conditions that maintain the buffered scholarly community. The frame loses force when the conditions that sustain it shift, which is the question every paragraph of Myers’s career has been a partial answer to and which Taylor’s frame returns with sharper edges than Myers permits.
“The Fall and Rise of Jewish Historicism: The Evolution of the Akademie für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (1919-1934)” Hebrew Union College Annual 63 (1992)
The piece argues that the Akademie für die Wissenschaft des Judentums had two lives. Franz Rosenzweig conceived it in 1917 (the Zeit ists proposal) as a anti-historicist institution. It would revive Jewish learning by shaking off “the curse of historicity” that Rosenzweig believed had disfigured nineteenth-century Wissenschaft. The Akademie would be a place where Jewish scholars could operate in a “new learning” mode that engaged Jewish texts with spiritual urgency rather than antiquarian detachment. This was the Rosenzweig vision.
The Akademie that existed from 1919 to 1934 under Eugen Täubler and Julius Guttmann was different. Täubler and Guttmann insisted the Akademie be “a house of pure science.” They moved it back toward exactly the historicist, empirical, textual methodology Rosenzweig wanted to escape. Myers’s title captures the irony. The Akademie was founded as a critique of historicism (“the fall”) and ended up becoming another institution of historicism (“the rise”). The institutional trajectory ran against the founder’s vision.
Can Jewish scholarship be something other than historicist? Rosenzweig said yes. Täubler and Guttmann said no, or their practice said no even when their rhetoric said yes. The Akademie failed to embody Rosenzweig’s alternative. The failure is what Myers wants to understand. This is the question that would anchor Resisting History a decade later. Rosenzweig is one of the four thinkers in the later book. The 1992 piece is the groundwork.
Myers shows that institutional practice tends to reassert historicist method even when the institution’s founding vision opposes it. The gravitational pull of Wissenschaft is strong. Scholars trained in historicist method produce historicist scholarship. Institutions funded by communities that want recognition from non-Jewish universities produce scholarship that meets those universities’ standards. The standards are historicist. The Rosenzweig alternative requires conditions that the Akademie could not sustain. Täubler and Guttmann were not traitors to Rosenzweig’s vision. They were scholars responding to the institutional conditions the Akademie faced.
This observation complicates the romance of anti-historicism. Rosenzweig, Breuer, Strauss, Cohen — the anti-historicist thinkers — are appealing because they propose alternatives to the dominant method. But alternatives require institutional support, trained scholars, funding structures, audiences. The Akademie tried to build the institutional support. The attempt produced scholarship that looked remarkably like what Rosenzweig criticized.
Myers writes: “what had begun, with the birth of the Akademie idea, as a crisis of historicism seemed to end up as an affirmation of historicism.” This sentence acknowledges the limits of the anti-historicist project as institutional reality. The crisis of historicism was real. The affirmation of historicism was what institutional reality produced. Both are true. The tension between them is what Myers has been working with since this piece.
At the end of his essay, Myers compares the Akademie with two other Jewish institutions of the same time — the Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus, where Rosenzweig transplanted his vision, and The Institut für Sozialforschung (the Frankfurt School). Both took different approaches. The Lehrhaus maintained Rosenzweig’s more participatory pedagogical vision longer than the Akademie did. The Frankfurt School pursued critical theory with no explicit Jewish agenda despite most members being of Jewish descent. Three institutions, three different attempts, three different fates.
Myers mentions that Fritz Baer’s Akademie-supported work on Spanish Jewry in Christian Spain, “culminating in a remarkably tendentious Hebrew narrative published after his immigration to Palestine,” ran “in direct defiance of the infatuation with Spanish Jewry” that Myers identifies as part of the emancipatory self-understanding of German-Jewish scholarship. Baer’s later Zionist work cast Spanish Jewry as “avaricious and morally bankrupt” rather than as models of dignity. Myers quietly observes that Baer’s post-Akademie scholarship represented “a response to, and rejection of, the ‘obsolete spirit of Enlightenment’ which he saw as dominating Jewish scholarship prior to his time.”
Baer then migrated to Palestine and founded Jewish history at Hebrew University.
Every subsequent book picks up threads from this early work. Re-Inventing the Jewish Past (1995) develops the Hebrew University side. Resisting History (2003) develops the anti-historicist side with the four German-Jewish thinkers. Between Jew and Arab (2008) applies the tradition of engaged-but-dissenting Jewish intellectual to Rawidowicz. The Stakes of History (2018) theorizes what serviceable history can be under conditions the Akademie piece shows are unavoidable. American Shtetl (2022) applies a related framework to American Jewish legal life.
Myers maps institutional contests over jurisdiction. Rosenzweig claimed jurisdiction over Jewish learning for an anti-historicist vision. Täubler and Guttmann effectively reclaimed jurisdiction for historicist Wissenschaft. The Frankfurt School claimed jurisdiction for critical theory without Jewish particularism. The Hebrew University scholars under Baer and Dinur claimed jurisdiction for Zionist-inflected Jewish scholarship.
“In Search of the ‘Harmonious Jew’: Judah L. Magnes between East and West.” John L. Sills Memorial Lecture. Berkeley, 1993.
Myers delivered the John S. Sills Lecture at the Magnes Museum in Berkeley on July 5, 1992, four years after the “dual loyalty in a Post-Zionist Era” essay. The lecture is more biographical and more personal. Myers admits up front that his attachment to Magnes is affective, that he first encountered Magnes while researching first-generation Hebrew University historians in 1989 during the First Intifada, and that Magnes exerted a strong hold on him.
The argument runs through Magnes’s life as a search for the “Harmonious Jew,” a type who bridges East and West, tradition and modernity, Diaspora and Palestine. Magnes takes the San Francisco Reform boy to Cincinnati to Berlin to New York to Jerusalem. Along the way he admires Ahad Ha-am, encounters Ostjuden in Berlin cafés, rejects the assimilationist path of Reform, pushes the Kehillah experiment in New York, moves to Jerusalem in 1922, builds the Hebrew University, clashes bitterly with Weizmann, advocates binationalism, and dies in 1948 just as the state he distrusted comes into being.
What Myers does well: he names the paradoxes without softening them. Magnes is an innovator and an apparatchik, a visionary and a mediocre administrator, a bitter opponent of political Zionism yet a deep Zionist of a cultural kind. The 1922 journal entry about Magnes’s visit to his father’s Polish hometown, where Magnes writes that the Jews are filthy, oriental, dirty, sick, and ragged while still insisting they are his people, is a brutal moment that Myers lets stand without rescue. Myers also catches Magnes in a deception during the Yiddish chair controversy, writing one thing to his Jerusalem friend and the opposite to the donor Shapiro.
What is worth pressing on.
The frame is hagiographic even where the evidence is not. Myers calls his own affection a “genealogy of affections” for Magnes, which is honest, but the honesty does not prevent the piece from reading as a case for canonization. Every failure gets reinterpreted as a paradox rather than as a failure. Magnes’s inability to deliver on his university vision becomes “personal limitations” set against “historical forces conspiring to upset” his erstwhile friendship with Weizmann. The agency drains out of the assessment at the moments it matters most.
For Myers and his cohort, Magnes becomes a forebear who licenses public criticism of Israel without forfeiting Jewish standing. The “dual loyalty” essay makes this structural. The Magnes lecture supplies the saint.
The narrative elides the judgment most of his listeners already carry. Magnes lost. The Hebrew University went to Weizmann’s side. Binationalism collapsed. The state came into being against his preferences. His Jewish-Arab reconciliation project failed in his lifetime and has failed more completely since. Myers registers these outcomes but declines to ask whether Magnes was wrong about the fundamentals, not just beaten by “historical forces.” A tougher reading might ask whether Magnes’s refusal to accept that Jews needed a state rested on the same German-Jewish confidence in universal humanism that Scholem, his friend, eventually admitted was an illusion.
The Shapiro episode deserves more weight than Myers gives it. A man who writes opposing things to opposing audiences about a controversy he is trying to manage is not a harmonious Jew. He is a fundraiser navigating a donor relationship. Myers names the maneuver and moves on. The incident cuts against the whole frame of the lecture and Myers lets it pass.
The “East and West” binary Magnes inherited and Myers preserves is worth questioning. By 1992 the East-West synthesis had largely happened in Israel, but not the way Magnes imagined. The Mizrahi majority that emerged from Arab lands after 1948 created a different East-West fusion, one that Magnes’s German-inflected cultural Zionism would not have recognized or welcomed. His “Harmonious Jew” was a Central European construct, not an Israeli.
The Klausner friendship is the strangest material in the lecture and Myers glosses it. Joseph Klausner (1874-1958) was a Revisionist Zionist, the Jabotinsky camp, the ideological ancestor of Likud. He wanted a Jewish state on both banks of the Jordan. He took a far harder line on Palestinian Arabs than Magnes. He opposed the Yiddish chair. He threatened to resign if the chair came in. On every political axis Myers uses to define Magnes, Klausner sat at the opposite pole. Yet the two kept up a decades-long correspondence and a mutual admiration society. Myers names this as “common marginality” drawing extreme ends together and as shared pursuit of “Judaism and humanism.” The friendship instead suggests that Magnes’s politics were less pure than the saint-making frame requires. A man who maintains close ties with the Revisionist camp while building his public identity as the binational alternative is more politically supple, more socially embedded, and more willing to keep channels open than the moralist icon Myers constructs. The lecture registers the oddity and moves past it.
The peroration is the clearest coalition tell. Myers delivers the lecture in Berkeley in 1992, the peak moment of American academic multiculturalism. He closes by mapping Magnes onto that moment. Magnes “anticipates” late twentieth-century scholars who see Judaism and humanism as fluid entities with shifting borders rather than sharply-defined essences. The dichotomies of Diaspora and Zion, East and West, Judaism and Humanism each contain elements of their supposed opposite. The multicultural world “we inhabit today” finds its forebear in the Harmonious Jew. This is Homi Bhabha (b. 1949) and Stuart Hall (1932-2014) vocabulary retrofitted onto a man who died in 1948. Magnes in his 1907 Temple Emanu-El sermon had no such framework and might not recognize himself in it. The retrofitting shows the alliance work. Myers’s cohort of American Jewish humanities scholars needs a Zionist patron saint whose Zionism maps onto their own intellectual idiom. Magnes, dressed in late-century cultural studies clothing, becomes that saint.
The essence claim contradicts the evidence Myers supplies earlier. Magnes’s 1896 “Palestine or Death” essay, written before he turned twenty, argued that Reform’s willingness to surrender large chunks of Judaism risked an irreversible loss of identity. Irreversible loss presumes something essential to lose. The whole polemic against assimilation that Myers traces from the young Magnes through Berlin and into Jerusalem rests on an essentialist premise: a Jewish core exists, and the core can be dissipated. Myers’s anti-essentialist coda pulls against this.
The missing interlocutor problem is the bigger hole. Magnes’s binational program failed against Ben-Gurion. It also failed to find Arab partners. The Mufti of Jerusalem had no interest in a shared commonwealth. Neither did the Arab Higher Committee. Magnes’s Ihud movement corresponded with a small circle of Arab moderates, most of them marginal in their own communities. The binational position required two willing sides and had one at most. Myers names Magnes’s “abhorrence of violence” against the 1989 backdrop of the Intifada and mourns the absence of Magnes’s clairvoyance from contemporary discourse. He does not ask whether the position was ever operative, or whether Magnes’s Arab partners ever represented a constituency that might have delivered what he asked of Jews. The question is absent because the answer is uncomfortable for the frame.
One line reads against the whole lecture: Magnes’s impact on the political culture of Jewish Palestine seemed, at times, little more than that of a troublesome gnat. Myers offers this as a concession before pivoting back. It might be the finding. A man loved by his donors, admired by a small German-academic circle in Rehavia, kept as a friend by a Revisionist he disagreed with on everything, isolated from the Eastern Europeans whose culture he romanticized, unable to rally Jewish Jerusalem to the Yiddish chair, dismissed by Weizmann as a lackey of American Jewish money, and defeated on the state question in 1948: the gnat line might describe the man more accurately than the Harmonious Jew does.
What Myers has built across the “dual loyalty” essay of 1988 and this 1992 lecture is a two-part theoretical position for his cohort. Dual loyalty makes Diaspora criticism of Israel structurally permissible. The Magnes lecture supplies the forebear who makes the critical Zionist posture respectable inside Jewish intellectual history. The pair of pieces together forms a small but coherent platform for what becomes, a decade later, the J Street position and, two decades later, the academic anti-occupation consensus in American Jewish studies. Myers’s later books on exile, on the Magnes archive, and on non-statist Zionism continue the same program.
“Eugen Täubler: The Personification of ‘Judaism as Tragic Existence’.” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 39 (1994)
This 1994 essay on Eugen Täubler was published in the Leo Baeck Institute Year Book when Myers was around 34, and it is the most emotionally engaged and personally invested piece among the early scholarly work we have seen. The subject and the treatment together tell us something about Myers’s intellectual temperament and about what he does with a case that resists his preferred framework.
The photograph at the opening is worth noting. Scholem, Buber, Dinur, Simon. The founding generation of Jerusalem Jewish studies that Myers has been mapping. Täubler sits outside this frame. Täubler never made it to Jerusalem. He ended up at HUC in Cincinnati, dying there in 1953, a “forgotten man” whose scholarly legacy had been extinguished compared to Scholem and Baron and Dinur. Myers writes the piece to rescue Täubler from this forgetting.
The substantive argument is about Täubler as the “personification of Judaism as tragic existence.” Täubler was the founding director of the Akademie in 1919. Myers has written about the Akademie before (the “Fall and Rise” piece). But Täubler has remained a figure in the background of that institutional history. This 1994 piece puts Täubler in the foreground. The move reveals something about Myers’s method. Institutional history eventually requires biographical attention to people who embodied institutional tensions. The Akademie could be studied institutionally. Its director required personal treatment.
Täubler’s tragedy is the thing Myers wants to capture. Täubler was caught between incompatible commitments that he could not resolve. He was German and Jewish. He was classical historian of Rome and Jewish historian. He was professional scholar committed to integration and proud Jewish nationalist committed to differentiation. He was loyal German citizen who served in the First World War and Zionist sympathizer. These tensions ran through his life without synthesis. The synthesis was unavailable to him. Every commitment pulled against every other commitment. The result was repeated nervous breakdowns, periods of “desperation and great depression,” a life of “bipolar” swings between mania and despair.
The Freud invocation matters. Myers brings in Freud’s concept of mourning and melancholia to read Täubler’s personality. Myers does not typically psychoanalyze his subjects. The move signals that the case requires something the standard scholarly apparatus cannot deliver. Täubler’s scholarly failures cannot be explained purely intellectually. The “tendency to change round into mania” and the “periodic depressions” are constitutive rather than incidental. Myers uses Freud as interpretive tool. Stolzenberg’s influence may be visible here. She would have been working in legal theory and psychoanalysis simultaneously. The interdisciplinary move is characteristic of their partnership.
Eugen Täubler died in Cincinnati in 1953 as a forgotten man. His scholarly legacy had been eclipsed by Scholem, Baron, and the Jerusalem scholars. Myers does the archival work to restore him. The piece traces Täubler from Berlin through the Akademie directorship to Heidelberg to the dismissal under Nazi law to the reluctant emigration to the American marginalization to the Cincinnati depression and the Jonah poem. The Freud invocation on mourning and melancholia is not scholarly performance. It is the interpretive tool the case requires because Täubler’s scholarly failures cannot be explained purely intellectually. The man was psychically organized in ways that prevented him from acting on what he intellectually knew. He stayed in Germany too long. He could not emotionally leave even after Germany had legally expelled him. He could not accept Palestine even after Magnes offered him a place. He could not write in Cincinnati even after HUC welcomed him. Each refusal was pathological and Myers treats it with the generosity the case requires.
Täubler taught at the Akademie. Baer and Dinur were his students. The methodological commitments that Baer and Dinur later deployed in Jerusalem to expand Jewish scholarship beyond Literaturgeschichte came from Täubler’s training. The Jerusalem school’s innovations descend from Täubler’s Berlin institution. This means the German-Jewish scholarly lineage runs forward through teacher-student chains rather than springing up anew in Palestine. Myers maps the chains carefully. The mapping is useful for anyone trying to understand how modern Jewish scholarship formed.
Several features of the essay stand out.
The treatment of Täubler’s 1933 decision to leave Heidelberg. Myers quotes Täubler’s letter resigning his professorship after being dismissed by Nazi law. Täubler expressed “deep indignation that he, a loyal German citizen who had served his country in the First World War, was subject to base discrimination because he was a Jew.” This is a German-Jewish moment. Täubler understood his treatment as betrayal of the German political order he had served. The response was not proto-Zionist recognition that the Jewish condition in Germany was always precarious. It was outraged German patriot recognizing that his Germany had abandoned him.
Myers treats this with empathy rather than the retrospective wisdom that would say Täubler should have seen earlier what was coming. The whole piece refuses the retrospective wisdom move. Täubler’s tragedy was that his commitments were genuine and his hopes reasonable given what he could know. History proved the hopes wrong. But the hopes were not ridiculous. Myers grants Täubler the dignity of having held defensible positions that reality made untenable.
The treatment of Täubler’s refusal to emigrate to Palestine is striking. Judah Magnes wanted him at Hebrew University. Yitzchak Baer (Täubler’s former student) was already there. Palestine was viable and available. Täubler refused. He offered philosophical justifications — he had become, he wrote, a “private researcher” whose work required European libraries, whose temperament required solitude, whose commitments required not-leaving. The justifications are transparently rationalizations of a deeper reluctance. Täubler could not leave Germany emotionally even after Germany had expelled him legally.
Myers does not moralize. He does not treat Täubler as naive or pathetic. He treats the refusal as symptomatic of Täubler’s psychic organization. “For those among our youth who have not yet decided to emigrate, I say, there is no future for Jews in this country.” Yet Täubler cannot leave. The gap between what he tells students and what he does is the tragedy of a man whose attachments exceed his rational understanding of his situation.
Myers opens his career writing about the French Resistance historian Marc Bloch who wrote The Historian’s Craft while about to be killed by the Gestapo. Bloch represents the engaged historian facing catastrophe. Täubler represents a different case. Täubler could not engage with the catastrophe. His scholarly commitments pulled him toward continued German-Jewish intellectual work even as the world that made such work possible was being destroyed. Bloch acted. Täubler oscillated, delayed, rationalized, finally escaped but never recovered. The two figures together map different possibilities for Jewish scholars in the Nazi period.
The treatment of Täubler’s Cincinnati years is melancholy. HUC gave him a position. He taught ancient Jewish history. He had colleagues including Abraham Joshua Heschel, Franz Rosenthal, Julius Lewy, Samuel Atlas. The intellectual world was respectable. But Täubler “never recovered from the initial depression and devoted the last years of his life in Cincinnati, frequently lapsed in depression, to poetry almost as much as scholarship.” He wrote his 74-page Jonah poem in 1943. He identified with Jonah — the reluctant prophet forced to flee, swallowed by disaster, eventually vomited onto shore in a place not of his choosing. The Jonah identification captures Täubler’s self-understanding. He was not a prophet who proclaimed. He was a prophet who fled and suffered and eventually ended up where God placed him against his will.
Julius Lewy, a Jewish colleague at HUC, wrote a 1947 memorandum accusing Täubler of Nazi sympathies during the 1930s. Täubler denied the charges. Myers investigates them seriously. He notes that Täubler was present in pro-Nazi circles in Germany longer than other Jewish scholars. Täubler went to Giessen in 1939 to seek an extraordinarius position — a baffling career move for a Jew under Nazi rule. Myers acknowledges the oddity without fully resolving it. Täubler was not a Nazi. But his attachment to Germany exceeded what rational self-interest would permit. The irrationality produced decisions that looked compromising.
Myers compares Täubler’s case to Ernst Kantorowicz — another German-Jewish medievalist who remained embedded in German nationalist intellectual circles longer than hindsight would approve. These are difficult cases. Jewish scholars who loved Germany, who served Germany, who could not or would not leave Germany when leaving became urgent. The post-war judgment of these figures was often harsh. Myers complicates the harshness. The attachment was real. The self-deception was also real. Both have to be held together.
Myers can treat a difficult case with real generosity. Täubler is a complex person whose tragedies are readable through careful scholarly attention combined with psychological imagination. The piece restores a forgotten figure to visibility.
His best work operates in this generous-reconstructive mode. Resisting History treats Cohen, Rosenzweig, Strauss, Breuer with this generosity. Between Jew and Arab treats Rawidowicz this way. The Ellenson festschrift treats specific German Orthodox figures this way. The Yerushalmi volume treats Yerushalmi this way. The Täubler piece treats Täubler this way. The mode is recurrent. Myers excels at restoring complex figures from forgetting by reading them with patience and psychological imagination.
His op-eds do not operate in this generous-reconstructive mode. They operate in a prophetic-denunciatory mode. Different subjects, different situations, different demands. The scholarly Myers and the op-ed Myers are recognizably the same person but the registers are different. The scholarly Myers can sit patiently with Täubler’s contradictions for fifty pages. The op-ed Myers compresses into stark binaries that admit less complexity.
Is this just format constraint? Partly. Op-eds have space limits and urgency demands. But the deeper question is whether the generous-reconstructive mode could be extended to contemporary political subjects. Could Myers write about, say, committed Religious Zionist settlers with the generosity he extends to Täubler? Could he restore the full psychological complexity of figures whose politics he opposes? The scholarly work suggests yes, he has the capacity. The op-eds suggest no, he does not currently deploy the capacity on these subjects. Coalition position makes generous reading of opposing-coalition figures costly. The costs are real. Myers has chosen not to pay them.
Täubler believed in the German-Jewish symbiosis. He lived the symbiosis. The symbiosis was destroyed. Täubler’s tragedy was that he could not accept the destruction emotionally even after accepting it intellectually. He wandered “between two worlds” — the world of classical scholarship and the world of Jewish scholarship, the world of German identity and the world of Jewish identity. The wandering was not chosen. It was his condition. He could not resolve it because no resolution was available.
This has contemporary resonance that Myers does not make explicit. Contemporary progressive American Jews live in a parallel condition. They are committed to American liberal democracy and committed to Jewish particularism. They are committed to universal human rights and committed to Jewish obligations. They are committed to Israel and critical of Israeli policies. The commitments strain against each other. Synthesis is not available. The question is how to live with the strain.
Täubler shows one way. Keep all commitments. Refuse to resolve. Oscillate between poles. Suffer depression when oscillation becomes exhausting. Write poetry in late years when scholarly work no longer sustains. Die in a place not of one’s choosing.
Myers’s own project offers a different way. Acknowledge the strains. Articulate the commitments. Hold middle space as a methodological position. Bridge what looks contradictory. Refuse both rigid resolution and pure oscillation. This is the dialectical mode the 1992 Zakhor piece articulated.
The question is whether the dialectical mode succeeds where Täubler’s oscillation failed. Or whether Myers’s mode is Täubler’s mode in more self-aware form. The 1994 Täubler piece does not answer this question. But the question is visible once we see that Myers has engaged Täubler’s predicament with this much sympathy and care.
Täubler’s memorandum to HUC in 1947, after Lewy’s accusations, includes the statement: “It is true that I had waited to stay in Germany as long as possible because I could consider my work there essential.” The priority of scholarly work over personal safety. The attachment to German-Jewish institutional life as irreplaceable. Täubler stayed because his work was there. He left only when leaving became unavoidable. Even then he left reluctantly and never really arrived anywhere else emotionally. Myers shows this with compassion.
Myers concludes: “Eugen Täubler was one of the great scholars, teachers and institution-builders of Jewish scholarship in this century. But his life followed a jagged path of professional and personal extremes: achievement and failure, veneration and isolation, joy and melancholy. Perhaps the final irony in his life of ironies was that the very locus of his plan to rescue Jews, and the venue of this own salvation — America — was the place where he was accused of embracing Nazism. Though the charge was ultimately withdrawn, Eugen Täubler never recovered from the initial blow. He lived the last years of his life in Cincinnati, frequently lapsed in depression and devoted to poetry almost as much as scholarship. America provided Täubler with physical refuge, but not relief from inner torment. As in Germany, he remained a tragic and displaced ‘wanderer between worlds.'”
Myers writes with literary care about a man whose life mattered and whose tragedy mattered. The essay does scholarly work. It also does memorial work. Täubler is restored. The jagged path is traced. The final quotation (“wanderer between worlds”) is given its weight. The essay is the work the mature Myers methodology authorizes — scholarship that is also memory-construction, history that forges collective remembrance of a forgotten figure. Täubler enters the record of twentieth-century Jewish intellectual life because Myers wrote this piece. The function Myers would theorize in The Stakes of History is performed in this essay.
Myers has been doing the work of generous reconstruction of complex Jewish intellectual figures since 1994 at the latest. The method is consistent across the career. The emotional register in this piece is warm and engaged in a way that most Myers scholarly prose is not. Täubler seems to have touched him. The essay shows what Myers produces when a subject engages him at a level beyond scholarly interest.
When Myers is engaged emotionally with his subject, the work gains power. The Rawidowicz book has some of this. The Yerushalmi volume has some of this. The Ellenson festschrift has some of this. The Täubler piece has it clearly. The best Myers comes out when the subject matters to him.
The op-eds also come from engagement, but the engagement is with coalition commitments. The difference in register follows. Engagement with persons produces generous reconstructive work. Engagement with coalitions produces combative advocacy work. Both are legitimate within Myers’s framework. They produce different kinds of writing.
The Täubler piece is closer to what Myers would want to be remembered for. The op-eds are current urgent work that the moment demands. Both come from the same scholar with the same commitments but in different registers for different purposes.
The Täubler essay is written with care and craft. The prose is controlled. The pace is deliberate. The argument builds. The conclusion has weight. This is Myers writing slowly and thinking slowly about a subject that deserves it. The op-eds are written fast and think fast about situations that demand immediate response. Different temporal conditions produce different writing. The scholarly books fall between — slower than op-eds but faster than fifty-page essays like this one. The temporal conditions of different formats shape the resulting writing as much as the format conventions do. Understanding Myers requires understanding which temporal register each piece of writing comes from. The Täubler piece is slow writing. It rewards slow reading. The rewards are substantial.
“Was there a ‘Jerusalem School?’: An Inquiry into the First Generation of Historical Researchers at the Hebrew University.” Studies in Contemporary Jewry 10 (1994)
This reads as the compressed article-length version of Myers’s 1991 Columbia dissertation “From Zion Will Go Forth Torah.” Published in the mid-1990s based on internal references, it maps the entire Jerusalem school as a scholarly-ideological formation and makes the move that has anchored his career ever since. Every subsequent book sits on this foundation.
The essay dismantles the triumphalist narrative that Jewish studies at Hebrew University constituted a methodological revolution. Myers shows the continuity with German Wissenschaft is stronger than the programmatic claims admitted. Jacob Nahum Epstein kept doing Mishnah criticism in Jerusalem that he had been doing in Berlin. The Institute of Jewish Studies was shaped by diaspora oversight, with Chief Rabbis Hertz and Lévi and Felix Warburg holding effective veto power over appointments and curricula. Biblical criticism was suppressed until 1938 by diaspora overseers. Scholem did not place the Jewish nation at the core of his research, which means the most celebrated figure of the supposed school operated outside the school’s defining commitments. The 1944 Scholem quotation Myers uses captures what the piece establishes: we came to rebel, and ended up continuing.
The work cuts against both the Israeli Zionist story and the diaspora progressive story. The Zionist story wants Hebrew University to be the fulfillment of Jewish scholarly autonomy after centuries of exile and accommodation. Myers shows the institution was built by Europeans doing European scholarship under European methodological assumptions with substantial diaspora supervision. The diaspora progressive story wants the Jerusalem school to be a cautionary example of ideology capturing scholarship. Myers shows the picture is more complicated. The scholars did continuous work. The ideological capture was real but limited and was negotiated against diaspora resistance. Neither coalition gets the clean story it wants.
Myers shows that the Klausner appointment to the Second Temple chair was blocked by diaspora opponents. Kaufmann was kept out for a quarter century. The modern Hebrew literature position was delayed. Each of these was a institutional contest with outcomes that reflected power distributions between Jerusalem and diaspora. The contests were not resolved by ideology. They were resolved by negotiation among institutional actors with differing interests and authorities. The collaboration with Stolzenberg deepens later. The capacity is visible in 1995.
The opening is a Butterfield citation. “The history of historical writing involves an enquiry into the manner in which men have changed their sentiment for the past.” Myers announces at the outset that he is doing historiography of historiography. The subject is not what happened in Jewish history but how Jewish historians have constructed what happened. Myers is not primarily a historian of Jewish events. He is a historian of Jewish historians. The sources he reads most carefully are the scholarly writings of previous generations of Jewish historians. The objects he studies are institutional. The field he maps is a scholarly formation.
The central methodological move is the refusal to accept the self-description of the Jerusalem scholars as a “school.” Myers argues that “Jerusalem school” is retrospective construction imposed by observers rather than self-description adopted by participants. The scholars at the Institute of Jewish Studies in the 1920s did not see themselves as coherent school. They were diverse scholars from various European backgrounds who arrived in Jerusalem through various routes and continued working on various topics with various methodologies. The coherence is interpretive. Later generations imposed it.
This matters because it sets up Myers’s analytical position. He can engage the Jerusalem scholars seriously while refusing the triumphalist Zionist framing that treats them as founders of a revolutionary new Jewish historiography. He can also engage them seriously while refusing the censorious diaspora framing that treats them as mere propagandists.
The Max Nordau invocation early in the piece is methodologically telling. Myers cites Nordau not for Zionism but for Nordau’s deconstruction of scholarly objectivity and group identity claims. Nordau saw that national identity is a function of “subjective imagining” and “concerted effort to invent a national history on which to base future action.” Myers deploys Nordau to establish that he approaches the Jerusalem scholars with awareness that national scholarly formations are constructions rather than natural outcomes. This is Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities” framework arriving in Jewish scholarship. Anderson is cited later in the notes. Myers is working with the constructivist approach to nationalism that was standard in 1990s academic discourse.
The substantive argument has several moves.
First, the Jerusalem scholars continued German Wissenschaft des Judentums despite their programmatic assertions of break. With one exception (David Yellin), all the first-generation Jerusalem scholars came from European rabbinical seminaries. They brought European models of Jewish scholarship with them. The Institute of Jewish Studies emerged as a kind of transplanted German rabbinical seminary rather than as a fundamentally new institution. The continuity is “manifest” in scholars like Epstein, who continued the same Mishnah-critical-edition project in Jerusalem that he had started in Berlin. Jacob Nahum Epstein’s career shows no “significant transformation” with the geographic shift. The institutional change did not produce the methodological revolution the programmatic statements promised.
Second, the specific fields that did show Zionist influence were Palestinology, modern Hebrew literature, and eventually Bible. Samuel Klein on Palestine studies had the task of documenting Jewish historical claim to the land. Joseph Klausner on modern Hebrew literature extended the national narrative backwards to the Haskalah. Biblical studies was delayed because the diaspora overseers (Chief Rabbis Lévi and Hertz) blocked critical biblical scholarship until Cassuto in 1938 and Kaufmann in 1949. The ideological alignments shaped what could and could not be done institutionally. The scholarship was not free to pursue whatever Zionism demanded. It was shaped by institutional constraints that Zionist ideology had to negotiate.
Third, Baer and Dinur under Täubler’s guidance did attempt to move beyond German Literaturgeschichte toward social, economic, political history. Their 1936 opening editorial in Zion announced overthrow of nineteenth-century “literary-theological character.” Their work extended Jewish historical vision in substantial ways. But they also affirmed continuity and immanence of Jewish history in ways that mirrored nineteenth-century Wissenschaft premises. Baer’s kehillah studies continued the tradition. Dinur’s Yisrael bagolah maintained the “complete unity of the Hebrew nation” that never ceased even in dispersion. The supposed revolution was limited.
Fourth, Scholem “defied the nationalist mode through and through” by not placing the Jewish nation at the core of his research. His interest remained Jewish religious and spiritual expression. His mysticism studies focused on that development, not on the nation as Volk. This is important for Myers because it shows that even the most celebrated “Jerusalem school” figure operated outside the school’s supposed defining commitments. The school is defined by commitments its most important members did not share.
The Scholem 1944 quote that Myers uses as structural punchline: “We came to rebel, and ended up continuing.” This is the devastating judgment from within. Scholem recognized that the Jerusalem scholars had not accomplished what they programmatically claimed. The continuities with Wissenschaft des Judentums were stronger than the breaks. The rebellion had been partial at best.
What this piece reveals about Myers’s position. He is neither Zionist triumphalist nor diaspora censorious critic. He is the historiographer who wants to see what the Jerusalem scholars did rather than what they claimed to do or what their opponents accused them of doing. This position is methodologically sophisticated. It requires sympathy for the scholars combined with critical distance from their self-descriptions. It requires institutional analysis that can trace continuities across apparent ruptures. It requires reading scholarly work for what it contains rather than for what its authors intended.
Myers invokes Gadamer’s insistence that scholars should acknowledge their prejudices rather than pretend to transcend them. “Acknowledging one’s own prejudices helps identify the interpretive accretions that stand between subject and historical object.” The Jerusalem scholars did not do this adequately. They “feared that to renounce their own objectivity was to admit to a subjective foray into identity formation. And such an admission required an unacceptable surrender of scholarly legitimacy.” This failure is not unique to Jewish scholars but is pronounced in the Jewish case because of the “insecurity about the Jewish condition” that drives Jewish scholars to appeal externally for validation.
Myers argues that Jewish scholars should do what the Jerusalem scholars failed to do. They should acknowledge their prejudices. They should embrace rather than flee from the acknowledgment that their work has identity-forming functions. They should give up the pretense of pure objectivity and take responsibility for the constructive dimensions of their work. This is the position that The Stakes of History would elaborate twenty-four years later. The commitment is in place in 1995.
Several important institutional observations in this piece deserve noting.
The emphasis on diaspora overseers controlling the Institute of Jewish Studies is striking. Chief Rabbi Joseph Hertz of England. Israel Lévi of France. Felix Warburg in New York. These non-Zionist and religiously observant diaspora figures held effective veto power over appointments and curricula. The supposedly Zionist institution was controlled by non-Zionist diaspora Jews. The Zionists in Jerusalem had to negotiate with this diaspora oversight. Klausner could not get the Second Temple chair because his diaspora opponents blocked him. Kaufmann was kept out for a quarter century. Biblical criticism was suppressed until the diaspora overseers allowed it. The institutional reality complicates the ideological narrative.
This has contemporary relevance that Myers does not make explicit but that the framework can notice. Myers’s own institutional positions have depended on diaspora constituencies that hold certain commitments. UCLA Jewish Studies. The Center for Jewish History. NIF. The Luskin Center. The network of donors and board members that sustains these institutions shapes what can be said and done within them. Myers operates within these institutional constraints. His positions are partly products of institutional negotiation rather than pure scholarly conclusions. The observation applies to him as he applies it to the Jerusalem scholars.
The treatment of Täubler’s role as mentor to both Baer and Dinur is important. Täubler taught at the Akademie in Berlin. Baer worked there from 1919 to 1930. Dinur encountered Täubler at the Hochschule in 1911. Baer and Dinur carried Täubler’s methodological commitment to broadening Jewish scholarship beyond Literaturgeschichte. The Jerusalem school’s methodological innovations came from their German training, not from something they invented in Palestine. Täubler’s institution-building work in Berlin prepared the students who would then build institutions in Jerusalem. The genealogy runs through Germany.
This matters because it connects Myers’s earlier Täubler piece to the Jerusalem school piece. The 1994 Täubler essay treated Täubler as a tragic figure. This 1995 piece treats Täubler as methodological mentor whose influence shaped Jerusalem scholarship. Myers was mapping the whole network simultaneously. The Täubler piece and the Jerusalem school piece and the earlier Akademie piece and the earlier Scholem-Kurzweil piece and the super-commentary on Zakhor were all parts of one project. Each illuminates different nodes in the same network. The dissertation was the first full mapping. The subsequent articles refined individual nodes.
Meron Benvenisti’s father David Benvenisti was a student at the Institute of Jewish Studies under Samuel Klein. Benvenisti’s book Conflicts and Contradictions describes the “cult-like obsession” with exploring the land of Israel that Klein’s Palestine studies embodied. Myers notes this. Later scholars from within the Israeli context (like Benvenisti) have recognized what the institutional formation produced in terms of commitments to the land. The recognition came later. At the time, participants experienced it as normal scholarly activity. The framework that would name what they were doing emerged only later. Myers is applying that later framework retrospectively.
One striking methodological move. Myers writes: “The aspiration to unite East and West and, as Ismar Elbogen had urged, to return to the point of historical origins was in the air in Jerusalem on December 22, 1924. On that day, the Institute of Jewish Studies of the Hebrew University was formally inaugurated on barren Mount Scopus.” The prose has literary force. The date is exact. The location is named. The atmosphere is evoked. Myers is doing not just historiography of historiography but evocative historical narrative that places readers in the founding moment. The methodological sophistication does not preclude engaged storytelling. This is characteristic of Myers’s best work. The scholarly rigor and the literary craft combine.
The footnotes are worth noting for what they reveal about Myers’s reading. Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions is cited. Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities is cited. Ernest Gellner on nationalism. Eric Hobsbawm on invention of tradition. E. J. Hobsbawm’s Nations and Nationalism Since 1780. These are the standard 1990s academic references for constructivist analysis of national formations. Myers is working with the most sophisticated theoretical apparatus available in his moment. He is not working in isolation within Jewish studies. He is connecting Jewish scholarship to the broader academic conversation about how national identities get constructed.
The Institute of Jewish Studies was jurisdictionally contested between Zionist Jerusalem scholars and diaspora non-Zionist overseers. Between German-trained scholars and East European-born scholars. Between defenders of philological Wissenschaft tradition and proponents of broader historical method. Between those who wanted biblical criticism and those who blocked it. Between those who wanted modern Hebrew literature professorship and those who wanted Second Temple history. Each contest had its own shape. Each was resolved through institutional negotiation. The outcomes were not predetermined by ideology. They were institutional.
This connects to the Stolzenberg collaboration on legal pluralism and the Kiryas Joel work. Myers has been interested in how institutional structures shape what can be done within them for his entire career. The Jerusalem school piece is early application of this interest. American Shtetl is late application. The through-line is institutional analysis of how scholarship and community get made under legal and organizational constraints.
Myers is even-handed in evaluating the Jerusalem scholars. He gives them credit for real accomplishments (methodological expansion, institutional building, new fields of research) while identifying limitations (continuity with Wissenschaft they claimed to reject, submission to institutional constraints they did not fully acknowledge, failure to meet Gadamerian standards of self-awareness).
“A New Scholarly Colony in Jerusalem: The Early History of Jewish Studies.” Judaism (Spring 1996)
Myers applies the vocabulary of colonialism and post-colonialism to the Hebrew University founding. This is a bolder framing than the 1995 “Was There a Jerusalem School?” piece. The earlier essay questioned whether the Jerusalem scholars constituted a coherent school. This essay asks whether they should be understood as scholarly colonizers whose enterprise has colonial features.
The opening move is striking. Myers begins with extended description of a Middle Eastern university founded by earnest Western men with missionary zeal to bring Enlightenment, culture, and academic excellence to the “barren shores of the Orient.” The language reads as Hebrew University. The passage deliberately misleads. Myers then reveals “with a certain mischievous delight” that he has been describing the American University of Beirut. The president whose words he quoted was Bayard Dodge, not Judah Magnes. The religious sensibilities checking academic scholarship were fundamentalist Protestant.
The rhetorical move is risky. Myers is inviting readers to notice that the AUB and the Hebrew University are structurally parallel institutions in ways that make both look colonial. Published in 1996 in Judaism, a mainstream American Jewish Congress journal, Myers tells a Jewish American audience that the Zionist university project shares specific features with American Protestant missionary education in the Arab world. Both imported Western norms. Both were “mired in a tangled web of relations symptomatic of colonialism.”
Myers is careful about what he means by colonialism. He disclaims the “imperial powers” meaning. He draws instead on post-colonial studies vocabulary, Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Kwame Anthony Appiah. The colonialism he has in mind is the “complex network of relations between Diaspora patrons and Palestine-based administrators and faculty.” It is the “cultural practices, identities, and implications emanating from colonial relations.” The relevant feature is “confounding” of cultural categories rather than imposition of domination. Myers is working with sophisticated post-colonial theory rather than deploying colonialism as simple accusation.
The Appiah citation is important. “European languages and European disciplines have been turned, like double agents, from the projects of the metropole to the intellectual work of the post colonial cultural life.” Myers applies this to the Jerusalem scholars. They came as “bearers of European academic standards and yet hoped to rid themselves of ignoble vestiges of Diaspora life.” They were simultaneously colonizers (bringing European Wissenschaft to Palestine) and colonized (fleeing their marginal position in European academic life). They were both the agents of Western scholarly norms and the products of those norms’ exclusions.
This captures something the earlier piece identified more cautiously. In 1995 Myers wrote about institutional continuities between Wissenschaft and Jerusalem. In 1996 he adds a political vocabulary for understanding those continuities. The Jerusalem scholars were not merely continuing European scholarly practice. They were enacting a colonial relationship in which European standards were imposed on a non-European location by scholars who were products of European exclusion.The whole arrangement had colonial features that Myers is willing to name in 1996.
Myers notes “the ongoing debate over ‘post-Zionism'” and cites the History and Memory 1995 special volume plus a November 1995 Ha’aretz symposium. He is engaging with Israeli scholarly and political discourse about whether Zionism has entered a post-classical phase that requires critical reassessment of founding narratives. This is the contested terrain of mid-1990s Israeli intellectual life. Benny Morris, Ilan Pappé, Avi Shlaim, Tom Segev, and other “New Historians” had been producing work that challenged founding Zionist narratives. Myers is positioning his scholarly work in relation to this post-Zionist moment.
He writes: “In suggesting this comparison, I do not mean to equate Zionism and colonialism, though this is a hotly contested issue in the current Israeli debates. Rather, I hope to emphasize that the culmination of an historical epoch—of European colonialism, on one hand, and of a certain stage of Israeli history (i.e., the phase of unrelenting conflict with the Arab world), on the other—brings with it the opportunity to explore the foundation myths underlying guiding ideologies.” The disclaimer does real work. Myers is not calling Zionism colonialism. He is using post-colonial theory to analyze the Hebrew University as institutional formation. The distinction matters. But the deployment of the vocabulary makes things visible that would not be visible otherwise.
Partha Chatterjee’s work on Bengali nationalism argued for a “non-political form of nationalist activity centered around the spiritual, as distinct from material, domain.” Myers suggests this model “perhaps be of value in analyzing a range of Jewish cultural activists in the early twentieth century, including Zionists, autonomists, and Bundists.” Applying Chatterjee’s post-colonial framework for Indian nationalism to Jewish nationalism is a bold move. It treats Jewish nationalism as one among a range of nationalisms that post-colonial theory illuminates. This is methodologically fresh in 1996.
The Trevor-Roper citation complicates things. “Zionism is the last, least typical of European nationalisms.” Myers is holding two positions simultaneously. Zionism is typical of European nationalism in its construction of imagined community through national language and national territory. It is also atypical because the language and territory were abstract constructs imposed on masses by a cultural elite to an unusual degree, and because the constituency was global rather than territorially concentrated. The both-and framing avoids simple identification while still permitting substantial analytical use of the nationalism framework.
Several features of the essay deserve attention.
The Magnes narrative is central. Myers treats Judah Magnes with sympathy throughout. Magnes was the American-born reform rabbi who moved from New York to Jerusalem in 1922, became chancellor of the Hebrew University, and served as “Warburg’s proxy in Jerusalem” in the arrangement that gave local supporters administrative control. Weizmann’s progressive antipathy toward Magnes, culminating in Magnes’s displacement by the Hartog Survey Committee in 1933-34, gets detailed treatment. The Hartog committee subjected Magnes to “interrogation” disguised as “friendly review.” Philip Hartog’s colonial credentials (University of Calcutta review, University of Dacca vice-chancellor) reinforced Myers’s colonial framing. Magnes was subjected to colonial review practices applied to a Jewish institution by British colonial-administrative experts.
Robert Weltsch called the Institute of Jewish Studies “a proper ‘Golus’ institution” — a proper diaspora institution. The accusation from the Zionist left was that the Institute was not properly Zionist because it was dominated by diaspora sensibilities and diaspora overseers. Klausner, despite being a Revisionist, “deeply resented the interference of Diaspora Jewry, particularly non-Zionists, in what he regarded as an essential national mission.” The tension Myers maps is not only between Zionist and non-Zionist but among Zionists about how much diaspora influence could be tolerated. The institutional reality required diaspora money and diaspora supervision. The ideological commitment required rejection of diaspora. The tension was never resolved. It was continuously negotiated.
The important closing observation. Myers writes: “They were exemplary cultural hybrids, never fully at home either in Europe or Palestine, and perhaps secretly reveling in their marginality. Their scholarship swayed between the poles of Zionism and jüdische Wissenschaft, as they sought to re-invent the Jewish past while using organizational models and the guiding ethos of their predecessors in Germany.”
The Jerusalem scholars were cultural hybrids. Their hybridity was not failure but productive condition. They were “perhaps secretly reveling in their marginality.” Marginality is often treated as deficit. Myers treats it as potentially positive, as the condition that produced their distinctive scholarly contribution.
Myers operates as cultural hybrid between scholarly and engaged, between critical and constructive, between American and Israeli Jewish discourse, between progressive politics and traditional Jewish practice. He has built his career on middle-space positions that do not resolve in either direction. The Jerusalem scholars he describes here share this intellectual temperament. The reading is partly self-recognition.
Martin Jay, a major intellectual historian at Berkeley, responds sympathetically but raises a critical point. The Central European founders were “running headlong away from what has for centuries, if not millennia, been stigmatized as the Hebraic alternative to Hellenic culture.” The irony Jay identifies is that while the university was to teach Hebrew and include Talmudic and rabbinic literature, the center of gravity of the founders’ existence “ultimately lay elsewhere, in that powerful tradition of Bildung and Wissenschaft.” Jay is pressing Myers on whether the colonial framing captures the European-Jewish dimension of the founders’ self-understanding. They were not just colonizers imposing Western norms. They were Jews trying to escape Hebraic stigma by building a Western-style institution in Palestine. The psychological structure is more complex than colonial framing alone suggests.
Myers did not get to respond in this particular forum. But the critique is substantive. Jay is right that the colonial framing can miss the Jewish dimension of what the founders were doing. Myers’s colonial framing brings new things into view. It also risks obscuring features the older Wissenschaft-continuity framing captured better. A fully adequate analysis would hold both framings together. The 1995 piece did more of the Wissenschaft work. The 1996 piece does more of the colonial work. Neither alone is sufficient. Together they give a fuller picture.
Myers is moving in the mid-1990s from the dissertation framework (institutional history of German-to-Jerusalem scholarly transfer) to more theoretical and comparative frameworks (post-colonial theory, nationalism studies, cultural hybridity). The basic empirical material is the same. The theoretical tools are expanding. He is reading Bhabha, Gilroy, Said, Appiah. He is positioning Jewish studies within broader academic conversations about how national and colonial identities get constructed.
The post-colonial theoretical tools Myers picked up in the mid-1990s shape everything afterward. The Rawidowicz book deploys similar analytical moves. The post-Oct 7 op-eds deploy them more polemically. The willingness to frame Jewish institutions and Jewish national formation using vocabulary developed for analysis of other national and colonial situations is a methodological commitment Myers made in this period. He maintains it throughout his career.
Myers writes the 1995 “Was There a ‘Jerusalem School’?” piece in a Zionist-inflected context (Bar-Asher symposium published in Essays on the Occasion of the Sixtieth Anniversary of the Hebrew University’s Institute of Jewish Studies). He writes the 1996 “New Scholarly Colony” piece in Judaism, an American Jewish Congress journal. The audiences are different. The framings differ accordingly. The 1995 piece is more cautious about challenging Zionist historiographical assumptions because it is being published in a Zionist-inflected venue. The 1996 piece is bolder because the American Jewish audience has more distance from Israeli political sensitivities. Same scholar, same material, different venues, calibrated differences in framing. Myers adjusts register and emphasis based on audience while maintaining his positions.
Myers concludes by invoking Scholem’s 1944 “We came to rebel, and ended up continuing” quotation that had also closed the 1995 piece. The quotation frames both essays. But the 1996 piece gives the quotation a different valence. In 1995 it suggested that the Jerusalem scholars failed to accomplish what they programmatically claimed. In 1996 it suggests that their hybridity was productive even though it did not match their stated ambitions. The same quotation supports different conclusions depending on the framing. Myers is working the evidence from different angles.
The jurisdictional contests are colonial in structure. Diaspora patrons held jurisdiction from abroad. Palestine-based administrators held jurisdiction on the ground. Neither could fully dictate to the other. The arrangements were continuously negotiated. Power was distributed unevenly. The unusual feature was that both sides were Jewish. “Both sides, the subjects and objects of the colonialist arrangement, were in their origins the same people.” The colonialism was internal to the Jewish people, with diaspora Jews patronizing Palestinian Jewish institutions in paternalist ways.
This maps onto the jurisdictional contests Myers operates within. American Jewish institutions (NIF, Center for Jewish History, progressive Jewish congregations, academic networks) hold jurisdiction over the American Jewish progressive space. Israeli institutions (universities, government, cultural bodies) hold jurisdiction over Israeli intellectual life. Myers operates in both. The tensions are structurally similar to the tensions he maps in the Jerusalem school piece. American progressive Jewish intellectuals like Myers often find themselves in complicated relationships with Israeli counterparts. The patronage patterns run in various directions. The jurisdictional lines are continuously contested. Myers is not writing about a dead historical situation. He is writing about a living structure whose features he recognizes in his own operational context.
Myers has been willing for three decades to name Jewish institutional and national formations in vocabulary that many Jewish audiences find uncomfortable. “Colony.” “Colonial.” “Cultural hybridity.” “Imagined communities.” “Invention of tradition.” These terms carry political valences. Using them for Jewish cases was a choice in 1996 and remains a choice now. The post-Oct 7 op-eds continue this willingness to name Jewish situations in terms that complicate comfortable self-understandings.
Myers’s current public writing deploys vocabulary developed in this 1996 moment. Jewish moral reckoning. Cultural hybridity. Diaspora responsibility. Post-colonial analytical frameworks. These tools were fresh in 1996. They are familiar now. They may have been overtaken by subsequent theoretical developments or by changes in the situation they are applied to. Myers’s project requires the framework to continue working. If it does not continue working adequately, the claims the framework supports become harder to defend. The framework that enabled the work also limits the work. The question is whether the framework is updated as conditions change or whether it ossifies as defense of positions that were defensible in an earlier moment.
Review of Mémoire juive et nationalité allemande: Les juifs berlinois à la Belle Époque by Jacques Ehrenfreund. Jewish History (Fall 2003)
This review is a mid-career historian reviewing a book on German-Jewish historiography, which is his own subfield. The confidence shows.
The opening frame is Yerushalmi’s Zakhor. Myers names his genealogy: Yerushalmi at the top, Meyer and Schorsch as the path-clearers, then the younger cohort including Biale, Feiner, Heschel, Hoffman, Raz-Krakotzkin, and Wiese. This is a field map. Myers places inside the younger cohort by the way he speaks. The phrase “a presumption I have often made in my own work” is the tell. He is writing as one of the working historiographers reviewing a book by another one. The review is also a self-audit. Myers is acknowledging that his earlier books on Scholem, Baer, and the Jerusalem school assumed that elite historians mirrored broader Jewish sensibility, and he is crediting Ehrenfreund for doing the harder social history that tests the assumption.
The analytical core is sharp. Ehrenfreund’s argument runs: German Jews entered the historicist idiom of the nineteenth century and found that history in its nineteenth-century form was national history, and they had no nation. They compensated through local history, museum projects, Mendelssohn anniversaries, and emancipation commemorations. Ehrenfreund calls this the “impossible nationalization” of Jewish historical memory. Myers catches the structure cleanly and names the tension: Germans Jews spoke the dominant idiom and found they could not quite fit inside it.
The move Myers does not make is the one his Pinsof–Turner–Trivers stack would later make easily. Ehrenfreund is describing coalition positioning under host-society conditions. German Jews adopted historicism because historicism was the prestige discourse of German Bildung, and adopting it was a marker of bourgeois arrival. The museum, the Mendelssohn anniversary, the territorialization through local community histories were coalition performances aimed at two audiences at once: the German majority, to whom they said “we belong here and have always belonged here,” and the Jewish community, to whom they said “our belonging is real and we have the scholarly apparatus to prove it.” The dissonance Ehrenfreund identifies is the dissonance of a minority coalition trying to use the dominant coalition’s legitimation tools and finding the tools do not quite fit.
Myers describes this without naming it as coalition work. He calls it “a minority group struggling to preserve its corporate identity and yet belong to the broader social mainstream.” The 2003 vocabulary is humane and descriptive rather than analytical. The later framework would turn the same material inside out and ask what the historicist turn was defending, what rival accounts it displaced, and what happened to Jews who refused the bargain. The Zionist teleology Myers mentions only to set aside is precisely the rival coalition that read the same evidence and drew the opposite conclusion. Ehrenfreund does not go there and Myers praises him for not going there. Both choices are coalition choices.
The dating quibble is the best piece of criticism in the review. Ehrenfreund dates popular Jewish historical consciousness to 1871. Myers pushes back with Graetz’s 1846 “Die Konstruktion der jüdischen Geschichte,” Frankel’s 1851 Monatsschrift, the first volume of Graetz’s Geschichte in 1853, and the Breslau seminary in 1854. He distinguishes historiography from scholarship and notes that the Wieseltier line about Wissenschaft des Judentums being born under philology rather than history is true for the founders but does not settle when history took over.
The closing line about Ehrenfreund announcing himself as an important new voice is the senior-historian blessing. Myers is now positioned to bestow field entry. The same voice that in 1988 called the Holocaust “an enigmatic series of events” whose “grand design still eludes human comprehension” now welcomes younger scholars into the historiographical turn. The two postures are continuous. In both cases Myers is curating the field, marking who counts as responsible, and keeping the coalition’s working assumptions intact.
What is absent is any pressure on Yerushalmi’s core claim. Zakhor argued that Jewish collective memory operated through ritual and liturgy for millennia and that modern Jewish historiography represented a break with that mode rather than its continuation. The argument is contestable and has been contested, notably by Amos Funkenstein. Myers does not engage the dispute. He treats Zakhor as the foundational moment and moves on. This is fine for a book review. It also shows the field’s orthodoxy. Yerushalmi is the name you invoke, not the name you argue with.
The prose is better than in 1988. Myers has learned to write. “An intoxicating victory in the Franco-Prussian War” carries the right period weight. “The complex and incomplete status of the turn to the past” is a real sentence. The review earns its length.
Myers is a competent, careful, coalition-aware historian of modern Jewish historiography who operates inside the institutional structures of American Jewish studies (Columbia graduate training, UCLA chair, JQR editorship) and does the work those structures reward. His analytical choices are the choices the field makes. His silences are the field’s silences. His generosity to younger scholars is the senior gatekeeper’s generosity. The Ehrenfreund review is him at his technical best, reviewing a book he can read at the level of dating, methodology, and theoretical lineage, and doing it fairly.
Resisting History: Historicism and Its Discontents in German-Jewish Thought (2003)
Myers discloses his stakes. His interest in Jewish anti-historicism is “unmistakably that of a professional historian and of a Jew—and, I must add, of a Jew for whom matters of belief and practice have become more vexing, consuming, and central with the passage of time.” By disclosing the stakes, Myers puts his cards on the table rather than producing pseudo-neutral scholarship that pretends distance from its subject. The framework credits this kind of disclosure because it lets readers calibrate their own vigilance accurately. Readers know what Myers is after and can evaluate the argumentation against that knowledge rather than being caught by an unstated position.
Second, the book takes seriously a position that the historicist mainstream would dismiss. Anti-historicism is, within academic history, something like a counter-tradition whose intellectual seriousness gets minimized. Myers’s four figures (Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, Leo Strauss, and Isaac Breuer) span substantial ideological range, from neo-Kantian philosophical Jew to Orthodox theological thinker to the figure who became the source of American political conservatism through his Chicago students. Selecting Strauss is notable. A scholar who wanted to play it safe within the coalition of historians of German-Jewish thought would probably not have put Strauss at the center of his book. Strauss is resistant to the dominant academic reading of modernity. Including him requires engaging his critique rather than dismissing it.
Third, the book’s central methodological claim resists simplification. Myers argues that anti-historicism operates “in tandem” with historicism rather than as its opposite, that his thinkers were “eager consumers and producers” of German culture while also critics of one of its dominant features, that cultural interaction is reciprocal rather than the one-way influence from dominant to passive recipient that the “influence” model implies. This refuses the easier narrative. The easier narrative would say German Jews assimilated into German historicism and these four thinkers were the ones who resisted. Myers’s argument is more complicated. The four thinkers were operating within the historicist culture while working to carve out domains (theology, metahistory, pre-modern political philosophy, Halakhah) that historicism could not fully colonize.
Fourth, the book acknowledges its own methodological predicament. Myers is writing historicist scholarship about anti-historicism. He cannot escape the methodological problem he is documenting. The Wolpe sermon example at the start makes this visible: the defender of non-literal Biblical faith makes his argument “in decidedly historicist fashion—by summoning up modern scholarly evidence to challenge the historicity of Exodus itself.” Myers sees this paradox and names it. He does not pretend to resolve it. He says he has not “overcome the periodic desire to leap beyond the historicist mode of cognition that defines my personal and professional being.” This self-implication is valuable because it reflects intellectual honesty rather than scholarly performance.
The book is about a jurisdictional contest. Historicism claims universal jurisdiction over the past. Anything that happened can be explained in terms of historical context, human causes, natural forces. This jurisdictional claim displaces the older theological jurisdiction under which God was the primary causal force. Myers’s four thinkers are resisting this jurisdictional imperialism by trying to preserve domains from historicist colonization. Cohen preserves neo-Kantian ethics. Rosenzweig preserves revelation as meta-historical event. Strauss preserves pre-modern political philosophy as accessing truths the historicist approach to political thought cannot access. Breuer preserves Halakhic existence as Metageschichte, outside ordinary historical time.
Each thinker is making a jurisdictional claim about what historicism cannot reach. The book takes these claims seriously as substantive intellectual positions rather than dismissing them as superseded by the victory of historical method. This is the work that the Alliance Theory lens would predict gets produced only under certain conditions: a scholar who has something like operational knowledge of the critique (Myers’s own Jewish religious ambivalence) combined with institutional security (tenure, UCLA) combined with a specialist audience that demands rigor rather than coalition performance.
The audience is specialist. The stakes are operational. Specialists in German-Jewish intellectual history will check claims about Cohen, Rosenzweig, Strauss, and Breuer against the primary and secondary literature they know. Myers’s reputation as a scholar depends on claims surviving scrutiny. The book is therefore disciplined in a way the VSI (Very Short Introductions) and the 2018 talk were not disciplined, because the specialist vigilance is much harder than the general-reader vigilance those other works face.
The framework also identifies something about the contrast with the VSI. The VSI has to compress 3,000 years into 35,000 words for general readers. Resisting History has space to develop arguments about individual thinkers. The compressed format produces distortions (the Ashkenazi-centric narrative Naar would push back on) that the specialist format does not produce. The differences between Myers’s works across formats are what his situations require, not expressions of a stable Myers-character that would produce the same work in any context.
Myers mentions he came to Kitaj’s painting for the cover through friendship with Kitaj after Kitaj’s move to Los Angeles. This small detail reveals something about how Myers’s scholarly work connects to his broader Los Angeles intellectual life. He is not just producing specialist scholarship in isolation. He is embedded in intellectual networks. Kitaj described the figure in the painting as possessed of “an aesthetic of entrapment and escape, an endless, tainted Galut-Passage.” This framing fits Myers’s own intellectual position as he describes it. He is a historicist who feels the anti-historicist pull, a Jew who cannot fully inhabit either the traditional religious framework or the purely secular academic framework. The Kitaj painting captures the position the book enacts.
Myers does what Yerushalmi taught him to do. He takes Jewish thinkers seriously on their own terms. He refuses the flattening narratives. He acknowledges his own stakes. He selects figures across ideological lines. He takes religious critiques of historicist academic practice seriously rather than dismissing them. He lets the reader see the methodological predicament rather than papering it over.
Myers stays within the German-Jewish frame in this book. He notes that other thinkers (Krochmal, Ahad Ha-am, Bergson, Arendt, Heschel, Kurzweil, Leibowitz) could have been included. The choice to stay with the Germans serves scholarly purposes (coherence, manageable scope) but also reproduces the canonical framing that positions German-Jewish thought as the primary site of modern Jewish intellectual contest. A different framing that included, say, Baruch Kurzweil or Yeshayahu Leibowitz (1903-1994) would produce a different picture of Jewish anti-historicism as a transnational intellectual phenomenon rather than a German episode.
“Editors’ Introduction.” Jewish Quarterly Review 94, no. 1 (2004)
The structural argument in this JQR editorial runs through three editorial moments. Abrahams and Montefiore in 1889 founded JQR as an English-language journal open to both “pure scholar” and “general reader,” with a stated commitment to the present as well as the past. Schechter and Adler in 1910 narrowed that vision, excluding material “not falling within the province of Jewish history, literature, philology, and archaeology” and setting aside the theological and present-facing content of the original. The new series that Horowitz and Myers are inaugurating in 2004 is their “third beginning,” and the stated intention is to recover the Abrahams-Montefiore breadth while preserving the Schechter-Adler scholarly rigor.
The word “haughtily” is the tell. Horowitz and Myers quote Schechter and Adler saying the journal “has passed from the hands of private individuals into those of a learned institution with a strict academic character” and describe this as “somewhat haughtily” explained. That adverb is a small critical act. The new editors are signaling that the Dropsie-era narrowing was not simply an increase in rigor but also an institutional posture that excluded legitimate forms of Jewish intellectual work. Their program is to reopen what Schechter and Adler closed.
The line “Recoveries, these reflections mark a kind of return of the repressed” is what jumps out when read alongside the 2010 centennial introduction. Myers used “Return of the Repressed” as his centennial title six years later, and here in 2004 the phrase first appears in the opening editorial. The centennial piece was a more explicit articulation of what the 2004 editorial announced programmatically. What was repressed in 1910, according to this reading, was the breadth of the original journal and its commitment to the present. The new editors are recovering it. The 2010 piece extends the diagnosis to name modern Jewish history as the repressed content. The 2004 piece is more general but the analytic move is the same.
The phrasing “the antiquarian alongside the postmodern” is the signature image. The antiquarian, which is the Schechter-Adler legacy of textual and philological scholarship, is to stand next to the postmodern, which is the late twentieth-century intellectual moment Myers will name again in the 2005 autobiography introduction. The journal will hold both together without choosing. The choice not to choose is a coalition position. It allows the field’s traditional textual scholarship to continue while opening the journal to newer methodological and disciplinary currents. A narrower editor would have chosen one side or the other. Horowitz and Myers refuse the choice.
The move toward “those proximate to, but not firmly within, the domain of Jewish studies: scholars of other fields, as well as writers, artists, and thinkers” is the cross-disciplinary opening that runs through the whole decade. The 2013 Hartman forum, with Hartman as the Yale comparatist who crossed into Jewish studies, is a direct enactment of this opening. The 2004 America issue with Hollinger the Berkeley Americanist contributing is another. The 2010 centennial with Morris-Reich on Simmel and Boas is another. The editorial program stated here in 2004 produces the curatorial choices across the tenure.
The “fusing detachment and attachment” or “critical method and a sympathetic feel” formulation is the methodological statement. This is Myers and Horowitz acknowledging that the pure-scholar posture of Schechter-Adler treated attachment as a scholarly disqualification, and that the new editors do not accept that posture. Scholars of Jewish studies are often also Jews, often care about Jewish life, often have relationships with the materials they study that exceed pure analysis. The Schechter-Adler response was to suppress attachment and perform detachment. Abrahams and Montefiore had been more comfortable holding both. The new editors are claiming the Abrahams-Montefiore model is better suited to where Jewish studies is in 2004. This is consistent with the broader move in Jewish studies, and in humanistic disciplines generally, away from positivist detachment and toward self-reflexive scholarship that acknowledges the researcher’s position. Myers would return to this in 2005 with the autobiography issue and again in 2013 with Appelfeld.
The phrase “an ironic moment of increased self-reflection and more fragmented knowledge” names the scholarly moment as hyper-reflexive and fragmented. The hyper-reflexivity is the postmodern inheritance. The fragmentation is the proliferation of subfields, methods, and identity-based specializations that characterized Jewish studies by 2004. A journal faced with this moment has to choose whether to reinforce the fragmentation by specializing further or to work against it by hosting conversations across the fragments. The new editors choose the latter. Their forum format, their theme issues, their invitation to outside scholars, their commitment to range, all serve this anti-fragmentation project.
What is not here, and what the piece quietly declines to do, is name any specific coalition commitments. The editorial is programmatic rather than ideological. It talks about “the manifold Jewish experience” and “the shared work of intellectual recovery and rejuvenation.” It does not say what the manifold should include or exclude. It does not say what the recovery should recover. It does not position the journal politically with respect to Israel, American Jewish life, the religious-secular divide, or the place of Jewish studies inside the broader academy. The absence is deliberate. A new editorial team announcing cannot afford to make enemies on the first page. Later issues will make the coalition commitments more legible. The 2004 piece just sets the frame.
The acknowledgments at the end are the institutional map. David Goldenberg is credited as the outgoing editor of fifteen years. David Ruderman is credited as the director of the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at Penn, the institution that houses JQR. Natalie Dohrmann is named as executive editor and would remain in that role through the Myers tenure. The University of Pennsylvania Press is named as the publishing partner. These are the people and institutions that made the editorial tenure possible. Ruderman, whose father’s diary from Mississippi Myers would feature in the 2004 America issue later that year, is the key institutional figure. He brought Horowitz and Myers into JQR and gave them the editorial platform from which they would do their decade of work.
The Horowitz-Myers partnership deserves a word. Elliott Horowitz was the scholar of medieval and early modern Jewish cultural history, best known for his controversial book Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence, published in 2006 two years into this editorial tenure. That book argued that the Purim festival had historically carried a legacy of real violence against Christians, not just the symbolic violence of the Purim play, and that modern Jewish historians had written this out of the tradition. The argument caused significant debate and Horowitz was attacked from multiple directions. Myers’s repeated tributes to Horowitz in the later introductions, especially the “brilliant and dearly departed” phrase in the 2022 Eastern European forum, should be read in this light. Horowitz was a scholar willing to say uncomfortable things about Jewish historical material, and the Horowitz-Myers editorial partnership hosted a journal that valued that willingness. Horowitz died in 2017 at the age of 63. The JQR under Myers alone after that is a different journal, though the continuity is substantial.
The diction of the editorial is a bit more formal and a bit more performatively literary than the later Myers voice. “It behooves us to rethink the sharply drawn lines of demarcation.” “We are poised to embark upon the journey.” The phrasing has some of the ceremonial register appropriate to an inaugural editorial. The later Myers, by 2010 and certainly by 2019, writes more directly and with fewer flourishes. The 2004 piece is finding its voice. The voice is still bilaterally shared with Horowitz here, and the prose reads like two scholars working to find a common editorial idiom.
What the 2004 editorial does, read in the context of the full arc, is lay out the program that the next fifteen years of editorial work will execute. The commitment to range across periods, the welcoming of disciplinary outsiders, the refusal to choose between antiquarian and postmodern, the recovery of what Schechter-Adler repressed, the emphasis on fusing detachment and attachment, the anti-fragmentation project, the curatorial work of forums and theme issues, the willingness to feature contested material, all of this is named in the opening editorial and then enacted issue by issue. The 2010 centennial is the midpoint summary. The 2019 bicentennial is the late summary. The 2021 and 2022 forums are continuations. The 2013 pieces on Hartman and Appelfeld are the moments when Myers’s own diasporist sensibility becomes most audible. The whole tenure hangs together as a project.
The project is a coalition project in a broader sense than the narrow Jewish-political sense. It is a project of maintaining the coherence and prestige of Jewish studies as an academic field during a period when the field was simultaneously expanding into new subject matter and becoming more methodologically diverse. The Schechter-Adler model of philological rigor was too narrow for this period. The purely identity-based model that some ethnic-studies fields adopted would have been too thin. Horowitz and Myers chose a middle path of serious scholarly range, and they executed it consistently across fifteen years. The field is in better shape for having had that editorial tenure than it would have been without it. The specific intellectual positions they advanced are contestable, but the institutional work was done well.
The question mark in the 2004 America title, the “return of the repressed” phrase here and again in 2010, the “ascending order of significance” line in 2013, the “unsettle fixed narratives” closer in 2019, the Tworek placement at the end of 2022, these are all variations on the same editorial gesture. Host the material, frame it carefully, let the implications emerge, do not overreach. The gesture is characteristic. The 2004 editorial is where it begins.
“America?” Jewish Quarterly Review 94, no. 4 (2004)
The title “America?” with the question mark is the tell. The issue marks the 350th anniversary of Jewish settlement in what became the United States, and Myers is signaling from the title that the commemoration will not be a celebration.
The frame is set in the third paragraph. “The aim is less to celebrate than to investigate, probe, and question the American Jewish experience.” This is an editorial choice to refuse the festival register. 1654 was the year twenty-three Sephardic Jews arrived from Recife in New Amsterdam and were promptly met with Peter Stuyvesant’s attempt to expel them. The standard celebratory narrative treats their arrival as the founding moment of American Jewry and glides past the reception. Kiron’s opening essay apparently reopens the question, asking whether 1654 is the right starting point and whether “America” should mean the United States or the Americas as a whole. Myers endorses the reopening. The project of decentering the Ashkenazi-American story runs across the first decade of Myers’s editorship.
The exceptionalism question is where the introduction does its work. American Jewish exceptionalism is the claim that no Jewish community in history has been as affluent, successful, or well-integrated as American Jewry. This is the master narrative of twentieth-century American Jewish self-understanding. It underwrites the philanthropic apparatus, the institutional confidence, the political self-image, and the comparative dismissal of European Jewish history as “lachrymose” (the term Myers uses, borrowing from Salo Baron’s famous critique of the lachrymose theory of Jewish history). The exceptionalist narrative also underwrites a particular American Jewish relationship to Israel, where American Jewry becomes the diaspora that does not need Israel in the way European Jewry did, because America is different.
The Nadell piece on Gerda Lerner and the 1954 tercentenary is the clearest diasporist-feminist recovery move in the issue. Lerner later became one of the founders of American women’s history as an academic field, but in 1954 she was a Jewish communal intellectual writing a musical review for a women’s club in Brooklyn. The review apparently used the tercentenary to insert Jewish women’s experience into the male-dominated American Jewish narrative. Nadell is doing recovery work on Lerner, and Myers is doing canon-expansion work by featuring Nadell.
David Ruderman is a major historian of early modern Jewish cultural history and was the director of the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at Penn, the institution that houses JQR under Myers’s editorship. Ruderman rereading his father’s diary from the 1960s, about a northern rabbi’s sojourns in Mississippi, opens onto the complicated American Jewish relationship to the civil rights era. The standard narrative has American Jews as prominent allies of the civil rights movement. The more complicated story involves Jewish Southerners who were embedded in Southern racial norms, Jewish Northerners whose progressive ideals collided with their Southern coreligionists’ caution, and Jewish institutional positions that shifted as the movement radicalized. Myers compresses this into “the clash between progressive Jewish ideals and deep-seated racial and social norms in the South” and “Jews, like others, are to be found in all venues, social classes, and political camps.” The second formulation is significant. It refuses the American Jewish self-image of uniform liberal-progressive commitment and names Jewish political heterogeneity as a fact.
The Leon Uris (1924-2003) and Charles Liebman (1934-2003) obituaries are striking. Uris wrote Exodus, the 1958 novel that did more than any single work to shape postwar American Jewish identification with Israel. Liebman was a serious scholar of contemporary Jewish politics who spent his career between Israeli and American contexts and wrote penetrating work on American Jewish religious life and on Israeli religious-secular divisions. The pairing puts popular culture alongside scholarship, which Myers names. It also pairs the novelistic construction of American Jewish Zionism with the scholarly study of Israeli-American Jewish relations. Liebman’s work on American Jewish religion, especially The Ambivalent American Jew (1973), is an important source for understanding American Jewish coalition dynamics. Featuring him alongside Uris is a way of honoring both the popular and the critical traditions.
The Albert Winn photographic essay is the most experimental inclusion. Winn was a gay Jewish photographer who documented abandoned Jewish summer camps and overlaid his own HIV-positive experience onto the documentation. Summer camp is one of the central institutions of postwar American Jewish formation, and abandoned camps evoke the demographic shift and institutional decline the camp movement has experienced since its mid-century peak. Winn’s photographs pair this decline with AIDS-era mortality and produce what Myers calls a juxtaposition of “the rapid and gleeful embourgeoisement of Jews in America” with “a Nazi concentration camp.” The phrasing is striking. Myers is saying that the most intimate images of American Jewish prosperity, summer camp photos, can tip suddenly into images of European Jewish destruction, and that this tipping is constitutive of American Jewish experience. The exceptionalist narrative promises separation from the European story. The camp photographs refuse the separation.
The closing sentence is measured. “We do not expect to find fixed borders or definitive answers. Somewhat more modestly, we insist only on asking challenging questions.” This is appropriate to the 350th anniversary context. A triumphalist editorial response to the commemoration would have been easy and unhelpful. A skeptical editorial response risks sounding ungrateful for American Jewish prosperity. Myers threads the needle by framing the issue as investigative rather than celebratory, placing the exceptionalism question at the center, and letting the contributors do the specific work of complication.
This piece sits just before the 2005 Ehrenfreund review and the 2005 autobiography introduction. The editorial voice is already recognizably Myers. The preference for staging questions rather than answering them, the curatorial eye for pieces that complicate received narratives, the quiet diasporist sensibility, and the careful avoidance of ideological pronouncement are all present. What is not yet present is the willingness to name the field’s repressed content that you see in the 2010 centennial introduction. “America?” questions American Jewish exceptionalism but does not name the coalition functions of the exceptionalist narrative. It opens space for questioning without saying what the questioning should reveal.
This is Myers in his second year at JQR, already confident enough to refuse a celebratory frame at a major commemorative moment, already curatorially committed to complications and questionings, but not yet willing to name the coalition structure of the field from outside. The willingness to name comes later. Here, the work is to make space.
“Editor’s Introduction.” Jewish Quarterly Review 95, no. 1 (2005)
The opening frame reproduces the standard story about Jewish autobiography. Jews wrote commentary on everything except themselves until Glikl of Hameln and Leon Modena broke the seal in the seventeenth century, and modern Jewish self-writing emerged from a tradition that had suppressed the personal voice. Myers hedges the claim with “we are told” and “this at least is the received wisdom,” which is the prudent move. The story is contested and the Chajes and Moseley pieces he is introducing are both engaging the contest.
The Chajes piece is the more interesting challenge to the received story. Jacques Presser’s concept of “egodocuments” is the key term. It covers autobiographical expression embedded in other genres rather than standalone autobiography. If you accept egodocuments as evidence of Jewish self-writing, the sixteenth-century Sephardic kabbalists turn out to have produced a substantial body of such material, and the pinkas tradition of community record-books contains more autobiographical voice than the standard account credits. The received story, that Jewish autobiography begins belatedly in the seventeenth century, depends on a narrow definition of the genre. Widen the definition and the story changes.
Moseley’s argument is the rival one. He apparently accepts a narrower definition and dates Hebrew and Yiddish autobiography proper to Eastern Europe in response to Rousseau, with a century-long lag behind Western European autobiographical literature. The belatedness thesis, rooted in the distinct Russian reception of Rousseau, keeps the standard story intact while adding nuance about why Eastern European Jewish autobiography emerged later than its Western analogues.
Myers places the two pieces in productive tension. Chajes directly engages Moseley’s dating, which the introduction notes. The juxtaposition lets the issue do field-internal argument rather than presenting a settled position.
The self-reflexive frame in the second paragraph is the piece’s one coalition-visible move. Myers names “the postmodern” as an era of hyper-reflexivity that produces memoir booms and scholarly interest in autobiography. He situates the issue inside that cultural moment. The phrasing “we inhabit, or perhaps have just exited” is a small tell. In 2005, the postmodern was starting to feel like a period term rather than a live present. The intellectual world was moving into the identity-studies phase and the digital-media phase that would structure the next two decades. Myers catches this in a parenthetical. The catch is accurate.
The connection between postmodern self-reflection and the memoir boom is worth thinking about. Myers names three consequences of the hyper-reflexive moment: the boom in autobiography and memoir, the scholarly commitment to explore “the byways of their own formation by inquiring into the life and work of inspired predecessors,” and the new scholarly interest in the genre of autobiography. The middle item is the coalition-relevant one. Scholars in the historiographical turn, which Myers has been writing about since his Ehrenfreund review two years earlier, study predecessors as a way of studying themselves. The Yerushalmi-Schorsch-Meyer generation of elders, the Biale-Feiner-Heschel-Hoffman-Raz-Krakotzkin-Wiese younger cohort he named in 2003, the whole historiographical project is a form of scholarly self-accounting. The autobiography issue is, among other things, a way for the field to think about its own relationship to self-writing.
The Elliott Horowitz piece Myers mentions is Horowitz sharing “the origins and depths of his own affections for autobiography.” This is the editor of JQR writing personally in the journal he edits, which is unusual. Horowitz was the scholar of Jewish material culture and popular religion who died young in 2017, and his writing voice was one of the more distinctive in American Jewish studies. His presence as coeditor gave JQR under Myers a particular quality. Myers’ 2022 Eastern European introduction called Horowitz “the brilliant and dearly departed” and noted their seventeen-year coeditorship. Here in 2005, Horowitz is alive and writing personally about autobiography. The grief in the later piece is the grief for someone missed.
The Flusser retrospective by John Gager is the other piece worth noting. David Flusser was the Israeli scholar of Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity who taught at Hebrew University and whose work on Jesus the Jew influenced a generation of scholars in Jewish-Christian relations. Gager is the Princeton scholar of early Christianity who was close to Flusser. The retrospective in the autobiography issue is a case of scholarly self-accounting through the life of a predecessor. Gager situates his own work by reflecting on Flusser’s. This is the middle item in Myers’ list of consequences from the hyper-reflexive moment. Scholars examining their own formation by writing about inspired teachers.
The Biale Book Forum is another curatorial choice. David Biale’s Cultures of the Jews was published in 2002, a major multi-volume project that reorganized Jewish history around cultural history rather than political or religious history, and presented Jewish cultures as plural and geographically diverse rather than as a single Ashkenazi-centered narrative. Myers placing a forum on Biale in the same issue as the autobiography pieces quietly links the two projects. Biale’s cultural-history approach and the autobiographical turn both decenter the received master narrative of Jewish history. The autobiographical turn decenters by recovering individual voices. The cultural-history turn decenters by recovering plural geographies. Both moves are part of the broader diasporist and particularist reorientation of Jewish studies in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first.
The three review essays on recent memoirs are by Petrovsky-Shtern, Weissberg, and Meltzer. These are substantial scholars. Petrovsky-Shtern on Russian-Jewish topics, Weissberg on German-Jewish cultural history, Meltzer on French intellectual history. The geographic spread is deliberate. Myers is presenting Jewish autobiography as a multi-national phenomenon rather than an American or Israeli one.
The closing sentence is the standard Myers curatorial sign-off. “The very balance of tradition and innovation, in genre and content, that we sought to introduce in our inaugural volume, and struggle to calibrate anew each time.” Tradition-and-innovation framing is as conservative a phrase as an editor of a scholarly journal can use. It signals reassurance to the field’s establishment while claiming forward motion. In 2005, early in his tenure, Myers was still earning trust. By 2010 with the centennial issue, by 2013 with Hartman and Appelfeld, by 2019 with the bicentennial, the voice becomes more distinctively his. This 2005 piece is the editor still settling into the chair.
What is not here is as interesting as what is. No political content. No coalition signaling of the kind that becomes audible later. No diasporist thesis. No critique of the field’s blind spots. The autobiographical topic could have been used to ask questions about whose autobiographies get read and whose get ignored, about the gender politics of Jewish self-writing (Glikl is named but not developed, and the women’s memoir tradition is a serious subject), about the place of Sephardi and Mizrahi self-writing in the canon. None of this happens. The piece is craft-competent and ideologically quiet.
The quietness may be intentional. A new editor signaling competence by doing the genre well rather than announcing a program. By 2010 Myers has the standing to title a centennial introduction “The Return of the Repressed” and name what the journal excluded for its first century. In 2005 he is introducing an issue on autobiography by staging a Chajes-Moseley disagreement and letting his coeditor write personally. The move is appropriate to the career moment.
Myers calls the Moseley piece “magisterial.” Marcus Moseley’s book Being for Myself Alone: Origins of Jewish Autobiography was a major work of the period, published by Stanford around this time. Myers is marking Moseley’s standing. The Chajes piece, meanwhile, is called “speculative and imaginative,” which is warm but not quite the same register. Chajes was at Haifa and was the younger scholar. The diction differentiates where the two sit in the scholarly hierarchy. Myers is doing gentle status-work in the diction, which is part of what editors of major journals do.
“Philosophy and Kabbalah in Wissenschaft des Judentums: Rethinking the Narrative of Neglect.” Studia Judaica (Cluj-Napoca) 16 (2008)
The canonical Scholem narrative, which Myers identifies in the opening paragraphs, holds that nineteenth-century Wissenschaft des Judentums scholars systematically neglected Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism. Scholem told this story in From Berlin to Jerusalem and elsewhere. He recounts the anecdote about Philipp Bloch, the octogenarian Kabbalah scholar, who in 1922 responded to Scholem’s youthful enthusiasm for Kabbalah by blurting out “What, am I supposed to read this rubbish, too?” The anecdote has become iconic. It symbolizes for many readers the dismissive attitude nineteenth-century German-Jewish scholars supposedly held toward Jewish mysticism. Scholem presents himself as the heroic scholar who rescued Kabbalah from this institutional neglect and placed it at the center of Jewish studies where it now sits.
Myers’s argument is that the narrative, “if not exhaustive, is somewhat episodic.” He is being polite. The argument he makes is that the canonical narrative is wrong. Wissenschaft scholars did not systematically neglect Kabbalah. They engaged it seriously across a range of positions. Some were hostile (Graetz). Some were sympathetic (Jellinek, Landauer, Joel). Some were agnostic. The range of engagement was substantial. The story of systematic neglect is a construction that served Scholem’s purposes — positioning himself as heroic rescuer of neglected tradition, establishing his scholarly program as necessary rather than merely incremental.
What Myers does in the piece is recover the figures whom Scholem’s narrative minimized. Adolphe Franck, whose 1843 La Kabbale ou, La philosophie religieuse des Hébreux was “perhaps the first systematic account of the Kabbalah in modern times.” Meyer Heinrich Landauer, who argued against Moshe de Leon authorship of the Zohar decades before Scholem did. Adolph Jellinek, who debated Zoharic composition with Scholem in 1925 and produced substantial Kabbalah scholarship at Leipzig and later at the Vienna rabbinical seminary. David Joel, the Breslau seminary professor whose work was “the polar opposite of the paradigmatic Wissenschaft des Judentums scholar.” Lazarus Bendavid. Franz Joseph Molitor, the Christian scholar whose four-volume work on Kabbalah was known to the young Scholem.
Each figure is named. Each engaged Kabbalah in substantial ways. Each gets minimized or erased in the Scholem narrative. Myers is not making a general argument about neglect. He is naming scholars whose work shows the neglect narrative to be factually inadequate. This is the kind of close scholarly work that builds a case rather than asserting one.
Myers shows that the curricula of nineteenth-century rabbinical seminaries (Breslau, Berlin, Budapest, Vienna) routinely included courses in Religionsphilosophie that focused on Maimonides, Saadya Gaon, Judah Halevi. Kabbalah was less central but not absent. Jellinek taught Kabbalah at the Vienna rabbinical seminary. The institutional picture is more complicated than the simple philosophy-triumphant-over-mysticism narrative suggests. Jewish mysticism had institutional homes. The homes were less prominent than philosophy. But they existed. Scholem’s narrative treated them as if they did not exist.
Scholem was a product of the institutional Wissenschaft tradition he claimed to be rescuing Jewish mysticism from. He knew these figures existed. He debated Jellinek publicly in 1925. He read Molitor as a young man. His narrative of neglect was constructed despite his knowledge of counter-evidence. The construction served scholarly-political purposes for Scholem’s own program. It was not innocent oversight. It was strategic narrative-making.
Myers does not quite say this. He says it more diplomatically. But the argument he builds supports the stronger conclusion. Scholem constructed a self-serving narrative that minimized his predecessors to elevate his own contribution. The construction has features of scholarly bad faith that Myers’s careful counter-narrative makes visible.
Myers is willing to make this argument about his own teacher’s teacher. Scholem was the towering figure Yerushalmi revered and whom Myers has cited throughout his career as canonical. Yerushalmi was Myers’s teacher. The lineage runs Scholem-Yerushalmi-Myers. Myers is showing that the foundational figure in the lineage constructed narratives that served his purposes rather than tracking the historical record. The filial respect Myers shows forScholem elsewhere does not prevent him from naming ways Scholem got things wrong.
In The Stakes of History Myers showed that Yerushalmi offered multiple contradictory models of the historian across his career and that the Zakhor position should not be treated as Yerushalmi’s settled view. That was respectful filial correction. Here Myers shows that Scholem’s famous narrative of Wissenschaft neglect was false. This is more substantial revisionism. Myers is willing to challenge the foundational figures in his own scholarly lineage when the evidence requires it. He is not a simple disciple of Scholem or Yerushalmi. He is a scholarly descendant who takes the lineage seriously enough to correct it where correction is warranted.
Instead of asking “did Wissenschaft scholars neglect Kabbalah,” Myers asks “where in the nineteenth-century intellectual universe were the resources for Kabbalah study located.” The reframing changes what counts as evidence. Jewish theological seminaries count. Christian Romantic philosophers who engaged Jewish mysticism (Molitor, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer) count. The general German academic world’s interest in folklore, mysticism, and vernacular religious traditions (the Grimms, Arnim, Brentano) counts. Once the frame expands beyond whether Kabbalah was a major topic at German universities, the picture shifts. Kabbalah had an institutional presence across multiple locations that Scholem’s frame excluded.
Myers reframes questions to make new evidence visible. The reframing often serves a generous-reconstructive purpose. He wants to restore complex figures and traditions that earlier narratives have flattened or erased. The Täubler piece does this for Täubler. The Rawidowicz book does this for Rawidowicz. This piece does it for nineteenth-century Wissenschaft scholars whom Scholem’s narrative had diminished.
The footnote on Christoph Schulte’s Die jüdische Aufklärung and his book on Meyer Heinrich Landauer notes that there are recent German scholarly works that have been recovering the figures Scholem minimized. Myers is working in an active scholarly conversation. He is not alone in finding Scholem’s narrative inadequate. A whole generation of German and German-American scholars has been restoring the complexity of nineteenth-century Wissenschaft engagement with Kabbalah that Scholem suppressed. Myers is adding his voice to this conversation. The scholarly community he operates within shares his willingness to correct the canonical narrative.
Myers writes about the general nineteenth-century German academic interest in mysticism and folklore. “Where in fact should we look? Of the four faculties typically found in the German university — philosophy, law, medicine, and theology — one would think that the study of mysticism could be housed in either the first or the last.” He maps the institutional locations where mysticism was studied. He notes Friedrich Paulsen’s observation that “the philological-historical sciences” (and the mathematical-physical sciences) were “conventionally divided between” “the humanistic side of that divide” and the philological-historical side. “Of course, the growing presence of philosophy, reflected by the new romanticist currents.”
Myers tracks what was happening in German academic disciplines at each moment. The picture he builds is complex and textured. It rewards close attention. The Scholem narrative treated the nineteenth-century German academic world as monolithic in its rationalism and as uniformly dismissive of mysticism. Myers shows that the world was more variegated. Romanticist currents made mysticism a legitimate topic. Folkloristic studies made popular religious traditions visible. Christian scholars engaged with Jewish mystical texts. The institutional universe had openings for Kabbalah study that Scholem’s narrative hid.
If Scholem got the nineteenth century wrong in this way, what else might he have gotten wrong? Myers does not ask this directly. But the question is available. Scholem’s authority in Jewish studies has been nearly absolute. His narratives have shaped what generations of scholars study and how they study it. If his self-interested narrative construction operated in the neglect-of-Kabbalah story, it might have operated elsewhere. Reading Scholem with the critical sophistication Myers brings in this piece raises uncomfortable questions about the entire canonical framework Scholem established.
Scholem claimed jurisdiction over how to understand Jewish mysticism and its nineteenth-century reception. Myers is challenging that jurisdictional claim. The challenge is not frontal but substantial. Every figure Myers recovers is a datum against Scholem’s framework. The accumulated data undermine the framework. Myers is contesting who gets to define the narrative of nineteenth-century Jewish scholarly engagement with mysticism.
If Wissenschaft scholars engaged Kabbalah seriously, then contemporary Jewish scholarly engagement with mysticism does not need to operate from Scholem’s position. Alternative traditions of Kabbalah scholarship become available. The figures Myers recovers (Franck, Landauer, Jellinek, Joel, Bloch) can be engaged as predecessors whose approaches differ from Scholem’s and whose work might support different contemporary scholarly projects. The authority Scholem has held over the field loosens when his narrative proves inadequate.
The opening move in which he describes Scholem’s anecdote about Philipp Bloch is framed. Myers treats the anecdote as rhetorically successful rather than factually reliable. “It is a fair measure of the extraordinary impact which Scholem had on the field of Jewish studies that this kind of dismissive attitude toward Kabbalah, imputed by Scholem to his German forebears, is a relic of the past.” The phrasing is careful. Scholem’s impact is real. The dismissive attitude Scholem imputed might not be fully accurate as historical description. Myers distinguishes between Scholem’s effect and Scholem’s accuracy. He is reading Scholem critically while respecting Scholem’s stature.
The piece ends with Myers noting that “the category of Religionsphilosophie in Wissenschaft des Judentums” remains “an important desideratum in nineteenth-century Jewish studies.” He is calling for further work. He is not making a final claim. He is opening a scholarly conversation. This is characteristic of his best scholarly work. Careful mapping. Close recovery. Invitation to continue. The polemical op-ed writing operates differently. The scholarly work is an invitation to conversation.
The willingness to take on Scholem shows Myers operating with scholarly confidence. He is not a junior scholar deferring to canonical authority. He is an established scholar willing to contest canonical authority when evidence requires it.
The Dinur template says: the scholar claims objectivity, an ideology saturates his work, trace the biographical formation that produced the ideology. The Kabbalah template runs at a different level. It asks: who installed the received narrative of rupture and neglect, what did that installation do for the installer, and what continuities does the narrative hide? Myers opens by naming Scholem as the narrative’s architect. Scholem made the Wissenschaft scholars look hostile to Kabbalah because Scholem’s own revolutionary self-presentation required predecessors who had been blind. Myers rehabilitates Landauer, Joël, Franck, Jellinek, and Bloch to show that the engagement with Kabbalah had been continuous, serious, and scholarly. The ostensible rupture was a coalition product. The hero made the story that made him heroic.
Apply this to Myers.
Myers has installed a narrative of rupture in American Jewish historiography. Before Yerushalmi’s Zakhor, Jewish historians wrote inside ideological closures they could not see. After Zakhor, critical self-awareness became possible. A suppressed pluralism can be recovered. Diasporic voices silenced by Zionist state-building can be restored. Rawidowicz’s excised Palestinian-refugee essay becomes the emblem of what the old historiography buried. Myers and his generation stand at the recovery moment, doing what the old guard could not.
The narrative serves Myers the way the Wissenschaft-neglect narrative served Scholem. It makes a continuous scholarly tradition look like a rupture. It casts predecessors as ideologically closed so that the current project appears to open what was closed. It authorizes institutional positions (Luskin Center, Kindness Institute, NIF presidency, JQR co-editorship) as the institutional face of critical awakening rather than as the latest chapter of the same American Jewish studies establishment Dinur’s generation built.
The Kabbalah method asks what continuities the rupture narrative hides. Several.
Yerushalmi was a Zionist. His Zakhor critique of historicism did not reject Zionism; it reframed Jewish historiography’s relationship to traditional Jewish memory. Myers inherits the reframing and treats Yerushalmi as the break from Dinur-era closure. The break is overstated. Yerushalmi taught at the Jewish Theological Seminary and Columbia, institutions as committed to the Zionist consensus as the Hebrew University ever was. The shift from Dinur to Yerushalmi to Myers is a shift within the liberal-Zionist academic coalition, not a departure from it. Myers’s narrative turns an internal evolution into an epochal rupture.
The Jerusalem School was more plural than Myers’s narrative allows. Baer, Scholem, Baron (Myers’s own teacher Yerushalmi’s teacher), and others argued among themselves about periodization, continuity, messianism, and the place of Kabbalah and mysticism. Myers knows this. His first book documents it. Yet when he writes for non-specialist audiences, the Jerusalem School flattens into a single ideologically saturated project against which his own recovery work defines itself. The flattening does for Myers what Scholem’s flattening of Wissenschaft did for Scholem. A differentiated predecessor tradition becomes a unified other.
Religious Zionist scholarship disappears from Myers’s map. The Gush Emunim rabbis, the Har Etzion yeshiva world, the Bar-Ilan Jewish philosophy faculty, the settlement movement’s historians: they work on the same sources Myers works on, produce peer-reviewed scholarship, hold credentials from the same universities. Myers’s narrative of critical recovery treats them as unserious or treats them not at all. They fail to appear in his account of Jewish historiographical development. The silence is functionally equivalent to Scholem’s treatment of the Wissenschaft engagements with Kabbalah that did not fit his rupture story.
Haredi scholarship gets partial treatment in American Shtetl as ethnographic and legal object. It does not appear as a scholarly interlocutor. The ArtScroll historical project, the Haredi biographical literature, the Chabad historiographical enterprise, the Mir Yeshiva and Lakewood intellectual output: Myers does not engage these as scholarship. They exist as communities to be studied. The Wissenschaft scholars treated Kabbalists the same way Myers treats Haredi scholars. Myers’s essay rebukes the Wissenschaft posture. His own posture toward Haredi intellectual life reproduces it.
The new material the Kabbalah method generates: Myers is a master of the narrative-of-neglect genre. Between Jew and Arab rehabilitates Rawidowicz. The Eternal Dissident rehabilitates Rabbi Leonard Beerman. The Luskin Center rehabilitates historical voices left out of public policy debates. The Kindness Institute positions against a neglectful culture of hostility. The Initiative to Study Hate positions against a neglectful academic indifference. The rehabilitation-of-the-neglected is Myers’s signature move. He did not invent it. He inherited it from Scholem via Yerushalmi. He has institutionalized it at UCLA.
The rehabilitation move has a shadow. Scholem rehabilitated Kabbalah by neglecting the scholars who had already taken Kabbalah seriously. His recovery operation required its own erasures. Myers’s rehabilitation of suppressed diasporic and dissenting voices requires analogous erasures: of the religious Zionist scholar, of the Haredi intellectual, of the right-wing American Jewish historian, of the Mizrahi scholar who refuses the Ashkenazi-German-Jewish genealogy Myers reveres. The continuities across these traditions and Myers’s own are closer than his narrative of rupture allows. A more honest map might place Myers inside a continuous American liberal-Zionist scholarly tradition that stretches from Salo Baron through Yerushalmi to the present, a tradition whose internal arguments are real but whose coalition boundaries hold firm.
The Dinur analysis showed Myers how ideology saturates a historiographical method. The Kabbalah analysis shows something harder. Myers’s own scholarship is structured by the same move he exposes in Scholem: a narrative of rupture that makes the narrator’s intervention look like a break rather than a continuation, and that silently drops the predecessors and contemporaries whose work does not support the rupture story.
Between Jew and Arab: The Lost Voice of Simon Rawidowicz (2008)
Myers published a scholarly book in 2008 advocating acknowledgment of Jewish responsibility for Palestinian refugee displacement and calling the refugee question “a matter of political urgency…as well as of compassion for the well-being of the displaced” and “above all an important test of Jewish morality.” The positions are Rawidowicz’s. Myers frames them as Rawidowicz’s. But the book is explicit that Myers holds the same positions: “Like Rawidowicz, I have become unsettled by the intoxicating effects of political power and sovereignty on the Jews.”
Rawidowicz was the “Lonely Man” who wrote a chapter in the mid-1950s advocating Palestinian refugee repatriation and then did not publish it. The chapter sat in a drawer until Myers found it in Rawidowicz’s son’s basement in Newton, Massachusetts. Myers translated it with Arnold Band (the mentor he dedicates the book to). Myers published it. The book is Myers doing what Rawidowicz could not bring himself to do. Myers notes: “Rawidowicz was aware that his words in ‘Between Jew and Arab‘ would elicit stiff opposition from fellow Jews, especially in the Diaspora where the need to uphold the image of a noble and invincible Israel is often stronger than in Israel. And yet, at the point of publishing his most trenchant and provocative challenge to his people, words failed him.”
Rawidowicz joins Hannah Arendt, Martin Buber, Hans Kohn, Judah Magnes, Akiva Ernst Simon, Mordechai Kaplan, Horace Kallen, and others as part of a “nonstatist forms of Jewish nationalism” tradition that Myers credits Noam Pianko with mapping. This is a counter-tradition within Jewish political thought that existed alongside mainstream statist Zionism and that has been marginalized in communal discourse. Myers is rehabilitating this tradition scholarly piece by scholarly piece. Rawidowicz is one entry point. The Ellenson festschrift was another. The Yerushalmi volume was another. Each of Myers’s scholarly projects does this work.
Myers argues that Jewish intellectual tradition includes positions that the current communal consensus excludes. The exclusion is not natural. It is the product of historical processes that made statist Zionism dominant and other Jewish nationalist positions marginal. By recovering Rawidowicz, Myers claims jurisdiction for a Jewish position on the refugee question that has the advantage of being grounded in Jewish thought, Jewish historical experience, and Jewish moral categories. The position is not imported from outside Judaism. It is internal to Judaism and has been suppressed. Recovering it is both scholarly and political work.
The S. Yizhar 1990 quote Myers highlights is directly relevant: “The Palestinian Question is not an Arab Question, but entirely a Jewish Question… It is a question for the Jews and a question for Judaism. And instead of continuing to run away from it, one must stop and turn to face it, turn and look at it directly.” This is the position Myers argues in every op-ed now. Yizhar, Rawidowicz, Myers — a Jewish tradition of treating the Palestinian question as a Jewish moral question. The Al Chet additions to the Yom Kippur liturgy are the ritual expression of this exact commitment. The liturgy names the sins committed in Jewish name. The framing is continuous with the tradition Myers has been mapping for decades.
The dedication and the references matter. The book is dedicated to Arnold J. Band — “Teacher, Colleague, Friend.” Band taught at UCLA. Myers frames himself as Band’s student. The connection to Band shows up in the Ellenson festschrift material and in the Yerushalmi volume too. Band is the constant. He is the UCLA connection that goes back to Myers’s earliest years there. The intellectual community Myers operates in is built around UCLA, around Band, around a network of scholars who share certain commitments. This community is where the scholarly work gets done. The op-eds reach further but depend on this community for their substance.
The “Lonely Man” designation. Rawidowicz used it as a pseudonym. Myers quotes it with clear self-identification. The scholar who says things the community does not want to hear risks isolation. Rawidowicz’s isolation was substantial. His chapter was never published in his lifetime. His most radical positions remained silent. Myers has not been as isolated. He has institutional positions, platforms, networks. But the “Lonely Man” frame acknowledges the psychological cost of saying things one’s community does not want to hear. The 2023 NPR piece mentioned earlier — where Myers discussed feeling isolated for calling for empathy amid the Israel-Hamas conflict — reads differently when you know he has been identifying with Rawidowicz’s “Lonely Man” for decades.
Myers writes: “Diaspora communities in general are often more conformist (and conservative) in their politics than the public — and at times, the government — back in the homeland.”
The Rawidowicz work is hard to assess because its coalition function is so clean. Myers finds an unpublished chapter in Rawidowicz’s son’s basement in Newton, translates it with Band, publishes it, and frames Rawidowicz as the lost voice of Jewish political thought on the Palestinian question. The coalition function is visible. Myers needs a Jewish precedent for the positions his coalition holds. Rawidowicz supplies the precedent. The Rawidowicz material gets recovered because it can be recovered to serve a contemporary purpose.
Rawidowicz’s Babylon and Jerusalem argues for a diaspora Hebraism that takes the diaspora seriously as a permanent feature of Jewish existence rather than as a waiting room for immigration to Israel. The libertas differendi concept is useful as a contribution to political philosophy of minority rights. The unpublished chapter on the Palestinian refugees does exist and does argue for repatriation on Jewish moral grounds. Myers’s translation and publication of this material makes it available to scholarship. Someone had to do this work. Myers did it carefully. The textual scholarship is solid. The framing is coalition-shaped. A later scholar who wanted to read Rawidowicz for other purposes could use Myers’s edition to do so.
Rawidowicz now exists in the record. He might not have. The son’s basement is where unpublished manuscripts go to disappear. Myers went and got the material. He worked with Band to translate difficult Hebrew. He contextualized it in the intellectual biography. The biography is solid institutional history of an underexamined figure. Rawidowicz taught at Chicago and Brandeis, edited Hebrew journals, corresponded with major figures, held positions in certain debates. None of this was well documented before Myers. He did the work.
“Between Past and Present, Jew and Arab: An Exchange between Gil Anidjar and David N. Myers.” AJS Review 34 (2010)
Anidjar’s charge is methodological, not political. Rawidowicz’s ellipse-with-two-foci image argued against the solitary center. The Jewish and Arab questions inhabit the same figure, neither prior to the other. Myers writes a book that affirms this claim while reinstating the solitary center through the figure of Rawidowicz. The lonely prophet, the “ish boded,” the voice that alone sees the linkage. The method reproduces the solipsism the content says to reject. Anidjar’s line lands: “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.”
If the Jew-Arab linkage is real, as Rawidowicz claimed, then Palestinians and post-colonial critics are already inside the conversation. They are the other focus of the ellipse. A book that renders Rawidowicz the lone articulator of the linkage has to exclude those other voices from the frame. Myers excludes them. Anidjar lists the scholars absent from the book: Saree Makdisi, Aamir Mufti, Gil Hochberg, Gabriel Piterberg, Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin. Readers of Edward Said. The people who have been arguing the Jew-Arab entanglement for a generation in comparative literature and post-colonial studies. Myers’ own UCLA colleagues, in some cases. They do not appear. Rawidowicz does all the work.
Anidjar also catches Myers not citing S. Yizhar’s Khirbet Khizeh under its recognizable English title. This is a fingerprint. Khirbet Khizeh is the canonical Hebrew literary treatment of 1948 expulsion guilt. Any scholar of Jewish moral reckoning with the Palestinian question knows the story. Its erasure from the bibliography suggests the book’s frame cannot accommodate voices that already did this work inside Zionism.
Myers needs the lone-prophet frame because the frame does coalition work. It makes Rawidowicz a distinctively Jewish moral voice American liberal Jews can claim as their own: a diaspora Hebrew-writing Zionist-adjacent Jew who saw the problem from within. The figure lets American Jewish progressives have the Palestinian-return argument without leaving the Jewish Studies coalition or aligning with the post-Said scholars who already made the argument.
Myers responds by invoking discipline. He describes himself as a historian. He accuses Anidjar of “creative misprision.” He calls the focus on the word “alone” Derridean artfulness. Myers deflects. Anidjar did not build his critique on one word. He built it on a structural observation: a book arguing for the inseparability of Jew and Arab frames its subject as a solitary figure and leaves the other pole of the ellipse unpopulated. The “alone” quotation is an example.
In the final paragraph, Myers admits the identification. He feels at odds with mainstream American Jewish communal politics. Rawidowicz speaks to him as a Jew. He reframes this from self-anointment as a martyr of conscience to “an oppositional stance within a broader political culture.” Myers writes Rawidowicz into the canon of Jewish conscience, then places himself as the inheritor of the voice. The historian’s craft becomes the vehicle for personal coalition signaling. Anidjar saw this and said so. Myers confirms it while insisting it does not invalidate his method.
Myers built Rawidowicz into the template of authentic Jewish intellectual dissent. The template has specific features. Lonely diaspora voice. Love of fellow Jews. Moral critique of Zionist policy. Call for Palestinian redress. Jewishly grounded rather than universalist. In 2019, Myers applies the template to Julius Stone. Stone fails at three points. He had institutional power in Sydney rather than marginal status. He did not extend minority-rights sensitivity to Palestinians. He denied Palestinian peoplehood. Therefore Stone is the anti-Rawidowicz, and his “axionormative dissent” in legal theory does not redeem his political position.
The template produces the verdict. Any Jewish intellectual who lands on Israel’s legal defense side of the post-1967 argument fails it, because Myers built the template to reward the opposite position. Any Jewish intellectual who lands on the return-and-critique side passes. The template presents as a neutral historical category recovered from Rawidowicz’s own writing. It is a sorting instrument for contemporary American Jewish coalition politics.
Myers’ belief that Rawidowicz’s distinctive isolated voice represents the true Jewish moral tradition on Israel/Palestine is convenient because it lets him occupy oppositional ground inside the Jewish Studies establishment without aligning with the post-colonial critics whose work might dissolve his disciplinary frame. The convenience does not prove the belief wrong. It does mean the belief needs scrutiny the historian does not offer.
Anidjar is also performing. His prose carries a lot of Derridean machinery. The “amalgame” aside, the “altneu” coinage, the “And I only am escaped alone” refrain running through the essay as a kind of incantation. Some of this is sophistication display. Some is coalition signaling to his comparative literature peers. The core analytical charges survive the style. Myers did exclude the post-Said scholars. Myers did construct Rawidowicz as the lonely prophet while ostensibly arguing against the lonely center. Myers did identify with his subject in a way that shaped the selection.
The exchange shows a coalition dispute dressed as methodology. Anidjar speaks from Columbia comparative literature and post-colonial studies. Myers speaks from UCLA Jewish Studies. Each represents a different academic formation with a different answer to the question of who defines authentic Jewish thought on Israel. Anidjar says the definition has to include the Palestinians and the post-colonial critics or it is not serious. Myers says the historian’s craft, properly practiced, produces the authentic recovery. Neither addresses the possibility that Rawidowicz, on this account, is a mid-century diaspora Jew whose thought belongs in the company of Arendt, Buber, Magnes, and Yizhar, and whose distinctiveness has been manufactured by a historian with contemporary coalition needs.
“The Return of the Repressed: Modern Jewish Studies in JQR.” Jewish Quarterly Review 100, no 3 (2010)
This is the JQR centennial issue introduction and the piece where Myers is writing most as the institutional custodian of JQR. The title “The Return of the Repressed” is the tell. He is signaling that modern Jewish studies was kept out of the journal for much of its century and is now returning. The Freudian vocabulary is doing work. Repression implies that the exclusion was not accidental or methodological but psychically motivated, and that what was excluded carried the coalition-relevant material.
The historical narrative he tells is clean. Adler and Schechter took over JQR in 1910 and wanted a scholarly journal focused on philology, Bible, Geniza, and classical rabbinics. They excluded modern Jewish history. That exclusion held for decades. Myers surfaces two exceptions, Davidson’s 1911 piece on Yiddish and Hebrew literature and the 1945 Zeitlin-Richards exchange on Jewish nationalism, and uses them to show that the modern kept breaking through. The present-day editors have now normalized what was once exceptional.
The Davidson piece is interesting and Myers handles it well. Davidson in 1911 argues that Yiddish literature is outstripping Hebrew, that Mendele and Peretz have no Hebrew peers, and that Yiddish has mass appeal where Hebrew is upper-class. This is a serious claim and a politically loaded one. The 1908 Czernowitz conference had tried to resolve the Hebrew-Yiddish question by declaring Yiddish a national Jewish language. The Hebraists pushed back. Davidson is writing three years after Czernowitz and is disclaiming any ideological stake, but his critical judgment tilts toward Yiddish. Myers notes that Davidson “hastened to insist” his comparison had nothing to do with the ideological debate, and speculates that Davidson did not want to run afoul of the new editors who wanted the journal above politics. The historian’s eye is sharp here. Davidson is doing coalition work while performing scholarly neutrality.
The Zeitlin-Richards exchange is where the introduction gets most substantive. Solomon Zeitlin took over JQR in 1940. From 1943 to 1945 he published a two-hundred-page study across six installments arguing that Jews constituted a religion rather than a nation throughout their history. This is the classical American Reform position, anti-Zionist in its basic logic, and Zeitlin pushed it hard enough to attack Dubnow on Jewish nationality and to declare the 1919 Paris Peace Conference effort for Jewish national minority rights an “abject failure.” Bernard Richards, who had been secretary to the American Jewish delegation at Versailles, wrote back accusing Zeitlin of a “superficial, misleading, if not mischievous account.” Zeitlin replied that Jewish national character in the Diaspora contravened “the spirit of Judaism.”
This is an extraordinary moment to surface in 2010. Zeitlin was writing during the Holocaust and immediately after, and his editorial line was to double down on the anti-nationalist reading of Jewish history at precisely the moment when European Jewry was being destroyed and the Zionist movement was moving toward statehood. Richards was writing from the opposite coalition position, as a man who had been inside the Versailles negotiations and believed Jewish national rights were both achievable and necessary. The exchange is a window into the American Jewish intellectual civil war of the mid-twentieth century, the one that culminated in 1942 at the Biltmore Conference and 1948 at Israeli independence and largely ended with the marginalization of the anti-Zionist Reform position.
Myers chooses to highlight this exchange in the centennial issue. The choice is not neutral. He is reminding readers that JQR was edited by a serious anti-Zionist for a significant period, that the anti-Zionist editor nevertheless opened his pages to his critic, and that the exchange “reveals a measure of the internal vibrancy” of the journal. The frame is generous to Zeitlin in one sense, he gets credit for editorial magnanimity, and critical in another, his position is named as the losing one that had “lingering present-day significance” for both parties. The phrase “lingering present-day significance” in 2010 is the coalition signal. Myers is writing in the period when his own diasporist position is starting to re-emerge in American Jewish intellectual life, and the Zeitlin-Richards exchange is one of the lost genealogies that position can claim.
Compare this to the 2013 Appelfeld introduction where he places Jewish above Hebrew above Israeli in ascending order of significance. The Zeitlin surfacing in 2010 is an earlier moment in the same project. Zeitlin’s position that Jews are a religion and not a nation is too extreme for Myers to endorse, but Zeitlin’s refusal to grant Zionism the last word on Jewish collective identity is the strand Myers wants to recover. Calling the piece “The Return of the Repressed” invites the reader to ask what was repressed. The answer the introduction suggests is modern Jewish history generally, but the specific examples Myers chooses, the Hebrew-Yiddish question and the religion-versus-nation question, are both cases where the diasporist position lost and was subsequently written out of the respectable Jewish studies canon.
The contributors to the centennial issue do not directly engage Zionism, and Myers notes this. But the selections continue the quiet decentering project. Cohen and Stein on Sephardic scholarly worlds push against the German-Ashkenazi center of Wissenschaft des Judentums. Loeffler and Cohen on Idelsohn recover a figure who worked in Palestine and America and does not fit neatly into either national tradition. Morris-Reich on Simmel, Boas, and Ruppin studies Jewish social scientists responding to antisemitism through their disciplines rather than through Jewish political mobilization. The four articles, taken together, show a Jewish modernity that is plural, diasporic, and not reducible to the Zionist-nationalist story. Myers names this as “boundary-crossing labor” and “bold new passages.” The vocabulary is Rosenzweigian, the same neues Denken he invoked in the 2013 Hartman introduction.
There is a nice moment of institutional honesty when Myers acknowledges that Dropsie College “did not survive, but its library, and JQR, were taken over and put to new use by a research center at the University of Pennsylvania.” Dropsie was an independent Jewish graduate institution founded in 1907, one of the last of its kind in America. Its collapse and absorption by Penn in the 1980s is a real institutional loss that the discipline has largely papered over. The Katz Center at Penn is a distinguished place, but it is not a Jewish institution in the way Dropsie was. Myers names the transition with “a mix of sadness and satisfaction,” which is about as much as an editor can say in a centennial introduction. The sadness is for the loss of the autonomous Jewish scholarly institution. The satisfaction is for the field’s arrival inside the university. Both are real.
The phrase “the more detached and antiquarian ambience that Adler and Schechter consciously cultivated” is also telling. Myers is naming the founding editorial posture as a choice, not a natural state. Adler and Schechter wanted JQR to be above politics and above the present. They wanted Geniza fragments and Semitic philology. The detachment was a coalition posture too, the coalition of the early twentieth-century American Jewish scholarly establishment that wanted to earn respectability inside American universities by looking like classical Orientalist scholarship. That posture had its own costs, one of which was the exclusion of modern Jewish history and by extension the exclusion of the political questions the modern period raised. Myers is naming those costs in 2010 and saying the current editors have chosen differently.
The phrase “anti-Semitism” in this introduction is hyphenated, which was the standard academic usage until the recent shift to “antisemitism” driven by the argument that the hyphenated form implies a scientific entity called “Semitism” that has opponents. Myers using the hyphen in 2010 places him before the shift.
Myers is securely in the editorial chair, the centennial is the occasion for a summary statement, and he uses the occasion to do three things at once: celebrate the journal’s longevity, name its founding exclusions, and signal the direction in which he and his coeditors are taking it. The coalition position is implicit rather than explicit, which is appropriate to the editorial register, but it is legible. Diasporic, plural, boundary-crossing Jewish modernity is the frame. Zeitlin’s extreme anti-Zionism is not endorsed but his refusal to let Zionism monopolize Jewish identity is recovered. The centennial lets Myers place his editorial tenure inside a hundred-year genealogy and use the genealogy to justify the direction of travel.
The “Return of the Repressed” title is the kind of phrase that reads as sophisticated literary flourish and is also, if you attend to it, a substantive claim about the field. What was repressed, in Myers’s reading, was the modern and the political and the diasporic. What is returning is all three. The 2013 Appelfeld introduction, the 2021 Simmel forum, the 2022 Eastern European forum are all further installments of the return he is announcing here. The project is coherent across the decade and this 2010 piece is where it receives its most explicit institutional declaration.
“Rethinking Jewish Collectivity in a Post-Statist World.” Jewish Peoplehood Papers 5 (2010)
The central claim is blunt. “Statism has failed.” The ideological proposition that the State of Israel is not just a means but the end of Jewish history and life has not delivered to Diaspora Jewry.
Mordecai Kaplan was a committed Zionist. He founded Reconstructionist Judaism. His 1949 essay raising problems with the State of Israel came from a committed Zionist position. Myers invokes Kaplan because Kaplan’s critique cannot be dismissed as anti-Zionist. Kaplan’s “strong Zionist faith” is what makes his warning “let us not get carried away by our enthusiasm” carry weight. Myers is positioning his argument within a internal Zionist tradition of critique rather than outside Zionism. The move parallels the Rawidowicz move in Between Jew and Arab. Recover the internal critic. Make the critique from within ahavat Yisrael. Refuse the framing that treats criticism as betrayal.
Leibowitz called Statism in its extreme form “a form of avodah zarah, idol worship — a fetishistic attachment to a set of political and military institutions at the expense of Jewish culture, Hebrew language, and yidishkayt.” Leibowitz was a Religious Zionist. He served in the Haganah. He was not a marginal critic. He was a committed participant in the Zionist project who identified ideological distortions within it. Myers invokes Leibowitz the way he invokes Rawidowicz — as internal critic whose Jewish and Zionist credentials cannot be impeached. The move is strategic. It establishes the authoritative Jewish lineage for the critique Myers is making.
The demographic argument is grounded. “Today a bit fewer than 60% of Jews in the world live outside of Israel, and that number will continue to fall in the coming decades.” In 1949 Kaplan noted 95% of Jews lived outside Israel. By 2010 the majority still lived in diaspora but the balance was shifting. Myers is working with the changing demographic reality. Fifteen years after this essay, the numbers have shifted further. More Jews now live in Israel than in the United States.
The striking claim about language. “The Jews, a famously verbal people, have lost a language to describe their collective self except via Statism. There is no name to designate what once was known in centuries past as Klal Yisrael, or simply Yisrael, the global Jewish collective unified by a shared sense of past and future.” Myers argues that the conceptual vocabulary for understanding Jewish collectivity has atrophied. The categories that once organized Jewish self-understanding have been replaced by a single category — the State of Israel — that cannot do the work the older categories did. The loss is not just political. It is conceptual and linguistic.
The “golden age of Jewish nationalism” is dated “1897 to 1939” — from the First Zionist Congress to the beginning of World War II. Myers describes this as a time of “dizzying range of ideological positions” debated “passionately in a robust marketplace of ideas.” Only one principle was shared: “that the Jews were a nation.” Beyond this principle, ideological positions varied. Zionism was one position among many. Autonomism (Dubnow). Diaspora Hebraism (Rawidowicz). Territorialism (Zangwill). Cultural Zionism (Ahad Ha-am). Labor Zionism. Revisionist Zionism. Bundism. Religious Zionism.
Myers argues this variety was productive and has been lost. The Statist paradigm has collapsed the variety into monoculture. “I am Jewish because I support the State of Israel.” This is a “thin form of cultural identity” compared to what the earlier variety provided.
The two circles image Myers proposes is the Center-Periphery Model (Israel as center, diaspora communities as peripheries) reflects Statist logic. The Global Jewish Model (two overlapping circles, one for Israel, one for diaspora, with the overlap representing the core of world Jewry) reflects what Myers seeks. Jewish collectivity is not hub-and-spoke with Israel at the hub. It is overlapping spheres with the intersection as the space of shared Jewish identity.
The striking rhetorical question. “Should not such a center, rather than the Chief Rabbinate of Israel, be responsible for deciding who is a Jew? Why should the global Jewish collective surrender the right of determining membership to a small, disconnected, and unrepresentative few?” This is a direct jurisdictional challenge. Myers contests the claim that Israeli religious authorities should determine global Jewish membership. The claim is made by the Israeli Chief Rabbinate and enforced through Israel’s Law of Return interpretation. Myers is asking why global Jewry should accept this arrangement.
The Birthright proposal is clever. Birthright currently sends young diaspora Jews to Israel to receive “a dose of Jewish vitality.” The program is structurally Statist. Israel has the vitality. Diaspora receives it. Myers proposes reversing the direction. Send Israeli young adults to Melbourne, Montevideo, Montreal. Send diaspora Jews to New York, Paris, Johannesburg en route to Israel. The result would be “a messier matrix of global Jewish collectivity, but a far richer one — and indeed one truer to the geographic and cultural condition of the Jewish nation.” This is a practical institutional proposal. It would cost relatively little. It would transform the ideological function of Birthright. It would enact the Global Jewish Model rather than the Center-Periphery Model.
Myers is not just arguing about Jewish collectivity. He is situating his argument within broader claims about how globalization is transforming sovereignty, citizenship, and jurisdiction generally. “We inhabit an age of globalization in which traditional notions of sovereignty, citizenship, and jurisdiction are being rethought. The ease of global travel, the instantaneous nature of cyber-communication, and the resulting shrinking of the world compel us to ask whether the regnant standard — territorially demarcated borders — is the best determinant of national identity.” This is the Stolzenberg-influenced framing. Legal pluralism. Multiple jurisdictions. Transnational identities. The claim that territorial state sovereignty is being superseded by more complex patterns of belonging and authority.
The framing has aged. Some predictions about globalization from 2010 look naive now. The optimistic claim that globalization was producing post-national identity forms has been contested by the return of nationalism across the world since 2016. Trump’s election. Brexit. Hungarian and Polish nationalism. Chinese nationalism. Russian imperialism. Israeli right-wing nationalism. The post-statist world Myers envisioned in 2010 has not arrived. The statist world has reasserted itself. Myers’s argument that globalization makes statist paradigms obsolete looks less compelling in 2026 than it did in 2010.
Myers built his position during an intellectual moment when post-national and transnational frameworks were ascendant. The moment has passed. Nationalism has returned. Myers continues to deploy post-statist frameworks in a world that has reasserted statist logic. The framework worked for analyzing the 1990s-2010s moment. Whether it works for the 2020s is a substantive question. The post-colonial and post-national analytical tools Myers adopted in the 1990s might be inadequate for current conditions. This 2010 essay shows those tools being deployed confidently at what might have been their peak moment of analytical authority. The subsequent return of nationalism has not changed Myers’s framework. He continues to argue for post-statist Jewish collectivity in a world where statism has strengthened. The question is whether his framework adequately engages what has changed or whether it treats current reassertions of statism as regressions from an expected post-statist future rather than as substantive returns to earlier patterns.
Myers does not address what would happen to Israel’s Jewish character if the right of the Chief Rabbinate to determine who is Jewish were transferred to a global Jewish body.
The essay also does not address what happens to the institutional arrangements that currently sustain Jewish collective life if Statism is deposed as the organizing principle. The State of Israel has capacities for Jewish collective action (military defense, mass immigration absorption, Hebrew cultural production) that no diaspora institution can match. The institutional monopoly Myers critiques is partly a function of the unique capacities a sovereign state provides. Critique of Statism as ideology does not specify what alternative institutional capacities would replace Israeli state capacities. The question of institutional replacement gets short shrift.
The publication venue is “The Peoplehood Papers” — an Israeli-diaspora dialogue project sponsored by “The Hub” (Jewish Peoplehood Hub). The venue is influential within Jewish communal and educational circles. Myers is not writing for an academic audience here. He is writing for Jewish professionals, educators, philanthropic leaders who shape how Jewish identity gets transmitted. The practical proposals about Birthright and a World Jewish Cultural Forum are directed at people with capacity to implement them. Myers is doing public intellectual work that targets institutional actors who might act on his recommendations.
The essay sits between academic scholarship and op-ed polemic. It has the substance of scholarly argument. It has the practical directness of advocacy writing. It has the audience of professional Jewish communal work.
The closing line is striking. “A messier matrix of global Jewish collectivity, but a far richer one — and indeed one truer to the geographic and cultural condition of the Jewish nation, as it struggles to gain a solid perch in the fast-moving globalized arena.”
“Rethinking the Jewish Nation: An Exercise in Applied Jewish Studies.” Havruta 6 (Winter 2011)
Rawidowicz lost his argument with Ben-Gurion in 1954. He wanted to keep the name “Israel” for the whole Jewish people and treat the state as one organ within a larger body. Ben-Gurion took the name for the state. The state got the army, the flag, the anthem, the law of return, and the gravitational pull of modern Jewish identification. Rawidowicz got a 900-page Hebrew tome that few read and an early death in 1957.
Myers rehabilitates the loser. The move is legitimate scholarship and coalition work at once. Liberal American Jewish academics in the 2010s needed a usable past that licensed criticism of the Israeli state without requiring them to become anti-Zionists. Rawidowicz supplies that past. His Babylon-and-Jerusalem frame gives the diaspora equal standing to Israel. His letters to Ben-Gurion place him inside the Zionist conversation rather than outside it. His binationalism, documented in Myers’s Between Jew and Arab, cues contemporary readers toward support for Palestinian civil equality. Rawidowicz lost in his lifetime, so the current revival cannot be charged with vindicating present power. He is a safe usable ancestor.
Myers targets what he calls Statist Zionism and codes it as an orthodoxy. When an academic labels a widely held view an orthodoxy, he claims for himself the role of free inquirer confronting dogmatists. The coding cannot settle who is right. The statist view has empirical force Myers does not engage. Jews in Caracas, Johannesburg, Buenos Aires, Paris, and Odessa have lost or are losing their communities. Jews in Israel built a population that grew from 650,000 in 1948 to more than seven million today. A Jewish nation defined by cultural and familial affinity rather than territory survives in practice because the territorial Jewish state exists and absorbs the refugees the diasporas produce. Myers treats sovereignty as optional and ornamental. The record of the past eighty years treats it as load-bearing.
The Shumsky citation does similar work. His argument that Ben-Gurion and Jabotinsky held autonomist-federalist positions has scholarly merit and coalition function. If the statist giants were secretly non-statist, then non-statism is not a marginal heresy but the true Zionist inheritance. Liberal Zionists claim the patrimony without the baggage. The move is elegant. It also understates how hard Ben-Gurion fought for the sovereign state once the chance arrived. Stated preferences in 1930 do not predict revealed preferences in 1948.
The demographic claim needs a footnote. Myers writes that 60 percent of world Jewry lives in the diaspora and that parity is coming. The trend line runs the other direction. Israel passed American Jewry as the largest Jewish population center around 2013, and the gap widens each year. American Jewish numbers stabilize or decline through intermarriage and disaffiliation. Israeli Jewish numbers grow through fertility. Parity is a waystation, not a destination.
Kaplan and Rawidowicz as patrons do coalition work visible when you ask why these men and not others. Both were marginalized in their lifetimes. Both have been rehabilitated by scholars whose politics align with the rehabilitation. Reconstructionism remains the smallest of the American denominations. Rawidowicz lives in academic footnotes more than in synagogue practice. Myers draws on a minor tradition and presents it as a road not taken. The road was not taken because most Jews, including most diaspora Jews, preferred the statist Zionist settlement. The preference emerged from what Jews wanted after the Shoah. To treat statism as an ideology to overcome is to treat the verdict of twentieth-century Jewish history as a mistake to correct.
“Editor’s Introduction: History and Mysticism.” Jewish Quarterly Review 101, no. 4 (2011)
This is Myers in Fall 2011 curating a forum on the study of Jewish mysticism, which is an interesting choice for him because it is not his field. Myers is a modern Jewish intellectual historian, and mysticism studies is a specialized area dominated by figures like Moshe Idel, Yehuda Liebes, Elliot Wolfson, Daniel Abrams, Jonathan Garb, and the younger generation represented in the forum. Myers editing a mysticism forum is an act of editorial reach rather than disciplinary expertise. The frame he gives it is the one he can give as a historian. He treats mysticism as a subject for historical method rather than as a subject that might resist historical method, and the forum he assembles is the historicist side of a long methodological quarrel in Kabbalah studies.
The Scholem question structures the whole piece. Gershom Scholem is the founder of the modern academic study of Kabbalah and the target of pushback from nearly every subsequent generation. Moshe Idel’s Kabbalah: New Perspectives in 1988 was the major opening shot, arguing that Scholem had flattened the phenomenological diversity of Jewish mysticism and had too neatly periodized the field. Elliot Wolfson pushed further in the phenomenological direction with attention to erotic and mythic elements. Yehuda Liebes complicated the relationship between Kabbalah and rabbinic literature. Haviva Pedaya, Boaz Huss, and others pushed from different angles. The field by 2011 was a decade into a series of arguments with Scholem that had produced real pluralism and also real fatigue.
Myers’s forum picks three younger scholars, Boustan, Lachter, and Magid, who all argue for a more thoroughly historicist approach. This is a narrower slice of the field than the introduction acknowledges. Boustan on Hekhalot literature arguing for bidirectional context, Lachter on medieval Kabbalah arguing for discourse analysis and thirteenth-century Castilian context, Magid on contemporary Kabbalah arguing against Scholem’s claim that authentic mysticism had ended. All three are historicizing moves. None of the three represents the phenomenological tradition of Idel or Wolfson, the literary-mystical tradition, or the internal-Kabbalistic tradition of scholars like Wolfson or Pedaya who study Kabbalah partly as practitioners. The forum is doing coalition work inside the field by privileging the historicist wing.
Myers’s own position makes this legible. As a historian, he believes the right tools for studying mystical material are historical tools. The forum’s shared position, that “a turn back to history” is the indispensable lens, is Myers’s own methodological home. He is assembling a forum that validates the disciplinary perspective he occupies. A different editor, a scholar of mysticism, might have built the forum around a different quarrel. Myers builds it around the quarrel historians can win.
The characterization of Scholem as “dominant (some would say domineering)” is the sharpest editorial phrasing in the piece. Myers is naming the coalition problem of Kabbalah studies. Scholem’s authority structured the field for half a century and continues to structure it as the foil against which newer work defines itself. The three contributors all position themselves against Scholem in specific ways. Boustan against the dialectical-esoteric reading of Hekhalot as the beating heart of rabbinics. Lachter against ahistorical affinity-hunting that Scholem’s methodology permitted. Magid against Scholem’s secularist bias and his pronouncement that authentic mysticism had ended. The Scholem foil does real work for each of them. Myers names this straightforwardly.
The Magid piece is the most politically loaded of the three, judging from the summary. Magid is a significant figure in his own right, a scholar of Hasidism and contemporary Jewish religious life who has written on Neo-Hasidism, on Israeli religious politics, and on the post-Zionist moment. His essay apparently argues that postmodernism and post-Zionism have “enabled old blinders to fall,” and that it is now possible to study haredi mysticism as part of Israeli civil religion and to attend to Sephardi and Mizrahi religious cultures. The phrasing is coalition-dense. “Post-Zionism” is a live political term in 2011. It refers to the scholarly and political current that critiques Zionist master narratives, treats Israeli identity as one identity among many rather than as the redemption of Jewish history, and opens space for Palestinian, Mizrahi, and diasporic counter-narratives. Myers is sympathetic to post-Zionism in his own work and writing. Featuring Magid’s post-Zionist reading of mysticism studies is continuous with the diasporist and decentering moves Myers has been making across his editorial tenure.
The Sephardi and Mizrahi angle is particularly interesting. Magid is apparently arguing that Kabbalah scholarship has neglected contemporary Sephardi and Mizrahi religious cultures in Israel. The academic study of Kabbalah in Israel has been overwhelmingly Ashkenazi-dominated in its personnel and its textual canon, even though much of the living kabbalistic tradition in contemporary Israel runs through Mizrahi and Sephardi communities, especially through figures like the late Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu, the late Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, and through institutions like Yeshivat Porat Yosef and the various Moroccan-descended kabbalistic networks. Jonathan Garb’s work and Pinchas Giller’s work are named as examples of the new scholarly attention. The Cohen-Stein piece on Sephardic scholarly worlds that Myers featured in the 2010 centennial is part of the same decentering project. Across the tenure, Myers is consistently pushing against the Ashkenazi-centered master narrative of Jewish studies and opening space for Sephardi and Mizrahi material.
The Lachter piece on medieval Kabbalah is the most methodologically programmatic. His “epistemological-evidentiary credo” that the data to study are “not personal experiences, states of mind, or God” but discourse that “constructs meaning, serves strategic interests, and bolsters contested identities” is a significant position. This is Foucault-inflected discourse analysis applied to medieval Kabbalah. It treats kabbalistic texts as coalition technologies rather than as records of religious experience. The claim that medieval kabbalists accorded Jews “considerable agency in maintaining the cosmic order” and that this was “an act of symbolic empowerment” treats the cosmic claims of Kabbalah as strategic rather than phenomenological.
Lachter argues that kabbalistic texts can be read as discourse that serves strategic interests and bolsters contested identities. The texts are not transparent to the cosmological claims they make. They are coalition technologies that produce Jewish agency under conditions of Christian political dominance in thirteenth-century Castile. Applied reflexively, the same move would read scholarly texts on Kabbalah as discourse that serves strategic interests and bolsters contested identities within the Jewish studies coalition. Myers does not take that step. He endorses Lachter’s method as applied to medieval Jews and does not apply it to the scholarship. The refusal to turn the method on one’s own coalition is a coalition move.
Boustan on Hekhalot is the most careful of the three, judging from the summary. His “bidirectional, tension-filled relationship that moves across several contemporaneous Jewish subcultures” is a nuanced position that avoids the false alternatives of perennialism and sharp socio-cultural pigeon-holing. The description suggests Boustan is working with the Princeton-style late antiquity methodology that reads rabbinic and non-rabbinic Jewish literatures as mutually constitutive rather than as separate streams. This is consistent with the work of scholars like Daniel Boyarin, Seth Schwartz, and others who have transformed the study of rabbinic Judaism by embedding it in Roman provincial contexts rather than treating it as autonomous.
The framing sentence “old blinders to fall” in the Magid paragraph repays attention. Myers is endorsing, in his curatorial voice, the idea that previous Kabbalah scholarship had blinders that can now be removed. The blinders he names are Scholem’s “secularist bias” and the neglect of contemporary, haredi, Sephardi, and Mizrahi material. This is a friendly reading of post-Zionist and decentering scholarship. A less friendly reading would note that what Myers calls “blinders” others might call “a coherent scholarly project with defined limits,” and that calling older work “blind” is a coalition move by the newer wing. The characterization is not neutral.
The closing sentence is classic Myers curatorial prose. “A turn at once surprising and unsurprising, old-fashioned and newfangled, simple yet textured.” The rhetorical move of pairing opposites lets the editor endorse the position without making strong claims. The turn is old-fashioned because it returns to historical method after decades of phenomenological and theoretical approaches. It is newfangled because the historical method being advocated is more sophisticated than the old Wissenschaft model, drawing on discourse analysis, critical theory, and post-colonial attention to Sephardi and Mizrahi material. Myers covers both registers without committing to either. This lets him avoid taking a clear position in the methodological quarrel he is adjudicating.
What the introduction does not say is how the historicist turn interacts with the other major methodological currents in contemporary Kabbalah studies. Elliot Wolfson’s work on mystical phenomenology, erotic imagery, and gender in Kabbalah is not mentioned. Moshe Idel’s ongoing work is mentioned only through the implicit Scholem-Idel quarrel that shapes the field. The literary-critical tradition of reading kabbalistic texts as literature is not mentioned. The practitioner-scholar figures who combine academic study with some relationship to Kabbalah as a living tradition are not mentioned. The forum is a specific slice of the field presented as if it were a general picture of where the field is going. Myers’s framing treats the historicist turn as the current state of play, which is a choice.
This piece sits between the 2010 centennial (“The Return of the Repressed”) and the 2013 pieces on Hartman and Appelfeld. The editorial voice is mid-tenure confident. Myers has earned the standing to curate forums in fields outside his own specialty and to frame those fields in terms that reflect his own methodological commitments. The historicist turn he endorses here in 2011 is continuous with the historiographical turn he endorsed in the 2003 Ehrenfreund review, the modern-history recovery he announced in the 2010 centennial, the diasporist-decentering frame he would articulate in the 2013 Appelfeld introduction, and the Sephardi and Mizrahi attention that runs through the 2010 centennial and the 2019 bicentennial. The career is coherent.
The piece is also interesting as an artifact of the moment when Magid’s approach to contemporary Kabbalah was becoming visible as a significant subfield. In the years after this forum, Magid would publish American Post-Judaism and several other books that extended his analysis of contemporary Jewish religious life. Jonathan Garb, named in the Magid summary, would become one of the major figures in the historicist turn in Kabbalah studies, publishing widely on twentieth-century Kabbalah and on the present. The forum was curatorially prescient. Myers caught a moment when the field was opening to contemporary material and helped consolidate the shift.
The Scholem characterization deserves one more pass. “Dominant (some would say domineering)” is parenthetical but substantive. Scholem’s practice was to control the Hebrew University department, to shape who got trained in Kabbalah, to dismiss rivals like Martin Buber on Hasidism and others, and to establish a canon of primary texts that subsequent scholars had to engage. This is a coalition operation that structured the field long after Scholem’s death in 1982. Myers naming this openly, even in parenthetical form, is the kind of quiet institutional honesty that marks his curatorial voice across the tenure. He sees how the field is organized. He does not say so at length. He lets the parenthetical do the work.
The piece is shorter than some of the other introductions and the register is more conventionally academic, which fits the specialist character of the forum. Mysticism studies has its own internal audience and its own technical vocabulary, and Myers writes for that audience rather than for the general reader. The stretches toward broader significance are modest. The forum is doing disciplinary work rather than coalition work at the scale of the 2010 centennial or the 2013 Appelfeld piece. It is the kind of issue that shows the journal operating at high quality across many subfields without every issue carrying a major programmatic statement. The editorial machine is running well.
“New Last Words of Yiddish.” Jewish Quarterly Review 102, no. 1, (2012)
Myers performs the mourning he describes. The title tells you everything: “New Last Words of Yiddish” plays on Singer’s 1978 line that Yiddish “has not yet said its last word,” and the whole piece positions as writing near the deathbed. Yiddish suffered “grievous, nearly mortal, injury” in the Holocaust. It “may indeed soon speak its last word.” Scholarship now “energetically seeks to salvage it.” The language has become a place, a memory, a sad warm object the grandchildren visit.
This is Jeffrey Alexander’s cultural trauma construction in real time. A carrier group (progressive diaspora-Jewish academics) transforms an event (the Holocaust plus alleged Israeli Hebraist suppression) into a foundational wound, claims victim status on behalf of the lost object, and uses the claim for present coalition purposes. The dead language gains sacred status. Tending the grave becomes a profession.
Notice the two nostalgias Myers names. The first is Fiddler on the Roof, the intimacy of grandparents, postwar sentimentality. The second does more work: a “Diaspora cultural politics” that wants to recover “an explosive Yiddish vitality forgotten and suppressed by the Hebraist and Israel-centered agenda of much organized Jewish communal life.” Yiddish becomes the good cosmopolitan alternative to the bad nationalist Hebrew. The language gets promoted to political symbol against Zionism. The mourners fight a contemporary jurisdictional war, and Yiddish is their banner.
The Efron summary on Dzigan sharpens this. Yiddish becomes “a tool of biting satire” against “the inscrutable political and bureaucratic culture” of Israel. The Israeli leaders treated Yiddish as “the language of the submissive Diaspora Jew,” “a mark of great indignity.” So the carrier group’s script runs: Zionism murdered Yiddish alongside the Nazis, or at least buried the wounded survivor, and the scholar now exhumes it as critique. A piece that sounds purely philological participates in a political program without announcing the program.
The revealing omission sits in one short paragraph. Yiddish is alive. It is the cradle-to-grave vernacular of hundreds of thousands of Haredim in Brooklyn, Bnei Brak, Antwerp, Monsey, Kiryas Joel. Children grow up in it. New books appear in it. New jokes are told in it. Myers mentions this in a single sentence and files it under “countervailing.” Why countervailing? Because existing Yiddish speakers break the elegy. If the language lives robustly among the wrong kind of Jews, the mourning loses its point. The scholar-mourner needs Yiddish dead or dying to do the work Myers wants done. A living Hasidic Yiddish that does not need saving, does not serve diaspora-cosmopolitan politics, and shows no interest in Moyshe Kulbak’s expressionism cannot be the sacred object the carrier group requires.
Run the coalition-analysis diagnostic on the piece. Who does Myers rely on for status, income, and protection? UCLA, Jewish studies programs, philanthropic donors, foundation grants, JQR readership. Who does he need to attract and retain? Fellow scholars in Yiddish studies, cultural studies departments, diaspora-oriented Jewish institutions, readers who share a soft anti-Zionist sensibility. What beliefs mark membership? That Yiddish is precious, endangered, and suppressed; that its suppression implicates Zionism; that scholarship is a form of salvage; that postvernacular cultural studies is the right frame. What would he lose if he reversed position? Admitting that Yiddish is alive and well among people who vote Republican, send their children to yeshivas that read Kulbak as apikorsus, and have no use for diaspora-cosmopolitan self-understanding would forfeit most of what the field offers its practitioners.
Turner’s convenient-belief analysis applies. The belief that Yiddish is dying is convenient for everyone in the academic Yiddish enterprise. It produces urgency, grants, elegiac prose, and the moral authority of the salvager. A flat demographic report showing Yiddish-speaking populations growing through Haredi fertility would wreck the genre. So the genre excludes that population or frames it as abnormal, not the real story.
Becker sits underneath all of it. Yiddish becomes a hero system for its scholars. The language is the martyred cultural nation with many capitals and no territory. The scholar who tends its memory participates in something larger than himself, acquires significance, earns a place. The piece reads like a eulogy because eulogizing is what the role requires.
What Myers gets right: Yiddish has had a remarkable history. Singer’s 1978 speech is beautiful. Kulbak is worth reading. Dzigan and Shumacher were brilliant. The philological work on the 1475 Trent letters sounds excellent. The articles are good. The question is what the framing does for the people who produce and consume it, and why the one living Yiddish-speaking population gets a sentence while the dead one gets the issue.
One more thing. The phrase “cultural nation with many capitals though no territory of its own” is the diaspora-studies credo in miniature. Yiddishland as anti-Zion. The piece nowhere argues against Israel. It does not need to. The framing does the work. This is how educated coalition signaling runs at the top of the field: through what gets lamented and what gets sidelined.
“A Novel Look at Moshe Idel’s East-West Problem,” Jewish Quarterly Review 102, no. 2 (Spring 2012)
Myers does something clever with the roman à clef move. He reads the book as fiction with Idel as the young upstart struggling against Scholem’s ghost. The conceit lets him land a harder charge without appearing to: Idel’s project fails on its own terms because Idel uses Central European historicist methods to attack Central European historicism.
The dichotomy Idel constructs, Eastern European rooted authenticity against Central European assimilated abstraction, does coalition work. It marks him off from Scholem and the Wissenschaft heirs, gathers him with phenomenologists and religious traditionalists, and builds Romanian cultural capital back home. Idel needs an outside vantage from which to critique Scholem. Without the shtetl as backstop, he becomes one more Kabbalah scholar disputing methods. With it, he speaks for a suppressed tradition reclaiming its ground.
Myers catches the self-deception without naming it. Idel wants to stand outside the Mitteleuropa tradition he criticizes. His methods, his framing, his critical apparatus come from inside that tradition. The closing Scholem quote, “We came to rebel, and ended up continuing,” lands as a diagnosis.
Scholem was a Zionist who rejected exile, so the “diasporic Central European elitist” framing falls apart at the start. Scholem’s coalition was not the Weimar cosmopolitans but the cultural Zionists who saw Kabbalah as Jewish vitality. Idel has to collapse that distinction to keep his binary alive.
By elevating Heschel as the “single representative of the Eastern European perspective,” Idel picks the most respectable, culturally canonized Eastern European figure available. Heschel anchors the authentic side. But Heschel studied at the University of Berlin, wrote his dissertation in German, and spent his working life in American academic institutions. The Eastern European label requires selective attention.
Myers handles with restraint the implicit charge that Central European Jews were less authentically Jewish. He notes Idel says this is not his claim, then shows it is. Myers does not press a harder charge: the framing has an ugly genealogy, the Ostjuden against assimilated Westjuden binary that antisemites and defensive bourgeois German Jews both weaponized in the nineteenth century, and that Scholem navigated as a young man. Idel inverts the valence and keeps the structure.
The novel conceit has its own history. Myers credits Wolff’s review of Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. The move treats nonfiction as self-revelatory fiction, which lets the reviewer make psychoanalytic claims without the liability of psychoanalysis. Myers gets to say “the fictive Moshe Idel” rather than “Idel, whom I am now analyzing.”
Myers closes on a line that reads as generous: both men are Apollonian and Mercurian, rooted and cosmopolitan. If everyone is Mercurian, Idel’s claim to a non-Mercurian Eastern European authenticity collapses.
“Editor’s Introduction.” Jewish Quarterly Review 103, no. 4 (2013)
Myers tells us he encountered Appelfeld in 1981 as a Yale undergraduate in Arnold Band’s Jewish literature course. Band was visiting from UCLA. This is unusual in the Myers curatorial voice. He rarely inserts himself into these introductions. The detail also explains something about his career shape. Band was at UCLA, Band taught him at Yale, Myers ends up at UCLA, and Band contributes the closing essay to this forum thirty years later. The professional circle closes inside the introduction. The intimacy is real and the introduction honors it.
Myers calls Appelfeld “an Israeli, Hebrew, and Jewish writer of great distinction, perhaps in ascending order of significance.” The parenthetical is unmistakable. Israeli is the smallest category. Hebrew is larger. Jewish is largest. Appelfeld’s significance rises as the category widens. The political implication is that Israeli particularity is the thinnest frame for reading him, that the Hebrew language tradition is richer, and that the Jewish literary and historical condition, of which exile is the permanent horizon, is the deepest. This is a diasporist reading, and Myers says so in the preceding paragraph: Milner and Band “hint at an important and perhaps underappreciated diasporist strand in modern Hebrew letters, especially after 1948.”
This is a political statement in the form of a literary-critical judgment. Standard Israeli literary nationalism treats 1948 as the hinge on which Hebrew literature turned from the diaspora toward the sovereign Jewish state. Appelfeld, the Hebrew writer who came to Palestine from Czernowitz and wrote his whole corpus about the lost Central European Jewish world, is the counter-example the diasporist reading needs. Milner’s framing through Brenner’s “nomadic urge” and her argument that Appelfeld projects “a diasporic orientation premised on the permanence of exile” is the analytical pivot. Myers endorses it. He is saying, inside the editorial voice of JQR, that the Hebrew literary tradition after 1948 contains a significant diasporist strand that Israeli nationalism has underappreciated, and that Appelfeld is a central figure in that strand.
The position has serious political weight. Myers later became a prominent public figure associated with critical perspectives on Israeli policy and with the New Israel Fund. He eventually served as president of The Center for Jewish History in New York and is known for advocating a liberal, diaspora-inclusive vision of Jewish life against what he would call the monopolization of Jewishness by Zionism. The 2013 introduction is an early editorial articulation of that position, delivered in measured literary-critical register. The ascending-order-of-significance sentence is the thesis. The rest of the introduction sets it up.
The Czernowitz framing does real work. Czernowitz in 1932 was a multiethnic Habsburg-legacy city with German-speaking assimilated Jews, Yiddish-speaking traditional Jews, Romanian state authority, and a famous 1908 Yiddish conference. It is the emblematic lost Central European Jewish world, the world whose destruction is the twentieth century’s central Jewish fact for the diasporist sensibility. Appelfeld grew up there, lost his mother there, was deported from there, escaped from Transnistria, and eventually reached Palestine. His corpus returns to that world obsessively. The introduction calls Badenheim 1939 “somewhat akin to Appelfeld’s Czernowitz,” which compresses the point. Appelfeld’s Hebrew is in service of remembering a pre-Israeli, pre-Zionist, Central European Jewish civilization. The Hebrew language turns out to be a tool for preserving what Hebrew language nationalism sometimes wanted to leave behind.
The 1981 Arnold Band reference does more than signal personal history. It signals a particular reading tradition. Band was a major figure in American academic Hebrew literature, trained in the old Dov Sadan humanist mode rather than in the ideologically driven Israeli literary establishment. Band read Hebrew literature as continuous with the diaspora Jewish literary tradition rather than as the inaugural literature of a new Israeli national subject. His influence on Myers appears to have been formative. The forum that closes with Band’s essay on Appelfeld and Agnon is also a tribute to Band’s reading tradition.
The Agnon connection matters. Appelfeld’s “everything and nothing” remark about Agnon catches the complicated inheritance. Agnon is the Nobel laureate of Hebrew letters, the writer whose work moves between Galicia and Jerusalem, between traditional Jewish textuality and modernist form. Both Agnon and Appelfeld “chose to look back at a lost world in [their] writing.” Band’s move is to place Appelfeld in an Agnonian lineage that is Hebrew but not primarily Israeli, modernist but backward-looking, literary but saturated with the destroyed religious civilization of Eastern European Jewry. This is the diasporist canon inside Hebrew letters. The forum is doing canon-building work.
The prose register is warmer than most of the editorial introductions. Myers clearly loves the material. The phrase “darkly surreal world” for Appelfeld’s fiction is accurate and affectionate. “Child nomad” for the eight-year-old Appelfeld escaping the camp is the phrase a careful reader of Appelfeld’s own memoirs would use. The introduction reads like a man writing about a writer he has lived with since undergraduate days. The analytical frame is not imposed. It grows out of long reading.
What the introduction does not do, and what a harder-edged critic might do, is interrogate the diasporist position as a coalition position. American Jewish liberal intellectuals have a complicated relationship to Israeli sovereignty. The diasporist reading of Hebrew literature is attractive to them in part because it lets them identify with Hebrew cultural achievement while holding Israeli political reality at arm’s length. Appelfeld, whose life involved deportation, escape, arrival in Palestine, Israeli citizenship, and a long career inside the Hebrew University and Israeli literary establishment, becomes in this reading a diasporic writer who happened to write in Hebrew inside Israel. The reading is defensible but it has costs. It sometimes flattens Appelfeld’s Israeli context. It sometimes uses him to perform a politics he did not necessarily hold. He was, by most accounts, a fairly conservative man who lived his adult life as an Israeli citizen and raised Israeli children. The “ascending order of significance” sentence is elegant but it is also an appropriation.
“Midrash, Testimony, and the Angel of Interpretation: Geoffrey Hartman in Jewish Studies.“ Jewish Quarterly Review 103, no. 2 (2013)
Myers curates a Festschrift-style forum for Geoffrey Hartman, who was then in his mid-eighties and would die in 2016. The genre is tribute. Myers treats it as tribute.
The frame opens with the now-familiar triumphal arc. Jewish studies has moved from periphery to center, what Europe wanted before the Holocaust has been achieved in America, the field now attracts border-crossers from other disciplines. Hartman is the exemplar of productive border-crossing. The Rosenzweig Lehrhaus analogy positions the forum as an act of neues Denken, renewing Jewish learning through non-specialist intelligence. This is a coalition story about the field’s prestige and porousness. The prestige is Hartman’s. The porousness is the field’s openness to receiving him. Both sides gain from the transaction.
Hartman’s biography gets the light touch. Kindertransport child, Yale PhD 1953, army service, Yale faculty from 1955, Wordsworth scholar, Yale School of Deconstruction. The Kindertransport detail does quiet work. It establishes Hartman as survivor-adjacent, which is part of why his move into Holocaust studies carries authority. The Fortunoff Video Archive, which he directed from 1982, made Yale one of the major sites of Holocaust testimony collection. Hartman’s involvement there pulled his literary theoretical work toward testimony and toward midrash as parallel modes of interpretation under conditions of the ineffable. This is the substance of his contribution to Jewish studies and the Liska essay apparently tracks it through the angel figure.
The Liska piece, from the summary, does the kind of work you would expect. She pairs midrash and testimony as mediating genres that resist “dehumanizing silence” in the face of the Absolute or the Shoah. The angel as interceder between heaven and earth, words at once winged and wounded. This is the lyrical-theological register Hartman worked in. Liska is writing in his idiom. The essay functions as an appreciation.
The de Graef and Vermeulen essay is more interesting. They pair Hartman with his teacher Erich Auerbach and use Dante as the test case. Auerbach read the Incarnation as initiating a process of secularization, the human being finally thought as human only, and he was untroubled by this. Hartman could not let go of something escaping “the dissolution of individuated existence into common humanity.” The phrase is carefully worded. What is at stake is whether Jewishness, or religion generally, carries an irreducible remainder that secular humanism cannot absorb. Hartman insists on the remainder. Auerbach did not. The teacher-student divergence is a coalition divergence. Auerbach represents the high assimilationist European Jewish scholar who reads Western literature as the site of the human. Hartman, a generation later and formed by the Holocaust, cannot occupy that position. The remainder he holds onto is the Jewish position that refuses full absorption into universal humanism. The essay names this tension without naming its coalition structure.
The Ben-Naftali essay on the de Man affair is where the forum touches live wire. Paul de Man, Hartman’s Yale colleague and friend, was posthumously revealed in 1987 to have written about 170 articles for Le Soir, a Belgian newspaper under Nazi occupation, some of them antisemitic. The scandal broke over Deconstruction as a whole because de Man was one of its leading figures, and because Derrida and Hartman, both Jewish, moved to defend or at least contextualize him. Hartman’s 1988 line “to contextualize is not to condone” has become a standard citation in discussions of the affair. Ben-Naftali apparently reads Hartman against Derrida, arguing Hartman did the more morally serious work by mourning de Man in a way that permitted moral judgment while Derrida’s defense did not.
The de Man affair is where the coalition dynamics of Jewish studies, Holocaust memory, and literary theory intersect painfully. De Man was not just a friend who turned out to have done something bad. He was the most influential literary theorist at Yale during the years Hartman was building the Fortunoff Archive. The same institution where Holocaust survivors were being videotaped was the institution where a former collaborator-adjacent writer was teaching literary theory that insisted on the instability of meaning and the death of the author. The contradiction is acute and the field has never fully metabolized it.
Myers handles the de Man material carefully. He notes that Ortwin de Graef, the same de Graef who co-authored the second forum essay, is the scholar who discovered the Le Soir articles in 1987. This is a tidy scholarly detail and also a structural one. De Graef is inside the story he is analyzing. The forum includes both the man who exposed de Man and a Jewish critic rereading Hartman’s defense of de Man, which positions the forum inside the controversy rather than above it. Myers names this without comment.
The closing move is the tell. Myers praises Hartman’s “gnawing, frustrating, and regenerative agnosticism” and says Hartman “exemplifies the very porousness of the boundary between the intellectual and the ethical.” This is the Jewish studies coalition’s preferred register for handling the de Man affair. Rather than demanding that Deconstruction answer for de Man’s wartime writings, the frame celebrates the productive porousness of boundaries and the fecundity of Hartman’s thought. Ben-Naftali apparently pushes further, arguing that Deconstruction does not show the moral limits of fiction but productively challenges the boundary between moral inquiry and textual discussion.
What the forum does not do is ask the harder coalition question. Why did the major figures of late twentieth century American literary theory, several of them Jewish, cluster around a theoretical framework that made questions of historical truth and moral responsibility radically unstable, at a moment when Holocaust testimony was becoming central to American Jewish identity? The Fortunoff Archive depends on the premise that survivors can testify to what happened. Deconstruction’s premises make that testimony’s epistemic status fraught. Hartman held both positions simultaneously. The forum treats this as productive tension. It could also be read as a coalition accommodation that let literary theorists stay in prestige conversations while testimony collection happened on a different floor of the same building.
The Auerbach-Hartman contrast in de Graef and Vermeulen is the piece that would repay more attention. Auerbach’s Mimesis, written in Istanbul during the war, is one of the great works of Jewish European humanism, and its premise is exactly the premise the de Graef and Vermeulen essay says Auerbach held: that the human becomes fully thinkable as human through the Incarnation’s move toward secular representation. The book was a coalition bid. Auerbach was claiming the whole Western literary tradition, from Homer through the Bible through Dante to Virginia Woolf, as the common inheritance of the human. That bid was made under conditions of exile and near-death, and it extended a certain kind of German-Jewish humanist position into a postwar settlement. Hartman’s inability to follow Auerbach is the refusal of a later generation to accept the bid on the same terms. The Holocaust had made the universal humanist move feel like surrender. The remainder Hartman holds onto, his “unease,” is the refusal to let Jewishness dissolve into general humanity.
This tracks the broader movement in American Jewish studies from the universal humanist register (Salo Baron, Harry Wolfson, Auerbach) to the particularist register (Hartman, the Holocaust studies turn, the identity-studies turn that made Jewish studies one identity among many rather than a bid for universal relevance). Myers presides over the latter phase. The forum is an artifact of that phase. The piece does not step back and describe the phase.
The prose register is the standard Myers register for forum introductions: warm, appreciative, naming the essays, positioning the honoree as admirable, gesturing at tensions without resolving them. The most telling sentence is probably the one that says Hartman “exemplifies the very porousness of the boundary between the intellectual and the ethical.” This is the field’s aspirational self-image. The intellectual and the ethical are porous to each other, literary theory can do moral work, Jewish studies can receive literary theorists as contributors to Jewish learning, everyone gains from the crossing. The de Man affair is evidence against this aspiration. The forum notes the affair and moves on.
The Faith of Fallen Jews: Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and the Writing of Jewish History (2013)
Yerushalmi was Myers’s teacher, his dissertation advisor at Columbia, the scholar whose Zakhor drew Myers into the doctoral program in the first place.
Every theme in Myers’s current public writing has scholarly roots in what Yerushalmi worked on. The Gaza op-eds, the Al Chet additions, the “vertical alliance” argument, the engagement with Jewish political strategy, the concern about messianic framings of Israel — all of these are applications of material Yerushalmi mapped out over forty years and passed to Myers.
Myers tells us Yerushalmi’s 1976 Lisbon monograph analyzed how Portuguese New Christians “continued to harbor the myth of kingly virtue” even after King Manuel had forcibly converted them. Yerushalmi returned to this at Emory in 2005, building on Baron’s work on medieval Jews as “serfs of the chamber” to “reconstruct a Jewish political history up to the twentieth century” against Hannah Arendt’s dismissal of Jewish political experience. The royal alliance — Jews aligning with state power for protection — was Yerushalmi’s long-term subject. When Myers now argues that American Jews must abandon the “vertical alliance” with state power and shift to “horizontal alliance” with other threatened groups, he is drawing directly on Yerushalmi’s scholarly framework. The current political claim has historical scholarship behind it. The op-eds compress into rhetoric what the scholarly tradition has developed over decades.
The divergence Myers marks without commenting on it. Myers tells us Yerushalmi “did not believe that his historical knowledge bestowed upon him any particular right to speak out on issues of the day with regularity or in forums other than scholarly ones. That said, he did begin to think and write about issues of a political nature in the last fifteen years or so of his life, particularly surrounding the State of Israel.”
So Yerushalmi’s late-career turn toward political commentary stayed within scholarly forums. Myers has gone further. The op-eds, the liturgical innovations, the LA Times and Forward pieces — these are all outside the scholarly register Yerushalmi maintained. Myers has extended the project into territories his teacher declined to enter. This is a divergence Myers notices without commenting on it directly. The framework asks what produces this divergence. Situational factors: different media environment, different institutional positions (Center for Jewish History presidency, Bedari Kindness Institute directorship, UCLA Luskin Center), different historical urgency. The post-October 7 situation is what Yerushalmi did not face. Myers is making a judgment that the situation requires more than scholarly commentary can deliver.
In a 1970 Hebrew College address, Yerushalmi told the graduating class: “It is therefore in the midst of history that we must know ourselves as Jews and build a Jewish future, slowly, often painfully. But to do so we must consciously carry a Jewish past within us.” Myers calls this anticipation of Zakhor “even more forthcoming about the communal mission of the historian than the more renowned work of 1982.” Yerushalmi then invoked Eugen Rosenstock Huessy’s image of the historian as “physician of the soul” whose job is to heal the wounds of memory.
This is what Myers is doing now. The Yom Kippur liturgy reimagining, the Tisha B’av reframing to include Jewish responsibility for Palestinian suffering, the attempt to recode Gaza as Jewish moral trauma — this is the historian as physician of the soul, healing wounds of memory by constructing new liturgical and commemorative resources. Myers identified this role in his teacher’s 1970 address. He is now enacting it in his own public work. The framework sees this not as novel activism but as the continuation of a role Yerushalmi defined and Myers learned from him.
The “faith of fallen Jews” phrase that titles the volume is important. It comes from Zakhor chapter 4, where Yerushalmi diagnosed modern Jewish historiography as “the faith of fallen Jews.” The volume’s title takes Yerushalmi’s diagnosis and turns it into a claim of continuity. Fallen Jews — those who have left traditional observance — can still carry a form of faith through historical scholarship. The title captures Yerushalmi’s own position (Orthodox yeshiva background, Jewish studies scholar at Columbia and Harvard, not observant in the traditional sense, but deeply engaged with Jewish tradition as scholar). It also captures Myers’s own position. Both men left traditional observance. Both made Jewish tradition their scholarly subject. Both treat the scholarly engagement as something religious-adjacent, as Ellenson put it, “a conduit to my soul.”
Yerushalmi worked on crypto-Jews for his entire career — the biography of Isaac Cardoso, the 1506 Lisbon massacre of New Christians, Freud read as quasi-Marrano figure maintaining secret Jewish engagement under public secular persona. Myers notes that what fascinated Yerushalmi about Marranos was “the complex psychology of the persecuted, who often possessed radically divergent public and private personae.” Myers writes: “It was the resulting psychic makeup of the crypto-Jew — and in a different way of the assimilated modern Jew — that animated Yerushalmi’s constant interest in the manifold and tortured permutations of Jewish identity.”
Yerushalmi’s 1993 German lecture, repeated at Emory in 2005, challenged Arendt’s claim that Jews “had no political tradition or experience.” Yerushalmi argued, contra Arendt, “that there was nothing in their historical experience to prepare them for the genocidal rage of Nazism.” If Jewish political experience is longstanding, then Jewish political strategy can draw on historical resources. If Jews have political history, they have political tradition to consult. Myers’s current political arguments about coalition strategy draw on this. His claim that American Jews must shift from state alliance to horizontal alliance is a strategic proposal grounded in the kind of Jewish political history Yerushalmi insisted Arendt had wrongly denied.
Yerushalmi worked on Ibn Verga’s Shevet Yehudah for forty years and never published his translation and commentary. Myers notes this as “a telling reminder of his unstinting and, at times inhibiting, perfectionism.” Yerushalmi’s slowness and perfectionism — he was “not an especially prolific writer,” Myers notes in explicit contrast to Baron’s “overwhelming” output — is a feature of his scholarly character. Myers’s own output is more prolific than Yerushalmi’s. Different situational demands, different temperaments, but also a conscious choice on Myers’s part to prioritize reach over Yerushalmi’s kind of perfectionism. The framework can note this as a methodological divergence that has costs and benefits. Yerushalmi’s perfectionism meant fewer but more carefully constructed interventions. Myers’s prolificacy means more public reach but less compression of the scholarly work into each piece.
Yerushalmi chose not to become a public intellectual. Myers made a different choice.
“Editor’s Introduction: Jorge Luis Borges and the Jewish Question.” Jewish Quarterly Review 104, no. 3 (2014)
Myers performs standard jurisdictional expansion. JQR is Penn’s Katz Center journal, the oldest English-language Jewish studies publication. Running a forum that concludes Borges is “perhaps the most Jewish of non-Jewish writers of the twentieth century” extends the field’s territory beyond ethnic Jews. The phrase is coalition grammar. It ranks outsiders by proximity to the coalition while preserving the border. Borges almost belongs.
The Pinochet and Videla problem gets one sentence. “Despite a brief and atypical period in the 1970s in which he expressed sympathy for the dictatorial regimes of Jorge Rafael Videla in Argentina and Augusto Pinochet in Chile, Borges tended to find himself on the right side of history.” Atypical. Brief. Myers brackets the fascism as anomaly so he can declare Borges on the correct side. The same handling of Pound or Heidegger might draw a thousand pages of anguished qualification. Here it sits in a subordinate clause. Borges’s philo-Semitism makes him too useful to the field to dwell on his dictator phase. The hero system protects itself.
The “Yo, Judio” essay from 1934 is an act of decency. Borges answered Argentine fascists who called him a Jew by saying he wished he were one. Myers reads this as pure courage. Philo-Semitism of this kind, admiration from the outside, often runs as status signal for both parties. The admirer performs cosmopolitan anti-fascism. The community gains prestige validation from a celebrated non-member. Borges got to wear a badge that marked him apart from the Buenos Aires nationalist right. The Jews of Argentina got a great writer vouching for them. Both sides traded real coin.
The Kabbalah framing deserves a closer look. Borges admitted “almost complete ignorance of the Hebrew language.” Wolfson claims he understood Kabbalah “as deeply as any kabbalist.” This cannot be right in any strong sense. Kabbalah without Hebrew, without halakha, without the lived discipline of a Jewish community, is not Kabbalah. It is a literary rendering of Kabbalistic themes. Borges read Scholem and other scholars. He extracted images of infinity, letters, mirrors, dreams. He made wonderful fiction from them. The tacit knowledge a kabbalist holds cannot move through that channel. What you learn from books without apprenticeship is a description of practice, not the practice.
The claim also serves the scholar. Wolfson gains by proximity. If Borges grasped the rudiments of Jewish esotericism as deeply as a kabbalist, then the study of Jewish esotericism joins company with a great writer of the twentieth century. The flattering traffic runs both ways.
The Lyotard invocation performs cultural trauma construction. “The events of the day so exceeded the capacity for cognitive comprehension” as to explain why Borges blurred fact and fiction. The Holocaust as sublime, as that which overwhelms representation, licenses a specific reading of his dream-logic fiction. The reading might be right. The move is familiar. It converts an aesthetic choice into a moral response to unthinkable tragedy, which stabilizes the writer’s reputation inside the coalition of those who remember correctly.
Myers writes in the house style of prestige philo-Semitic hagiography. Count the intensifiers. “Unusually probing.” “Extraordinary writerly talent.” “Courageous directness.” “Deeply committed.” “Voracious reading.” “Heartfelt admiration.” The prose performs the admiration it describes. The pattern across the piece is simple. Establish greatness. Establish Jewish affinity. Link them so each underwrites the other. The greatness vouches for the Jewish connection. The Jewish connection explains the greatness.
“Six Theses on the Sustainability of Minority Culture in a Majority Society: The Jewish and Muslim Cases,” Muslim World (2014)
The essay is a coalition statement wearing the clothes of general theory. Myers writes as UCLA history chair, as a participant in a Hartford Seminary interfaith workshop, as a non-Orthodox Jewish scholar, and as a contributor to a journal that exists to run this kind of dialogue. The six theses he proposes are the six theses his position requires him to propose. A UCLA history chair who declared Orthodox Judaism the correct answer, Gerson Cohen a disaster for American Judaism, and assimilation a curse, does not hold the chair.
Thesis one, the porous boundary, is convenient for the cultural historian who works on religious subjects without being a theologian and on Jewish life without being an observant Jew. A sharp boundary shrinks the cultural-historical project. A porous one opens it up.
Thesis two, that balance is unavoidable, naturalizes the non-Orthodox settlement. Orthodox Jews do not experience tradition as a balancing act. They experience it as transmission. Framing balance as unavoidable forecloses the Orthodox answer by fiat.
Thesis three is the key move. Gerson Cohen gave his Blessing of Assimilation speech in 1966 as Chancellor of JTS. The speech was internal Jewish polemic against the Orthodox account of Jewish survival. Myers lifts it out of that polemical context and presents it as general theory available to Muslims. The Orthodox reply writes itself. Cohen presided over the collapse of the Conservative movement he led. His thesis faces refutation by the demographics of his own denomination and by the opposite success of the Haredi world he rejected. Myers does not mention this and cannot, because the mention might undo the thesis.
Thesis four, cultural difference as positive value, does double duty with thesis three. Myers now has permission to endorse assimilation and permission to resist it, whichever the moment needs. Rawidowicz’s libertas differendi is a fine concept, and Myers is right that Rawidowicz deserves more attention than he gets. The essay’s use of him is coalition maneuvering room rather than serious engagement.
Thesis five tells you what Myers thinks about religious authority. He treats Napoleon’s Paris Sanhedrin as a “decisive turning point.” He describes two centuries of Halakhah in the West as “adaptation, accommodation, and diminution of scope.” The prose is neutral; the preference is not. An Orthodox jurist rejects the Paris Sanhedrin as binding in any sense. He does not concede that civil law enjoys superiority over Torah law. Myers’s description legitimates the modern civil-law primacy that makes his chair possible in the first place.
Thesis six is the reassurance the speaker and his audience both need. If the secular is not the enemy of the religious, then the Jewish studies chair at a secular university has not betrayed his tradition, and the Muslim scholar who enters the same settlement has not betrayed his. Casanova’s deprivatization serves here because it says the secular age does not banish religion from public life. The essay does not mention that Casanova’s thesis has aged awkwardly, that European deprivatization has gone in directions Myers’s coalition finds alarming, or that the American version depends on settlements that Orthodox communities reject.
The treatment of the Muslim interlocutors repays attention. They look on “admiringly” at Jewish institutional success. They “appeared to feel much less at liberty to reinterpret their scriptural tradition.” The asymmetry flatters the Jewish side. The possibility that Muslim reluctance to reinterpret scripture is the correct answer, and Jewish elasticity the error, the essay cannot entertain. Thesis three has foreclosed it.
The coalition boundary appears in the footnotes. Cohen, Ahad Ha-am, Rawidowicz, Cover, Berger, Casanova, Hyman, Weber, Williams. No Soloveitchik. No Hirsch. No serious Muslim traditionalist. No scholar who argues Cohen was wrong. The absent interlocutors are the ones whose objections the essay cannot survive.
The essay also offers its readers a Beckerian immortality project. Survival is the heroic act, adaptation the vitalizing labor, the balancing man the hero. Myers casts himself and his readers in that role. The exhausting work of balancing becomes the cultural exercise that allows creative reinvigoration. This is hero-system language in scholarly syntax.
Each thesis reads as a convenient belief for the coalition that produces it. Thesis one makes Myers’s cultural history possible. Thesis two legitimates the non-Orthodox settlement. Thesis three authorizes the historical choices of his coalition. Thesis four protects the claim to particularity as the coalition assimilates. Thesis five legitimates Reform and Conservative halakhah against Orthodox halakhah. Thesis six legitimates the university as a site of religious studies. The theses are not wrong because they are convenient, but their convenience is the thing Myers does not examine.
The Muslim World is a Hartford Seminary journal. Hartford is a mainline Protestant school that found its post-Protestant niche running interfaith programs. The journal wants exactly the essay Myers gives it. The essay flatters the venue’s reason for existing, and the venue rewards the flattery with publication. Collins’s interaction ritual chain at work, a small emotional-energy exchange among people who need each other to keep doing what they do.
Between Jewish Tradition and Modernity: Rethinking an Old Opposition (2014)
The festschrift format is the key. The 2014 volume honors David Ellenson while he was alive, with Myers as co-editor and author of the introduction. The audience is specialists in modern Jewish intellectual history who will check Myers’s claims about Ellenson’s work against what Ellenson wrote. This is the hardest form of operational vigilance Myers’s writing can face, because readers know the material intimately and will catch any misrepresentation of formations, arguments, contributions. The writing is disciplined accordingly.
What Myers does in the introduction is substantial. He constructs an intellectual genealogy for Ellenson that includes Fritz Bamberger at HUC, David Little at Virginia (the exposure to Marx, Durkheim, Freud, Weber that “changed my life”), Gillian Lindt and Robert Nisbet at Columbia, Arthur Hertzberg, Joseph Blau, and most importantly Jacob Katz. The genealogy is checkable. It is also Myers’s own genealogy. Both work within the German-Jewish intellectual tradition. Both take Weber seriously while noting his limitations on Judaism. Both treat Jacob Katz as central methodological guide. Both are interested in tradition-modernity negotiation as the central question of modern Judaism. Both focus on rabbinic responsa and liturgy as the sites where the negotiation becomes visible.
The methodological claim Myers credits to Ellenson is what connects this essay to the current liturgical work. Ellenson’s heroes, Myers says, are “precisely those German Orthodox figures who defied the stereotype of rigid and unvarying legalists—rabbis such as Markus Horovitz, David Zvi Hoffmann, and Esriel Hildesheimer.” These are figures who operated in the gray area between accommodation and resistance, against Peter Berger’s dichotomy. Myers quotes Ellenson: “Jewish law, even when interpreted by Orthodox authorities, displays the same dynamism of pluralism and variability that characterizes all living legal systems.”
This is the intellectual commitment underwriting Myers’s own liturgical innovations. Tradition is not a fixed thing from which one departs. It is a living system whose internal resources include precedents for the kinds of modifications Myers makes. The Yom Kippur Al Chet additions are not innovations from outside Jewish practice. They are continuations of the approach to Jewish law and liturgy that Ellenson documented in his German-Orthodox subjects and that Ellenson practiced. When Myers adds new confessions for Jewish sins against Palestinians, he is operating within the tradition he credits Ellenson with illuminating.
Myers notes that Ellenson “left Orthodoxy as a young man” and that he was “more open in acknowledging the inseparable bond between the scholarly and spiritual planes in his life” than Jacob Katz was. This is biographically pointed. It is also the path Myers appears to be walking. The 2025 HUC address mentioned Myers praying the Amida daily. The Ellenson essay mentions Ellenson’s “inseparable bond between the scholarly and spiritual planes.” Two scholars who left Orthodoxy but retained deep engagement with Jewish religious tradition, working on the historical question of how tradition adapts to modernity, extending their scholarly work into religious practice in their own lives. The alignment is substantial.
The observation that Ellenson was from Newport News, Virginia, raised in an Orthodox household that “distinguished them from most others in the city” while permitting “successful integration into the fabric of Newport News—or at least, of white Newport News—in professional, civic, and educational terms” is Myers’s kind of observation. The parenthetical “or at least, of white Newport News” does pointed work. It names the racial structure of southern Jewish acculturation without making it the center of the essay. This is the characteristic Myers move. He notices and marks the structure without centering it. Scholars who want to center it can build on the observation. Scholars who do not care to notice it will pass over the parenthetical. The phrasing accomplishes coalitional work across different scholarly audiences.
Myers’s claim about Ellenson is notable. “Ellenson is one of the most important sociological theorists of Judaism today.” He notes that Ellenson “has not promoted himself (or even been acknowledged) as” such. This is Myers making an advocacy argument. He is using the festschrift to argue that his friend deserves recognition the field has not accorded him. This is classic insider work. Scholars do this for each other when they share commitments and want those commitments visible in the field. The festschrift format permits this advocacy because the whole point of festschrifts is to accord recognition the honoree deserves. Myers uses the format skillfully.
The substantive scholarly content of the introduction is disciplined. The Bernard Illowy case in mid-nineteenth century New Orleans, the Markus Horovitz case in late nineteenth century Frankfurt, the disagreements about circumcising sons of Jewish fathers and Gentile mothers, the dissent of Zvi Hirsch Kalischer with his zera kodesh framing, the transnational rabbinical discourse Ellenson documented. Each of these is checkable and textured. Myers is summarizing Ellenson’s scholarly contributions in ways that readers can verify.
The festschrift audience produces the most disciplined version of Myers’s writing because it imposes the hardest operational vigilance. The claims about scholarship must survive specialist checks. Myers delivers. The essay also shows the intellectual commitments underwriting the post-October 7 public work. Those commitments are intellectually disciplined, and continuous with a scholarly tradition Myers has worked in for decades.
The current liturgical work looks different when you read this essay. The Al Chet additions are not out-of-nowhere political interventions. They are the current iteration of a tradition of Jewish legal and liturgical adaptation that Myers has studied his entire career. The warrant for those additions comes from the scholarship Myers has done and the intellectual friendships he has formed. When Myers and Seidler-Feller add new confessions to the Yom Kippur liturgy, they are operating within the tradition Ellenson documented. The innovation is continuous with the scholarly work.
The 2025 graduation address mentioned Ellenson as “soulmate, dear colleague, conversation partner, mentor, friend, brother.” The 2014 festschrift shows you why. Eight years of intellectual collaboration when Myers was writing his dissertation at the HUC library in LA, decades of shared intellectual commitments, shared commitment to the same scholarly question, shared approach to Jewish tradition as living system. The personal grief in the graduation address is grounded in the intellectual relationship this festschrift documents.
The Ellenson relationship is the central intellectual friendship of Myers’s career. The commitments it embodies are the commitments that produce everything else. The current liturgical innovations are extensions of exactly what Myers credits Ellenson with illuminating. The tradition-modernity frame is the frame Myers has worked in for his entire career. When Myers argues that Jewish religious life must incorporate responsibility for Palestinian suffering, he is operating within the framework he has credited Ellenson with developing. Tradition is not static. It adapts to circumstances through authorized modifications.
Rabbi Hayim David Halevi was chief rabbi of Tel Aviv-Jaffa, and a student of Rabbi Ouziel, a Sephardic posek. He wrote responsa on the obligations of the State of Israel toward its Arab minority. Myers quotes Halevi’s condemnation of King Saul for his role in the death of the Gibeonites: “the obligation of every government to be concerned for the subsistence of its citizens, whether they are permanent residents or strangers.” Myers adds that failure to discharge that obligation, in Halevi’s framing, would “bring shame upon the Jewish people” and the God of Israel.
This is the halakhic tradition Myers is drawing on when he writes post-October 7 about Jewish responsibility for Palestinian suffering. The Gaza op-eds and the Al Chet additions are not secular political interventions with a Jewish veneer. They are the contemporary application of a Sephardic halakhic tradition that Myers identified in 2014 as doing exactly this kind of work. Halevi used the form of the responsum to offer novel readings of biblical texts to formulate clear moral directives for a broad public. Myers is using the form of the op-ed and the liturgical innovation to do the same work for the same reasons.
Myers is not running a generic progressive Jewish project. He is running a Sephardic-inflected halakhic project that extends moral concern to non-Jewish minorities on the strength of rabbinic precedents. The authority claim behind the liturgical work is not “I am a progressive Jewish public intellectual.” It is “I am continuing the tradition of Halevi and Ouziel, scholars who used halakhic tools to formulate Jewish moral obligations toward non-Jewish populations in the Jewish polity.” The Sephardic framing matters because Sephardic halakhic authority has historically been more willing than Ashkenazic halakhic authority to run these kinds of extensions. When Myers invokes this lineage, he is claiming warrants his Ashkenazic-dominated progressive Jewish audience would not immediately grasp but that survive serious scholarly check.
Myers writes about Ellenson: “a traditional system to whose tenets he no longer adheres. That said, he studies it with as much acuity and empathy as any living scholar. His way is not dispassionate and disengaged study. It is study that can serve, he avers, as ‘the conduit to my soul.'” This describes Ellenson. It also describes Myers. Both left Orthodoxy. Both study Jewish tradition with acuity and empathy. Both treat the study as soul conduit rather than dispassionate scholarship. The HUC graduation address in 2025 made explicit what the 2014 festschrift shows through describing Ellenson. Myers prays the Amida daily because the study is soul conduit. The practice follows from the scholarly engagement rather than existing separately from it.
Myers closes with “talmid hakham, moreh derekh, tsadik” applied to Ellenson, with a citation to Psalm 92 (the Shabbat psalm) and the tsadik ke-tamar image. The register is fully Jewish and fully traditional. Myers is operating within the Jewish tradition he studies, using its categories to honor Ellenson, deploying rabbinic language in a scholarly introduction. The boundary between scholarship and religious practice that secular academic convention would maintain is not maintained here. Myers does not apologize for the boundary collapse. The festschrift format permits it and the honoree deserves it.
Myers concludes: “Like Hayim David Halevi, he studies law in order to mine the tradition for moral principles to guide his community in the present. While not yielding a single Kantian ‘categorical imperative,’ these principles nourish David Ellenson’s undiluted goodness and generosity of spirit, which, in turn, radiate out to the broader Jewish world.”
This is the self-description Myers is offering. Study as mining tradition for moral principles to guide community in the present.
Read on.
