David N. Myers is a Distinguished Professor of History at UCLA. He is the co-author (with Nomi Stolzenberg) of “American Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic Village in Upstate New York” (2022) and a member of the Haredi Research Group.
David N. Myers
By David N. Myers
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Opinion Vaccine hesitancy is not a uniquely Haredi problem
The first case of polio in years was recently revealed to be an Orthodox Jewish man, leading some to blame the community at large
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Opinion To uphold its founding promise, Israel must treat its Arab citizens as truly equal
The current cycle of violence between Israel and the Palestinians dispels two major illusions. The first regards the impact of the Abraham Accords of September 2020, which normalized relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. In announcing the Accords, President Donald Trump boldly declared that “(a)fter decades of division and conflict, we…
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Opinion Yes, Palestinians have the right to speak about antisemitism
Earlier this week, a group of 122 prominent Palestinian and Arab scholars and intellectuals signed a petition about antisemitism. In it, they took on the question of whether anti-Zionism is inherently antisemitic, taking aim at the definition of antisemitism used by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. Among other things, the IHRA working definition holds that…
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Opinion What the current crisis shows about Haredi leadership and politics
The protests against COVID-19 restrictions by Haredi Jews in Brooklyn last week, which included burning masks and an attack on a Haredi journalist, were shocking. They seemed to represent a blatant defiance of public-health norms and plain old common sense. And they mark a new stage in the evolution of the Haredi community in the…
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News Remembering Professor Ruth Gavison, scholar, activist, and friend
This past Saturday saw the untimely passing of Professor Ruth Gavison z”l, one of Israel’s leading intellectuals and legal minds, at the age of 75. Ruth Gavison was the rarest of individuals: a searingly brilliant legal theorist and a deeply engaged citizen in the life of her country, a person with little patience for small…
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News Remembering Steven M. Lowenstein, prominent Jewish historian
The prominent Jewish historian, Steven M. Lowenstein, passed away at his home in Los Angeles after a ten-month struggle with pancreatic cancer. He had largely completed a massive scholarly project on which he had been working for decades: a 731-page study of the demographic history of German Jewry. This alone would stand as a remarkable…
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Opinion Climate change, inequality, anti-Semitism, occupation: Corona is a chance for a reset
Previous Article Next Article Never has the period between Passover and Shavuot been like this. The 49 days of counting the Omer, to which I have been a bit too episodically attentive over the years, have never had more significance to me. Today, these seven weeks provide a measuring stick for our confinement during the…
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Opinion Coronavirus is no excuse to demonize Haredim
In the endless stream of stories about the COVID-19 pandemic, an unsettling sub-plot has been the actions, or lack thereof, of various Haredi groups in the New York metropolitan area. Reports of a swarm of positive test results in Borough Park and Williamsburg have raised fears of a cluster outbreak, triggered by a small number…
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