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Tony Robert Judt,
( ; 2 January 1948 – 6 August 2010) was a British historian, essayist, and university professor who specialized in . Judt moved to New York and served as the
Professor in European Studies at , and Director of NYU's Erich Maria Remarque Institute. He was a frequent contributor to the . In 1996 Judt was elected a Fellow of the
and in 2007 a corresponding Fellow of the .
as a young man, Judt dropped his faith in Zionism after youthful experience in
in the 1960s and came to see a Jewish sta he moved away from Marxism in the 1970s and 1980s. In later life, he described himself as "a universalist social democrat". Judt's works include the highly acclaimed , a history of Europe after the . He was also well known for his views on Israel, which generated significant debate after he advocated a
According to journalist David Herman, Judt's directorship of the Remarque Institute, his book Postwar and his articles on Israel made him "one of the best-known public intellectuals in America," having previously been "a fairly obscure British historian, specialising in modern French history".
In an interview a few weeks before his death Judt said: "I see myself as first and above all
next a writer of E next a commentator on E next a public intellectual voice within the American L and only then an occasional, opportunistic participant in the pained American discussion of the Jewish matter . . ."
Judt was born in 1948 in London, England to
parents, Joseph I Judt and Stella S Judt as referenced in Tony Judt's book the Memory Chalet (2011). He was raised by his mother, whose parents had emigrated from
and , and his father, who was born in
and had immigrated as a boy to Ireland and then subsequently to England. Judt's parents lived in , but due to the closure of the local hospitals in response to an outbreak of infant , Judt was born in a
maternity unit in , in the . When he was a small boy, the family moved from
to a flat above his mother's business in , . When Judt was nine years of age, following the birth of his sister, the family moved to a house in , Surrey. The family's main language was English, although Judt often spoke in French to his father and to his father's family.
Judt won a place at
in , and following his education at Emanuel, he went on to study as a scholarship student at . Judt was the first member of his family to finish secondary school and to go to university. While at Cambridge, Judt became close friends with , who later became well known as a chemist and star of the . He obtained a BA degree in history in 1969 and, after spending a year at the
in Paris, completed a PhD in 1972. 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
of 1967, later stating that "I went with this idealistic fantasy of creating a socialist, communitarian country", but that he came to realise that left-wing Zionists were "remarkably unconscious of the people who had been kicked out of the country...to make this fantasy possible". He came to describe his Zionism as his particular "ideological overinvestment". Judt wrote in February 2010 that: "Before even turning twenty I had become, been, and ceased to be a Zionist, a Marxist, and a communitarian settler: no mean achievement for a south London teenager".
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. Following a brief period teaching social history at the , he returned to Great Britain in 1980 to teach politics at . He moved to New York University in 1987.
Judt was married three times, 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. In June 2010, Judt and his son Daniel wrote a dialogue about Barack Obama, politics and corporate behaviour for the New York Times.
Judt's piece in The New York Review of Books for 27 May 2010, refers at length to his teaching time at , and not to time at Berkeley. The piece also refers to "a month of heavy radiation" for cancer in 2002, an illness unrelated to his death from ALS several years later.
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: . 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 : A Study in the Origins of the French Modern Left, an "enquiry into a political tradition that shaped a nation", 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 Provence 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.
In the 1970s and 1980s Judt was a historian of modern France. Marxism and the : Studies in Labour and Politics in France
collects several previously unpublished essays on the 19th and 20th centuries, ending with a discussion of . In Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, , Judt moved away both from social history towards intellectual history, and from endorsement of French Marxist traditions to their critique. In Past Imperfect, he castigated French intellectuals of the postwar era, above all
for their "self-imposed moral amnesia". Judt criticized what he considered blind faith in '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 , in 1995, of the responsibility of the French state during the , on the anniversary of the , he claimed in an op-ed published by
"...people like Jean-Paul Sartre and
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
did. No one stood up to cry "" at high functionaries, as
did during the . When ,
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."
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. 's widow, actress , bequeathed her fortune to
and this enabled the Institute of European Studies bearing her late husband's name to come into being under Judt's direction.
Judt's first broader book of this period – the result of a speech delivered at the
in 1995 – was A Grand Illusion? In this extended essay, he dealt directly with the
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". The benefits of European unity, he argued, were unevenly distributed and the regions that EU policy favored came to have more in common with each other than with their neighbors living in the same state. The
region in southwestern Germany, the
region of France,
were evoked as examples of disproportionately rich "super-regions". Another division, Judt claimed, could be seen in the . Nothing more than a "highest common factor of discriminatory political arithmetic," 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 wrote, 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 was carried over – albeit in slightly different form – into Judt's 2005 book, .
In Postwar, Judt examined the history of Europe from the end of
(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, Postwar has won considerable praise for its sweeping, encyclopedic scope and was a runner up for the 2006 . 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. The book was named as one of the ten best of 2005 by the New York Times Book Review and, in 2009, the
named it the decade's best historical book.
Judt's last book to be published during his lifetime, Ill Fares the Land, projected lessons learned forward, challenging readers to debate "what comes next?" The book made t it received mixed reviews.
Written under the debilitating effects of , Ill Fares The Land (2010) has been described as Judt's "most overtly political book" and a "dramatic intervention" in the decline of the
ideals of the 20th century. Judt lamented the breakdown of the post-war Keynesian policy consensus as well as the rise of
economics with its political manifestations under Thatcher, Reagan, and others. In analyzing the limited success achieved by
triangulation and the paradoxical resurgence of unfettered capitalism after the , Judt described the recent past as "lost decades" marked by "fantasies of prosperity". The missing reward from modern government has been , and Judt explored how the
which had defined the postwar world – with guarantees of security, stability, and fairness – was no longer considered a legitimate social goal. He concluded his book with a "passionate appeal for a return to
Judt's mother and father were British citizens and secular Jews. Judt enthusiastically embraced Zionism at age 15. For a time he wished to emigrate to Israel, against the wishes of his parents, who were concerned about his studies. In 1966, having won an exhibition to , he worked for the summer on
. 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 , he worked as a driver and translator for the . After the war, Judt's belief in the
enterprise began to unravel.
In October 2003, in an article for the , 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
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
living in Israel and the . 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. The NYRB was inundated with over a thousand letters within a week of the article's publication, peppered with terms like "antisemite" and "," and the article led to Judt's removal from the
of . In April 2004 Judt gave a public speech at Columbia University in which he further developed his views.
In March 2006 Judt wrote an op-ed piece for
paper entitled "". 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 [.... 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."
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 . The article, published the day before , recaps Israel's short history, describing what Judt saw as a steady decline in Israel's credibility that began with the
On 4 October 2006, Judt's scheduled New York talk before the organization
was abruptly cancelled after Polish Consul Krzysztof Kasprzyk suddenly withdrew his offer of a venue following telephone calls from the
and the . The consul later told a reporter that "I don't have to subscribe to the ." According to , "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."
According to the , 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
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."
The cancellation evoked protest from a roster of academics and intellectuals who said there had been an attempt to intimidate and shut down free debate.
wrote a letter to Foxman in protest, which was signed by 114 people and published in the . 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."
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."
In a March 2007 interview, Judt argued the American need to block
stemmed from the rise of
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." He added ruefully: "Apparently, the line you take on Israel trumps everything else in life".
Asked about his taste for controversy during an interview with
prior to his death, Judt stated "I've only ever published four little essays in a lifetime of book writing and lecturing and teaching, just four little essays which touched controversially on painful bits of other people's anatomies, so to speak. Two of them were about Israel".
Judt was praised by his peers for his wide-ranging knowledge and versatility in analysis. Jonathan Freedland wrote in NYRB: "There are not many professors in any field equipped to produce, for example, learned essays on the novels of
and the writings of the now forgotten
– yet also able to turn their hand to, say, a close, diplomatic analysis of the
of 1962." 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." In reviewing Judt's Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century, Freedland wrote that Judt had put conscience ahead of friendship during his life, and demanded the same courage in others.
In 2009, Judt was awarded a Special
for Lifetime Achievement for his contribution to British political writing.
However, a posthumous collection of Judt's writings, titled When the Facts Change: Essays , exposed the author's limitations, according to : "his essays read as symptoms of their age, rather than explanations of it."
In 2008, Judt was diagnosed with
(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. In January 2010 Judt wrote a short article about his condition, the first of a series of memoirs published in the . In March 2010, Judt was interviewed by
on 's , and in June he was interviewed by the BBC's disability affairs correspondent
programme No Triumph, No Tragedy.
Judt died of ALS at his home in Manhattan on 6 August 2010. This was two weeks after a major interview and retrospective of his work in
magazine and the day before an article about his illness was published in the
indicating that he "won't surrender any time soon" and comparing his suffering to that of author , who was diagnosed with early-onset
in 2007. Shortly before his death, according to , he was said to have possessed the "liveliest mind in New York." He continued his work as a public intellectual right up until his death, writing essays for the New York Review of Books and composing and completing a synthetic intellectual history under the title Thinking The Twentieth Century with fellow historian . He also wrote a memoir entitled The Memory Chalet, which was published posthumously in November 2010. During his illness, Judt made use of the
technique to remember paragraphs of text during the night, which he placed mentally in rooms of a
and then dictated to his assistant the next day.
Following his death
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". 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 , 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". , 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."
Judt, Tony (January 22, 2015). When the Facts Change: Essays, . Penguin Press. p. 400.  .
Judt, T Snyder, Timothy (2012). Thinking the Twentieth Century. London: .  .
Judt, Tony (2010). The Memory Chalet. London: William Heinemann.  .
Judt, Tony (2010). Ill Fares the Land. Penguin Press.  .
Judt, Tony (2008). Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century. Penguin Press.  .
Judt, Tony (2005). . Penguin Press.  .
Judt, Tony (1998). The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century. University of Chicago Press.  .
Judt, Tony (1996). A Grand Illusion?: An Essay on Europe. Douglas & McIntyre.  .
Judt, Tony (1992). Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, . University of California Press.  .
Judt, Tony (1990). Marxism and the French Left: Studies on Labour and Politics in France . Clarendon.  .
Judt, Tony (1979). Socialism in Provence : A Study in the Origins of the Modern French Left. Cambridge University Press.  .
Judt, Tony (1976). La reconstruction du parti socialiste : . Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politique.
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.  .
; ; Judt, Tony (2000). The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and its Aftermath. Princeton University Press.  .
Judt, Tony (1989). Resistance and Revolution in Mediterranean Europe . Routledge.  .
Grimes, William (7 August 2010). . New York Times 2010.
Judt, Tony (11 February 2010). . New York Review of Books 57 (2).
Herman, David (11 May 2009). . Jewish Quarterly 213 2010.
Jukes, Peter (22 July 2010). .
"Notes on contributors". History Workshop 7 (7): 248. 1979. :.  .
Preceding information contributed in person by Deborah Judt, sister of Tony Judt.
Wheatcroft, Geoffrey (8 August 2010). . The Guardian 2010.
Judt, Tony (19 August 2010). . New York Review of Books 57 (13).
, Periodic Table of Videos, accessed 22 January 2015.
Grimes, William (8 August 2010). . The New York Times. p. A18.
. NPR. 11 August .
College website , King's College Cambridge website, 9 August 2010
Hansen, Suzy (15 October 2006). . The New York Observer 2010.
Judt, D Judt, Tony (19 June 2010). . The New York Times 2010.
Judt, Daniel (22 June 2010). . The Daily Beast 2010.
Tony Judt, Socialism in Provence : A Study in the Origins of the Modern French Left, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals , Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992
Tony Judt, , , 19 July 1995
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Tony Judt, A Grand Illusion?, New York: Hill and Wang, 1996, p. 125
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. New York Times. 11 December .
; Wagner, V Smith, Dan (20 June 2009). . Toronto Star 2010.
Patten, Chris (11 April 2010). . The Guardian (London) 2010.
Chambers, David (21 May 2010). . Washington Times 2010.
Herman, David (5 April 2010). . New Statesman 2010.
Kamm, Oliver (20 March 2010). . London: Times Literary Supplement 2010.
Malcolm, Noel (28 March 2010). . London: Telegraph 2010.
Baggini, Julian (3 April 2010). . Financial Times 2010.
MacShane, Dennis (9 April 2010). . The Independent (London) 2010.
Willetts, David (7 April 2010). . The Spectator 2010.
Rutten, Tim (22 March 2010). . Los Angeles Times 2010.
Garner, Dwight (22 March 2010). . New York Times 2010.
Sandbrook, Dominic (28 March 2010). . London: Times Literary Supplement 2010.
Jukes, Peter (22 July 2010). . Prospect 173 2010.
(2010). . Harper's (Harper's Foundation) 320 (1,921): 71–72 2011. Judt offers his solution to the crisis of what he calls the past two 'lost decades,' in which 'fantasies of prosperity and limitless personal advancement displaced all talk of political liberation, social justice or collective action': a revival of the ideals of social democracy that brought stability and prosperity to a devastated Europe and security to generations of Americans who benefited from such public programs as Social Security and Medicare. Judt's passionate appeal for a return to social-democratic ideals....(subscription required)
LeVine, Mark (14 August 2010). . Al Jazeera 2010.
(archived 29 September 2007)
Judt, Tony (23 October 2003). .
60 (16) 2006.
(CAMERA). 17 October .
Wieseltier, Leon (18 October 2003). .
Online 2006.
Judt, Tony (19 April 2006). . The New York Times. p. A21 2006.
Judt, Tony (2 May 2006). .
. . 6 October .
. . 5 October 2006. p. 1 2006.
Powell, Michael (9 October 2006). . The Washington Post 2006.
(14 January 2007). . The New York Times.
Lilla, Mark & Sennett, Richard (16 November 2006). .
. New York Review of Books. 30 November .
Graham, Bowley (16 March 2007). . Financial Times 2012.
Freedland, Jonathan (9 October 2008). . New York Review of Books 55 (15).
Kirsch, Adam (27 January 2015). .
Pilkington, Ed (9 January 2010). . The Guardian (London) 2010.
Judt, Tony (14 January 2010). . New York Review of Books 57 (1).
. NPR. 29 March .
. BBC Radio 4 2010.
Grimes, William (7 August 2010). . The New York Times 2010.
(7 August 2010). .
Doward, Jamie (7 August 2010). . The Guardian () 2010.
. Der Standard (in German). 8 August .
Snyder, Timothy (14 October 2010). . New York Review of Books 57 (15) 2010.
. Random House 2010.
Elliott, Michael (7 August 2010). .
Garton Ash, Timothy (20 August 2010). . New York Review of Books 2010.
– Articles written by Judt
– Interview with Judt on Europe
– One of Judt's final essays
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