David N. Myers is a professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he holds the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Chair in Jewish History and is an elected fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research and the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities. Myers was the president and CEO of the Center for Jewish History 2017 – 2018, serves as the President of the New Israel Fund, and the director of the Luskin Center for History and Policy. He previously served as chair of the UCLA History Department and as director of the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies. He received his BA from Yale College and undertook graduate studies at Tel-Aviv and Harvard Universities before completing his doctorate at Columbia in 1991.
He has written extensively in the fields of modern Jewish intellectual and cultural history. He has authored Re-Inventing the Jewish Past: European Jewish Intellectuals and the Zionist Return to History, Resisting History: Historicism and Its Discontents in German-Jewish Thought, Between Jew and Arab: The Lost Voice of Simon Rawidowicz, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction, and The Stakes of History: On the Use and Abuse of Jewish History for Life.
Myers has edited or co-edited eight books, including The Jewish Past Revisited and Enlightenment and Diaspora: The Armenian and Jewish Cases, and The Faith of Fallen Jews: Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and the Writing of Jewish History. Myers has taught at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales and the Russian State University for the Humanities, visited at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem, and been a fellow on three occasions at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. Since 2003, he has served as co-editor of the Jewish Quarterly Review.