Judt at War

“I’m struck when I observe the Jewish community in the United States, especially in New York,” said Tony Judt last Saturday, Oct. 7, sitting cross-legged in his Washington Square Park apartment, “that it’s a community which is the most successful, the wealthiest, the most well-integrated, the most influential, the most safe Jewish community in the history of Judaism, period—anywhere, anytime—since the Roman Empire. And yet it’s driven by an enormous self-induced insecurity.”

The 58-year-old Mr. Judt, a British-Jewish professor of European history at New York University and director of the Remarque Institute, had just come off a busy week perhaps particular to accented intellectuals who speak controversially about Israel: Just days before, Mr. Judt found two of his New York speaking engagements, one at the Polish Consulate, the other at Manhattan College, suddenly canceled.

The ensuing chaos—a combination of conflicting news reports, pitched rhetoric and the specter of censorship raised in heated semi-public e-mail discussions—forced the spotlight back on Mr. Judt, an already divisive figure in the Jewish community, as well as in New York’s chatty intellectual hothouse.

“There are people out there like Chomsky and Finkelstein and others who take positions on Israel that are far more extreme than those of Judt, and who are thus much more easily pigeonholed and marginalized,” said Michael Massing, a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. “Because Judt has such a prominent position in the New York intellectual community and is so articulate, he’s seen as a much greater threat.”

Mr. Judt’s canceled appearances came on the heels of his Sept. 21 London Review of Books essay “Bush’s Useful Idiots,” which lambastes American liberal intellectuals for helping the President along the road to Iraq. But Mr. Judt was most notorious for his 2003 NYRB essay “Israel: The Alternative,” in which he called for a one-state solution as an end to the Israeli-Palestinian morass. (For many, that means the very end of Israel itself.) And on Sept. 28, he’d appeared at Cooper Union to argue in a debate—inspired by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s bomb-throwing essay in the London Review of Books—that an American Israel Lobby does, indeed, squelch honest discussion in the U.S.

As with all things academic (and all things Israel), l’affaire Judt has turned out to be a nuanced one.

“I’m not some kind of victim here. That’s garbage,” said Mr. Judt on Oct. 7. “I don’t even regard this as censorship. But I regard it as serious exercise of censorship by someone on someone else, with me in the middle.”

WHAT HAPPENED ON POLISH SOIL LAST WEEK was much ado about something—but what? By Tuesday, Oct. 10, it was still hard to tell whether or not—and if so, how closely— Jewish groups were tailing Mr. Judt.

On Tuesday, Oct. 3, Mr. Judt was scheduled to speak about the Israel Lobby to Network 20/20, a leadership organization for mid-career professionals, in space at the Polish Consulate. Network 20/20’s president, Patricia Huntington, called Mr. Judt around 5 p.m. and canceled. Shortly thereafter, Mr. Judt wrote in an e-mail to almost 100 “friends”—a list that includes David Remnick, Charlie Rose, Rashid Khalidi, Fareed Zakaria and Mr. Judt’s agents, Andrew Wylie and Sarah Chalfant— that, according to Ms. Huntington, “serial phone-calls from ADL president Abe Foxman warned [the Polish Consulate] off hosting anything involving Tony Judt.”

The next day, Oct. 4, The New York Sun’s Ira Stoll reported that the Polish Consulate took responsibility for the decision to cancel the event. Ms. Huntington again said it was the A.D.L. that had scared the Poles off from Mr. Judt’s speech. David Harris, the executive director of the American Jewish Committee, was on record “bravo”-ing the Polish Consulate for doing the “right thing.” Mr. Stoll called Mr. Judt “hostile to the Jewish state” and noted the “quickening entente between free Poland and Israel.”

It appeared to Mr. Judt, who received the reporter’s call immediately after Ms. Huntingdon canceled, that the story in The Sun was a direct feed from the A.D.L.

Mr. Foxman admitted to contacting the consulate but denied pressuring them. “We received a couple calls and e-mails informing us that people heard that [Mr. Judt’s] speaking at the Polish Consulate and inquiring whether it was true,” Mr. Foxman told The Observer on Oct. 9, calling from a “quiet corner” in Rome. “One of our staff people called; they said they were just making the facilities available. We said, ‘O.K., thank you.’ As far as we were concerned, the issue was closed.” Mr. Foxman said he was pleasantly surprised the event had been abandoned.

He also denied being the source of the story in The New York Sun.

David Harris of the A.J.C did personally call the Polish Consulate. But he too was “shocked,” but pleased at the speedy results.

“I told the Consul General that I had just learned about a meeting that evening—and I wanted to be sure that he was aware of it,” said Mr. Harris. “He already was [aware] when I called. I wanted to alert him becaus