Tony Judt, 1948–2010

During his teenage years, Tony Judt was an ardent Marxist and Zionist, flying to Israel from London every summer to work on a kibbutz. “I was the ideal recruit,” he said in 2010, “articulate, committed, and uncompromisingly ideologically conformist.” But doubts about Zionism emerged soon after he served as an interpreter for Israeli troops occupying the Golan Heights following the 1967 Six-Day War. He said he found the Israeli officers he worked with callously brutal, calling them “right-wing thugs.” In 1983, he made his break with Israel complete, denouncing it as an “ideologically driven, faith-based ethno-state.”

Born in the Jewish East End of London to a Belgian father and a Russian mother, Judt showed early promise as a scholar, winning an invitation to attend Cambridge University even before he had completed his entrance examinations. His first books, which concerned the history and development of the French left, displayed a “suspicion of all forms of ideology,” said the London Guardian. He angered many on the left with The Burden of Responsibility, his admiring study of Leon Blum, Raymond Aron, and Albert Camus—three French intellectuals who resisted the Marxism fashionable in postwar Paris.

Judt made a specialty of contradictions and controversy, said the London Independent. A committed leftist whose last book urged a return to European-style social democracy, he nevertheless “displayed a profound suspicion of left-wing ideologies and of identity politics.” He loved Europe, and his most acclaimed book, Postwar, was a sweeping study of the continent’s recovery from the devastation of World War II. Yet he chose to live in the U.S. for much of his adult life.

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The controversy that Postwar stirred was nothing compared with the firestorm that erupted in 2003, when The New York Review of Books published an essay in which Judt argued for a binational Israel where Jews and Arabs would enjoy equal status, said The New York Times. A lecture he was scheduled to give on the essay in New York City was canceled, “apparently under pressure, explicit or implicit, from the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee.” The New Republic, for which he had long written, removed his name from its masthead.

In 2008, Judt was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, which attacked his spine and gradually paralyzed him. He likened the illness to a prison cell that shrinks six inches a day. Yet even as he lost the ability to move, he dictated a series of autobiographical essays that appeared in The New York Review of Books. Divorced twice, he is survived by his third wife, the dance critic Jennifer Homans, and their two sons.