By TONY JUDT [New York Times] – For many decades after the war, no one in France wanted to be reminded of its treatment of the Jews. Survivors wanted only to melt back into the democratic Republic. The Gaullists found it useful to depict Vichy and its collaborators as the work of a handful of extremists, with most of the French silently or actively supporting the Resistance.
Intellectuals, so prominent in postwar France, might have been expected to force the issue. Yet people like Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault were curiously silent. One reason was their near-obsession with Communism. While proclaiming the need to “engage,” to take a stand, two generations of intellectuals avoided any ethical issue that could not advance or, in some cases, retard the Marxist cause.
Vichy was dismissed as the work of a few senile Fascists. No one looked closely at what had happened during the Occupation, perhaps because very few intellectuals of any political stripe could claim to have had a “good” war, as Albert Camus did. No one stood up to cry “J’accuse!” at high functionaries, as Emile Zola did during the Dreyfus affair. When Simone de Beauvoir, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida entered the public arena, it usually involved a crisis far away — in Madagascar, Vietnam or Cambodia.
Continued at the New York Times
Revising Israel off the map.
By EVAN R. GOLDSTEIN [Chronicle Review] – Judt’s historical analogy drew sharp rejoinders. “If Israel resembles French Algeria, why exactly should Israel and its national doctrine, Zionism, be regarded as any more legitimate than France’s imperialism?” asked the political writer Paul Berman. That was a good question. A few months later, Judt revised his position. “The time has come to think the unthinkable,” he proclaimed in a widely disseminated essay in The New York Review. The two-state solution—a Jewish state and an Arab state—”is probably already doomed,” and the least-bad option remaining was for Israel to convert from a Jewish state to a binational state. “The depressing truth,” Judt wrote, “is that Israel today is bad for the Jews.”
According to Benny Morris, a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and author of One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict (Yale University Press, 2009), Judt’s essay placed the one-state idea “squarely and noisily on the table of international agendas.” The Forward described it as “the intellectual equivalent of a nuclear bomb on Zionism.” Within weeks, The New York Review had received more than 1,000 letters to the editor.
Continued at The Chronicle of Higher Education Review | Tony Judt died 6 August 2010. An obituary is here | More Chronicle & Notices.
