Tony Judt
Tony Robert Judt FBA (/dʒʌt/ JUT; 2 January 1948 – 6 August 2010)[1] was an English historian, essayist and university 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 Erich Maria Remarque Institute. He was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. In 1996 Judt was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2007 a corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.
Tony Judt
2 January 1948
6 August 2010 (aged 62)
Historian; Erich Maria Remarque Professor in European Studies at New York University
Biography[edit]
Judt was born on 2 January 1948 in London, England, to secular Jewish parents,[1] Isaac Joseph ("Joe") 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.[2] 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.[3]
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.[4] He was the first member of his family to finish secondary school and to go to university.[5] 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 (Judt watched his videos and would regularly write to him about them).[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, 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".[4] He came to describe his Zionism as his particular "ideological overinvestment" and he moved away from Marxism in the 1970s and 1980s.[8] 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".[9] In later life, he described himself as "a universalist social democrat".[9]
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.[10] After a brief stint teaching social history at the University of California, Berkeley, he returned to the United Kingdom 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, which generated significant debate after he advocated a one-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. According to 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".[11]
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".[12]
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.[1][13] In June 2010, Judt and his son Daniel wrote a dialogue about Barack Obama, politics and corporate behaviour for The New York Times.[14][15]
Writings[edit]
European history[edit]
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",[16] 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.
Critical reception[edit]
Judt's peers praised him for his wide-ranging knowledge and versatility in historical 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 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."[46] Freedland added 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."[46] 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 received a Special Orwell Prize for Lifetime Achievement for his contribution to British political writing.[47]
Some of his peers had a more critical view of Judt. Dylan Riley of the University of California, Berkeley, argued that Judt was more of a pamphleteer and a polemicist than a historian, and that he changed his views without hesitation or good reason.[48]
In 2007 Judt received the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought (German: Hannah-Arendt-Preis für politisches Denken), a prize awarded to individuals representing the tradition of political theorist Hannah Arendt, especially in regard to totalitarianism. It was instituted by the German Heinrich Böll Foundation (affiliated with the Alliance '90/The Greens) and the government of Bremen in 1994, and is awarded by an international jury.
Illness and death[edit]
In September 2008, Judt was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). From October 2009, he was paralysed from the neck down. He was nevertheless able to give a two-hour public lecture.[49] 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.[50] In March 2010, Judt was interviewed by Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air,[8][51] and in June he was interviewed by the BBC's disability affairs correspondent Peter White for the Radio 4 programme No Triumph, No Tragedy.[52]
Judt died of ALS at his home in Manhattan on 6 August 2010.[53] This was two weeks after a major interview and retrospective of his work in Prospect magazine[54] and the day before an article about his illness was published in the Irish Independent indicating that he "won't surrender anytime soon" and comparing his suffering to that of author Terry Pratchett, who was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's disease in 2007.[55] Shortly before his death, according to The Guardian, he was said to have possessed the "liveliest mind in New York."[56] He continued his work as a public intellectual right up until his death, writing essays for The New York Review of Books[56] and composing and completing a synthetic intellectual history, Thinking The Twentieth Century, with fellow historian Timothy D. Snyder.[57][58] Judt also wrote a memoir, The Memory Chalet, published posthumously in November 2010.[59] During his illness, Judt made use of the memory palace technique to remember paragraphs of text during the night, which he placed mentally in rooms of a Swiss chalet and then dictated to his assistant the next day.[8][49]
After Judt's death, Time called him "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".[60] He was also praised for carrying out what he called 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".[30] In his obituary in The New York Review of Books, Timothy Garton Ash placed Judt in "the great tradition of the spectateur engagé, the politically engaged but independent and critical intellectual."[61]