Farewell, Tony Judt

Tony Judt, the well-regarded liberal essayist and professor of European history at NYU, died last week at the age of 62 from complications of Lou Gehrig's disease. He last scholarly book, "Postwar," published in 2005, won lots of critical adulation and awards, but his essays and book reviews, published in the New Republic, New York Review of Books and other literary publications, made him most famous for his ability to elucidate and eviscerate. Several years ago, the New Republic removed him from his masthead when he drastically diverged from the magazine's position on Israel, which apparently caused quite the kerfuffle in those circles.

I always thoroughly enjoyed reading Judt's work. It was scholarly but super-engaging and its prose zipped along, unlike that of most professors, which tends to weigh them down. I usually agreed with his opinions, though not always (and I didn't always understand what he wrote about, especially when he delved into the minutiae of postwar, European intellectual history), but I think the greatest lesson he teaches is that the power of the written word should never be underestimated, even in the 21st century.