Professor Tony Judt
Professor Tony Judt , who died on August 6 aged 62, was widely regarded as a
brilliant historian of modern Europe; he described himself as
"post-ideological" and deployed his sharp and combative mind against
intellectual foes on both Right and Left and, most controversially, over
Israel.
Telegraph.co.uk
Published 08 Aug 2010
Judt, a secular Jew who grew up in south-west London, argued that Israel
should not be a Jewish state, but a state for both Jews and Palestinians
living together under one government. As it stood, he suggested as early as
1983, Israel was a "belligerently intolerant, faith-driven ethno state".
His views, and sharp criticism of Israel's continued building of Jewish
settlements in the occupied Palestinian Territories, drew a fierce response.
Countering his claim that "Israel is drunk on settlements" and corrupted by
an "illegal occupation", the American Jewish Committee responded that: "Tony
Judt is just drunk on anti-Zionism". His views so scandalised The New
Republic magazine, where he was a contributing editor, that Judt's name was
stripped from the masthead. A colleague there, Leon Wieseltier, said that
Judt had "become precisely the kind of intellectual whom his intellectual
heroes would have despised".
But Judt remained unbowed, seeming in fact to relish the combat of ideas.
His only irritation with the debate was that it overshadowed his other,
considerable, achievements. "Apparently, the line you take on Israel trumps
everything else in life," he said in 2007.
By then he had published his greatest work: Postwar (2006), a book of
staggering breadth which chronicled the rise of Europe from the ruins of
1945 to the continent that by-and-large enjoys stability and prosperity
today. Over its 900 pages, Judt argued that the rescue of Europe from "a
brief interlude and then a Third World war, or a return to depression" was
an achievement whose magnitude was hard to exaggerate. For this he
emphasised the contribution of America - a country he would later lambast
for its campaign in Iraq - through its Marshall Plan funding and "the
psychological boost... [of] crucial support at a crucial moment".
But Judt did not consider Europe definitively beyond the possibility of
sliding again into the abyss. Though he was sceptical about the European
Union (a standpoint he expressed in the 1996 book A Grand Illusion?: An
Essay on Europe), he argued that "for Europe to play a part in the world on
the scale of its wealth and its population and its capacities, Europe has to
be united in some way, and Europe is not united".
He was in favour of bringing Turkey swiftly into the European Union ("it
would mean Europe would have a real voice in the Muslim world") but worried
that some immigrant and Muslim communities in those nations already in the
EU were living in "isolation".
"What you need is the state and politicians having the courage to say: 'You
must be integrated. You have to learn the local language. You cannot live in
cultural isolation'," he said in 2006. "But we in turn have to ensure that
you have the possibility of jobs, equal opportunity in education, in the
media, in everything which integrates you into a society. We have to give
you that society that we have created in a way that makes you want to be
part of it rather than feel outside it."
If European nations failed to address such social and ethnic divisions, Judt
theorised, then "nationalist, anti-European, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim
public political figures, seem a worrying picture of a possible European
future. We could still fall back into pre-Europe... and it worries me."
Concerns with the shape of society recently came to dominate Judt's
thinking, and allowed him to show off his talent for using history to
reflect upon the present day. It was a skill that he had mostly deployed the
other way around during his career, when he described the events of the past
with the immediacy of current affairs.
In his last book, Ill Fares the Land (2010), Judt argued that the Europe
that had so miraculously emerged from the wreckage of the Second World War
had gone "profoundly wrong". "For 30 years we have made a virtue out of the
pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes
whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose," he wrote.
The security and stability of post-Cold War Europe had bred its own problem:
"This is the second generation of people who can't imagine change except in
their own lives, who have no sense of social collective public goods or
services, who are just isolated individuals desperately striving to better
themselves above everybody else," he said earlier this year.
His ruminations about the place of the individual within society were, by
then, particularly piquant. Judt's own world was rapidly shrinking following
a diagnosis, in 2008, of motor neurone disease. Typically, he was as
uncompromising and unsentimental with himself as he had been writing about
others.
In a series of essays he chronicled his life and the swift progress of the
disease, which attacks the spinal cord, gradually shutting down the body's
ability to talk or move, but leaving the mind intact. "In contrast to almost
every other serious or deadly disease, one is thus left free to contemplate
at leisure and in minimal discomfort the catastrophic progress of one's own
deterioration," he wrote.
Tony Robert Judt was born in London on January 2 1948, and raised in Putney
in a secular Jewish family with Lithuanian roots. As a boy he joined the
Zionist youth group Dror and soon became devoted to the cause. In his teens
he spent summers working on kibbutzes in Israel and volunteered with the
Israeli army during the Six Day War, when he served as an interpreter.
His service with soldiers whom he described as "right-wing thugs with
anti-Arab views", marked a turning point in his love affair with Zionism,
and he returned to England to take up his place to read History at King's
College, Cambridge. His disillusion with his time in Israel bled into a more
general scepticism of the political and social dogmas that were prevalent in
the late Sixties. "I remember going through the 1960s watching my friends
become Maoists or Althusserian feminists or God knows what else and
thinking: 'This is garbage'. So I became post-ideological."
Judt then spent a year in Paris at the Ecole Normale Supérieure before
returning to King's to complete his doctorate. He specialised in the history
of the France's Left-wing and acquired a reputation for his willingness to
take on the Left's sacred cows. Jean-Paul Sartre, the Soviet Union and
postcolonial revolutionaries, whose status as good things Judt thought were
too-often unquestioned, all came under his fearless scrutiny.
Judt's teaching career took him from Cambridge to California, where he was
at Berkeley, and then back to Oxford. In 1987 he joined New York University,
where he founded the Remarque Institute for the study of Europe, and where
he remained for the rest of his career.
He wrote half a dozen books, but his output was dominated by Postwar, and by
his frequent and often polemical essays in publications including The New
York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement.
Judt was clear-eyed about the inevitable consequence of his disease, and did
not romanticise his combat against it. "There is no saving grace in being
confined to an iron suit, cold and unforgiving," he noted. "There have been
people who have said to me: 'Tony, you are so lucky. More than anyone you
live the life of the mind. It could have been so much worse'. Hello! Are you
from Planet Zurg? This is one of the worst diseases on Earth. It is like
being in a prison which is shrinking by six inches each day."
In 2009 he received an honorary George Orwell Prize for "intelligence,
insight and conspicuous courage".
Tony Judt was thrice married. He is survived by his wife and their two sons.
***
http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/news/338218,18-million-jobs-2009.html
Brazil created close to 1.8 million jobs in 2009
Posted : Thu, 05 Aug 2010 20:48:47 GMT
By : Earth Times
Brasilia - Brazil generated 1.77 million jobs in 2009, despite the effects
of the international financial crisis that shook much of the world,
Brazilian authorities said Thursday.
"In a crisis year, the country generated 1.77 million formal jobs. Brazil
was the only country in the G20 (Group of 20) that generated that number of
jobs," Brazilian Labour Minister Carlos Lupi declared.
Lupi said that by the end of this year Brazil will have achieved the goal of
creating 15 million jobs during the presidency of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva,
who took office on January 1 2003 and is set to leave on December 31.
Lupi said Lula's government is only 1 million jobs short of that goal.
"We will reach 15 million with relative ease," he said.
Lupi said public administration was the sector that created most jobs in
2009. This was partly due to a change in the law which banned the government
from hiring contractors to carry out tasks.
Civil construction, including the construction of housing for low- income
families and other infrastructure, played a major role in the 11.37-per-cent
private sector employment expansion last year.
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