Tony Judt could be described as a historian and an intellectual – and he took these titles very seriously. He told an interviewer recently that he thought “intellectuals have a primary duty to dissent not from the conventional wisdom of the age (though that too) but, and above all, from the consensus of their own community.” Judt was educated in Europe, but he made his career here in the United States, where he founded and headed NYU’s Remarque Institute. He died recently at the age of 62. 

You can hear Leonard Lopate’s interview with Tony Judt from November of 2005 for his book, Postwar – a history of Europe since 1945.