Fluidly written, with a strong narrative drive and an insistent, polemical edge, both books established Mr. Judt as a historian whose ability to see the present in the past gave his work an unusual air of immediacy. Increasingly he inclined toward free-ranging inquiry across disciplines, pursuing a wide range of his interests reflected in the essay collection “Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century” (2008).

“A historian also has to be an anthropologist, also has to be a philosopher, also has to be a moralist, also has to understand the economics of the period he is writing about,” he told the online magazine Historically Speaking in 2006. “Though they are often arbitrary, disciplinary boundaries certainly exist. Nevertheless, the historian has to learn to transcend them in order to write intelligently.”

In 1987, after teaching at Cambridge, the University of California at Berkeley and Oxford, he began teaching at N.Y.U. There, in 1995, he helped found the Remarque Institute with a bequest from Paulette Goddard, the widow of the writer Erich Maria Remarque. Under his directorship, it became an important international center for the study of Europe, past and present. His skepticism about the future of the European Union found expression in a sharply polemical, pamphlet-length book, “A Grand Illusion?: An Essay on Europe” (1996).

His first two marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, the dance critic Jennifer Homans, and their two sons, Daniel and Nicholas.

His views on Israel made Mr. Judt an increasingly polarizing figure. He placed himself in the midst of a bitter debate when, in 2003, he outlined a one-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian problem in The New York Review of Books, proposing that Israel accept a future as a secular, bi-national state in which Jews and Arabs enjoyed equal status.

In 2006, a scheduled talk at the Polish Consulate in Manhattan was abruptly canceled for reasons later hotly disputed, but apparently under pressure, explicit or implicit, from the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee.

Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, told The New York Observer at the time that Mr. Judt, on Israel, “has become precisely the kind of intellectual whom his intellectual heroes would have despised.” Mr. Judt’s name had been removed from the masthead of the magazine, where he had been a contributing editor, after his article on the one-state solution.