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Marxism and the French Left: Studies in Labour and Politics in France 1830–1981 collects several previously unpublished essays on the 19th and 20th centuries, ending with a discussion of President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", 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.
Ill Fares the Land Judt's last book published during his lifetime,
Ill Fares the Land, projected lessons learned forward, challenging readers to debate "what comes next?" The book made the case for renewed
social democracy; it received mixed reviews. Written under the debilitating effects of
amyotrophic lateral sclerosis,
Ill Fares The Land (2010) has been called Judt's "most overtly political book" and a "dramatic intervention" in the decline of the progressive ideals of the 20th century. Judt laments the breakdown of the postwar Keynesian policy consensus as well as the rise of
neoliberal economics with its political manifestations under
Margaret Thatcher,
Ronald Reagan and others. In analysing the limited success achieved by
Third Way triangulation and the paradoxical resurgence of unfettered capitalism after the
2008 financial crisis, Judt calls the recent past "lost decades" marked by "fantasies of prosperity".
Israel Judt's parents were British citizens and
secular Jews. After the war, Judt's belief in the Zionist enterprise began to unravel. In October 2003, in an article for
The New York Review of Books, Judt argued that Israel was on its way to becoming a "belligerently intolerant, faith-driven
ethno-state." He called for the conversion of "Israel from a Jewish state to a
binational one" that would include all of what is now Israel,
Gaza,
East Jerusalem and the
West Bank. This proposed new state would have equal rights for all Jews and
Arabs living in Israel and the
Palestinian territories. The article, which presented a view of Middle Eastern history and politics that had rarely been given exposure in the mainstream media in the US, was criticised by pro-Israeli writers who saw such a plan as "destroying" Israel and replacing it with a predominantly Palestinian state governed by a Palestinian majority. The
NYRB was inundated with over a thousand letters within a week of its publication, peppered with terms like "antisemite" and "
self-hating Jew", and the article led to Judt's removal from the
editorial board of
The New Republic. In April 2004 Judt gave a public speech at
Columbia University in which he further developed his views. In March 2006 Judt wrote an op-ed piece for
The New York Times about the
John Mearsheimer and
Stephen Walt paper "
The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy". Judt argued that "[in] spite of [the paper's] provocative title, the essay draws on a wide variety of standard sources and is mostly uncontentious [.... Does] the Israel Lobby affect our foreign policy choices? Of course—that is one of its goals [...]. But does pressure to support Israel distort American decisions? That's a matter of judgment." He summed up his assessment of Mearsheimer and Walt's paper by asserting that "this essay, by two 'realist' political scientists with no interest whatsoever in the Palestinians, is a straw in the wind." He predicted that "it will not be self-evident to future generations of Americans why the imperial might and international reputation of the United States are so closely aligned with one small, controversial Mediterranean client state." In May 2006 Judt continued in a similar vein with a feature-length article, "The Country That Wouldn't Grow Up", for the Israeli newspaper
Haaretz. Published the day before
Israeli Independence Day, it summarises Israel's history, describing what Judt saw as a steady decline in Israel's credibility that began with the Six-Day War in 1967. On 4 October 2006 Judt's scheduled New York talk before the organisation Network 20/20 was abruptly cancelled after Polish Consul Krzysztof Kasprzyk suddenly withdrew his offer of a venue following phone calls from the
Anti-Defamation League and the
American Jewish Committee. The consul later told a reporter, "I don't have to subscribe to the
First Amendment." According to
The New York Sun, "the appearance at the Polish consulate was canceled after the Polish government decided that Mr. Judt's views critical of Israel were not consistent with Poland's friendly relations with the Jewish state." According to
The Washington Post, the ADL and AJC had complained to the Polish consul that Judt was "too critical of Israel and American Jewry", though both organisations deny asking that the talk be cancelled. ADL National Chairman
Abraham Foxman called Judt's claims of interference "wild conspiracy theories." Kasprzyk told
The Washington Post that "the phone calls were very elegant but may be interpreted as exercising a delicate pressure. That's obvious—we are adults and our IQs are high enough to understand that." Judt, who had planned to argue that the
Israel lobby in the US often stifled honest debate, called the implications of the cancellation "serious and frightening." He added that "only in America—not in Israel—is this a problem", charging that vigorous criticism of Israeli policy, acceptable in Israel itself, is taboo in the US. Of the ADL and AJC, he said, "These are Jewish organizations that believe they should keep people who disagree with them on the Middle East away from anyone who might listen." The cancellation evoked protest from a roster of academics and intellectuals who said there had been an attempt to intimidate and shut down free debate.
Mark Lilla and
Richard Sennett wrote a letter to Foxman in protest, which was signed by 114 people and published in
The New York Review of Books. In a later exchange on the subject in
The New York Review of Books, Lilla and Sennet argued, "Even without knowing the substance of those 'nice' calls from the ADL and AJC, any impartial observer will recognize them as not so subtle forms of pressure." The ADL and AJC defended their decision to contact the Polish consulate and rejected Judt's characterisation of them. Foxman accused his critics of themselves stifling free speech when "they use inflammatory words like 'threaten,' 'pressure,' and 'intimidate' that bear no resemblance to what actually transpired." He wrote that the "ADL did not threaten or intimidate or pressure anyone. The Polish consul general made his decision concerning Tony Judt's appearance strictly on his own." Foxman said that Judt had "taken the position that Israel shouldn't exist [and t]hat puts him on our radar", while AJC executive director David A. Harris said that he wanted to tell the consulate that the thrust of Judt's talk ran "contrary to the entire spirit of Polish foreign policy". Asked during an interview with
NPR shortly before his death about his taste for controversy, Judt said, "I've only ever published four little essays in a lifetime of book writing and lecturing and teaching, just four little essays which touched controversially on painful bits of other people's anatomies, so to speak. Two of them were about Israel". ==Critical reception==