David Myers, professor and Robert N. Burr Department Chair in the UCLA College’s Department of History, has been awarded the inaugural Sady and Ludwig Kahn Chair in Jewish History, which will provide the renowned historian funds for research, graduate student support and annual public seminars and symposia.
“It is a great honor to be the first holder of this chair, which will ensures that the poignant and powerful story of Sady and Ludwig Kahn — and of so many other Jews from the near and distant past — will be taught to generations of students at UCLA,” Myers said. “The Kahn Chair affirms UCLA’s place as a major center for the study of Jewish history in the United States and the world.”
Myers, who will be stepping down as department chair at the end of June, received his bachelor’s degree from Yale College in 1982. He then 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, with a particular interest in the history of Jewish historiography.
Myers is the author of the books "Re-Inventing the Jewish Past: European Jewish Intellectuals and the Zionist Return to History" (Oxford University Press, 1995), "Between Jew and Arab: The Lost Voice of Simon Rawidowicz" (Brandeis University Press, 2009) and "Resisting History: Historicism and its Discontents in German-Jewish Thought" (Princeton University Press, 2010). Myers has also edited seven books, including "The Jewish Past Revisited: Reflections on Modern Jewish Historians" (Yale University Press, 1998), "Enlightenment and Diaspora: The Armenian and Jewish Cases" (Scholars Press, 1999) and "The Faith of Fallen Jews: Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and the Writing of Jewish History" (Brandeis, 2013).
