Born in the New York City borough of Brooklyn into the Lithuanian-Jewish (Litvak) family of the award-winning Yiddish poet Menke Katz, Dovid Katz graduated from Columbia University in 1978, completing a doctorate on the origins of the Yiddish language at the University of London. A founding instructor of the Yiddish studies program at Oxford University, Katz began publishing Yiddish fiction while in the United Kingdom under the nom de plume Heershadovid Menkes in 1992, following the passing of his father. He co-founded the Oxford Institute for Yiddish Studies in 1994, serving as research director for the institute until 1997.

Katz relocated to Vilnius in the late 1990s in order to establish a Yiddish program at Vilnius University, where he founded the Vilnius Yiddish Institute after a brief period of work at Yale University. Professor Katz is the author of Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish (2007), whose trajectory traces the evolution of the Yiddish language over a millennium as well as three books of fiction in Yiddish and numerous scholarly works on aspects of the Yiddish language and Lithunian Jewish culture.

Katz has been an outspoken critic of the presentation of Holocaust history in the national historical narratives of the Baltic states, condemning them as aiming at both mitigatating the extent of local involvement in the tragedy and trivializing and obfuscating the Holocaust. After official pressure against a proposed program to teach Holocaust history at Vilnius University, Katz was forced to teach his account of the Holocaust in students' homes instead of the university's campus.

Professor Katz associates the phenomenon of Holocaust obfuscation not with a popular anti-semitism among the Lithuanian people but with an "anti-Semitic establishment that is based not among everyday people, but among the elites of government and some of its agencies and some quasi-academic institutions." Observing the treatment of the Holocaust history in the Baltic states, Katz has spoken of an organized campaign oriented around various strategems

"including delegitimization of the anti-Nazi resistance (resulting most recently in prosecutorial campaigns against Holocaust survivors who resisted); delegitimization of the Wiesenthal Center and efforts to bring Nazi war criminals to justice; extreme embellishment of Jewish participation in Soviet rule; redefinition by law of the word 'genocide'; provocation of anti-Semitic moods centered on local Jews and Holocaust survivors; marginalization of valiant local non-Jewish champions of truth-telling, and their replacement by lavishly sponsored 'double genocide' commissions, research centers and museums. Discussion of successes to date in the European Parliament."

Registering his dissent against the United Kingdom's Conservative Party's efforts to align itself with the controversial eastern European right in 2009, Katz has suggested that the party must not get "off the hook for their dalliances with some of the worst racists and Holocaust perverters in eastern Europe, who have turned obfuscation and distortion of history into foreign policy and for whom the watering down of the notion of genocide is a prime principle," dismissing support for such a bloc from British politicians as an ethically "untenable" stance.