The title, as you may know, comes from John Maynard Keynes, and continues: “I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” This can be irritating when used by people who presume the high moral position but have not actually changed their minds. There are one or two big things, however, that the historian Tony Judt changed his mind about, and in this superb collection of essays, which consists mainly of substantial reviews from the New York and London Reviews of Books, we can track at least one of them.
Judt used to be a Marxist Zionist, but then he changed into a social democrat, and one quite prepared to criticise Israel. In 2003 he wrote an essay for the New York Review of Books in which he said a state that founded itself on ethnic identity was an anachronism, and that “unless something changes, Israel in half a decade will be neither Jewish nor democratic”. He called for Israel to become a binational state, and consequently suffered a firestorm of denigration. Judt was himself Jewish, albeit not religiously observant. His widow, Jennifer Homans, tells in her introduction of the time he went to a bar mitzvah in New York and “was indignant and a bit offended, but mostly confused” when he arrived at the synagogue to find he was the only guest wearing a hat. “What kind of Jews were these?” he asked. This may not convince his detractors, but I find it touching nevertheless.
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