The Jewish Past Revisited: Reflections on Modern Jewish Historians

by David N. Myers (Editor)

In this fascinating collection of writings, contemporary American and Israeli historians examine the ways earlier historians have framed, written, and "made" the Jewish past. The contributors offer new perspectives on various central figures of twentieth-century historiography, each of whom confronted the challenges posed by assimilation, anti- Semitism, and various forms of nationalism. Studies in Jewish Culture and Society, a series of the Center for Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania .

244 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 1998

About the author

David N. Myers received his A.B. from Yale College in 1982, 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, with a particular interest in the history of Jewish historiography. He has authored Re-Inventing the Jewish Past: European Jewish Intellectuals and the Zionist Return to History (Oxford: 1995) and Resisting History: Historicism and its Discontents in German-Jewish Thought (Princeton, 2003). Myers has edited five books, including The Jewish Past Revisited and Enlightenment and Diaspora: The Armenian and Jewish Cases.

At present, Myers is working on books on the Diaspora Hebraist thinker Simon Rawidowicz and (together with Nomi Stolzenberg) the Satmar Hasidic community of Kiryas Yoel, New York. He is also actively involved in a major project on the history of Jews in Los Angeles. Myers has taught at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and the Russian State University for the Humanities, and visited at the Institute for Advanced Studies (Jerusalem) and the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies (Philadelphia). Since 2003, he has served as co-editor of the Jewish Quarterly Review. At UCLA, Myers teaches courses in ancient, medieval, and modern Jewish history.