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. His polemic style is on display. Fellow liberals such as David Remnick, Michael Ignatieff and Thomas Friedman are excoriated for supporting the war in Iraq. 'In today's America,' Judt writes, 'neoconservatives generate brutish policies for which liberals provide the ethical fig leaf.' He explores how international opinion turned against Israel after its victory in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. In The Country that Wouldn't Grow Up, he equates Israel with a narcissistic adolescent that believes itself to be unique and universally misunderstood. Some of the essays first appeared in The New Republic, which listed Judt as a contributing editor until 2003. After Israel: The Alternative was published, the magazine's literary editor, Leon Wieseltier, removed his name from the masthead. 'He does not wish to be held accountable for things that he has not himself done or to be regarded as a representative of anyone but himself,' Wieseltier wrote. 'Why must Israel pay for his uneasiness with its life?' The troublesome essay is conspicuously absent from this collection. 'I really didn't want reviewers and readers to turn to that immediately, then read the book as though it was a footnote to that essay,' Judt says. By 2003, Judt had become convinced that the creation of separate Jewish and Palestinian states was no longer possible. 'Israel controls the water, the economy and the power to the state militarily,' he says. 'It owns the land and has chopped it up in a way that will make a coherent Palestinian state impossible. One should recognise that, rather than talking as if at some point in the near future ... Israel will walk away from the land and there'll be a Palestinian state.' Fears, even among left-wing Jews, that the one-state solution would mean Jews becoming a minority in Greater Palestine, are exaggerated, he says. 'A substantial segment of the Palestinian population, which is still the best educated and most secular of all the Arab populations, will be very happy to live with and work with the majority of the Jewish population. Although Israel has done its best to turn the Palestinians into angry Islamists, they are not yet.' When Judt wrote an opinion piece about the Jewish lobby for The New York Times, an editor asked him to insert that he is Jewish. Would Judt have entered the fray if he were not Jewish? 'I might be, like many of my non-Jewish friends here, inhibited for fear of being accused of being insensitive to Jewish suffering,' he says. 'One has to live in the United States to realise how oppressive the silence about American policy in the Middle East is, especially compared with similar conversations pretty much anywhere in the world, including Israel.' In October 2003, Judt was scheduled to deliver a speech at the Polish Consulate in New York about the 'Jewish lobby'. An hour before he was expected to arrive, the consulate cancelled the talk after receiving calls from the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Congress. The League's director, Abraham Foxman, dismissed allegations that the Jewish organisations silenced Judt as 'conspiratorial nonsense', but the consulate clearly felt under intense pressure. Judt was 15 when his mother, a hairdresser, and father, a bookseller, concerned about his lack of a social life, sent him to a Zionist summer camp in Israel. He says he was 'sucked into the whole youthful enthusiasm - dancing in a circle, singing songs, being both left-wing and nationalistic'. At 19, at the end of his first year at Cambridge, he organised a group of volunteers to replace the soldiers called up for the Six-Day War in the fields. Later that year, he drove trucks and translated Hebrew and French for Israeli officers. His romance with Zionism unravelled, however. 'I started to see a side of Israel that I didn't know very well,' he says. 'I listened to Israeli soldiers talking about how, 'We now have all this land and we will never give it back,' and, 'The only good Arab is a dead Arab.' You didn't have to be a political genius to see that this was a catastrophe in the making.' In 1995, Judt founded the Remarque Institute at New York University to facilitate dialogue with Europe, but he holds out little hope for the future of US-European relations. 'The substantive content of the relationship probably won't change hugely because the American way of looking at the world is very different from Europe's. Europeans look at Turkey or the Middle East as frontier issues, whereas Americans see them as long-distance menaces.' In Post-war, Judt describes Europe 'as a paragon of the international virtues' and 'an exemplar for all to emulate' before concluding that 'the 21st century might yet belong to Europe'. For a hard-nosed historian it is a remarkably sentimental vision. 'The European model of how to live a western, pluralistic, democratic life in the globalised world is probably the only available model to us - that is to say, which combines the reality of nation-states with the necessity of transnational institutions, legislation and co-operation,' he says. Garton Ash calls Post-war a landmark achievement: the first history of post-war Europe to integrate the histories of western and eastern Europe. The historian also feels Judt exaggerates the divergence between Europe and America: 'I think both sides of the Atlantic are likely to come back to what I call a Euro-Atlanticist agenda, to a kind of a strategic partnership. Tony has been deeply marked by his experience of eight years in the United States under the Bush administration,' he says. Buruma suggests that Judt 'sometimes overstates to further the discussion'. He sees Judt's idealisation of Europe as a way of expressing his disillusionment with the US. 'He's a passionate man and I think sometimes takes up very passionate positions and then feels disillusioned. The disillusionment is sharper because of the passionate enthusiasm he had at first. It's true of Israel, and it's true of the US.' Writer's notes Name: Tony Judt Age: 60 Born: 1948, London Family: second wife Jennifer Homans, dance critic for The New Republic; two sons, 11 and 13 Lives: New York City Genres: history, book reviews, political essays Latest book: Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century (William Heinemann; Penguin) Current project: a book about the future of social democracy Other books: Socialism in Provence, 1871-1914: A Study in the Origins of the Modern French Left (1979); Studies in Labour and Politics in France, 1830-1981 (1986); Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956 (1992); A Grand Illusion? An Essay on Europe (1996); Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century (1998); A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005) Other jobs: university lecturer; translator and truck driver in Israel during the 1967 war What the papers say: 'Judt is a liberal thinker dedicated to demystifying liberal illusions. Reappraisals is an indispensable tract for the times by one of the great political writers of the age.' The Guardian
