Tony Robert Judt FBA (2 January 1948 ' 6 August 2010)^[1] was a British historian, essayist, and university professor.^[2] He specialized in European history and was the Erich Maria Remarque Professor in European Studies at New York University and Director of NYU's Erich Maria Remarque Institute. He was a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books. In 1996 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2007 a corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. A Marxist Zionist as a young man, he dropped his faith in Zionism after youthful experience in Israel in the 1960s and came to see a Jewish state as an anachronism, and moved away from Marxism in the 1970s and 1980s. In later life, he described himself as "a universalist social democrat".^[3] Judt's works include the highly acclaimed Postwar, a history of Europe after the Second World War. He was also well known for his views on Israel, which generated significant debate after he advocated a one-state solution to the Israeli'Palestinian conflict.

In an interview a few weeks before his death Judt said: "I see myself as first and above all a teacher of history; next a writer of European history; next a commentator on European affairs; next a public intellectual voice within the American Left; and only then an occasional, opportunistic participant in the pained American discussion of the Jewish matter'" ^[4]

[edit] Family and professional life

Born in 1948 in London, England, Judt was raised in South London by a mother whose parents had emigrated from the Russian Empire and a father who was born in Belgium and had emigrated as a boy to Ireland and then England. Judt was educated at Emanuel School, a Christian grammar school in Wandsworth, south-west London, before going on to study as a scholarship student at King's College, Cambridge.^[5] Judt was the first member of his family to finish secondary school and to go to university.^[6] He obtained a BA degree in history in 1969 and, after spending a year at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, completed a PhD in 1972.^[7] As a high school and university student he was a left-wing Zionist, and worked summers on kibbutzim. He moved away from Zionism after the Six-Day War of 1967, but remained impressed by Marxism as a tool of analysis.

After completing his Cambridge doctorate, he was elected a junior fellow of King's College in 1972, where he taught modern French history until 1978.^[8] Following a brief period teaching social history at the University of California, he returned to Great Britain in 1980 to teach politics at Oxford University. He moved to New York University in 1987.

Judt was married three times, with his first two marriages ending in divorce. His third marriage was to Jennifer Homans, The New Republic's dance critic, with whom he had two children.^[9][1] In a review of Judt's Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century, Jonathan Freedland writes that Judt has put conscience ahead of friendship during his life, and has demanded the same courage in others.

[edit] Writings

[edit] European history

Judt's experiences in Paris contributed to what would become a long and fruitful relationship with French political culture. He translated his Cambridge doctorate into French and published it in 1976 as La reconstruction du parti socialiste: 1921-1926. It was introduced by Annie Kriegel, who along with Maurice Agulhon was an important influence upon his early work as a French social historian. Judt's second book, Socialism in Provence 1871-1914: A Study in the Origins of the French Modern Left, an 'enquiry into a political tradition that shaped a nation',^[10] was an attempt to explain early origins and the continuities of left-wing politics in the region. More than any other work by Judt, Socialism in Province was based upon extensive archival research. It was his one and only attempt to place himself within the social history that was dominant in the 1970s.

[edit] Modern French history

In the 1970s and 1980s Judt was a historian of modern France. Marxism and the French Left: Studies in Labour and Politics in France 1830-1981 collects several previously unpublished essays on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ending with a discussion of Mitterand. In Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956, Judt moved away both from social history towards intellectual history, and from endorsement of French Marxist traditions to their critique. In Past Imperfect, he castigates French intellectuals of the postwar era, above all Jean-Paul Sartre for their 'self-imposed moral amnesia.'^[11] Judt has criticized what he considered blind faith in Stalin's communism. In Judt's reading, French thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre were blinded by their own provincialism, and unable to see that their calls for intellectual authenticity should have required them to interrogate their own attachment to communism and criticize the Soviet Union for its policies in postwar eastern Europe. This was in some sense a criticism from within, using French sources and polemical style against famous French intellectuals. Judt made a similar case in some of his more popular writings. For instance, following the recognition by then President Jacques Chirac, in 1995, of the responsibility of the French state during the Collaboration, on the anniversary of the Vel' d'Hiv raid, he claimed in an op-ed published by The New York Times that:

"people like Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault were curiously silent. One reason was their near-obsession with Communism. While proclaiming the need to "engage," to take a stand, two generations of intellectuals avoided any ethical issue that could not advance or, in some cases, retard the Marxist cause. Vichy was dismissed as the work of a few senile Fascists. No one looked closely at what had happened during the Occupation, perhaps because very few intellectuals of any political stripe could claim to have had a "good" war, as Albert Camus did. No one stood up to cry "J'accuse!" at high functionaries, as Emile Zola did during the Dreyfus affair. When Simone de Beauvoir, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida entered the public arena, it usually involved a crisis far away -- in Madagascar, Vietnam or Cambodia. Even today, politically engaged writers call for action in Bosnia but intervene only sporadically in debates about the French past."^[12]

[edit] Postwar

In the years following the publication of Past Imperfect, Judt turned his attention to the wider issues of European history. He spent the 1980s and much of the 1990s at Emory, Oxford, Stanford, and Vienna, where he taught political theory, learned Czech, and became friendly with a number of east European intellectuals. Erich Maria Remarque's widow, actress Paulette Goddard, bequeathed her fortune to NYU and thus the Institute of European Studies bearing her late husband's name came into being under Judt's direction. Judt's first broader book of this period ' the result of a speech delivered at the Johns Hopkins-SAIS Bologna Center in 1995 ' was A Grand Illusion? In this extended essay, he dealt directly with the European Union and its prospects for the future, which, in his view, were quite bleak. According to Judt, Europe's sense of its divisions had long been one of the 'defining obsessions of its inhabitants."^[13]

The benefits of unity were unevenly distributed and the regions it favored came to have more in common with each other than with their neighbors living in the same state. The Baden-Württemberg region in southwestern Germany, the Rhône-Alpes region of France, Lombardy and Catalonia are evoked as examples of disproportionately rich 'super-regions.' Another division, Judt claims, could be seen in the Schengen Agreement. Nothing more than a 'highest common factor of discriminatory political arithmetic,'^[14] the Schengen Agreement made Eastern European countries into barrier states designed to keep undesirable immigrants at bay. Similar dangers existed in eastern Europe where former critics of Soviet universalism deftly recycled themselves into anti-European, nationalist agitators.

These problems, Judt writes, could find their resolution only in increased national intervention. States would be called upon to redistribute wealth and preserve the decaying social fabric of the societies they governed. This conception of the role of the state is carried over ' albeit in slightly different form - into Judt's 2005 book, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945.

Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 cover

In Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, Judt examines the history of Europe from the end of World War II (1945) to 2005. Writing on such a broad subject was something of a departure for Judt, whose earlier works, such as Socialism in Provence and Past Imperfect, had focused on challenging conventional assumptions about the French Left. Weighing in at nearly 900 pages, it has won considerable praise for its sweeping, encyclopedic scope^[15] and was a runner up for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-fiction.^[16] Postwar was described by the BBC in Judt's obituary as "acclaimed by historians as one of the best works on the subject" of modern European history.^[17] The book was named as one of the ten best of 2005 by the New York Times Book Review^[18] and, in 2009, the Toronto Star named it decade's best historical book.^[19]

[edit] Ill Fares the Land

Judt's last book, Ill Fares the Land, projects lessons learned forward, challenging readers to debate, "what comes next?" The book makes the case for renewed social democracy, and received mixed reviews.^{[20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30]}

Written under the debilitating effects of ALS, Ill Fares The Land, has been described as Judt's "most overtly political book" and a "dramatic intervention" in the decline of the progressive ideals of the 20th century^[31]. Judt laments the breakdown of the post-war Keynesian policy consensus, the rise of Austrian Neo-liberal economics in the West and its political manifestations under Thatcher, Reagan et al. He notes the limited triangulation achieved by the Third Way and the paradoxical resurgence of the Right after the Global Financial Crisis. He asks: where to now for social democracy? He concludes that nothing less than a radical restatement of the values of equality and community can stem the challenge of the hegemonic Right.^{[citation needed]} He explored how the social contract that defined post-war Europe and the US and the guarantee of security, stability, and fairness was no longer considered a legitimate social goal and how a social democratic vision could win back the disaffected by creating a "civic language" that could support a renewed social contract between governments and their citizens.^[32]

[edit] Israel

Judt's mother and father were British citizens and secular Jews.^[5] They moved the family from the Jewish East End of London to Putney when Judt was a small boy. Judt was one of very few Jewish boys at Emmanual School. The language of the family was English, with some French with his father's family. Against the wishes of his parents, who were concerned about his studies, Judt enthusiastically embraced Zionism at age 15. For a time he wished to emigrate to Israel. In 1966, having won an exhibition to King's College, Cambridge, he worked for the summer on kibbutz Machanaim. When Nasser expelled UN troops from Sinai in 1967, and Israel mobilized for war, he volunteered to replace kibbutz members who had been called up. During and in the aftermath of the Six-Day War, he worked as a driver and translator for the Israel Defense Forces.^[33] After the war, Judt's belief in the Zionist enterprise began to unravel. "I went with this idealistic fantasy of creating a socialist, communitarian country through work," Judt has said. The problem, he began to believe, was that this view was "remarkably unconscious of the people who had been kicked out of the country and were suffering in refugee camps to make this fantasy possible."^[33]

In October 2003, in an article for the New York Review of Books, Judt argued that Israel was on its way to becoming a "belligerently intolerant, faith-driven ethno state." He called for the conversion of "Israel from a Jewish state to a binational one" which would include all of what is now Israel, Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank. This proposed new state would have equal rights for all Jews and Arabs living in Israel and the Palestinian territories.^[34] The article, which presented a view of Middle Eastern history and politics that had rarely been given exposure in the mainstream media in the United States, generated an explosive response, positive as well as negative. It drew strong criticism from pro-Israeli writers who saw such a plan as "destroying" Israel and replacing it with a predominantly Palestinian state governed by a Palestinian majority.^[35][36] The NYRB was inundated with over a thousand letters within a week of the article's publication, peppered with terms like 'antisemite' and 'self-hating Jew,' and the article led to Judt's removal from the editorial board of The New Republic.^[37] In April 2004 Judt gave a public speech at Columbia University in which he further developed his views.^[38]

In March 2006 Judt wrote an op-ed piece for The New York Times about the John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt paper entitled "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy". Judt argued that "[in] spite of [the paper's] provocative title, the essay draws on a wide variety of standard sources and is mostly uncontentious." He asked "[does] the Israel Lobby affect our foreign policy choices? Of course ' that is one of its goals. [...] But does pressure to support Israel distort American decisions? That's a matter of judgment." He summed up his assessment of Mearsheimer and Walt's paper by asserting that "this essay, by two 'realist' political scientists with no interest whatsoever in the Palestinians, is a straw in the wind." He predicted that "it will not be self-evident to future generations of Americans why the imperial might and international reputation of the United States are so closely aligned with one small, controversial Mediterranean client state."^[39]

In May 2006, Judt continued in a similar vein with a feature-length article entitled "The Country That Wouldn't Grow Up" for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.^[40] In a March 2007 interview, Judt commented on the American need to block criticism of Israel as stemming from the rise of identity politics in the US. "I didn't think I knew until then just how deep and how uniquely American this obsession with blocking any criticism of Israel is. It is uniquely American." The article, published on Israeli Independence Day, recaps Israel's short history, describing what Judt sees as a steady decline in Israel's credibility that began with the Six-Day War in 1967.^[41]

"Apparently, the line you take on Israel trumps everything else in life," Judt observed sardonically during an interview with the Financial Times in 2007.^[42]

On October 4, 2006, Judt's scheduled New York talk before the organization Network 20/20 was abruptly cancelled after Polish Consul Krzysztof Kasprzyk suddenly withdrew his offer of a venue following telephone calls from the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee. The consul later told a reporter that "I don't have to subscribe to the First Amendment."^[43] According to The New York Sun, "the appearance at the Polish consulate was canceled after the Polish government decided that Mr. Judt's views critical of Israel were not consistent with Poland's friendly relations with the Jewish state."^[44]

According to the Washington Post, the ADL and AJC had complained to the Polish consul that Judt was "too critical of Israel and American Jewry," though both organizations deny asking that the talk be canceled. ADL National Chairman Abraham Foxman called Judt's claims of interference "wild conspiracy theories." Kasprzyk told the Washington Post that "the phone calls were very elegant but may be interpreted as exercising a delicate pressure. That's obvious ' we are adults and our IQs are high enough to understand that." Judt, who had planned to argue that the Israel lobby in the US often stifled honest debate, called the implications of the cancellation "serious and frightening." He added that "only in America ' not in Israel ' is this a problem," charging that vigorous criticism of Israeli policy, acceptable in Israel itself, is taboo in the US. Of the ADL and AJC, he said, "These are Jewish organizations that believe they should keep people who disagree with them on the Middle East away from anyone who might listen."^[45]

The cancellation brought support from a roster of academics and intellectuals who said there had been an attempt to intimidate and shut down free debate - seeming to Judt's supporters to prove the point that Judt had wanted to make.^[46] Mark Lilla and Richard Sennett wrote a letter to Foxman in protest, which was signed by 114 people and published in the New York Review of Books.^[47]

In a later exchange on the subject in the New York Review of Books, Lilla and Sennet argued that "Even without knowing the substance of those 'nice' calls from the ADL and AJC, any impartial observer will recognize them as not so subtle forms of pressure."^[48]

The ADL and AJC defended their decision to contact the Polish consulate and rejected Judt's characterization of them. Foxman accused his critics of themselves stifling free speech when "they use inflammatory words like 'threaten,' 'pressure,' and 'intimidate' that bear no resemblance to what actually transpired." He wrote that the "ADL did not threaten or intimidate or pressure anyone. The Polish consul general made his decision concerning Tony Judt's appearance strictly on his own." Foxman said that Judt has "taken the position that Israel shouldn't exist [and t]hat puts him on our radar," while David A. Harris, executive director of the AJC, said that he wanted to tell the consulate that the thrust of Judt's talk ran "contrary to the entire spirit of Polish foreign policy."^[49]

[edit] Critical reception

Judt was praised by his peers for his wide-ranging knowledge and versatility in analysis. Jonathan Freedland wrote in NYRB, for example: "There are not many professors in any field equipped to produce, for example, learned essays on the novels of Primo Levi and the writings of the now forgotten Manès Sperber ' yet also able to turn their hand to, say, a close, diplomatic analysis of the Cuban missile crisis of 1962."^[50] Freedland further stated that Judt had demonstrated "through more than a decade of essays written for America's foremost journals... that he belongs to each one of those rare, polymathic categories."^[50]

In 2009, Judt was awarded a Special Orwell Prize for Lifetime Achievement for his contribution to British political writing.^[51]

[edit] Illness and death

In 2008, Judt was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease. From October 2009, he was paralyzed from the neck down. He was nevertheless able to give a two-hour public lecture.^[52][53] In January 2010 Judt wrote a short article about his condition, the first of a series of memoirs published in the New York Review of Books.^[54] In March 2010, Judt was interviewed by Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air,^[55] and in June he was interviewed by the BBC's disability affairs correspondent Peter White for the Radio 4 programme No Triumph, No Tragedy.^[56]

Judt died of ALS at his home in Manhattan on 6 August 2010.^[57] This was two weeks after a major interview and retrospective of his work in Prospect magazine^[58] and the day before an article about his illness was published in the Irish Independent indicating that he "won't surrender any time soon" and comparing his suffering to that of author Terry Pratchett, who was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's disease in 2007.^[59] Shortly before his death, according to The Guardian, he was said to have possessed the "liveliest mind in New York."^[60] He continued his work as a public intellectual right up until his death, writing essays for the New York Review of Books^[60] and composing and completing a synthetic intellectual history under the title Thinking The Twentieth Century with fellow historian Tim Snyder.^[61]

Following his death TIME said he was "a historian of the very first order, a public intellectual of an old-fashioned kind and ' in more ways than one ' a very brave man".^[62] He was also praised for carrying out what he himself described as the historian's task "to tell what is almost always an uncomfortable story and explain why the discomfort is part of the truth we need to live well and live properly. A well-organised society is one in which we know the truth about ourselves collectively, not one in which we tell pleasant lies about ourselves". Mark LeVine, a professor of history at the University of California at Irvine, said that Judt's "writings on European history and the need for a new social contract between rulers and ruled can inspire a new generation of scholars and activists in other cultures".^[32]. Timothy Garton Ash, in his obituary in the New York Review of Books, placed Judt in "the great tradition of the spectateur engagé, the politically engaged but independent and critical intellectual."^[63]

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Books written

• Judt, Tony (2010). Ill Fares the Land. Penguin Press. ISBN 1-59420-276-1. 
• Judt, Tony (2008). Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century. Penguin Press. ISBN 1-59420-136-6. 
• Judt, Tony (2005). Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. Penguin Press. ISBN 1-59420-065-3. 
• Judt, Tony (1998). The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-41418-3. 
• Judt, Tony (1996). A Grand Illusion?: An Essay on Europe. Douglas & McIntyre. ISBN 0-8090-5093-5. 
• Judt, Tony (1992). Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956. University of California Press. ISBN 0520079213. 
• Judt, Tony (1990). Marxism and the French Left: Studies on Labour and Politics in France 1830-1982. Clarendon. ISBN 0-19-821578-9. 
• Judt, Tony (1979). Socialism in Provence 1871-1914: A Study in the Origins of the Modern French Left. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-22172-2. 
• Judt, Tony (1976). La reconstruction du parti socialiste : 1921-1926. Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politique. 

[edit] Books edited

• Judt, Tony, and Lacorne, Denis (2005). With Us Or Against Us : Studies in Global Anti-Americanism. Palgrave. 
• Judt, Tony, and Lacorne, Denis (2004). Language, Nation, and State: Identity Politics In A Multilingual Age. Palgrave. ISBN 1-4039-6393-2. 
• Déak, Istv�¡n, Gross, Jan T., and Judt, Tony (2000). The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and its Aftermath. Princeton University Press. ISBN 1-4039-6393-2. 
• Judt, Tony (1989). Resistance and Revolution in Mediterranean Europe 1939-1948. Routledge. ISBN 0415015804. 

[edit] See also

• Eric Hobsbawm
• Raymond Aron

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• New York Review of Books - Articles written by Judt
• Historical Society, Boston University - Interview with Judt on Europe
• "If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have" - One of Judt's final essays

Obituaries

• Tony Judt An East End Intellectual. The Economist. Volume 396 Number 8695 August 14th-20th 2010, page 72.
• Professor Tony Judt by The Daily Telegraph
• Elliott, Michael. Tony Judt: A Public Intellectual Remembered by Time magazine
• Hannan, Daniel. Tony Judt was the foremost chronicler of post-war Europe. - The Daily Telegraph
• Grimes, William. Tony Judt, Chronicler of History, Is Dead at 62. - The New York Times
• Nelson, Valerie, J. Tony Judt dies at 62; leading historian of postwar Europe. - Los Angeles Times
• Schudel, Matt. Tony Judt, scholar of European history, dies at 62. - The Washington Post
• Doward, Jamie. Historian Tony Judt dies aged 62 - The Guardian
• Wheatcroft. Geofrey. Obituary: Tony Judt, The Guardian
• Goldberg, Saul. Tony Judt: the captivating wit and intellect of my friend and teacher. - The Guardian
• Acclaimed British historian Tony Judt dies aged 62 - BBC News
• Taylor, Jerome. Historian 'saw the big picture, but went to the heart of the matter'. - The Independent
• Historian Tony Judt, 62, Dies After Battle with Lou Gehrig's Disease - video report by Democracy Now!
• LeVine, Mark. Tony Judt: An intellectual hero
• Tony Judt, historian and critic, dead at age 62 by The Globe and Mail