Although he speaks softly in his British accent and responds with courtesy to tart questions, it’s not hard to see how Tony Judt, the distinguished historian of European intellectual life, can arouse strong feelings. “We are a remarkably conformist community,” Judt told an audience in McGuinn Hall on February 6, referring to university intellectuals and especially to those who, like him, came of age during the 1960s. Many academics may style themselves as nonconformist or even “countercultural,” he said, but “it’s very easy to be countercultural when everyone is countercultural around you.”

Judt is the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of European Studies at New York University and author of the critically lauded Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005). In his talk, part of Boston College’s Lowell Humanities lecture series, he expressed the wish that left-leaning academics would take their cues from the French intellectual Julien Benda, whose defense of timeless truths and universal values, entitled The Treason of the Intellectuals, was published in 1927. The stance would seem to place Judt among conservative campus watchdogs, but he is not one of their number. And his critique of the professorial in-crowd is, in any case, not the reason his name has appeared recently in the news columns of the New York Times and Washington Post.

A onetime Zionist youth leader in Israel, Judt is among a distinct handful of Jewish writers and intellectuals now publicly accused by other Jews of abetting anti-Semitism through outspoken criticism of the Jewish state. In a January 31 article in the Times, Judt was quoted as saying that he has been targeted because of his criticism of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians. Two articles by him are frequently cited by his accusers—a Times op-ed in which he took issue with America’s “unconditional support” for Israel, and a piece in the New York Review of Books in which he made the case for a nonsectarian state of Israel.

A few detractors from the Boston area turned out for the Lowell lecture in McGuinn; one of them, a man with an East European accent who declined to identify himself or answer a reporter’s questions, kept a video camera on his lap fixed on Judt throughout the evening. Still, the volleys from the seats in McGuinn 121 were pleasant compared to what regularly turns up in Judt’s e-mail inbox: He spoke in an interview of messages branding him a “self-hating Jew” and of threats to his family’s safety.

Perhaps with a bow toward current interest, Judt asked Lowell lecture organizers to change the title of his long-scheduled talk from “In Defense of Decadent Europe: Reflections on the Decline of the American Way of Life,” as originally billed, to “Disturbing the Peace: Universities and Intellectuals in an Illiberal Age.” Judt’s lecture was, nonetheless, about intellectual culture, not so much about international politics, much less about himself. And yet the political and personal stakes didn’t need to be spelled out when he insisted more than once that intellectuals have solemn duties to speak “uncomfortable truths,” to say “unfashionable things, untimely things.”

As Judt expressed it, the trouble with intellectuals, particularly those sheltered by universities, is not exactly that they don’t have the courage of their convictions. It’s that they don’t often have bedrock convictions. In Judt’s words, university intellectuals suffer from a paralyzing case of “moral cowardice,” shielded by methodologies that support the notion that one idea or interpretation is as good as another. Another name for this, in Judt’s nomenclature, is “academic relativism.”

Universities now have, according to Judt, “identity intellectuals” who ask merely whether a proposition is good for “my cause,” not whether it is inherently true. These intellectuals, he said, have reproduced academically the cafeteria tables infamously dividing students (voluntarily) by race, by developing such delineations as African-American studies, Jewish studies, and women’s studies. (Each is offered as an interdisciplinary minor at Boston College, alongside Irish studies, Middle Eastern and Islamic studies, and the like.) Thus, argued Judt, “We are encouraging people to come to university and study themselves,” reinforcing the “catastrophic American propensity” to know only about us.

On this score, Judt met with a polite objection during the Q&A period, in the person of Jeremy Kaplan ’07, who wore a Hebrew-lettered Red Sox cap and identified himself as a Jew who minors in African and African diaspora studies. Kaplan spoke up for African-American classmates in the African studies program, saying that these students “don’t see themselves reflected in the core education of universities,” and that through such programs they finally “can see history that reflects themselves.”

“So much the better,” Judt replied, if you can’t see yourself in the textbooks; “it means you’re learning something new.” But then Judt’s comments curved back to the 1960s, when he and other European student radicals agitated against conventional histories that failed to reflect the experiences of the working class (the era’s favored identity group). Speaking for the first and only time that evening as an academic authority figure, he told the young man with shoulder-length hair and ethnically distinctive baseball cap that “we” (the universities) need to uphold the canons of classical learning, but “your job” is to get the universities to constantly update their ideas of what’s worth studying.

“We are the children of our circumstances,” he acknowledged in another context, alluding to personal situations that inevitably shade perceptions of truth. Nevertheless, Judt argued, today’s threats and challenges are “palpably obvious,” extending to the growing possibility that a demagogue with “fascistic skills” would be able to win over the American populace. “We live in potentially undemocratic times,” he warned, in response to a question by Rabbi Ruth Langer of the University’s theology department; Langer had suggested that Judt was casting politics in black and white.

The closest questioning came from the neighbor of the man with the video camera. He purported to know what “resonates in [Judt’s] soul.” Continuing in an incongruously agreeable tone, the man said, “Israel is an embarrassment to you.” (“I’m not embarrassed by Israel. I’m angered by Israel,” answered Judt, a child of Holocaust survivors, who grew up in London attending Hebrew schools.) Later, as he strode out the door, the questioner identified himself as Hillel Stavis, and when asked by a reporter if he represented any particular group, he just smiled and said, “the Jews.” Stavis is a local pro-Israel activist who owns the Curious George Shop in Harvard Square, which sells children’s books and items inspired by the stories of Hans and Margret Rey—German Jews who fled Paris in 1940 carrying the original manuscript of their classic tale about the inquisitive monkey.

Not all of the 75 or so people present at the lecture on that frigid night saw Judt’s truths as “palpably obvious,” but many seemed drawn to his intellectual spirit. Judt had been generous with his time—the 45-minute lecture had been followed by an hour of Q&A, after which a dozen or so attendees lingered around the podium continuing the conversation with him well after the time the lights usually go off. A cluster of undergraduates including Kaplan came away testifying to Judt’s civility, no faint praise in a time when apparently even academics must look over their shoulders after speaking the truth as they are given to see it.

William Bole is a freelance writer and editor in the Boston area.

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