Saturday, August 7, 2010
[The following, by Eamonn McDonagh, is crossposted from Z Word.]
Mondoweiss has reported the death of Tony Judt. I daresay they'd know. As good a moment as any to recall that he regarded Jews as morally unfit for self-government and warned that the Jews as a whole might have to suffer as a result of the alleged crimes of some individual Jews.
Neither was he shy about using the memory of his own butchered relatives as a shield to protect his views that Jews paid too much attention to the Holocaust and used it to protect themselves against criticism for the crimes they commit today.
For a penetrating critique of Judt's views on the Holocaust you should read this brilliant text by Norman Geras from which I offer this brief quote:
As I have argued before, there is not too much attention given to the Holocaust or any other genocide, there is too little. Think only of the energy and attention that is being given, in the US and globally, to the American presidential election; or think of a major sporting event like the football World Cup; and then think how it might be, politically, if there were a planetary consciousness, a world-wide human rights movement, so cognizant of the worst crimes of the past, not turned away from them towards easier preoccupations, that people marched and agitated in their tens and hundreds of thousands whenever there was a genocide in process or threatening, demanded that the governments of the world and the institutions of world governance would treat these situations as urgent. Can Tony Judt, or anyone, be confident that this would not make the world a better place?
John Donne's "For Whom the Bell Tolls" employs a lovely and inspiring conceit, that of no one being an island entire of themselves, rather all of us a part of a greater whole, that of mankind. But it is manifestly untrue that we are diminished by each and every man's death, since were it true, it would mean we are somehow diminished even by the passing of the greatest monsters among us, e.g., Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc. I don't see Judt as so singularly terrible a person as any of those embodiments of Evil, especially since there are so many others of Judt's ilk. If any bells toll to mark his death, though, they will in no way be tolling for me
NPR told their bells for Judt today in a puff-piece, with some commentary by his friend Rashid Khalidi and from another Columbia prof who said he wasn't all bad and shouldn't be judged on just one issue.
So BHO and Tony Judt and had a mutual friend in Rashid Khalidi. Considering the circles he moved in, is it any wonder that the president is so hostile to Israel?
“A memorial website was created for Tony Judt! Honor his memory by contributing to his memorial site http://tonyjudt.people2remember.com/”
I was a TA for Tony Judt when he first arrived at U.C. Davis. Among the graduate students we knew next to nothing about him. I was studying U. S. History and wanted to TA for someone in my field, not in European History. So I went to his office to be as obnoxious as I could. I told him that the only European history I had read was from E. P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm and any other Marxist I could get a hold of and I doubted if he would want me to work for him. He laughed gleefully. I shall miss him.