Talia Sasson
Talia SassonYoni Kempinski

David Myers, a scholar of Jewish history, has been tapped as the next president of the radical left wing New Israel Fund, according to Haaretz.

Myers is the President & CEO of the Center for Jewish History in New York. He is a professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he holds the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Chair in Jewish History.

Myers published his first book, Re-Inventing the Jewish Past: European Jewish Intellectuals and the Zionist Return to History, in 1995.

He served for ten years as the director of the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies and, from 2010–15, as the Robert N. Burr Department Chair of the UCLA History Department. He also has served since 2003 as the co-editor of the Jewish Quarterly Review.

Recently, he has been engaged in research on the Satmar Hasidic community of Kiryas Joel, New York.

Many nationalists in Israel have come to see the New Israel Fund as a radical and dangerous organization, intent on weakening Israel's Jewish character and sapping its fighting spirit by various stealthy means. According to this view, the NIF deceives society at large by supporting various causes that are within the national consensus, while also donating funds to groups that subvert the Jewish national state.

The critics hold that much of this subversion is invisible to most people, and is disguised as seeking to correct societal injustice and assist disenfanschised segments of the population.