The State of Hate is a three-part series, jointly sponsored by UCLA's Friends of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, UCLA's State of Hate Initiative, and the Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital Board of Advisors.

Hate and the Internet/Social Media - Part 3 in the series, will examine how the landscape of hate online has changed (or not) since the 2024 elections. The speakers will also discuss how young people are experiencing hate online, and what kinds of interventions should educators, content creators, and policymakers institute to fight on-line hate?

Speakers:

David Myers, PhD, is a Distinguished Professor of History, Sady and Ludwig Kahn Chair in Jewish History at UCLA, and the Director of the UCLA Initiative to Study Hate, a three-year pilot project intended to foster cutting-edge research and high-level teaching to understand better and mitigate group-based hate.  As of fall 2017, Dr. Myers served as the Director of the Luskin Center for History and Policy (http://luskincenter.history.ucla.edu/).  He previously served as chair of the UCLA History Department (2010-2015) and as director of the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies (1996-2000 and 2004-2010).  He 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. He has authored six books: Re-Inventing the Jewish Past: European Jewish Intellectuals and the Zionist Return to History (Oxford: 1995), Resisting History: Historicism and its Discontents in German-Jewish Thought (Princeton, 2003), Between Jew and Arab: The Lost Voice of Simon Rawidowicz (Brandeis University Press, 2008), Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction  (2017), The Stakes of History: On the Use and Abuse of Jewish History for Life  (2018), and with Nomi M. Stolzenberg, American Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic Village in Upstate New York (2022), which won the 2022 National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish Studies.  Myers has edited or co-edited twelve books, including The Eternal Dissident: Rabbi Leonard I. Beerman and the Radical Imperative to Think and Act (2018), with Benjamin C.I. Ravid, Simon Rawidowicz: Between Babylon and Jerusalem: Select Writings. Together with Michael Berenbaum, he brought to publication the monumental book of the late Steven Lowenstein, The Population History of German Jewry, 1815-1939 (2023).

Dr. Myers has taught at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociates and the Russian State University for the Humanities, visited at the Institute for Advanced Studies (Jerusalem), and been a fellow on three occasions at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies (Philadelphia). Since 2003, he has served as co-editor of the Jewish Quarterly Review. Myers is an elected fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research and the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities.  At UCLA, he teaches courses on Jewish history and the history of history. 

Christine Ong, PhD, is a Research Scientist at CRESST. Having worked in the field of educational research and evaluation for over 10 years, she currently co-directs an evaluation of the STEM Teacher in Advanced Residency (STAR) program at California State University Domiguez Hills, funded by the U.S. Department of Education. She also leads CRESST evaluation efforts on the Mobilize project, an innovative computer science initiative for high school students, which is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and serves as an advisor to the Exploring Computer Science project at the local and national level. Prior to her work at CRESST, Dr. Ong worked as a research analyst at First 5 LA and participated in the planning and dissemination of several large-scale evaluation studies, including the Los Angeles Universal Preschool Child Outcome Study (UPCOS) and the LA County Healthy Kids Insurance evaluation. She began her career in education as an early childhood teacher and museum educator. Dr. Ong is also a research fellow with the Initiative to Study Hate, with a team examining the spread and youth experiences of hate on social media.