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The Memory Chalet
by Tony Judt
Penguin Press HC, 240 pp.
Tony Judt disliked the grand title “public intellectual,” even though he embodied it to the last day of his life. Judt (pronounced “Jutt”) was a professor of European history at New York University who died of Lou Gehrig’s disease at age sixty-two in August 2010. Before his death he rose to great prominence on two fronts. First, he published in 2005 the magnificent, comprehensive Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, a book encyclopedic in its learning yet engagingly written and argued. The pinnacle of his career, it quickly became one of the most celebrated works of history in recent years. Second, Judt contributed dozens of bracing, relentlessly clear, and frequently provocative essays to the New York Review of Books, his intellectual home. His audience was more receptive to some of his arguments than others. Judt’s harsh critiques of unrepentant communist thinkers like Eric Hobsbawn and Louis Althusser, and his championing of European-style social democracy, put Marxism firmly in its place while articulating a strong, practicable vision for the left. Yet his equally withering assessment of the Middle East crisi
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