His grandmother was from Bessarabia. A Marxist Zionist as a young man, Judt dropped his faith in Zionism after youthful experience in Israel in the 1960s and came to see a lewish state as an anachronism; he moved away from Marxism in the 1970s and 1980s. In later life, he described himself as "a universalist social democrat". He was educated at Cambridge University and the École Normale Supérieure, Paris. From 1972-1978 he was a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge before moving to the University of California at Berkeley and thence to Oxford University, where he taught Politics. In 1987 he came to New York University, where he has served as Chair of the History Department, Dean for Humanities and Director of the Remarque Institute, which he founded in 1995. Professor Judt was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts &Sciences, a Fellow of the British Academy, and a frequent contri- butor to The New York Review of Books, The New York Times and many other jour- nals in Europe, the US and the Middle East. He is the author or editor of twelve books, including Socialism in Provence: A Study in the Origins of the modern French Left; Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals 1944-1956; The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron & the French 20th Century; Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945; Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century; and most recently, Il Fares the Land, and The Memory Chalet (published posthumously).