“The problem with Israel,” Tony Judt wrote in a 2003 article in The New York Review of Books, is that it “arrived too late.” It has imported, he explains, “a characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law.” Judt was linking political Zionism to the time and place of its founding – late-nineteenth- century Europe – when many of what he calls Europe’s “subject peoples” (Poles, Czechs, Serbs, Armenians, and others) aspired to some form of self-determination, the realization of which often took place at the expense of local minorities’ rights. “The very idea of … a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded,” Judt concludes, “is rooted in another time and place.”2