Taking issue with the orthodoxies
Ben Naparstek; 14/6/08
It must take nerve for Tony Judt, professor of European history at New York University, to check his email. He receives hundreds of vitriolic messages, sometimes threats against his life or, worse, his family. People do not, needless to say, want his head for his scholarly tomes on the history of the French Left or for his magisterial 900-page book Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, published in 2005, which was a Pulitzer prize finalist and helped secure his place in the world’s top 100 public intellectuals named in a Foreign Policy-Prospect survey in May. What makes the celebrated British-born academic a target for hate are his essays on Israel and US foreign policy in the Middle East, the best known of which is Israel: The Alternative, published by The New York Review of Books in October 2003. Describing Israel as an anachronism, he wrote that “the time has come to think the unthinkable”: the dismantling of Israel as an exclusively Jewish state and its replacement by a secular and binational state of Jews and Palestinians. As Judt is the son of Yiddish-speaking Jewish refugees, his detractors struggle to label him an anti-Semite. He has always taken unorthodox positions. A long-term anti-communist, he is a firm believer in state intervention. He is politically progressive but rejects postmodern theory and finds academic political correctness “just as annoying as the reactionary politics of Washington”. A historian of French ideas, he is no Francophile. In Past Imperfect (1992) and The Burden of Responsibility (1998), he attacks French intellectuals for closing their eyes to totalitarianism.
See: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23841417-5001986,00.html