Tony Judt
Celebrated historian whose strong views, especially on Israel, attracted criticism but also widespread praise
With the publication in 2005 of Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945, Tony Judt established himself as one of the leading historians and left-wing thinkers of his era. At nearly 900 pages it was a thumping testimony to its author’s intellectual immersion in the period, covering every aspect of history with an extraordinary sweep. But it was a tribute to his talent as a writer that it did not read like a hardboiled polemic. “The pace of a thriller and the scope of an encyclopaedia,” wrote one reviewer.
Judt’s eye for detail led him to note the impact of the increase in the ownership of transistor radios and also comment on the involvement of the state in Italian ice-cream production. He also made a point of emphasising that the rebuilding of Europe had been based partly on expediency, in particular, in accommodating Nazi sympathisers and collaborators and creating a myth of resistance where sometimes none had existed.
But he made sweeping conclusions, too, the principal one of which was a celebration of the success of social democracy in postwar Europe. His personality and world view emerged strongly from the page. In The New Yorker, Louis Menand noted that Judt “does not count self-effacement a literary virtue”. The historian Timothy Snyder called it “the best book on its subject that will ever be written by anyone”. It was, not surprisingly, nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
However, Judt came to believe that the years of prosperity and peace had left Europe weaker and that in the past 30 years it had gone “profoundly wrong”. He lamented the failure of the young to engage with serious political thought and criticised “the pursuit of material self-interest”. In the last of his seven significant works of history, Ill Fares the Land, published earlier this year, he wrote: “As recently as the 1970s, the idea that the point of life was to get rich and that government existed to facilitate this would have been ridiculed; not only by capitalism’s traditional critics but also by many of its staunchest defenders.”
In the United States, where he had lived and worked since the late-1980s, he became best known for his trenchant criticism of Israel. He was at the centre of a furore in 2003 with an essay in the New York Review of Books entitled Israel: The Alternative. His view that it was time to “think the unthinkable” and bring an end to Israel as a Jewish state and establish a binational state of Israelis and Palestinians. Predictably, its publication was hugely controversial in the US and he acknowleged that the ensuing row had changed the way in which he was perceived in his adopted homeland. “Apparently, the line you take on Israel trumps everything else in life,” he said.
Tony Robert Judt was born in 1948 into a Jewish community in East London, although his family eventually settled on the other side of the capital in Putney. His grandparents were Yiddish-speaking Jews from Eastern Europe. Politics and books played a key role in his home life but his parents were not easily pigeonholed. “They were left wing, even Marxist, but strongly against communism,” he recalled.
Fearing he had become rather withdrawn as a teenager, his parents encouraged him to join Dror, the Zionist youth organisation. He became — in his own words — a “gung-ho, utterly committed, left-wing Zionist”. After a year at King’s College, Cambridge, he went to live on a kibbutz just before the outbreak of the Six-Day War in 1967. He worked as a driver during the brief conflict and later as a translator on the Golan Heights, but the seeds of his disaffection with Israel were sown during that summer, in particular in remarks he overheard from army officers and in the wider reaction to the acquistion of disputed territory.
He returned to Cambridge and began graduate research into the history of French Marxism before, in 1970, enrolling for a year in the École Normale Supérieure, where he found the conversation more intellectually stimulating than at Cambridge. He gained his PhD at Cambridge in the early 1970s and taught there and at Oxford — which he preferred — and also spent some time teaching at Berkeley. Thinking that he needed to expand his horizons, he taught himself Czech and became involved in smuggling books and manuscripts out of Czechoslovakia. Sensing the onset of the Velvet Revolution, he travelled to Prague where he saw the momentous events of late 1989 at first hand. It was an experience that added considerably to the content of Postwar.
He had moved to New York University in 1988 and in 1995 formed the university’s Remarque Institute to promote the study and discussion of Europe in the US. He remained the institute’s director until his death and was instrumental in bringing together Eastern European and American intellectuals.
Nevertheless, he became increasingly frustrated with the state of political debate in the US. He maintained that his views of Israel would not have attracted the same opprobrium anywhere else and was embroiled in another widely reported row after the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York. In an essay, Bush’s Useful Idiots, he criticised those intellectuals who had supported the war in Iraq but changed their minds when America was seen to lose control of the country. It was a piece that disassociated him from many of his customary allies on the Left.
Puerto-Rican freedom fighter who led an assault on the US Congress but in old age abandoned violence as a means to independence
Lolita Lebrón campaigned throughout her long life for the independence of her native Puerto Rico from the United States, by violent means if necessary. Despite spending a quarter of a century behind bars for her beliefs, her dream was never fulfilled: only a small minority of her compatriots wanted independence at any price.
The young Lolita Lebrón achieved notoriety when she led a group of armed militants in an assault on the US Congress in 1954. The gunmen opened fire from the spectators’ gallery of the House of Representatives as members debated an immigration Bill on the floor of the chamber below. Nobody was killed, but five Congressman were wounded, one seriously.
Lolita Lebrón was born in 1919, in the village of Lares, south-western Puerto Rico, where her father was a foreman on a coffee farm. She moved to the US mainland in 1940, joining the many thousands of Puerto Ricans who used their US passports, granted after the Caribbean island became an unincorporated territory of the US in 1917, to seek a better life in “America”. Before that the island had been one of the last remnants of Spain’s empire in the New World, but it was transferred to US sovereignty after a brief war in 1898.
In New York, where she struggled to make a living as a machinist in a succession of sweatshops, a bitterly disillusioned Lolita Lebrón joined the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, and came under the influence of its president, the Harvard-educated Pedro Albizu Campos, who was imprisoned for his part in an assault on President Harry S Truman’s temporary residence in Washington in 1950. He argued that Puerto Rico was a colony of the United States, and nothing less than full independence would do for an island with its own language, history and culture. He was prepared to use violence to achieve this end.
On March 1, 1954, two years after the US Congress had voted to give Puerto Rico commonwealth status — which granted islanders substantial self-government but left the territory under the sovereignty of Congress — Lolita Lebrón and her three companions were ordered by Albizu Campos to perform their dramatic act of armed propaganda on Capitol Hill. She said afterwards that she never intended to hurt anybody, and her main objective was to unfurl a Puerto Rican flag and cry “Viva Puerto Rico libre!”. The eight shots she fired from her Luger pistol were aimed at the ceiling. Although she said she did not expect any of them to escape with their lives, all the attackers were captured and were given prison sentences. They were released in 1979, after President Jimmy Carter granted them clemency — a move rumoured to be part of a prisoner exchange agreement with Fidel Castro’s Cuba. Lolita Lebrón had served just half of her 50-year sentence. Back in Puerto Rico, after a tour of Puerto Rican communities in US cities, followed by a triumphal visit to Cuba, she continued to campaign for independence and to espouse nationalist causes. One of these was a protest movement against a US Navy bombing range on the small offshore island of Vieques, after a local security guard was killed by a stray bomb in 1999. Two years later, Lolita Lebrón, then aged 81, was detained with several other protesters after cutting through a fence surrounding Navy property on Vieques. She was sentenced to 60 days in prison for trespass. On this occasion her actions were not in vain, as the Navy abandoned its facilities on Vieques soon afterwards.
By that time the fiery freedom fighter had mellowed somewhat, and she abandoned her earlier support for violent methods. Her new-found convictions were put to the test in 2005, when the FBI ambushed and killed Filiberto Ojeda Ríos, the leader of a Puerto Rican paramilitary pro-independence group known as Los Macheteros. When an angry crowd gathered in the streets, Lolita Lebrón managed to persuade them to keep the demonstration peaceful. Her status as a national treasure, revered by people of different political persuasions, was assured.
Lolita Lebrón is survived by her husband, Sergio Irizarry Rivera, a doctor whom she met in prison. Her son and daughter both predeceased her.
Dolores (Lolita) Lebrón Sotomayor, Puerto Rican nationalist, was born on November 19, 1919. She died on August 2, 2010, aged 90
