The New York-based Center for Jewish History is a partnership of five Jewish history, scholarship, and art organizations in which makes up the biggest repository of Jewish history in the United States. The Center serves as a centralized place of scholarly research, events, exhibitions, and performances. Shamefully, the organization’s new CEO, David N. Myers has been exposed as a boycotter of Israel.
Canpus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum, has reported that Myers’ anti-Israel invective has “employed all the usual clichés—"cycle of violence,” “disproportionately harsh"—to single Israel out as “the most responsible party” for the “escalating violence” in a July 2006 Los Angeles Times op-ed. In a piece titled, “Rethinking the Jewish Nation” in the Winter 2011 edition of the Havruta Journal, Myers argued that “Statist Zionism,” or a Jewish state, should give way to a “global Jewish collective.”
In an op-ed in the LA Jewish Journal entitled “Another Way To Look at BDS,” Myers defended a boycott of Israel and blamed settlements for BDS. Among his gems:
Jews do themselves no benefit by taking aim at BDS without struggling to end the occupation and granting Palestinians the right to self-determination. We are rapidly losing credibility in the world, among long-standing friends, on college campuses and particularly with our own Jewish youth, who no longer buy the hasbara refrain of Israel’s unblemished virtue. To right an ongoing injustice (and halt Israel’s plummeting reputation in the world), it is imperative to fight the root cause of BDS, which is not anti-Semitism, but rather the occupation.
We need a new campaign that makes clear that we stand with Israel and its right to exist, but can no longer tolerate the occupation and settlement-building. They are key factors in the denial of national rights to Palestinians and add fuel to the frustration-driven violence of today. Almost 50 years after the territorial conquests in 1967, with hundreds of thousands of Israeli Jewish civilians dwelling on land that the world regards as illegally settled, it seems hard to dispute that the occupation has been a tragic mistake. It is the Masada of our time — a seemingly bold and heroic pursuit, but ultimately a project of moral failing, political error and collective suicide.
David N. Myers also serves as a board member of The New Israel Fund, a radical organization that supports a boycott of Israel, and which Israel’s cultural minister said just last month aids terrorists. The Center for Jewish History has hired someone who is a radical leftist. The Center must be challenged on this.