The Souls of Yellow Folk

by Wesley Yang

  Judt is a man of many commitments and loyalties, none of them unconditional, and all of them subservient to the preservation of intellectual independence. “I grew up among Marxist autodidacts, but was never a root-and-branch Marxist for that very reason,” Judt explains. “It’s like chicken pox: If you’re inoculated early enough, you don’t get it completely.” In the sixties, he spent his summers working on a kibbutz, but he now says he was “never entirely, wholeheartedly ‘part of the project.’” This sense of dislocation followed him to Cambridge, where he studied and taught for twelve years yet never quite belonged. “At a certain point,” he says, “to remain slightly tangential to wherever I was became a way of ‘being Tony’: by not being anything that everyone else was.”

  In the spring of 2008, the neuromuscular disease that was already stirring in Judt began sending out its first faint warning signals. While typing, he would slip and hit the wrong key, “as if your fingers wouldn’t quite do what you had told them to do.” Judt had undergone treatment for sarcoma in his left arm only six years earlier, and the prospect of another devastating illness was not on his mind. “Next thing you know,” he says, “you’re throwing a baseball and it doesn’t go quite as far as you expected, and you’re still thinking, ‘Oh, shit, I’m getting old.’ And then you go for a walk and your breathing is a bit tight, and you think, ‘I need to work out more.’ And it’s only when the doctor puts all these things together do you realize, ‘Wait a minute, what’s happening here is more serious.’”

  ALS causes the neurons that connect the brain to the spinal cord and the spinal cord to the muscles to degenerate. The brain loses the ability to control movement. The muscles atrophy and die. Judt was diagnosed in September 2008, and the rapid deterioration of the large muscles in the lower part of his body set in soon afterward.

  “He always wanted to continue doing things until it was no longer possible,” says Casey Selwyn, a recent NYU graduate who worked as Judt’s assistant. “Things like turning pages, or typing, or using a mouse.” She watched as, one by one, these faculties faltered. “Until it was absolutely physically no longer possible,” she says, “he would keep doing it.”

  Before his diagnosis, Judt had just begun imagining his next magnum opus, a follow-up to Postwar that would trace the history of twentieth-century social and political thought. These plans fell by the wayside—”Reality is a powerful solvent,” he says—and in November 2008, the Yale historian Timothy Snyder proposed, in its place, that they collaborate on a series of interviews ranging across the breadth of Judt’s career.

  The disappointment was painful—Judt had never worked with a collaborator before—but he was impressed with Snyder’s intellect, and the partnership has been successful. “So long as your collaborator is very talented,” Judt allows, “it’s great fun.”

  Their discussions took place against the backdrop of Judt’s rapid decline. By January 2009, he had lost the use of his arms. By March, his legs began to fail. He was on a respirator by May. “Without actually saying ‘You’ll be dead next month,’” Judt remembers, “the doctors said, ‘This is very fast. It’s unusual.’” Every week for five months, Snyder interviewed Judt for hours on end. “We wanted to get enough material for Tim to finish up on his own in case I was not able to do it with him,” Judt says.

  Soon after they finished their project, in May, a remarkable thing happened: Judt’s health stabilized. The large muscles in most of his body were long gone, but the small muscles that control eating, speaking, and swallowing remained unaffected. They could go at any time and take him with them, or they could last a long time—months, even years. No one knows why his body stopped degenerating, or what happens next.

  The interview sessions with Snyder awakened in Judt the urge to start writing again, and to make some noise. In June, he returned to print for the first time since his diagnosis with an op-ed in the Times warning that if Obama failed to follow through on his call for a settlement freeze in the occupied territories, “the United States would be humiliated in the eyes of its friends, not to speak of its foes.” In July, he wrote a eulogy for the left-wing Israeli journalist and historian Amos Elon in the New York Review of Books contending that Zionism has, “for a growing number of Israelis, been corrupted into an uncompromising ethno-religious real estate pact with a partisan God.” Here was the old Tony Judt, renewing the old polemics. He was not backing down an inch.

  “I would say that I have become more radical as I have gotten older,” he says. “I started out very radical when I was young, like most people, but I became less actively politically engaged in the middle of my life. And now I detect—and I don’t just think it’s because I have ALS—an urgency about the need to be angrier about what needs doing, what needs saving, and what needs changing.”

  In a sense, it is Judt’s continued engagement with the world that has kept him sane. In order to pass the time at night, he has trained himself to enter into prolonged reveries: He organizes various memories into “a Swiss chalet,” placing certain thoughts in certain cupboards, and different examples in different shelves. The mnemonic device has worked well enough that he can wake in the morning and dictate the first draft of brief autobiographical essays, which he would send as emails to friends. They are now published as a series in the New York Review of Books and will eventually be collected into a short book.

  Some of the essays are charming reminiscences on light subjects such as his mother’s dismal British cooking. Recently, they have begun to dip, as if by the gravitational pull of Judt’s temperament, into ever more polemical forays. One recent essay on the dangers of identity politics assailed “para-academic programs” like gender studies and Asian-Pacific-American studies that “encourage members of that minority to study themselves—thereby simultaneously negating the goals of a liberal education and reinforcing the sectarian and ghetto mentalities they purport to undermine.”

  In “Kibbutz,” Judt wrote about his youthful infatuation with Israel and his eventual disillusionment following the Six-Day War, when he learned, to his chagrin, that “most Israelis were not transplanted latter-day agrarian socialists but young, prejudiced urban Jews who differed from their European or American counterparts chiefly in their macho, swaggering self-confidence, and access to armed weapons.”

  Ever since his friend Edward Said died in 2003, Judt has been assigned, not without his own participation, the mantle of the most visible intellectual dissident from the American consensus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The subject of Israel’s fate upsets him greatly. “It’s true I feel something between a kind of sorrow and anger that that country is going in that direction,” he says. “I feel I want to stamp hard on the toes of my fellow Jews and ask them: Have you any idea what kind of a place this is that you blindly defend?” He holds in greatest disdain those American Jews who have come down hard on his stance on Israel while declining to live there themselves. “The people whose necks hurt when I write about the Middle East tend to live in Brooklyn or Boca Raton: the kind of Zionist who pays another man to live in Israel for him. I have nothing but contempt for such people.”

  In August of last year, Judt found himself planning out the agenda for the Remarque Institute. He told the dean of NYU that he intended to give a seminar about social democracy—its problems and its prospects today. In response, the dean suggested he consider making it a public lecture.

  Samuel Johnson famously likened women preachers to dogs walking on their hind legs: “It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.” As the audience gathered at the Skirball Center at NYU one night last October—nearly 1,000 people, including much of New York’s intellectual community—there was considerable unease in the air. It was Judt’s first major public-speaking engagement since his diagnosis. Would this famously articulate speaker, rumored to be afflicted by a dreadful sickness, even meet the Johnsonian standard?

  “We did not know what to expect,” says the Columbia University historian Istva
n Deak, who had collaborated with Judt in the past. “We were worried about whether he would be able to speak at all, and how painful it would be to see this terribly ill man.” Judt himself knew that his mental capacity was undiminished. Still, he would be unable to take a drink or be adjusted if his body grew uncomfortable, and the logistics of having someone join him onstage to turn the pages of his notes were tricky enough that he decided to memorize the entire lecture. “It would have to be a pure adrenaline-driven performance,” he remembers.

  After a fulsome introduction by the dean, Judt was wheeled onto the stage, accompanied by his breathing apparatus and swaddled in a black blanket. He looked ancient and regal and slightly unearthly; his head was clean-shaven, his nostrils distended by the bi-pap valves. Alone onstage, Judt had only two resources to draw on: his words and his will. But they were sufficient to keep the crowd enthralled.

  Judt delivered a masterful performance, speaking for an hour and a half without interruption or hesitation. He began by referring to himself as “a quadriplegic wearing facial Tupperware,” and, after running through a concise history of his illness, declared, to an enormous upsurge of laughter and applause, “What you see before you is an original talking head.” As he turned to the substance of his speech, Judt’s voice grew stronger, spontaneously generating the same seamless structure of well-ordered thought that he had habitually produced before his illness. “Why is it,” he asked the audience, “that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so?”

  Judt left the auditorium satisfied: He had delivered as vigorous a cry for the importance of old-fashioned left-wing ideas as had been heard in New York in some time. (“It was a good lecture by any standard,” he says, “not just the standard of quadriplegics with bi-paps.”) Afterward, in his apartment, Judt elaborated on the themes of his speech. “There is much more to be done,” he said, “in defense of what we used to think of as classical philosophical abstractions—justice, fairness, equality—in countries like the United States which have become increasingly unjust, unfair, unequal, and which are, by their nature, intuitively unworkable over the long run. If we say it’s not fair that Goldman Sachs can rip off the taxpayer, we are told that that is a silly way to talk and that it has nothing to do with fairness. Well, it has everything to do with fairness. You can’t run a society that is profoundly unfair for a long time without people becoming profoundly distrustful, and without social trust, there can be no common consent and no common goods, and no shared purposes. We need to find a way to once again talk about these things, in ways that used to be commonplace, but now have become radical propositions.”

  The speech has had a prolonged afterlife. It was published in the New York Review of Books last December, and Judt worked quickly to expand it into a longer essay, which then aroused the interest of the Penguin Press, who encouraged Judt to expand it further. Judt calls the resulting book, Ill Fares the Land, “an essay on the possibility of living differently.” It was rushed to press, and will be released next week.

  It has been a long time since such a political pamphlet has found an American audience. “Who knows if I can get a readership for a book like that,” he says. “But if I don’t try, I have no right to complain that no one is reading or writing such things.” Judt acknowledges the degree to which his illness has added to the curiosity surrounding his work. “I am a little caught between satisfaction at my newly increased reach and mild irritation at the reason for it,” he says. “I understand the sense in which it seems as though I am in a hurry. But as you’ll see when you read the book, I am quite convinced that the urgency lies in the external world and all I am doing is drawing attention to it.”

  “You’re going to find this weird,” Judt says, “but the thing I do best is teach.” He considers his role as teacher to be more important than his work as a historian or public intellectual, and he has received hundreds of letters from former students over the years expressing their gratitude. Last spring, Judt taught an undergraduate class in his living room, and since then he has continued to teach a graduate seminar and the occasional individual student.

  One Wednesday last month, as a blizzard blankets Washington Square, Judt is helping a second-year graduate student, whom we will call Gabrielle, construct a dissertation reading list on Jewish history.

  Gabrielle is a fresh-faced woman in her twenties who speaks with a French accent. They settle into an easy rapport, readily interrupting each other and finishing each other’s sentences.

  “So, how many books . . .” asks Gabrielle.

  “Should we do in toto? Look, if the choices are between twenty, fifty, a hundred, and five hundred . . .” Judt begins.

  “We go for five hundred?”

  “We go for one hundred, dear,” Judt replies. “There won’t be more than a hundred books worth reading.”

  Their talk ranges across the whole of European Jewish history—Eastern, Central, and Western Europe, the Sephardim, the “port Jews” living in places like Salonika and Alexandria. They arrange to meet weekly to plow through the reading.

  “I have a request,” Gabrielle mentions. “I said yes to a seder in California. I’ll be away for just four days, but I feel guilty.”

  “Guilty toward the work or guilty toward me? That’s why God created holidays. So people like you can go to California.”

  After a while, they turn to more personal subjects. “I cannot resist Cambridge people,” Gabrielle confesses.

  “That’s a bad basis on which to select anything—husbands, boyfriends, whatever,” says Judt with an amused nod of the head.

  “I know!” Gabrielle says ruefully, shrugging.

  “I had the same problem once, with midwestern Puritans, with similar consequences.”

  They laugh. “All right, then, kiddo. You have your marching orders.”

  After Gabrielle leaves, and in the remaining interval before his massage therapist arrives, Judt talks about focusing his unsentimental mind on the subject of his own illness. He gives the impression that rationality is sufficient to master any situation. When a reporter for the Guardian asked him recently if he would ever consider euthanasia, he answered without hesitation. “It’s perfectly reasonable that there will come a point where the balance of judgment of life over death swings the other way.”

  It is the fate of every strong, indomitable personality to confront his or her own decline, and no one, it seems, has done so with harder lucidity than Judt. “Nothing prepares you to die,” he says. “I imagine it helps if you are profoundly religious, if you absolutely, unequivocally believe that there is a purpose to all this, and that you are going to go somewhere nice. I don’t believe either of those things.

  “I thought of this as a stroke of catastrophic bad luck,” Judt explains. “Neither unjust, because after all, there is no justice in luck; nor unfair—‘Why me and not you?’—which would be a ridiculous way to think of it; nor implausible, because it’s so implausible that plausibility is off the scale. Nor does it have meaning: One thing I always felt very strongly empathetic about in my reading of [the Italian chemist and Holocaust diarist] Primo Levi was his absolutely clearheaded sense that none of what had happened to him in the camps had any meaning. You might draw lessons from it in terms of experience, you certainly might draw political lessons. But at the existential level of one man’s life, it had no meaning. This has no meaning. What I do with it is up to me.

  “History can show you that it was one pile of bad stuff after another. It can also show you that there’s been tremendous progress in knowledge, behavior, laws, civilization. It cannot show you that there was a meaning behind it. And if you can’t find a meaning behind history, what would be the meaning of any single life? I was born accidentally. I lived accidentally in London. We nearly migrated to New Zealand. So much of my life has been a product of chance, I can’t see a meaning in it at all. I can just see the good stuff th
at happened and the bad stuff.

  “The meaning of our life,” Judt continues, “is only incorporated in the way other people feel about us. Once I die, my life will acquire meaning in the way they see whatever it is I did, for them, for the world, the people I’ve known. I have no control of that. All I can do is do the best, now.”

  New York Magazine, 2010

  6

  THE TERRORIST SEARCH ENGINE

  EVAN FRANÇOIS KOHLMANN acquired his unloved nickname in 2002, when an FBI agent who was consulting with him on a case dubbed him “the Doogie Howser of Terrorism.” The many detractors he has amassed over the years have never let go of that memorable handle. “Look,” Kohlmann says one afternoon earlier this year, sitting in the two-bedroom apartment where he spends his days and nights analyzing jihadist video, communiqués, and chatter on the Internet. “Someone gave me that nickname when I was twenty-three years old. I’m not twenty-three anymore. How old do I have to be before they stop it?”

  The nickname is one of the reasons observers are inclined to underrate Kohlmann, who is thirty-one. The outlandish but true story he tells—of Islamist revolutionaries spreading out from Afghanistan to wage holy war around the globe—is one you would expect to hear from a toffee-colored man with an Oxbridge accent, or a ruddy man with a buzz cut and no neck. You would not expect to hear it from Kohlmann, who is wearing, when I meet him, a close-fitting spandex biking shirt, black jeans, and Tevas. “It also doesn’t help that I look about ten years old,” he observes.