Tony Judt, who died recent­ly from com­pli­ca­tions of amy­otroph­ic lat­er­al scle­ro­sis (A.L.S.), also known as Lou Gehrig’s Dis­ease, was a polar­iz­ing fig­ure among many in the Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty because of his views on Israel. Fol­low­ing his grad­u­a­tion from King’s Col­lege, Cam­bridge, he vol­un­teered as an aux­il­iary with the Israeli Defense Forces dur­ing the Six-Day War, act­ing as an inter­preter for oth­er vol­un­teers in the new­ly con­quered Golan Heights. There he lost faith in the Zion­ist mis­sion and began to see Israel as a malign occu­py­ing pow­er whose self-def­i­n­i­tion as a Jew­ish state, he lat­er argued, made it ​“an anachro­nism.” In 2003, Judt, one of the country’s out­stand­ing pub­lic intel­lec­tu­als, placed him­self in the midst of a bit­ter debate when he out­lined a one-state solu­tion to the Israel-Pales­tin­ian con­flict in The New York Review of Books, propos­ing that Israel accept a future as a sec­u­lar, bi-nation­al state in which Jews and Arabs enjoyed equal status.

Think­ing the Twen­ti­eth Cen­tu­ry is the end prod­uct of a series of con­ver­sa­tion with his­to­ri­an Tim­o­thy Sny­der, the author of Blood­lands, writ­ten in the final months of Judt’s life, when he had lost all con­trol of his body move­ments. The book reflects Judt’s impres­sions, both as a Jew and as an intel­lec­tu­al, of the ideas and events that shaped twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry thought, as well as his reflec­tions on the con­tro­ver­sy stirred up by his remarks about Israel. Judt’s last book is a thought­ful and impor­tant con­tri­bu­tion to our under­stand­ing of one of history’s blood­i­est centuries.