Life

Tony Judt’s Particularism Problem

By Daniel Treiman February 12, 2008

First, historian Tony Judt griped that the character of the Israeli state was too Jewish, labeling it the “an anachronism.”

Now, he’s complaining that the lens through which we view the Holocaust is too Jewish. He warns that we’re exaggerating the threat posed by contemporary antisemitism, and that in tying “the memory of the Holocaust so firmly to the defense of a single country — Israel — that we are in danger of provincializing its moral significance.”

Read Tony Judt’s latest New York Review of Books polemic against particularism (Jewish particularism in particular) here.

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