Tony Judt

Tony Judt was a British historian and intellectual.

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".

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 Europe's history from the end of World War II to the '90s. Later 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.

Tony Judt died on 6 August 2010 after a long struggle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a degenerative motor neuron disorder.