Tony Judt
Tony Robert Judt was an English historian, author, essayist and professor who specialised in European history. Judt moved to New York and served as the Erich Maria Remarque Professor in European Studies at New York University and director of NYU's Remarque Institute. He was director of the New York Institute for the Humanities from 1993 to 1996. Judt was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996 and a corresponding Fellow of the British Academy in 2007.
Biography
Tony Robert Judt was born on 2 January 1948 in London, England, to secular Jewish parents, Isaac Joseph Judt and Stella S Judt. His mother's parents had emigrated from Russia and Romania, and his father was born in Belgium and had immigrated as a boy to Ireland and then subsequently to England. Judt's parents lived in North London, but due to the closure of the local hospitals in response to an outbreak of infant dysentery, Judt was born in a Salvation Army maternity unit in Bethnal Green, in the East End of London. When he was a small boy, the family moved from Tottenham to a flat above his mother's business in Putney, South London. When Judt was nine years of age, following the birth of his sister, the family moved to a house in Kingston-upon-Thames, Surrey. The family's main language was English, although Judt often spoke French to his father and his father's family.Judt won a place at Emanuel School in Wandsworth, and following his education at Emanuel, he went on to study as a scholarship student at King's College, Cambridge. He was the first member of his family to finish secondary school and to go to university. At Cambridge, Judt became close friends with Martyn Poliakoff, who later became well known as a chemist and star of The Periodic Table of Videos. 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.
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, later saying, "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" and he moved away from Marxism in the 1970s and 1980s. Judt wrote in February 2010, "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". In later life, he described himself as "a universalist social democrat".
After completing his Cambridge doctorate, Judt was elected a junior fellow of King's College, Cambridge, in 1972, where he taught modern French history until 1978. After a brief stint teaching social history at the University of California, Berkeley, he returned to England in 1980 to teach politics at St Anne's College, Oxford. He moved to New York University in 1987.
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, over which there was debate after he advocated a one-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. According to the journalist David Herman, Judt's directorship of the Remarque Institute, 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, specializing in modern French history".
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".
Judt was married three times, his first two marriages ending in divorce. His third marriage was to Jennifer Homans, The New Republics 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.
Writings
European history
Judt's experiences in Paris contributed to 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 on 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", 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 on extensive archival research. It was his only attempt to place himself within the social history that was dominant in the 1970s.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 19th and 20th centuries, ending with a discussion of President François Mitterrand. In Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944–1956, Judt moved away both from social history towards intellectual history, and from the endorsement of French Left and Marxist traditions to their critique. In Past Imperfect, he castigated French intellectuals of the postwar era, above all Jean-Paul Sartre, for their "self-imposed moral amnesia". Judt criticised what he considered blind faith in Joseph Stalin's communism. In Judt's reading, French thinkers such as 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 criticise 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.After President Jacques Chirac recognised in 1995 the responsibility of the French state during the collaboration with Nazi Germany, on the anniversary of the Vel' d'Hiv raid, Judt wrote in The ''New York Times'', "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 Émile 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."
''Postwar''
In the years after the publication of Past Imperfect, Judt turned his attention to 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, learnt Czech and became friendly with a number of Eastern European intellectuals. Erich Maria Remarque's widow, the actress Paulette Goddard, bequeathed her fortune to NYU, enabling the Institute of European Studies bearing Remarque'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 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, 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 favoured came to have more in common with each other than with their neighbours in the same state. The Baden-Württemberg region in southwestern Germany, the Rhône-Alpes region of France, Lombardy and Catalonia were invoked as examples of disproportionately rich "super-regions". Another division, Judt claimed, 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 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 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, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945.
In Postwar, Judt examined the history of Europe from the end of the Second World War in 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. At nearly 900 pages, Postwar has won considerable praise for its sweeping, encyclopaedic scope, and was a runner-up for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. In Judt's obituary, the BBC wrote that Postwar was "acclaimed by historians as one of the best works on the subject" of modern European history. The ''New York Times Book Review named the book one of the ten best of 2005, and in 2009 the Toronto Star'' named it the decade's best historical book.