Tony Judt

Tony Robert Judt was a British-American historian, essayist, and university professor specializing in European history. Judt moved to New York and served as 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 Judt was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and, in 2007, a corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.

Judt was born on 2 January 1948 in London, England, United Kingdom, to secular Jewish parents Isaac Joseph ("Joe") Judt and Stella S Judt. His mother's parents had emigrated from Russia and Romania, and his father was born in Belgium and had immigrated as a boy to Ireland and then subsequently to England. 

Judt's parents lived in North London, but due to the closure of the local hospitals in response to an outbreak of infant dysentery, Judt was born in a Salvation Army maternity unit in Bethnal Green, in the East End of London. When he was a small boy, the family moved from Tottenham to a flat above his mother's business in Putney, South London. When Judt was nine years old, following his sister's birth, the family moved to a house in Kingston-upon-Thames, Surrey. The family's main language was English, although Judt often spoke French to his father and his father's family.

He had just won a place at Emanuel School in Wandsworth, and following his education at Emanuel, he went on to study as a scholarship student at King's College, Cambridge. He was the first member of his family to finish secondary school and attend university. At Cambridge, Judt became close friends with Martyn Poliakoff, who later became well-known as a chemist and star of The Periodic Table of Videos (Judt watched his videos and would regularly write to him about them).

 He obtained a BA degree in history in 1969 and, after spending a year at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, completed a Ph.D. in 1972. As a high school and university student, he was a left-wing Zionist and worked summers on kibbutzim. He moved away from Zionism after the Six-Day War of 1967, later saying, "I went with this idealistic fantasy of creating a socialist, communitarian country," but that he came to realize that left-wing Zionists were "remarkably unconscious of the people who had been kicked out of the country...to make this fantasy possible". He came to describe his Zionism as his particular "ideological overinvestment," and he moved away from Marxism in the 1970s and 1980s. Judt wrote in February 2010, "Before even turning twenty, I had become, been, and ceased to be a Zionist, a Marxist, and a communitarian settler: no mean achievement for a south London teenager." Later, he described himself as "a universalist social democrat."

After completing his Cambridge doctorate, Judt was elected a junior fellow of King's College, Cambridge, in 1972, where he taught modern French history until 1978. After a brief stint teaching social history at the University of California, Berkeley, he returned to the United Kingdom in 1980 to teach politics at St Anne's College, Oxford. He moved to New York University in 1987.

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. According to journalist David Herman, Judt's directorship of the Remarque Institute, Postwar and his articles on Israel made him "one of the best-known public intellectuals in America," having previously been "a fairly obscure British historian, specializing in modern French history."

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."

Judt was married three times, his first two marriages ending in divorce. His third marriage was to Jennifer Homans, The New Republic's dance critic, with whom he had two children. In June 2010, Judt and his son Daniel wrote a dialogue about Barack Obama, politics, and corporate behavior for The New York Times.