Tony Judt was one of the speakers in the debate that followed the publication of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's piece on the Israel lobby in the LRB in 2006. You can (re)watch 'The Israel Lobby: Does it Have Too Much Influence on US Foreign Policy?' here.
It's been hardly a week since Tony Judt died, and Anglo-American intellectual life already feels poorer. He was diagnosed two years ago with amyotropic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease; within a year he had been reduced, as he wrote, to a 'cockroach-like existence', unable to move. Yet he continued to write and stir things up, producing a flurry of probing autobiographical essays (which he was forced to dictate); delivering from his wheelchair a stunning lecture on social democracy at New York University, which left some members of the packed audience in tears; and publishing an expanded version of the lecture as a book, Ill Fares the Land, a robust critique of free market ideology. He was so visible, and so lively on the page – in the New York Review of Books, in the London Review, in the Guardian, in the New York Times – that his death still came as a shock.