34 Facts About Tony Judt

Tony Robert Judt was a British-American historian, essayist and university professor who specialized in European history.

Tony Judt was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books.

In 1996 Tony Judt was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2007 a corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.

Tony Judt's 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.

Tony Judt's parents lived in North London, but due to the closure of the local hospitals in response to an outbreak of infant dysentery, Tony Judt was born in a Salvation Army maternity unit in Bethnal Green, in the East End of London.

When Tony Judt was nine years of age, following the birth of his sister, the family moved to a house in Kingston-upon-Thames, Surrey.

The family's main language was English, although Tony Judt often spoke French to his father and his father's family.

Tony Judt won a place at Emanuel School in Wandsworth, and following his education at Emanuel, he went on to study as a scholarship student at King's College, Cambridge.

Tony Judt was the first member of his family to finish secondary school and to go to university.

At Cambridge, Tony Judt became close friends with Martyn Poliakoff, who later became well known as a chemist and star of The Periodic Table of Videos.

Tony Judt obtained a BA degree in history in 1969 and after spending a year at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris completed a PhD in 1972.

Tony Judt came to describe his Zionism as his particular "ideological overinvestment" and he moved away from Marxism in the 1970s and 1980s.

Tony 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".

Tony Judt's works include the highly acclaimed Postwar, a history of Europe after the Second World War.

Tony Judt was married three times, his first two marriages ending in divorce.

Tony Judt criticized what he considered blind faith in Joseph Stalin's communism.

In Tony 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 criticize the Soviet Union for its policies in postwar eastern Europe.

Tony Judt made a similar case in some of his more popular writings.

Tony Judt 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.

In Postwar, Tony Judt examined the history of Europe from the end of World War II to 2005.

Tony Judt concludes the book with a "passionate appeal for a return to social-democratic ideals".

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

In May 2006, Tony Judt continued in a similar vein with a feature-length article, "The Country That Wouldn't Grow Up", for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

The article, published the day before Israeli Independence Day, recaps Israel's short history, describing what Tony Judt saw as a steady decline in Israel's credibility that began with the Six-Day War in 1967.

Tony Judt's peers praised him for his wide-ranging knowledge and versatility in historical analysis.

In 2009, Tony Judt received a Special Orwell Prize for Lifetime Achievement for his contribution to British political writing.

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

In 2007 Tony Judt was awarded the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought, a prize awarded to individuals representing the tradition of political theorist Hannah Arendt, especially in regard to totalitarianism.

In September 2008, Tony Judt was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, known as Lou Gehrig's Disease.

Tony Judt was nevertheless able to give a two-hour public lecture.

In January 2010, Tony Judt wrote a short article about his condition, the first of a series of memoirs published in The New York Review of Books.

In March 2010, Tony Judt was interviewed by Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air, and in June he was interviewed by the BBC's disability affairs correspondent Peter White for the Radio 4 programme No Triumph, No Tragedy.

Tony Judt died of ALS at his home in Manhattan on 6 August 2010.

Tony Judt wrote a memoir, The Memory Chalet, published posthumously in November 2010.