Tony Judt (1948–2010) was a British historian, essayist, and professor who served as Erich Maria Remarque Professor in European Studies at New York University (NYU) and director of NYU’s Remarque Institute. Born in London to a secular Jewish immigrant family with Lithuanian and Romanian roots, Judt was active in Zionist youth movements in his adolescence and volunteered on a kibbutz during the 1967 Six-Day War. He was educated at King’s College, Cambridge, and the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.
Judt specialized in modern European history, french intellectual tradition, and social democracy. His major publications include Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944–1956 (1992) and Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005), the latter of which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Shortly before his death from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) in 2010, Judt published Ill Fares the Land (2010), a defense of social democracy, and completed the oral history Thinking the Twentieth Century (2012) with Timothy Snyder.
In October 2003, Judt published a controversial essay in The New York Review of Books titled “Israel: The Alternative.” In the article, Judt argued that Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories and the growth of settlements had rendered the two-state solution impractical. Characterizing the Jewish state model as anachronistic in a multicultural global era, he wrote: “The problem with Israel is simply that it has arrived too late. It has imported a characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that has moved on…” He further contended that “Israel today is bad for the Jews,” proposing instead a single, binational, secular democratic state with equal rights for Jews and Arabs.
The essay provoked intense debate within American and international academic circles, leading to cancelled speaking engagements and public censure from several Jewish institutions. In contemporary Middle Eastern studies and political commentary, Judt’s critique of territorial nationalism and his early assessment of the decline of the two-state framework remain widely referenced benchmarks.