{"id":4453,"date":"2010-08-09T06:51:38","date_gmt":"2010-08-09T11:51:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=4453"},"modified":"2010-08-09T06:51:38","modified_gmt":"2010-08-09T11:51:38","slug":"tony-judt-1948-2010","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/tony-judt-1948-2010\/","title":{"rendered":"Tony Judt (1948 -2010)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photograph: Lisa Carpenter<\/p><\/div>\n

Tony Judt died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis \u2013\u00a0 Lou Gehrig\u2019s disease \u2014 on Saturday. Over the years I have\u00a0 immensely enjoyed the historian\u2019s brilliant and insightful essays (at times acerbic-romantic, at times outrageous-calmly British)\u00a0 Of course I have not always agreed with his stances, intellectual or historical. Let me just mention along those lines of disagreement his claim that the 70ies were an intellectually disastrous period in France because \u201cdeconstruction\u201d\u00a0 supposedly took over \u2014 which wasn\u2019t the cause of the disaster, though disaster there be,\u00a0 but rather the rise of the know-nothing \u201cnew philosophers\u201d such as BHL or Andr\u00e9 Glucksman (even if superficially the latter, for example, had a certain Judtian tone in his dismantling of the Marxist\u00a0 prerogative & its\u00a0 Stalinist\u00a0 intellectual impositions.) Yet I cannot disagree with his sense of a \u201ccardinal axiom of French intellectual life\u2026 a radical disjunction between the uninteresting evidence of your own eyes and ears and the incontrovertible conclusions to be derived from first principles\u201d.<\/p>\n

But in many ways, his thinking was not that far from some of the core French thought of the time. I have always associated him to some extend with Jean-Fran\u00e7ois Lyotard, who similarly saw and studied \u201cthe withering away of the \u2018master narratives\u2019 of European history,\u201d until the present moment when the \u201ccycle of ideological politics in Europe was drawing to a close.\u201d In the US he may be best known for his stance against Israel (for which he was fired from magazines he had been writing for and a number of public lectures were canceled under pressure from pro-Zionist organizations). He called for a non-ethnic, non-religious binational state to replace the anachronism of present Israel. He hoped to see in time \u201ca natural distinction between people who happen to be Jews but are citizens of other countries; and people who are Israeli citizens and happen to be Jews.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Here are some of the first obituaries\/ commentaries:<\/p>\n

\u2014 in the\u00a0 Guardian<\/strong> Geoffrey Wheatcroft celebrates<\/a> (besides other achievements) Judt\u2019s critical engagement with Israel. Peter Kellner writes (under the same link): \u201cTo those who did not know him well, Tony Judt was a bundle of contradictions<\/strong>: an idealist who could be scathingly critical of those who shared his ideals; a Jew, immensely proud of his heritage, who came to be hated by many Zionists; a very European social democrat who preferred to live in America<\/strong>.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2014 The Jerusalem Post<\/strong> writes: \u201cJudt was extremely pessimistic about attempts to create a politically homogeneous Europe devoid of borders<\/strong> and cultural distinctions. For Israel, by contrast, the time has come to \u2018move on,\u2019 to \u2018think the unthinkable,\u2019 to replace the Jewish state with \u2018a single, integrated, bi-national state of Jews and Arabs,\u2019 in his vision. For Judt, European particularism was an undeniable fact, but the Jewish variety<\/strong> was outdated.\u201d Haaretz<\/strong> (here<\/a>) is not as judgmental.<\/p>\n

\u2014 You can read a full dossier on Judt<\/a> in the New York Review of Books<\/strong>, where you can also reread his most disputed\u00a0 essay<\/a> \u201cIsrael: The Alternative.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2014 Here is the link<\/a> to New York Times<\/strong> obit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tony Judt died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis \u2013\u00a0 Lou Gehrig\u2019s disease \u2014 on Saturday. Over the years I have\u00a0 immensely enjoyed the historian\u2019s brilliant and insightful essays (at times acerbic-romantic, at times outrageous-calmly British)\u00a0...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[42,43,55,59,76],"tags":[723],"class_list":["post-4453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays","category-european-history","category-intellectuals","category-israel","category-obituaries","tag-tony-judt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4453"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4453\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}