Tony Judt
Tony Judt
Tony Robert Judt, FBA was a British historian, essayist, and university professor who specialized in European history. Judt moved to New York and served as the Erich Maria Remarque Professor in European Studies at New York University, and Director of NYU's Erich Maria Remarque Institute. He was a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books. In 1996 Judt was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2007 a corresponding Fellow of the...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionHistorian
Date of Birth2 January 1948
Israel today is bad for the Jews,
Undergraduates today can select from a swathe of identity studies.... The shortcoming of all these para-academic programs is not that they concentrate on a given ethnic or geographical minority; it is that they encourage members of that minority to study themselves - thereby simultaneously negating the goals of a liberal education and reinforcing the sectarian and ghetto mentalities they purport to undermine.
It does irritate me when I am described as a controversialist and commentator on Israel.
We have responsibilities for others, not just across space but across time. We have responsibilities to people who came before us. They left us a world of institutions, ideas or possibilities for which we, in turn, owe them something. One of the things we owe them is not to squander them.
I know exactly how and where I am going to die. The only question is when.
If we have learned nothing else from the 20th century, we should at least have grasped that the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying its consequences. Incremental improvements upon unsatisfactory circumstances are the best that we can hope for, and probably all we should seek.
How should we begin to make amends for raising a generation obsessed with the pursuit of material wealth and indifferent to so much else?
I don't much mind being expelled from communities.
Love, it seems to me, is the condition in which one is most contentedly oneself.
All modern U.S. presidents are perforce politicians, prisoners of their past pronouncements, their party, their constituency, and their colleagues.
If active or concerned citizens forfeit politics, they thereby abandon their society to its most mediocre and venal public servants
Today, neither Left nor Right can find their footing.
After 1945 what happened was rather the opposite: with one major exception boundaries stayed broadly intact and people were moved instead.
The military system of a nation is not an independent section of the social system but an aspect of its totality.