August 6: Tony Judt

Historian, critic and writer Tony Judt died in Manhattan at age 62 of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) on this date in 2010. Judt was the Erich Maria Remarque Professor in European Studies at New York University and a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books. He was a sharp critic of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and of the Zionism that he had embraced as a young man; in 2003 he warned that Israel was on its way to becoming a “belligerently intolerant, faith-driven ethno state” and advocated a binational alternative — views that fetched him both censure and censorship. An expert on modern French and European history, the British-born Judt was a wide-ranging public intellectual whose books included Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005), Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century (2008), Ill Fares the Land (2010), and the posthumous Thinking the Twentieth Century (2012, with Timothy Snyder). He was “a fearless critic of narrow orthodoxies and bullying cliques, from communist apologists to the Israel lobby,” wrote the Guardian in its obituary, “from ‘liberal hawks’ to progressive educationists. And his political writings have proved not only perceptive but often prophetic.” To hear him speaking in 2009 about “What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy,” including comments on the Obama administration and on Jewish revolutionaries of old, click here.
“I’m regarded outside New York University as a looney-tunes lefty self-hating Jewish communist; inside the university I’m regarded as a typical old-fashioned white male liberal elitist. I like that. I’m on the edge of both, it makes me feel comfortable.”—Tony Judt
Watch Charlie Rose’s last interview with Tony Judt, taped eight days before his death.