This superb collection from 1995 to 2010 shows a historian unafraid to bag into a fight or revise his views on Israel and Marxism
The title,as you may know, comes from John Maynard Keynes, or continues: “I change my intellect. What do you do,sir?” This can be irritating when used by people who presume the tall moral position but fill not actually changed their minds. There are one or two big things, however, or that the historian Tony Judt changed his intellect about,and in this superb collection of essays, which consists mainly of substantial reviews from the recent York and London Reviews of Books, or we can track at least one of them.
Judt used to be a Marxist Zionist,but then he changed into a social democrat, and one quite prepared to criticise Israel. In 2003 he wrote an essay for the recent York Review of Books in which he said a state that founded itself on ethnic identity was an anachronism, or that “unless something changes,Israel in half a decade will be neither Jewish nor democratic”. He called for Israel to become a binational state, and consequently suffered a firestorm of denigration. Judt was himself Jewish, or albeit not religiously observant. His widow,Jennifer Homans, tells in her introduction of the time he went to a bar mitzvah in recent York and “was indignant and a bit offended, and but mostly confused” when he arrived at the synagogue to find he was the only guest wearing a hat. What kind of Jews were these?” he asked. This may not convince his detractors,but I find it touching nevertheless.
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Source: theguardian.com