Tony Judt - Family and Professional Life

Family and Professional Life

Judt was born in 1948 in London, England to secular Jewish parents. He was raised by his mother, whose parents had emigrated from Russia and Romania, and his father, who was born in Belgium and had immigrated as a boy to Ireland and then subsequently to England. Judt's parents lived in North London, but due to the closure of the local hospitals in response to an outbreak of infant dysentery, Judt was born in a Salvation Army maternity unit in Bethnal Green, in the East End of London. When he was a small boy, the family moved from Tottenham to a flat above his mother's business in Putney, South London. When 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 Judt often spoke in French to his father and to his father's family.

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. Judt was the first member of his family to finish secondary school and to go to university. He obtained a BA degree in history in 1969 and, after spending a year at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, completed a PhD in 1972. As a high school and university student he was a left-wing Zionist, and worked summers on kibbutzim. He moved away from Zionism after the Six-Day War of 1967, later stating that "I went with this idealistic fantasy of creating a socialist, communitarian country", but that he came to realise that left-wing Zionists were "remarkably unconscious of the people who had been kicked out of the country...to make this fantasy possible". He came to describe his Zionism as his particular "ideological overinvestment". Judt wrote in February 2010 that: "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".

After completing his Cambridge doctorate, he was elected a junior fellow of King's College in 1972, where he taught modern French history until 1978. Following a brief period teaching social history at the University of California, Berkeley, he returned to Great Britain in 1980 to teach politics at St Anne's College, Oxford. He moved to New York University in 1987.

Judt was married three times, his first two marriages ending in divorce. His third marriage was to Jennifer Homans, The New Republic's dance critic, with whom he had two children. In June 2010, Judt and his son Daniel wrote a dialogue about Barack Obama, politics and corporate behaviour for the New York Times.

Judt's piece in The New York Review of Books for 27 May 2010, refers at length to his teaching time at University of California, Davis, and not to time at Berkeley. The piece also refers to "a month of heavy radiation" for cancer in 2002, relevant to the cause of death.