Tony Judt and ‘edge people’
by Habitus · 02/26/10
The always-provocative Tony Judt has been wrestling aloud with his own past and self-definition in the NYRBlog. Today, he takes on the problems of identity and affiliation directly:
As an English-born student of European history teaching in the US; as a Jew somewhat uncomfortable with much that passes for “Jewishness” in contemporary America; as a social democrat frequently at odds with my self-described radical colleagues, I suppose I should seek comfort in the familiar insult of “rootless cosmopolitan.” But that seems to me too imprecise, too deliberately universal in its ambitions. Far from being rootless, I am all too well rooted in a variety of contrasting heritages.
He speaks of his affinity for “edge people” and “the place where countries, communities, allegiances, affinities, and roots bump uncomfortably up against one another—where cosmopolitanism is not so much an identity as the normal condition of life.”
In our latest issue, our own Yuri Slezkine sketched out his own biography in somewhat similar terms, in an essay he titled “How I Became Multicultural.”
I became half-Jewish in 1967 when I told my father that Mishka Ryzhevskii from apartment thirteen was a Jew, and my father said, “Let me tell you something.”
I became mostly Jewish around 1968, when I became anti-Soviet. My father, who was already anti-Soviet, did not have the option of becoming Jewish.
