Tony Judt

From RationalWiki
Jump to: navigation, search

Tony Judt (2 January 1948 – 6 August 2010) was a British historian and intellectual. He died on the 6th August 2010 after a long struggle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a degenerative motor neuron disorder.

Like many British academics of his day, he embraced Marxism in his youth but later came to renounce the ideology. He was also originally an avowed left wing Zionist, but got in a shitload of trouble after questioning the democratic basis of the Jewish state and voiced support for the one state solution. The Anti-Defamation League was horrified, mostly by his characterization of the Israeli state as "an anachronism".[1][2]

Judt wrote widely on French intellectual history and the emergence of socialism within that country. His magnum opus was the magisterial Postwar, a 1,000 page tome analyzing European history from the end of WWII to the 90's. More recently he became a champion of the international left with his Ill Fares the Land, a rebuke of the standard Reagan/Thatcher dogma of the market and a personal testament in honor of the European Welfare State, which Judt considered the single greatest achievement of mankind.

Judt had to deal with many wingnuts. As he grew older he consistently challenged what he saw as powerful Zionist influences in American politics with his insightful and entertaining columns for the New York Review of Books.

[edit] Footnotes

  1. Israel: The Alternative New York Review of Books
  2. And Alternative Future: An Exchange on Tony Judt's "Israel: The Alternative"
Personal tools
Namespaces

Variants
Actions
Navigation
Community
Tools
support