"In an age in which the lack of independent public intellectuals has often been sorely lamented, the historian Tony Judt played a rare and valuable role, bringing together history and current events, Europe and America, what was and what is with what should be. Tony Judt's widow and fellow historian Jennifer Homans has assembled an essential collection of the most important and influential pieces written in the last fifteen years of Judt's life. Included are essays on the full range of Judt's concerns, including Europe as an idea and in reality, before 1989 and thereafter; Israel, the Holocaust and the Jews; American hyperpower and the world after 9/11; and issues of social inclusion and social justice in an age of increasing inequality. Judt was at once most at home and in a state of what he called internal exile from his native England, from Europe, and from America, and he finally settled in New York--between them all. He was a historian of the twentieth century acutely aware of the dangers of ethnic exceptionalism, and if he was shaped by anything, it was the Jewish past and his own secularism. His essays on Israel ignited a firestorm debate for their forthright criticisms of Israeli government polices relating to the Palestinians and the occupied territories. Those crucial pieces are published here, including an essay, 'What Is to Be Done?' When the Facts Change also contains Judt's homages to the culture heroes who were some of his greatest inspirations: Amos Elon, Francois Furet, Leszek Kolakowski, and perhaps above all Albert Camus, who never accepted the complacent view that the problem of evil couldn't lie within us as well as outside us. Included here too is a two-part essay on the social and political importance of railway travel to our modern conception of a good society; as well as the urgent text of 'What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy,' the final public speech of his life, delivered from a wheelchair after he had been stricken with a terrible illness; and a tender and wise dialogue with his then-teenage son, Daniel, about the different outlooks and burdens of their two generations. A wise, human, deeply informed view on our most pressing concerns, delivered in good faith."--Provided by publisher.

Introduction: In Good Faith -- Part One 1989: Our Age -- Chapter I Downhill All the Way -- Chapter II Europe: The Grand Illusion -- Chapter III Crimes and Misdemeanors -- Chapter IV Why the Cold War Worked -- Chapter V Freedom and Freedonia -- Part Two Israel, the Holocaust, and the Jews -- Chapter VI The Road to Nowhere -- Chapter VII Israel: The Alternative -- Chapter VIII A Lobby, Not a Conspiracy -- Chaper IX The "Problem of Evil" in Postwar Europe -- Chapter X Fictions on the Ground -- Chapter XI Israel Must Unpick Its Ethnic Myth -- Chapter XII Israel Without Cliches -- Chapter XIII What Is to Be Done? -- Part Three 9/11 and the New World Order -- Chapter XIV On the Plague -- Chapter XV Its Own Worst Enemy -- Chapter XVI The Way We Live Now -- Chapter XVII Anti-Americans Abroad -- Chapter XVIIIThe New World Order -- Chapter XIX Is the UN Doomed? -- Chapter XX What Have We Learned, if Anything? -- Part Four The Way We Live Now -- Chapter XXI The Glory of the Rails -- Chapter XXII Bring Back the Rails! -- Chapter XXIII The Wrecking Ball of Innovation -- Chapter XXIV What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy? -- Chapter XXV Generations in the Balance -- Part Five In the Long Run We Are All Dead -- Chapter XXVI Francois Furet (1927-1997) -- Chapter XXVII Amos Elon (1926-2009) -- Chapter XXVIII Leszek Kolakowski (1927-2009) -- Chronological List of Tony Judt's Published Essays and Criticism -- Index.