Appointment of David N. Myers, Distinguished Professor and Sady and Ludwig Kahn Chair in Jewish History appointed Faculty Director of the Bedari Kindness Institute

Dear Colleagues,

Following an internal search, David N. Myers, Distinguished Professor and Sady and Ludwig Kahn Chair in Jewish History in the UCLA Department of History, has been named faculty director of the UCLA Bedari Kindness Institute.

The UCLA Bedari Kindness Institute was established in 2019 with a gift from The Bedari Foundation, a private family foundation whose aim is to enable significant cultural shifts in the fields of health and wellness, community displacement, and environmental conservation. The institute supports world-class research on kindness, creates opportunities to translate that research into real-world practices, and serves as a global platform to educate and communicate its findings. Among its principal goals are to empower citizens and inspire leaders to build more humane societies. Under the direction of Myers, two important campus-wide initiatives, the Dialogue Across Difference Initiative and the Initiative to Study Hate, will be integrated under the institute. The Dialogue Across Difference Initiative, one of the campus’s strategic priorities, aims to model and promote the values of intellectual engagement, curiosity, empathy, active listening, and critical thinking through a series of campus events, classes, informal learning opportunities, and social programming. The Initiative to Study Hate is a three-year pilot project intended to foster cutting-edge research and high-level teaching to understand and mitigate group-based hate.

I thank Daniel Fessler, inaugural faculty director of the UCLA Bedari Kindness Institute, for his thoughtful and tireless leadership launching the institute. Under his direction, the institute supported over 25 graduate students in the furtherance of their dissertations, funded research grants for a dozen faculty-led projects, sponsored over 20 Fiat Lux courses for undergraduates on themes of kindness, created a kindness-based vaccine promotion during COVID that was shared with healthcare organizations throughout the U.S., and established the Contagious Kindness Project, a student-led initiative in which UCLA students share experiences of acts of kindness they have witnessed across social media platforms. These are key and important projects that have begun to lay the foundation for a thriving research and impact arena on kindness, and I am grateful for his time and leadership in this space.

David Myers received his A.B. in Near Eastern Languages and Literature from Yale and his Ph.D. in History from Columbia University. Myers began his tenure at UCLA in 1991, teaching Jewish history to undergraduate and graduate students. For ten years, he served as director of the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies. Myers also served as Robert N. Burr Department Chair of the UCLA History Department from 2010 to 2015. From 2017 to 2018, he served as the President/CEO of the Center for Jewish History in New York. Myers is the founding director of the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy.

Please join me in thanking Dan for his service and welcoming David to this important new role.

Sincerely,

Abel Valenzuela, Ph.D
Dean of Social Sciences, UCLA College