When the Facts Change, Ignore Them: The World According to Tony Judt

Toward the end of his career as a much-lauded historian of 20th-century Europe, the late Tony Judt made a name writing scathing condemnations of American foreign policy and of Israel’s existence as the nation state of the Jews. Reviewing a recently-published collection of these essays, entitled When the Facts Change, Adam Kirsch finds Judt’s ideas both devoid of “novelty or originality” and disconnected from reality. Moreover, writes Kirsch, they bespeak a deep-seated pathology, perhaps best exemplified in a 2003 article calling for Israel’s dissolution, that has seized hold of many on the American-Jewish left: