Tony Judt

Tony Judt (born 1948, London, England) is a British historian, author and professor. He specializes in Europe and is the Director of the Erich Maria Remarque Institute at New York University. He is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books.

Life

Born in 1948, Tony Judt was raised in the East End of London by a mother whose parents had immigrated from Russia and a Belgian father who descended from a line of Lithuanian rabbis. Judt was educated at Emanuel School, before receiving a BA (1969) and PhD (1972) in history from the University of Cambridge.

Like many other Jewish parents living in postwar Europe, his mother and father were secular, but they sent him to Hebrew school and steeped him in the Yiddish culture of his grandparents, which Judt says he still thinks of wistfully. Urged on by his parents, Judt enthusiastically waded into the world of Israeli politics at age 15. He helped promote the migration of British Jews to Israel. In 1966, having won an exhibition to King's College Cambridge, he took a gap year and went to work on kibbutz Machanaim. When Nasser expelled UN troops from Sinai in 1967, and Israel mobilized for war, like many European Jews, 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 .

But during the aftermath of 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."

Judt was also until late 2003 a contributing editor at The New Republic, a moderate magazine with strong pro-Israel leanings. However, his article in the 23 October 2003 issue of The New York Review of Books favoured a one-state solution in Palestine. Shortly after, he was dropped from the masthead of The New Republic and condemned by the magazine's literary editor, Leon Wieseltier, and other pro-Israel commentators.

Writings

European History

After completing his Bachelor's degree at Cambridge, Tony Judt pursued his studies under the auspices of the Ecole Normale Supérieure. His experiences in Paris contributed to what would become a long and fruitful relationship with the French political culture. His first 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” was above all a social history. Intellectual and cultural currents – those of Marxism, in this case - are interpreted as the agents of political change. This Marxist-inspired approach which gives a special importance to human agency would become a hallmark of Tony Judt’s style.

Judt’s fascination with French political culture would result in three further studies, including Marxism and the French Left: Studies in Labour and Politics in France 1830-1981 and Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956. In Past Imperfect, he castigates French intellectuals of the postwar on the grounds of a “self-imposed moral amnesia.” Their blind faith in Stalin’s communism is seen as a major weakness of the French political culture. In many ways, Judt’s stance mirrors that of Albert Camus in months preceding his ideological split with Jean-Paul Sartre. In Judt’s interpretation of the postwar belief system one can already discern a certain distaste, if not an outright hostility for the alleged myths on which postwar culture was founded. This disillusionment was the seminal idea in his early work; it would find an increasingly broad application in his subsequent writing.

In the years following the publication of Past Imperfect, Tony Judt turned his attention to the wider issues of European history. Erich Maria Remarque’s widow 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. The first publication 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, Judt deals 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." 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 south-western 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,” the Schengen Agreement made Eastern European countries into tampon 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 only find their resolution in increased national intervention. Nation-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 nation-state is carried over – albeit in slightly different form - into his latest effort, 2005’s Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945.

Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 cover

His latest book, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 examines the history of Europe from the end of World War II (1945) to 2005. Weighing in at nearly 900 pages, it has won considerable praise for its sweeping, encyclopedic scope and was a runner up for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-fiction. 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.

Israel

Judt is also noted for his writings criticizing Israel. These writings some prompted furious responses from the Israel's supporters, including from his former friend Leon Wieseltier, who argued in The New Republic that Judt had neither the background nor intellectual detachment to make his case.

In 2003, an article for the New York Review of Books in which Judt argued that Israel was on its way to becoming a "belligerently intolerant, faith-driven ethno state" and called for the conversion of "Israel from a Jewish state to a binational one" with equal rights for all Jews and Arabs living in Israel and the Palestinian territories, drew strong criticism from those who saw such a plan as tantamount to dismantling the Jewish state. The NYRB was inundated with over a thousand letters within a week of the article's publication, and the article led to Judt's removal from the editorial board of The New Republic.

In March 2006 Judt wrote an op-ed piece for the 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."

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. 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.

Because of his outspoken criticisms regarding Israel, Tony Judt was featured prominently in a critical essay entitled 'Progressive' Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism published by the American Jewish Committee.

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.”

Speech cancellation controversy

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." 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."

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."

The cancellation brought support from a roster of Judt's fellow academics and intellectuals who said there had been an attempt to intimidate and shut down free debate - seeming to prove the point that Judt had wanted to make. A 114-signature letter was written to Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, and published in The New York Review of Books.

The ADL and AJC defended their decision to contact the Polish consulate and rejected Judt's characterization of them. 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 later exchange on the subject in the New York Review Of Books, 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."

The New York Sun reported that "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. (ibid)" However, Foxman's critics Mark Lilla and Richard Sennett argue 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."

Books authored

• Judt, Tony (2005). Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. Penguin Press. ISBN 1-59420-065-3.
• Judt, Tony (2004). Identity Politics In A Multilingual Age. Palgrave. ISBN 1-4039-6393-2.
• Judt, Tony (2000). 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 (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 (1990). Marxism and the French Left: Studies on Labour and Politics in France 1830-1982. Clarendon. ISBN 0-19-821578-9.

See also

• Eric Hobsbawm
• Raymond Aron

External links

• New York Review of Books - Collection of articles authored by Judt
• Historical Society, Boston University - Interview with Judt on Europe
• What History Teaches the Jews by Peter Coleman, review of Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945, Quadrant Magazine, July 2006, Volume L, Number 7-8