Tony Judt (1948-2010)

Tony Robert Judt FBA was a British historian, essayist, and university professor. He specialized in European history and was 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 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2007 a corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. A Marxist Zionist as a young man, he dropped his faith in Zionism after youthful experience in Israel in the 1960s and came to see a Jewish state as an anachronism, and moved away from Marxism in the 1970s and 1980s. In later life, he described himself as "a universalist social democrat." 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.

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."

If it seems odd to claim that a tiny political faction in Russia had the authority of history to speak for the workers of the world, how much odder to suppose that a universal God should have attached himself for eternity to one tiny itinerant people.

— "The Jewish Europe of Manès Sperber"