Tony Robert Judt FBA (/dʒʌt/ JUT; 2 January 1948 – 6 August 2010)[1] was an English historian, essayist and university professor who specialised in European history.

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.

[8] 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".

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".

Marxism and the French Left: Studies in Labour and Politics in France 1830–1981 collects several previously unpublished essays on the 19th and 20th centuries, ending with a discussion of François Mitterrand.

In Judt's reading, French thinkers such as Sartre were blinded by their own provincialism, and unable to see that their calls for intellectual authenticity should have required them to interrogate their own attachment to communism and criticise the Soviet Union for its policies in postwar eastern Europe.

After President Jacques Chirac recognised the responsibility of the French state during the collaboration in 1995, on the anniversary of the Vel' d'Hiv raid, Judt wrote in a New York Times op-ed, "people like Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault were curiously silent.

When Simone de Beauvoir, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida entered the public arena, it usually involved a crisis far away—in Madagascar, Vietnam or Cambodia.

He spent the 1980s and much of the 1990s at Emory, Oxford, Stanford, and Vienna, where he taught political theory, learned Czech and became friendly with a number of east European intellectuals.

Nothing more than a "highest common factor of discriminatory political arithmetic",[19]: 125  the Schengen Agreement made Eastern European countries into barrier states designed to keep undesirable immigrants at bay.

Writing on such a broad subject was something of a departure for Judt, whose earlier works, such as Socialism in Provence and Past Imperfect, had focused on challenging conventional assumptions about the French Left.

[24] Judt's last book published during his lifetime, Ill Fares the Land, projected lessons learned forward, challenging readers to debate "what comes next?"

[25][26][27] Written under the debilitating effects of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Ill Fares The Land (2010) has been called Judt's "most overtly political book" and a "dramatic intervention" in the decline of the progressive ideals of the 20th century.

[28] Judt laments the breakdown of the postwar Keynesian policy consensus as well as the rise of neoliberal economics with its political manifestations under Thatcher, Reagan, and others.

In analysing the limited success achieved by Third Way triangulation and the paradoxical resurgence of unfettered capitalism after the global financial crisis, Judt calls the recent past "lost decades" marked by "fantasies of prosperity".

[32] The article, which presented a view of Middle Eastern history and politics that had rarely been given exposure in the mainstream media in the U.S., generated an explosive response, positive as well as negative.

[33][34] The NYRB was inundated with over a thousand letters within a week of its publication, peppered with terms like "antisemite" and "self-hating Jew", and the article led to Judt's removal from the editorial board of The New Republic.

[36] In March 2006, Judt wrote an op-ed piece for The New York Times about the John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt paper "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy".

He summed up his assessment of Mearsheimer and Walt's paper by asserting that "this essay, by two 'realist' political scientists with no interest whatsoever in the Palestinians, is a straw in the wind."

[38] On 4 October 2006, Judt's scheduled New York talk before the organisation Network 20/20 was abruptly cancelled after Polish Consul Krzysztof Kasprzyk suddenly withdrew his offer of a venue following phone calls from the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee.

"[40] According to The Washington Post, the ADL and AJC had complained to the Polish consul that Judt was "too critical of Israel and American Jewry", though both organisations deny asking that the talk be cancelled.

He added that "only in America—not in Israel—is this a problem", charging that vigorous criticism of Israeli policy, acceptable in Israel itself, is taboo in the U.S. Of the ADL and AJC, he said, "These are Jewish organizations that believe they should keep people who disagree with them on the Middle East away from anyone who might listen.

[42] Mark Lilla and Richard Sennett wrote a letter to Foxman in protest, which was signed by 114 people and published in The New York Review of Books.

[43] In a later exchange on the subject in The New York Review of Books, Lilla and Sennet argued, "Even without knowing the substance of those 'nice' calls from the ADL and AJC, any impartial observer will recognize them as not so subtle forms of pressure.

Jonathan Freedland wrote in NYRB, "There are not many professors in any field equipped to produce, for example, learned essays on the novels of Primo Levi and the writings of the now forgotten Manès Sperber—yet also able to turn their hand to, say, a close, diplomatic analysis of the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.

"[46] Freedland added that Judt had demonstrated "through more than a decade of essays written for America's foremost journals... that he belongs to each one of those rare, polymathic categories.

Dylan Riley of the University of California, Berkeley, argued that Judt was more of a pamphleteer and a polemicist than a historian, and that he changed his views without hesitation or good reason.

[53] This was two weeks after a major interview and retrospective of his work in Prospect magazine[54] and the day before an article about his illness was published in the Irish Independent indicating that he "won't surrender anytime soon" and comparing his suffering to that of author Terry Pratchett, who was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's disease in 2007.

[59] During his illness, Judt made use of the memory palace technique to remember paragraphs of text during the night, which he placed mentally in rooms of a Swiss chalet and then dictated to his assistant the next day.

[30] In his obituary in The New York Review of Books, Timothy Garton Ash placed Judt in "the great tradition of the spectateur engagé, the politically engaged but independent and critical intellectual.