It must take nerve for Tony Judt, professor of European history at New York University, to check his e-mail. He receives hundreds of vitriolic messages - sometimes death threats. Needless to say they are not for his 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist book, Post-war: A History of Europe Since 1945.
What makes the British-born academic a target for hate are his essays on Israel and American foreign policy in the Middle East - most famously Israel: The Alternative, published in 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 binational state of Jews and Palestinians. Since 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'.
British historian Timothy Garton Ash says Judt's commitment to public discourse makes him unique in the English-speaking world: 'He is much more like what we in Britain would think of as a continental thinker rather than an Anglo-Saxon academic - someone who thinks that ideas matter and that the job of an intellectual is to be engaged in public policy debates.'
Academic and journalist Ian Buruma suggests Judt's worldliness sets him apart from other historians. 'He doesn't just write history from archives and books. He is more like a journalist in that he spends time in countries and reports as much as he writes actual history.'
Judt's interests are examined in his new book, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century, a collection of 25 essays written over 12 years. They range from pieces on Jewish intellectuals, including Arthur Koestler, Primo Levi, Manes Sperber and Hannah Arendt, to quirky portraits of countries such as Romania and Belgium and essays on American foreign policy during the cold war and the decline of social democracy.