Reviewed by:
Ira Robinson,
Academic Fellow, CIJR
Concordia University
Judt, Tony, with Timothy Snyder. Thinking the Twentieth Century. New York, Penguin Press, 2012. xvii + 414 pages. ISBN: 978-1-59420-323-7
This is the last book written by Tony Judt, who gained fame as an intellectual historian of the twentieth century and much notoriety for his negative opinions on Israel. It was undertaken after he had been diagnosed with ALS and takes the form of a long conversation with fellow historian Timothy Snyder. Perhaps because of the extraordinary circumstances of its origin, it partakes in equal parts of personal reminiscence and apologia on Judt’s part, and a fascinating and opinionated trip through the history and historiography of the twentieth century.
Among the many fascinating aspects of this book, not the least is its treatment of Judt’s Jewishness. In Snyder’s foreword, he remarks that:
It is not the case…that Tony wrote Jewish history because he is Jewish. He never really has written about Jewish history. Like many scholars of Jewish origin in his generation, he evaded the manifest centrality of the Holocaust to his own subjects, even as his personal knowledge of it motivated, at some level, the direction of his research. (xiii).
For Snyder, then, there was something importantly Jewish about Judt and his scholarship. Judt shows himself to have considerable ambivalence on this subject. He spoke of having come from a “self-consciously un-Jewish family”, despite having had a bar mitzvah and unnumbered Friday night dinners with his grandparents, for whom his parents had to park their car around the corner so as not to publicly offend his grandfather’s Sabbath observance. (8) Judt also asserts that “I was remarkably uninterested in…not only the Holocaust, but Jewish history in general (32) Having experienced the best education Britain could offer, Judt identified with the spiritual world of England far more than that of Judaism:
If you asked me even today where I would feel more at home, in an Orthodox synagogue or a rural Anglican church, I would have to say I feel at home in both, but in different ways. I would immediately be able to identify, recognize and share what was going on in the Orthodox synagogue, but would not feel at all part of the world of the people around me. Conversely, I would feel completely at ease in the world of an English rural church and its surrounding community, even though I don’t share the beliefs, nor do I identify with the symbols of the ceremony. (48)
Considering his professed alienation from things Jewish, it may be surprising to some that he had a sustained encounter with Israel that nearly resulted in a permanent aliyah to live on a kibbutz. His involvement with the Labor Zionist youth organization, Dror, led him to spend summers on Kibbutz Hakuk and to develop reasonable fluency in Hebrew. At the time, as he said, he “threw himself into Zionism and its ideological penumbra.” (107) It is in the aftermath of the Six Day War in 1967, as a volunteer working with the Israel Defense Forces, that Judt claims to have first realized that there were Israelis unlike those he had met on the kibbutz, Israelis who were chauvinistic, hated Arabs, and whose politics was not of the left. (117)
Though he went on record in a notorious essay in the New York Review of Books that argued for a one-state solution to the problem of Israel/Palestine, Judt insists that he is not anti-Israeli, and it is certainly true that Judt’s criticism of Israel and Israelis is considerably less trenchant than that of Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, whom Judt clearly admires. Judt’s ambivalence about Israel is tied in with his expression of concern for “the troubling consequences of our contemporary obsession with Holocaust commemoration.” It is clear, of course, that these troubling consequences concern Israel, and its “unhealthy” dependence on the Holocaust as “moral crutch” and “weapon of choice with which to fend off all criticism”. (119)
It is interlocutor Tim Snyder’s voice that provides a necessary background to Judt’s concern about alleged Israeli Holocaust abuse:
For today’s Europe the Jews have served in the role of something like a collective messiah; for a long time, they were a considerable irritant—they caused a lot of trouble, they introduced a lot of troublesome revolutionary or liberal ideas. But when they died—were exterminated en masse—they taught Europeans a universal lesson…The meaning of the State of Israel for Europeans is bound up with the Holocaust: it points to a lost messiah from whose legacy we have at least been able to draw a new secular morality. But the actually existing Jews in Israel disrupt this narrative. They cause trouble. It would be better—so goes this thinking—if they did not cause so much trouble and allow us Europeans to interpret them in peace…(121-122)
It is clear that Judt has spent some time and effort contemplating Jewish history and historiography, and that he has read and seriously considered Jewish historian Yosef Haim Yerushalmi’s book on the relation of Jewish history and Jewish memory, Zakhor, though he does not cite him by name in ultimately dismissing the thesis:
…the duty to remember the past gets confused with the past itself: the Jewish past becomes conflated with those bits of it which are serviceable for collective memory. (277)
Snyder remarks that Judt’s piece in the New York Review of Books, which defined his position on Israel in opposition to that of mainstream American Jewry, was “certainly a program for success in making yourself an outsider”. (138) In his response, Judt eschews the standard position taken by intellectual critics of Israel, many of whom wish to emphasize the sacrifices they make for the sake of the truths they espouse. On the contrary, Judt is honest enough to say that he responds “with genuine discomfort” to those anti-Israel forces who wish to make of him a hero and a martyr. As he concluded, “the fact is it took little courage to publish a controversial piece about Israel in the New York Review of Books while holding a tenured chair at a major university.”(139)
Tony Judt lived to the full the relatively privileged life of a university professor and he must be considered a distinguished member of a cohort of leftist intellectuals of Jewish origins for whom the campus offered a refuge from the ebb-tide of leftist politics that marked the late twentieth century. In step with many in his cohort, he first embraced Israel and then rejected it after 1967. His last book explains much about twentieth century leftist thought, and it helps us tremendously in attempting to make sense of the contemporary anti-Israel intellectual left.