Professor David N. Myers was among The Promise Institute Affiliated Faculty who joined us last semester for Affiliated Faculty Office Hours, an effort to bring faculty from across campus to meet students at the law school. A leading scholar in the fields of modern Jewish intellectual and cultural history, he has served as co-editor of the Jewish Quarterly Review since 2003. Myers is an elected fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research and the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities. At UCLA, he teaches courses on Jewish history as well as the history of history and runs a portfolio of impactful centers and institutes you’ll learn more about below. We are excited to share his interview with you. 

Professor David N. Myers is no stranger to insisting on nuance, even (perhaps especially) at times when nuance makes him a lightning rod. “Hardly a day goes by where I don’t receive an email from someone upset that I’m not taking a more partisan position on Israel and Palestine.”  

Prof. Myers is a Distinguished Professor who holds the Sady and Ludgwig Kahn Chair in Jewish History in the Meyer and Renee Luskin Department of History. As the Director of the Bedari Kindness Institute, the UCLA Initiative to Study Hate, the Faculty Director for the Dialogue Across Difference Initiative, as well as the longtime Director of the Luskin Center for History and Policy (from which he has recently stepped down), his career reflects his deep commitment to his values. If asked about his unrelenting curiosity, pursuit of contextualized understanding, determination to forge reconciliation, as well as his unflagging commitment to the dignity of all people, he is likely to demur, saying he’s continuing his family legacy. 

Professor Myers 

Growing up, he was always clear on wanting his work to allow him to help others, in ways that were consistent with foundational concepts of dignity and justice, including human rights. As a boy, he had witnessed his father and grandfather’s legal practice and was sure he’d follow in their footsteps; “as I saw it, the law was a noble profession through which one could do good in the world.” At a certain point in adolescence, however, he described coming to the “alienating realization that the skill of the lawyer sometimes was more determinative than the meting out of justice.” After many years of certainty, he described a period of feeling unsure about which life path to pursue instead. 

Attending school first at the University of Scranton, he immersed himself in the Jesuitical version of the studia humanitatis (a classical curriculum which includes rhetoric, literature, politics, history, and moral philosophy.) He then 

transferred to Yale College, where he took up the study of Middle Eastern politics. But it wasn’t until he took a class taught by a visiting professor from UCLA, Arnold Band, that the young Prof. Myers ultimately discovered his real passion and homed in on his career ambition: the study of Jewish History. “It’s a historically fascinating phenomenon. This small, often beleaguered people who—against all odds—managed to survive, cutting a vast geographic swath across the globe.”  

When asked how he came to UCLA after graduate school, he chuckled and said candidly, “by the grace of God.” His wife had landed a job at USC’s Gould School of Law and he was a graduate student finishing his dissertation at the time. They braced themselves for the whims of the job market. Lo and behold, a temp position in his “itty bitty little field” of Jewish History opened up at UCLA. Within a month he prepared to teach six classes and was off to the races. Fast forward, he and his wife both had found their way to academic jobs in “great institutions in the same city – a miracle!” And the UCLA professor who helped set him on this path originally, Arnold Band? They became colleagues and close friends over the years. 

In the decades since, Prof. Myers’ career has in many ways defied strict categorization. He’s become (perhaps, he always was) keen to understand why people react the way they do; whether the paradigms of conflict are as rigid as they sometimes have seemed; whether it’s possible to hasten more compassionate and just outcomes, and how we can reach across frameworks to do so. 

That approach was rooted in early experiences that shaped him as he started graduate studies at Tel Aviv University. Having first visited Israel as a child with his family, he was very taken with the country. He visited frequently and, in 1982, went there to commence his M.A. work with the idea of moving to the country permanently. That is, until a pivotal experience in that same year shook him to the core. Israel’s war in Lebanon, punctuated by the massacre of Palestinians by its allies in Sabra and Shatila, came as a shock to him. Myers felt that “Some of my naive assumptions about Israel fell by the wayside. I had to reorient my world view. I understood on whose side I must stand: the side of the oppressed, not the side of the powerful.” It was the beginning of his lifelong dedication to advancing prospects for peace between Palestinians and Israelis. And more recently, “towards really foregrounding the righteous struggle for freedom for Palestinians under Israeli occupation.”  

One of the many things you could say Prof. Myers specializes in is context. Not only because he is a history professor who has led a successful podcast, but also because it’s so readily on display through his founding leadership of the Luskin Center, from which he recently stepped down. The Luskin Center advocates for the importance of history in public discourse and insists that knowledge of the past is a vital ingredient in informed debate and policymaking. Indeed, one of their most important studies was on the history of homelessness in LA over the past century. They learned that many positive outcomes were driven by government programs which entrusted the unhoused to be active participants in policy formation.  

“Responsibly extracting lessons from history means casting your gaze on examples from the past, doing careful research that is empirically grounded, and not predetermining results to align with your inquiry’s end point,” he advised. “History isn’t always the greatest predictor of where we’re going, but if you want a decent sense of how problems take root and how to solve them, contextual reasoning is crucial.” 

In recent years, Myers has poured a good deal of his energy into three important campus initiatives: the UCLA Initiative to Study Hate, the UCLA Dialogue across Difference Initiative, and the Bedari Kindness Institute (BKI). Since 2024, Myers has directed BKI; he brought under its aegis both the Initiative to Study Hate and Dialogue across Difference. All three share a commitment to leveraging UCLA’s research excellence to promote kindness and mitigate hate in society. He is on sabbatical this year as a fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania but looks forward to coming back to BKI next year.     

Prof. Myers confessed that a few years ago he might have rolled his eyes at initiatives devoted to hate, kindness, and dialogue. Now, after bringing together some 130 researchers from across campus and bridging vastly different disciplines, he understands the relevance and import of this work. “This spring I was in conversation with the great john a. powell from UC Berkeley Law, and we spoke about the fierce urgency of now. Of dialogue, foregrounding kindness and compassion. There are deficits of these things in our society, and it is incapacitating.”  

Part of the work is to make clear that compassion and dialogue do not demand unanimity of agreement on issues. Instead, the point is to build the muscle to hear others as they would like to be heard and to think, too, of the commonalities that unite us.  

“We find ourselves in a chasm. Navigating the culture of polarization and countering the virulent contagion that is hate, particularly in whatever technological successors will follow social media—this is what I’ve come to see as the most important work I may do in my academic career. In paraphrasing Thomas Paine: ‘the times have found me,’” he smiled. 

What’s a piece of music you really love?

“I’ve become more and more of a confirmed Deadhead over time.” 

"Fire on the Mountain" by Grateful Dead

The Promise Institute for Human Rights (Los Angeles) acknowledges our presence on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Gabrielino/Tongva peoples.