Huge red Turkish flags hung from balconies where families drank tea; one woman had stretched a flag across the frame from which the glass of her window had been blown out by the bombs.

Gungoren is the kind of neighborhood I might take a foreigner to if I wanted to say: This is Turkey. And it's the kind of neighborhood that would lead anyone to wonder, as one man who'd lived there for 40 years wondered to me: "Why Gungoren?"

Istanbul is such a diverse and geographically enormous city that when news breaks of a terrorist bombing, the scramble to make sense of the act requires everyone to marshal all of their resources to find out exactly where it happened. Phone-calling, Googling, and then arguing over what exactly the neighborhood is.

Turks reflexively know whether any neighborhood sits on the European side or the Asian side; I imagine that's a genetic adaptation in this ancient border-sentinel city.

But then come the disagreements and confusions over borders: "It's out by the airport." "But is it near New Bosnia?" "Close, but not too close." "By the sea, or not by the sea?"

Last month's attack on the U.S. consulate, recently moved to a safer location up the Bosphorus, invited a similar response—you probably know someone who lives near the site, but that could be quite far away from you.

When the news identified the neighborhood of this latest attack as "Gungoren," there are a few things I knew immediately. The bombing wasn't in Sultanahmet, the Old City—the peninsula home of the Aya Sofya, the Blue Mosque, the Golden Horn, and, once upon a time, a thousand sex slaves locked up in a palace with a view. Everyone knows those neighborhoods.

It also can't be anywhere near Beyoglu, the old European city; the deluxe dance clubs of the Bosphorus; or the modern skyscrapers of Maslak. If someone were to bomb these Istanbul commons—as al Qaida did in 2003—where security cameras line the streets but trash cans do not, the news would take a more sensational tone than this one had. It was a whole different kind of bold.

This is partly why Sunday's attack was so chilling.

The terrorists targeted a pedestrian street in a middle-class neighborhood of no unique political or religious character. There are no Byzantine treasures or European corporate headquarters here. Just a civilian cross section of working, living, breathing Istanbul, shopping before bedtime.

Pedestrian boulevards are beloved in a hilly, trafficky city of large families and lonely migrants. In Istanbul, a pleasant, flat place to walk is also a communal sanctuary, especially in summer, when nighttime is a blissful reprieve from days spent cursing the sun.

The bomb exploded out of a garbage bin after 10 p.m. And killed 17 people and injured 150, thanks to a tactic the Iraq war has made cruelly familiar: set off one bomb, draw hundreds of concerned citizens to the scene, then set off the other. One witness caught an image of the second bomb exploding on his cell phone.

So, who wanted to bomb Gungoren? The bombs went off the night before the first day of a massive trial: Turkey's top prosecutor, with high-level support from ultra-secularists, had been trying to shut down the AKP, the Islamic conservative ruling party, and ban the prime minister and president from politics for five years. The highest court here can do that, even though the AKP won 47 percent of the vote in a democratic election. (The verdict came late this Wednesday: The so-called Islamist government will remain in power.)

Still, the timing of the bomb raised suspicions—but only that vague suspiciousness that always attends coincidence. Turkey doesn't have a strong history of radical Islam, and the AKP's supporters aren't radicals anyway.

"Who does everyone think did this?" I asked my young cab driver, who'd lived in Istanbul his whole life, on the way to Gungoren.

"Maybe Al Qaida?"

The international terrorist fraternity had been accused of the brash attack on the U.S. Consulate.

"Could be," he said.

"Not the PKK?"

On July 29, officials fingered the PKK, the militant Kurdish organization that has engaged in terrorist tactics for 30 years. The PKK doesn't have an obvious connection to the AKP trial, but it has been taking a beating from the Turkish military in recent weeks. So far, the PKK, who often take responsibility for their terrorist acts, have denied Gungoren, and offered their condolences to the victims.

"Could be," he replied again.

"This is the problem when something like this happens now," said one Turkish intellectual. "You think: ‘It could be the PKK, it could be DHKP/C, it could be Al Qaida, it could be the "Deep State"—it could be anyone!'"

The Deep State—or Ergenekon—is another story, and a distinctly Turkish one.

The word "Ergenekon" refers to a Central Asian myth about the origin of the Turkish race, and involves caves and wolves and possibly world domination, but what's important to know today is that "Ergenekon" was the name chosen by a murderous gang.

At least, in Turkish, they call it a "gang," but the word carries a different meaning than it does in English. This isn't the Crips and the Bloods. It also isn't the Italian Mafia, because Turkey's mafias run parking lots. Ergenekon, assuming it exists, is the most powerful gang of all, the übergang.

Turks have been living in a state of legitimized paranoia since January, when over 80 members of the Ergenekon gang were arrested for trying to create an atmosphere of instability that would result in a coup against the ruling religious government. The accused make up the ultranationalist upper crust—retired military generals, lawyers, academics, journalists, a university president, the head of PR for a church.

The 2,500-page indictment against Ergenekon, which was released this past weekend, accuses the gang of engaging in demonic terrorist tactics: bomb prominent targets, blame left-wing or minority groups, and stir up chaos until the army is forced to step in, shut down the government and wipe the slate clean. That's why subscribers to this theory might think Ergenekon had a hand in Gungoren: maximum chaos, minimal sense.

That's not as far-fetched as it sounds. Every morning, Turks wake up to terrifying headlines, newspapers filled with incredible details about Ergenekon. Among many other things, Ergenekon supposedly kept a to-do list including plans to kill Prime Minister Tayyip Erodgan and Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk—and anyone else who threatens the sanctity of the secular nation or the tenets of Turkish nationalism.

One of the arrested was the lawyer, Kemal Kerincsiz, who prosecutes writers and other liberal folks for violating the infamous anti-free-speech law Article 301. Some link Ergenekon to the 2007 assassination of Hrant Dink, editor of the newspaper Agos and the face of Istanbul's Armenian community.

Could one group possibly be responsible for all these acts? It strains credulity, and so some suspect that anti-secularist or religious elements have engineered the Ergenekon investigation. That secularist vs. Islamist war in Turkey you've been hearing about goes way beyond head scarves.

But the point is that Turks have been living for years with the idea that some secret force controls the fate of their nation. Here, well before the Ergenekon case, when participating in any sort of political conversation, it was common for Turks—all Turks, not conspiracy theorists—to mention the "Deep State" as a legitimate actor in the country's problems.

For now, some Turks will be satisfied by the authorities' prime suspects: PKK for Gungoren, Al Qaida for the U.S. consulate. But in this climate, the deeper Turkish response to the Gungoren tragedy and others will remain, Who the hell knows anymore?

"Terror is terror," said one Gungoren native, sitting on a bench at the bomb site, chain-smoking. And so living, working Istanbul learns to live with its dangerous enemies, whoever they are.

“Is he a good person?” she finally said.

In June, a Pew poll found that out of 47 countries, Turks had the least favorable view of the United States. This must have been confusing news to Americans who heard it: Isn’t Turkey our ally? What did we do to them? Didn’t we do much more terrible things to other countries? And what would it take to change their minds?

In Turkey, the “America” conversation—the one you have while sitting in cabs, or waiting to get your phone/Internet/electricity/heat/water turned back on—goes more like this:

“Where are you from? Germany?”

“New York.”

Silence.

“I’m from America.”

“America! Very nice.”

“You like America?”

“America is very good. I don’t like Bush, but I like Americans.”

Such generalizations are easiest to communicate in simple Turkish, but there are thousands of specific grievances. One source of Turks’ antipathy toward Bush—only one, but a big one—blew up during this holiday season of elections, assassinations and teen pregnancy. Turks not only opposed the war in Iraq, but grew infuriated that America was also preventing them from chasing down the PKK, the Kurdish guerrilla organization that had been hiding out in northern Iraq and attacking Turkish soldiers. The oppressed Kurds have been America’s treasured allies in Iraq, but a few weeks ago, the U.S. provided Turkey with satellite imagery and the air space to invade.

“It will take a while, but if this doesn’t work, then anti-Americanism is beyond repair,” said Soli Ozel, a professor at Istanbul’s Bilgi University and a columnist and writer for various Turkish and international publications.

Since then, hundreds of Kurdish militants have been killed by the Turkish military (according to the Turkish military), and Turkish newspapers seem more kindly disposed toward America. “Hey, don’t say anything bad about Bush!” said one Kurdish man with heavy sarcasm. “He is our best friend now!”

But President Bush, for now, remains the symbol of all suffering, and this makes the case for Obama, most eloquently made by Andrew Sullivan in The Atlantic, all the more seductive. America will get a new president this year, but sometimes it seems like what America needs is “re-branding,” as Sullivan put it.

“If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology,” Sullivan wrote, among many other things, “Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.”

Isn’t that comforting: Barack Obama not only as a corrective to our own bloody history, but as a challenge to the foundations of anti-Americanism, and perhaps as a salve for international wounds, too. I don’t know exactly what Sullivan meant by “Islamist ideology,” and whatever he meant, I don’t think it applies to most of moderate-Muslim Turkey, but it’s easy to understand what he meant about Obama’s face. Americans believe so deeply in images.

Sullivan’s idea, of a young Pakistani Muslim (the article was written before the assassination of Benazir Bhutto) watching “this new face of America,” convinced me that he was right. My American inner image-response system lurched forward eagerly to receive Sullivan’s message, even as I knew we were disregarding foreigners’ complex knowledge of American domestic politics and foreign policies, and ignoring the extent to which Bush has radicalized people against the U.S. in the past seven years.

Many Turks I spoke to thought Obama would change something. Some hadn’t heard of him. While dribs and drabs about Obama’s experience or Hillary’s support for the Armenian genocide resolution or which candidate Steven Spielberg supports pop up in the Turkish media, the election is, for them, still a long way off.

But Turks react with surprise when they hear about his blackness and vague Muslim background: “It would, it would! Yes, of course, make a difference!” And then come the “buts.”

One Turkish shop owner smiled when I mentioned Obama. “The mixed guy? Oh, right. And he has some Muslim name. Right, Hussein. Well, it wouldn’t change my opinion of America, but maybe it would for other people!” he said brightly. “But you know he wouldn’t really make the policies anyway, so it doesn’t matter.”

“Wait, who makes the policies?” I said.

“The petroleum companies. That’s what they tell us, anyway.” (“Leftist” arguments blithely discredited on American television sound perfectly humdrum in Turkey.) The shopkeeper also thought it was nice that Obama hadn’t supported the war in Iraq, but pointed out that was probably just because Obama was a Democrat and those who started the war had been Republicans.

“Obama wouldn’t change their opinions of the U.S.—that would be childish,” said one Turkish man, a professional in his 30’s. “But they might feel less aggressively than they do now.”

Omer Taspinar, director of the Turkey program at the Brookings Institution and a columnist for two Turkish newspapers, said that Obama’s mere image did have this power.

“Turks know that Obama represents something quite different—they’ve seen Roots,” he said. (Roots was very popular in Turkey.) “They know the history. So an African-American with an African name and a name like Hussein—the fact that people are willing to give him a chance, despite that he attended a madrasa, and had a Muslim father, would represent a huge change in the U.S., compared to the Bush-Clinton dynasties.

“People are really astonished in Turkey—they keep asking me if he really has a chance,” he continued. “He represents something unbelievable.”

So unbelievable that some Turks waved away my question because they didn’t think Americans would ever elect him. Different types of Turks identify if not specifically with American blacks, then with the American underdog—from elite secularists who believe the world wants to take Turkey from them, to religious “black Turks” posed in opposition to those elite secularist “white Turks,” to Kurds, whose parallels to the African-American experience actually make the most sense.

Obama’s mixed-race, immigrant background appeals to Americans of varying backgrounds, but it’s his blackness, after a parade of white American leaders, that might strike a chord with foreigners—in ways that Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, constrained by their affiliation with Bush, never could.

Still, one Turk cautioned me about the emotional reactions I might be hearing. “Turks will tell you that it will change their perceptions of the U.S. because Turks view themselves as victims and they identify with other victims,” he said. “They’ll respond positively because you’re asking a hypothetical question. It doesn’t necessarily mean that deep down their feelings will change.”

In other words, who knows how they’d feel if Obama actually wore the label president of the United States.

“What it would do is give the U.S. a period of respite,” said Ozel.

I began to feel that the election of Barack Obama would suggest far less about the potential for change in U.S. policy than it would say about the maturity of the American electorate. When Obama came up in my Turkish class last summer, the young students, mostly from Germany and Holland and other countries that had absorbed thousands of Turkish immigrants, watched me with European civility as I explained why I thought Obama could win.

“But we still don’t understand why America voted for Bush the second time,” they said gently, that “we” presumably standing in for the whole the world. “We just don’t understand.”

“I never would have thought we could elect a black man,” I said. “But now ...”

A middle-aged man from Israel, studying the language to reconnect with his Turkish roots, snapped, “I think you’re giving your country too much credit,” and having ended the conversation, turned back to his work.

Suzy Hansen is an Istanbul-based writer and fellow at the Institute of Current World Affairs. She can be reached at shansen@observer.com.

On stapled, slick magazine covers across Food Town, behold the randy, dancing boy, smooth-whiskered, pink-cheeked Justin Timberlake, gaping, blinking for his youth and freedom, while a glowering, suddenly dark-haired, Demi Moore’d version of Cameron Diaz, 34 but somehow older, pouts and jangles the keys to the jail cell in her basement.

There Was Something About Cameron in the 90’s, but Mr. Timberlake is the latest boy to wear this decade’s America’s Sweetheart sash. It may be an Age of Hillary thing: Justin’s ex-, Britney, is playing the rough-living, hard-drinking rehab role and he is innocent on the way up; Britney is Norman Maine and Justin is Vicky Lester.

And on Jan. 31, the former ’N Sync star, who nearly went the way of Jordan Knight, turns 26—still so young, newly unattached, universally popular and … oddly respected. He’s the ultimate vessel of escapism and therefore the quintessential escape artist. Happy birthday, Justin—for your 26th birthday, you get a pass.

Americans react to Mr. Timberlake with the same giddy hope they fling on Barack Obama, who, with that walk of his, could do worse than use Mr. Timberlake’s “SexyBack” as his campaign song. The power of “SexyBack,” arguably one of the worst tracks on Mr. Timberlake’s excellent second album, had less to do with the “Sexy” than with the idea that anything good was “Back.”

Mr. Timberlake has been making money in music for over a decade. But this country needs any Comeback Kid it can get.

In the words of one 29-year-old male hip-hop fan: “It’s not easy to go from being Mr. ’N Sync to being a complete pimp.” Skinny white boys everywhere have taken note.

Mr. Timberlake’s two solo albums seemed to prove he’d broken from his lame past—twice, if you count the Mickey Mouse Club. No one cared if it was really producer Timbaland who deserved credit for FutureSex/LoveSounds, because Mr. Timba-lake’s conversion was like a tectonic shift on a continent where Kelly Clarkson’s queen. There’s nothing like reinvention at a time when everything seems stuck.

In Nick Cassavetes’ widely disparaged Alpha Dog, critics not only heralded Mr. Timberlake as a real actor, but, according to The Village Voice, as “the moral center of a movie sorely in need of some conscience.” His character in the film helps kill a kid. What a feat of charisma and white teeth.

Take us with you, was the popcorn-chomping vibe at Alpha Dog on 19th Street in Manhattan every time Mr. Timberlake giggled and said “fuck” on screen, to that special place where everything’s funny and white men can dance and rap with rappers and you can admit you love your mama and no one beats you up and Scarlett Johansson still wants to sleep with you ... where you’re the only American on the planet anyone still likes ….

“He’s so tall,” a woman behind me cooed.

In Mr. Timberlake’s case, authenticity of talent means less to his fans than what appears to be Mr. Timberlake’s authenticity of self: Tearing free from his packaging, supposedly, he unveiled the more desirable idol underneath. Forget up-from-the bootstraps: The beloved celebrity storyline is the one where the marionette cuts his own strings and comes to life. What a fine fantasy that is, too.

That SNL Thing

At the Golden Globes, Mr. Timberlake affectionately made fun of Prince, to whom he owes much of FutureSex/LoveSounds. Everyone laughed. Remember Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction? Remember those were Mr. Timberlake’s paws? Few cared. When Britney Spears cheated on him, or so the story goes, he made a music video about the saga, called it “Cry Me a River,” and this worked.

He did his homework. Mr. Timberlake’s lyrics are simultaneously lust-filled and polite (“Tell me which way you like that / Do you like it like this? / Do you like it like that?”), old-school romantic (“If I wrote you a symphony / Just to say how much you mean to me”) second-wave feminist (“You don’t need no Maybelline / Cuz you a beauty queen”) and so pro-marriage, you need to rewind a few times before you believe your ears:

This ring here represents my heart

But there is just one thing I need from you

Saying ‘I do.’

It’s probably only a matter of time before Us and Star change the storyline, do their best to take Mr. Timberlake down to the sewer with Aniston, Jolie and Spears—there’s a law firm!—because sometimes in tabloid-world, single + man = cad. But when it comes to anointing or torching celebrities, the tabs may no longer be a match for the mass-infiltrating power of YouTube.

The current conventional wisdom about Mr. Timberlake’s popularity suggests that while his solo albums garnered critical raves, that while he made the greatest comeback in boy-band history, that while he’s very cute and wears Jams nicely and surfed and golfed giddily with the elderly Ms. Diaz for almost four seemingly monogamous years, it was actually his Saturday Night Live self-parody video “Dick in a Box” that brought him back to the commercial world of the living.

Every college kid in America, even people who never had seen ’N Sync, loved “Dick in a Box” before they even viewed it. It’s called “Dick in a Box,” and that’s comedy, all right. But it’s also called “Dick in a Box,” and for anyone who ever endured boy-band pop music in the 90’s, it was pay dirt. The link was sent via e-mail, and clicking is more expedient than reading. And it was the ideal American combination—forbidden and really funny. NBC had thrown it off its site, and Saturday Night Live, which followed up the Timberlake coup with a Jake Gyllenhaal performance nearly as funny as “Dick,” was back in the business of making stars out of stars by simply making them seem—as they did with Paul Simon, Christopher Walken and Alec Baldwin—that they understood their prior lives were a joke. Only difference was: Maybe this transformation was happening on thousands of computer screens at work on Monday, rather than on Saturday night, live.

Suddenly, straight men partial to football and/or indie rock had uncomfortably warm feelings for this former boy-band wuss. I was advised to watch “Dick in a Box” by your typical mid-thirtysomething New York music snob whose exposure to mainstream pop music is so paltry I’m pretty sure he still hasn’t heard “Hey Ya.” He spoke enthusiastically of FutureSex/LoveSounds, Mr. Timberlake’s album. He referred to Mr. Timberlake as “J.T.”

“Dick in a Box” boasts a Wikipedia entry that includes “Plot,” “­R­esponse” and “Parodies and Homages,” and claims that “Dick in a Box” is the fourth-most-viewed video on the whole entire Internet. I learned of the most famous parody, “Box in a Box,” produced by a busty University of Pennsylvania sophomore who maintains her own fan site, when a bewildered but amused 60-year-old called to tell me she’d seen it on Keith Olbermann. Waxing rhapsodic about Mr. Timberlake soon followed—she’d never really seen him before all those boxes.

‘J.T.’ Is Not Your Friend

So everyone calls him J.T. Apparently, it’s cool to show affection for a high-voiced former ballad-crooner once he abandons his vanity. The laws of celebrity in the Wedding Crashers era dictate that Vince Vaughn one-ups Brad Pitt on the thinking woman’s imaginary-boyfriend list, and Mr. Timberlake, no fool, chose self-effacement over self-seriousness.

J.T. was always hot but unthreatening. He dressed up in a gingerbread suit and danced to M.C. Hammer on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. He dressed up in a huge soup cup and danced and cracked up on SNL. And, again, he dressed up as his former self in “Dick in a Box” and ripped that guy to shreds. Don’t forget, the guy’s a former Mouseketeer; he understands he’s here to entertain.

Mr. Timberlake’s a jack of all trades, like a vaudevillian who’d talk directly to the audience, anything to make ’em smile. Americans, we know, love a semblance of ordinariness; even our celebrities must jump through hoops to prove that their two feet actually touch the ground. A banner showing on SNL brings a celebrity down to a level of accessibility that fans can handle; it means Mr. Timberlake’s hanging with the funny guys, that he knows that he’s surfing the waves of culture, and that moving up and down the banister in jump-cut sequence and crooning romantically about your member is just the thing to save a career.

But none of this explains why critics thought Mr. Timberlake, in his big-screen debut, outshone a raft of experienced actors in Alpha Dog. With his lanky, long-necked vulnerability, those limbs swinging willy-nilly, his odd pallor and dark blue eyes hinting at late nights, his wide smile quick and pristine, Mr. Timberlake made a convincing stunted adolescent. But the other actors were clearly the pros.

Critics not only disliked Alpha Dog, they were repulsed by the subject matter. No one enjoys watching rich white kids behave like monsters, and they especially don’t like watching them behave like embarrassingly absurd monsters. There’s no dignity to it.

“The implication is that too much video culture and too little parental supervision make Johnny a danger—and that it sure is fun to play at being Johnnies in movies,” wrote Entertainment Weekly, recycling an argument beloved of a certain generation.

A far more popular recent film, Borat, highlighted frat boys—not even scary, handsome frat boys with tickets to Goldman Sachs, but silly, beefy, unattractive frat boys—beating their chests and heads in an R.V. That scene was unscripted—i.e., real—but this majority group is easily disregarded as some harmless drunken minority. Or Southern. Under the rug with all of them! They vote for the other guys.

J.T.’s acting turn was a far happier revelation. A singer previously thought to be all smoke and mirrors was only just beginning to prove his depth! His image survives on the premise that he’s a guy of real and endless possibilities, and apparently audiences are all too eager to affirm that dream.

“Timberlake is the latest resident and/or weekend visitor to Hip-Hop Nation to prove himself superb in the movies,” cried The Buffalo News, lumping him in with Ice-T and Ice Cube rather than, interestingly, Elvis.

But in the movie theater, no one was reacting to Frankie, the happy thug Mr. Timberlake plays. They were twittering and shivering for J.T., their all-American boy, in a good way. Men and women laughed at his every move, as if eager to prove to celluloid J.T. that they were with him, that they got his joke. They were in on it, too. They were with him, they were him. That’s a good sign for any star, and it’s about enough to get you in a big movie or elected to the Presidency. It’s what American celebrity consumerism is all about.

Happy birthday, J.T.! At least you know what you’ll be getting when you open your box—the best present any boy could ever get. May you, and we, enjoy it for years to come!'

“Among our circle of friends, she was known as the ‘higher life form,’” said Richard Goldstein, the former editor of The Village Voice.

But to many, she will chiefly be remembered as a pioneering rock critic—one of the first women to crack a genre that Mr. Goldstein called “more macho than the sports pages.”

“Ellen Willis is a bit of a forgotten pioneer, because unlike her close male peers, like Greil Marcus and Robert Christgau, she didn’t continue doing music criticism,” said Ann Powers, the music critic for the Los Angeles Times. Ms. Powers also said, “I know that Joe Levy, the music editor of Rolling Stone, went to the library, went through The New Yorker, Xeroxed her pieces and distributed them to his friends. He really felt her legacy has been forgotten and wanted to direct people to it.”

She wrote prolifically—for Rolling Stone, The Voice, The Nation—and published a number of books, including Beginning to See the Light, No More Nice Girls and Don’t Think, Smile! The subjects she wrote about ranged from women and shopping to Lou Reed, to the Middle East, to The Sopranos.

At The New Yorker, Willis broke another barrier to become the first pop-music critic at the magazine, under William Shawn. She began in 1968, at the age of 26.

New Yorker critic Sasha Frere-Jones now stands in her shoes. “Ellen Willis’ work is sort of a major unreleased album in rock criticism,” he said. “This is not a minor body of work. There may have been a mistaken impression of The New Yorker as being square—that’s completely untrue. They got it right when they had Ellen.”

“Ellen didn’t have any signature of being a woman writer, but certainly her way of looking at the music was different in that she had a tremendous respect for pleasure and desire,” Mr. Goldstein said. “Then she added to this a kind of rigor which didn’t necessarily come from a vulnerability to the rock mystique that a number of male critics had. Her opinions weren’t formed by analysis covering up an identification with the musicians. I don’t mean to say her gender was the reason why, because her mind was more rigorous that almost anyone’s I knew.”

Her friend and former lover, Robert Christgau, said: “I’ve never met anyone in my life who generated as many ideas in a day as Ellen.”

Mr. Christgau had known Willis since they attended the same junior high school in Corona, Queens. Willis was from Bayside, the daughter of a police lieutenant. She graduated from Barnard College in 1962, and soon after began writing about music. “One idea which has been attributed to me, I know originated with Ellen,” said Mr. Christgau. It’s “the idea that the artist’s persona is their fundamental creation.”

Willis’ husband Stanley Aronowitz, the sociologist and 2002 Green Party candidate for Governor, said by phone from their home in Queens that his wife perceived pop music as more than just entertainment. “Music was a form of cultural criticism and commentary,” he said. “In the case of Janis Joplin, she said, ‘Look, this is a boy’s genre, and here’s this woman who comes in and flaunts her subjectivity and makes her own personality. She’s not simply playing with the band, Connie Francis style …. This is a feminist act.’”

Willis founded Redstockings, a radical feminist group that advocated abortion rights, with Shulamith Firestone in 1969, and by the mid-70’s she’d turned her attention more toward feminism and politics than music. Mr. Goldstein pointed out that the evolution was a natural one: “Ellen was a huge believer in ecstasy as a liberalizing force,” he said. “In the 60’s, music was an ecstatic art; in the 70’s, it became an industrial art. The politics of the 70’s were about other forms of ecstasy. Second-wave feminism begins with the sexual revolution and the liberation of female sexuality. It’s grounded in desire.”

Barbara O’Dair, now the executive editor of More magazine, was a young junior editor at The Village Voice in the late 80’s when she met Willis, then a senior editor at the paper. “I couldn’t reconcile loving the Rolling Stones or the Sex Pistols without getting her perspective,” Ms. O’Dair said. “She had such passion for pleasure … I loved that she was pro-sex and not anti-porn. Porn, in her view, stood for freedom of expression and freedom for women … She was the godmother of the pro-sex movement.”

But she wasn’t without a critical eye when it came to porn. In 1973, writing about Deep Throat for The New York Review of Books, she wrote: “Movies like Throat don’t turn me on, which is, after all, what they are supposed to do. It baffles and angers me that men can get off on all those bodies methodically humping away, their faces sweatless and passionless, their consummation so automatic they never get a chance to experience desire.”

Willis’ daughter, Nona Willis-Aronowitz, wrote of her mother on The Nation’s Web site on Nov. 10: “She taught me what a feminist was—a woman who understood the concepts of joy, truth and curiosity, without forgetting that her personal life was hers to shape …. Because if there was ever a person with a sense of self, Mom was it.”

Willis, who resisted marriage for a long time, had lived with Mr. Aronowitz since 1981, and had Nona in 1984. The couple married in 1998, “in a plain civil ceremony, because of health insurance,” Mr. Aronowitz said. “Nona didn’t come to the wedding because she’d rather go to school.”

“She called her husband and daughter ‘the nukes,’ as in nuclear family,” said Mr. Goldstein. “It was a terrific marriage, an inspiration of a marriage.”

The couple lived in Washington Square until they moved to Queens this year, and they owned a house in the Catskills since the early 90’s, where Willis loved to spend the summers swimming and walking. “She was a reader,” said Mr. Aronowitz. (Mr. Goldstein said their home “looked like the Strand bookstore.”) “First, she would read novels—popular novels, mysteries and thrillers, but also any contemporary novel that had characteristics of 19th-century huge family novels. Secondly, and I used to kid her about this, she read every book of pop psychology that ever came out for a while—how-tos. And she loved reading Abby and Ann. At one point, she thought she might become an advice columnist to the lovelorn.”

Willis founded the cultural reporting and criticism program at New York University’s Journalism School in 1995; at her memorial service at Riverside Chapel, many of the 500 mourners in attendance were students, bidding her a hero’s farewell.

As for Willis’ own heroes, Mr. Aronowitz said, she had “two and a half.” “The first two were Freud and Wilhelm Reich. She was deeply interested in psychoanalysis. The half was Marx—Marx himself, and his basic material insights.”

Throughout her life, Willis combined her obsessions in essays on pop culture. “She was deeply respectful of pop culture—something proper intellectuals disdain,” Mr. Goldstein said.

In a Nation essay, “Dreaming of War,” which appeared on Oct. 15, 2001, a month after Sept. 11, she railed against those who suggested that something good might come of the attacks and pinpointed the role of popular culture in American life.

“The boundaries of political debate had steadily narrowed, not because we were fat and happy but because it was taboo to challenge in any serious way the myth that we were fat and happy,” she wrote. “The notion that there might be any need for, or possibility of, profound changes in the institutions that shape American life—work, family, technology, the primacy of the car and the single-family house—is foreign to the mainstream media that define our common sense …. Popular culture carries the burden of our emotions about race, feminism, sexual morality, youth culture, wealth, competition, exclusion, a physical and social environment that feels out of control.”

Willis concluded the piece, now five years old: “Let’s not compound our losses with deluded bombast about what we have to gain.”

“Among our circle of friends, she was known as the ‘higher life form,’” said Richard Goldstein, the former editor of The Village Voice.

But to many, she will chiefly be remembered as a pioneering rock critic—one of the first women to crack a genre that Mr. Goldstein called “more macho than the sports pages.”

“Ellen Willis is a bit of a forgotten pioneer, because unlike her close male peers, like Greil Marcus and Robert Christgau, she didn’t continue doing music criticism,” said Ann Powers, the music critic for the Los Angeles Times. Ms. Powers also said, “I know that Joe Levy, the music editor of Rolling Stone, went to the library, went through The New Yorker, Xeroxed her pieces and distributed them to his friends. He really felt her legacy has been forgotten and wanted to direct people to it.”

She wrote prolifically—for Rolling Stone, The Voice, The Nation—and published a number of books, including Beginning to See the Light, No More Nice Girls and Don’t Think, Smile! The subjects she wrote about ranged from women and shopping to Lou Reed, to the Middle East, to The Sopranos.

At The New Yorker, Willis broke another barrier to become the first pop-music critic at the magazine, under William Shawn. She began in 1968, at the age of 26.

New Yorker critic Sasha Frere-Jones now stands in her shoes. “Ellen Willis’ work is sort of a major unreleased album in rock criticism,” he said. “This is not a minor body of work. There may have been a mistaken impression of The New Yorker as being square—that’s completely untrue. They got it right when they had Ellen.”

“Ellen didn’t have any signature of being a woman writer, but certainly her way of looking at the music was different in that she had a tremendous respect for pleasure and desire,” Mr. Goldstein said. “Then she added to this a kind of rigor which didn’t necessarily come from a vulnerability to the rock mystique that a number of male critics had. Her opinions weren’t formed by analysis covering up an identification with the musicians. I don’t mean to say her gender was the reason why, because her mind was more rigorous that almost anyone’s I knew.”

Her friend and former lover, Robert Christgau, said: “I’ve never met anyone in my life who generated as many ideas in a day as Ellen.”

Mr. Christgau had known Willis since they attended the same junior high school in Corona, Queens. Willis was from Bayside, the daughter of a police lieutenant. She graduated from Barnard College in 1962, and soon after began writing about music. “One idea which has been attributed to me, I know originated with Ellen,” said Mr. Christgau. It’s “the idea that the artist’s persona is their fundamental creation.”

Willis’ husband Stanley Aronowitz, the sociologist and 2002 Green Party candidate for Governor, said by phone from their home in Queens that his wife perceived pop music as more than just entertainment. “Music was a form of cultural criticism and commentary,” he said. “In the case of Janis Joplin, she said, ‘Look, this is a boy’s genre, and here’s this woman who comes in and flaunts her subjectivity and makes her own personality. She’s not simply playing with the band, Connie Francis style …. This is a feminist act.’”

Willis founded Redstockings, a radical feminist group that advocated abortion rights, with Shulamith Firestone in 1969, and by the mid-70’s she’d turned her attention more toward feminism and politics than music. Mr. Goldstein pointed out that the evolution was a natural one: “Ellen was a huge believer in ecstasy as a liberalizing force,” he said. “In the 60’s, music was an ecstatic art; in the 70’s, it became an industrial art. The politics of the 70’s were about other forms of ecstasy. Second-wave feminism begins with the sexual revolution and the liberation of female sexuality. It’s grounded in desire.”

Barbara O’Dair, now the executive editor of More magazine, was a young junior editor at The Village Voice in the late 80’s when she met Willis, then a senior editor at the paper. “I couldn’t reconcile loving the Rolling Stones or the Sex Pistols without getting her perspective,” Ms. O’Dair said. “She had such passion for pleasure … I loved that she was pro-sex and not anti-porn. Porn, in her view, stood for freedom of expression and freedom for women … She was the godmother of the pro-sex movement.”

But she wasn’t without a critical eye when it came to porn. In 1973, writing about Deep Throat for The New York Review of Books, she wrote: “Movies like Throat don’t turn me on, which is, after all, what they are supposed to do. It baffles and angers me that men can get off on all those bodies methodically humping away, their faces sweatless and passionless, their consummation so automatic they never get a chance to experience desire.”

Willis’ daughter, Nona Willis-Aronowitz, wrote of her mother on The Nation’s Web site on Nov. 10: “She taught me what a feminist was—a woman who understood the concepts of joy, truth and curiosity, without forgetting that her personal life was hers to shape …. Because if there was ever a person with a sense of self, Mom was it.”

Willis, who resisted marriage for a long time, had lived with Mr. Aronowitz since 1981, and had Nona in 1984. The couple married in 1998, “in a plain civil ceremony, because of health insurance,” Mr. Aronowitz said. “Nona didn’t come to the wedding because she’d rather go to school.”

“She called her husband and daughter ‘the nukes,’ as in nuclear family,” said Mr. Goldstein. “It was a terrific marriage, an inspiration of a marriage.”

The couple lived in Washington Square until they moved to Queens this year, and they owned a house in the Catskills since the early 90’s, where Willis loved to spend the summers swimming and walking. “She was a reader,” said Mr. Aronowitz. (Mr. Goldstein said their home “looked like the Strand bookstore.”) “First, she would read novels—popular novels, mysteries and thrillers, but also any contemporary novel that had characteristics of 19th-century huge family novels. Secondly, and I used to kid her about this, she read every book of pop psychology that ever came out for a while—how-tos. And she loved reading Abby and Ann. At one point, she thought she might become an advice columnist to the lovelorn.”

Willis founded the cultural reporting and criticism program at New York University’s Journalism School in 1995; at her memorial service at Riverside Chapel, many of the 500 mourners in attendance were students, bidding her a hero’s farewell.

As for Willis’ own heroes, Mr. Aronowitz said, she had “two and a half.” “The first two were Freud and Wilhelm Reich. She was deeply interested in psychoanalysis. The half was Marx—Marx himself, and his basic material insights.”

Throughout her life, Willis combined her obsessions in essays on pop culture. “She was deeply respectful of pop culture—something proper intellectuals disdain,” Mr. Goldstein said.

In a Nation essay, “Dreaming of War,” which appeared on Oct. 15, 2001, a month after Sept. 11, she railed against those who suggested that something good might come of the attacks and pinpointed the role of popular culture in American life.

“The boundaries of political debate had steadily narrowed, not because we were fat and happy but because it was taboo to challenge in any serious way the myth that we were fat and happy,” she wrote. “The notion that there might be any need for, or possibility of, profound changes in the institutions that shape American life—work, family, technology, the primacy of the car and the single-family house—is foreign to the mainstream media that define our common sense …. Popular culture carries the burden of our emotions about race, feminism, sexual morality, youth culture, wealth, competition, exclusion, a physical and social environment that feels out of control.”

Willis concluded the piece, now five years old: “Let’s not compound our losses with deluded bombast about what we have to gain.”

The 58-year-old Mr. Judt, a British-Jewish professor of European history at New York University and director of the Remarque Institute, had just come off a busy week perhaps particular to accented intellectuals who speak controversially about Israel: Just days before, Mr. Judt found two of his New York speaking engagements, one at the Polish Consulate, the other at Manhattan College, suddenly canceled.

The ensuing chaos—a combination of conflicting news reports, pitched rhetoric and the specter of censorship raised in heated semi-public e-mail discussions—forced the spotlight back on Mr. Judt, an already divisive figure in the Jewish community, as well as in New York’s chatty intellectual hothouse.

“There are people out there like Chomsky and Finkelstein and others who take positions on Israel that are far more extreme than those of Judt, and who are thus much more easily pigeonholed and marginalized,” said Michael Massing, a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. “Because Judt has such a prominent position in the New York intellectual community and is so articulate, he’s seen as a much greater threat.”

Mr. Judt’s canceled appearances came on the heels of his Sept. 21 London Review of Books essay “Bush’s Useful Idiots,” which lambastes American liberal intellectuals for helping the President along the road to Iraq. But Mr. Judt was most notorious for his 2003 NYRB essay “Israel: The Alternative,” in which he called for a one-state solution as an end to the Israeli-Palestinian morass. (For many, that means the very end of Israel itself.) And on Sept. 28, he’d appeared at Cooper Union to argue in a debate—inspired by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s bomb-throwing essay in the London Review of Books—that an American Israel Lobby does, indeed, squelch honest discussion in the U.S.

As with all things academic (and all things Israel), l’affaire Judt has turned out to be a nuanced one.

“I’m not some kind of victim here. That’s garbage,” said Mr. Judt on Oct. 7. “I don’t even regard this as censorship. But I regard it as serious exercise of censorship by someone on someone else, with me in the middle.”

WHAT HAPPENED ON POLISH SOIL LAST WEEK was much ado about something—but what? By Tuesday, Oct. 10, it was still hard to tell whether or not—and if so, how closely— Jewish groups were tailing Mr. Judt.

On Tuesday, Oct. 3, Mr. Judt was scheduled to speak about the Israel Lobby to Network 20/20, a leadership organization for mid-career professionals, in space at the Polish Consulate. Network 20/20’s president, Patricia Huntington, called Mr. Judt around 5 p.m. and canceled. Shortly thereafter, Mr. Judt wrote in an e-mail to almost 100 “friends”—a list that includes David Remnick, Charlie Rose, Rashid Khalidi, Fareed Zakaria and Mr. Judt’s agents, Andrew Wylie and Sarah Chalfant— that, according to Ms. Huntington, “serial phone-calls from ADL president Abe Foxman warned [the Polish Consulate] off hosting anything involving Tony Judt.”

The next day, Oct. 4, The New York Sun’s Ira Stoll reported that the Polish Consulate took responsibility for the decision to cancel the event. Ms. Huntington again said it was the A.D.L. that had scared the Poles off from Mr. Judt’s speech. David Harris, the executive director of the American Jewish Committee, was on record “bravo”-ing the Polish Consulate for doing the “right thing.” Mr. Stoll called Mr. Judt “hostile to the Jewish state” and noted the “quickening entente between free Poland and Israel.”

It appeared to Mr. Judt, who received the reporter’s call immediately after Ms. Huntingdon canceled, that the story in The Sun was a direct feed from the A.D.L.

Mr. Foxman admitted to contacting the consulate but denied pressuring them. “We received a couple calls and e-mails informing us that people heard that [Mr. Judt’s] speaking at the Polish Consulate and inquiring whether it was true,” Mr. Foxman told The Observer on Oct. 9, calling from a “quiet corner” in Rome. “One of our staff people called; they said they were just making the facilities available. We said, ‘O.K., thank you.’ As far as we were concerned, the issue was closed.” Mr. Foxman said he was pleasantly surprised the event had been abandoned.

He also denied being the source of the story in The New York Sun.

David Harris of the A.J.C did personally call the Polish Consulate. But he too was “shocked,” but pleased at the speedy results.

“I told the Consul General that I had just learned about a meeting that evening—and I wanted to be sure that he was aware of it,” said Mr. Harris. “He already was [aware] when I called. I wanted to alert him because we’ve worked with Poland for a long time, and Poland has worked since 1989 to build a strong relationship with Israel after decades of poor relations under the Communist regime—and because I knew that Tony Judt was not a universally popular figure in the Jewish community. We had a nice conversation.” He denied asking the Polish Consulate to take any action.

Both Mr. Foxman and Mr. Harris said they’d been keeping tabs on Mr. Judt since his NYRB essay.

In the meantime, members of Mr. Judt’s e-mail listserve agreed that, whatever his views, he deserved the right to speak. Mark Lilla of the University of Chicago and Richard Sennett of the London School of Economics e-circulated a petition to be sent to Mr. Foxman and the New York Review that read: “We who have signed this letter are dismayed that the ADL did not choose to play a more constructive role in promoting liberty.” The historian Timothy Garton Ash mentioned his friend Mr. Judt in an editorial on free speech published in the Los Angeles Times. Versions of the story were picked up in France, England and Poland, as well as in The Jewish Week and The Washington Post.

“Tony Judt is a scholar and writer of real standing, and it is wrong and foolish for anyone to try to muzzle or smear him,” David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, told The Observer by e-mail on Oct. 9. “We can use all the intelligent dissent we can get. If Abe Foxman really made that kind of effort—and I’ve done no independent reporting on it—then Abe Foxman was wrong.”

Then, late on Oct. 10, the Polish Consulate sent out a press release: “The unprecedented wave of press coverage of this incident is the result of misinformation released by Ms. Patricia Huntington …. Under no circumstance was the Consulate forced to do anything.” The release said that after the consulate canceled the event, Ms. Huntington phoned. “Since the [Consul-General] was engaged in a conversation with ADL at that very moment, he was unable to join, and Network 20/20 was so advised. This was the only bit of information on the contact between the Consulate and any Jewish organization or any individual that was passed on to Network 20/20.”

It concluded by saying that on Oct. 4, “Ms. Huntington sent an apology letter to the Consul General.”

Ms. Huntington did not return repeated calls from The Observer for comment.

“I don’t fully understand Ms. Huntington’s position,” said Mr. Judt, reached by phone on Oct 10.

“There’s a curious contradiction between the statement [the Polish Consulate] just put out and the direct quote from the Consul General himself in The Washington Post,” he went on. “What he says is, ‘The phone calls were very elegant but may be interpreted as exercising a delicate pressure. That’s obvious—we are adults and our IQ’s are high enough to understand that.'”

Mr. Judt added, “All I ever said was that pressure was exercised.”

ANOTHER CONFRONTATION THAT HAS RECEIVED less attention was the canceled speaking appearance at Manhattan College.

On Oct. 5, The Sun reported that Mr. Judt had withdrawn from attending an Oct. 17 event at the Holocaust Resource Center of Manhattan College. It turned out that Rabbi Avi Weiss of the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, along with a number of local rabbis who have protested Mr. Judt in the past, had “threatened to picket the college” if Mr. Judt, “a State of Israel denier,” spoke during a forum on the Holocaust. (Mr. Judt is the author of 2005’s critically acclaimed Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945; the epilogue of the book details the moral failure of Europeans to recognize and memorialize the continent’s murdered Jews in the years following the Holocaust.)

Rabbi Weiss had suggested to Frederick Schweitzer, director of the center, that they invite another speaker to balance Mr. Judt’s views.

“But that’s not our way. We’ve never done that,” said Mr. Schweitzer, who invoked the First Amendment to Rabbi Weiss. “We implied, though, that had this situation built up at the time we negotiated Tony’s visit, our sense would have been to wait a couple years. Tony got upset about our not acknowledging his authority to speak on Israel.”

Mr. Schweitzer also said he was disappointed that his students wouldn’t hear get to hear Mr. Judt speak: “I insist that he is hypercritical of Israeli government policies,” he said, “but not seeking the destruction of the state of Israel.”

“I felt very embarrassed,” Mr. Judt said afterwards. He suggested that “State of Israel denier” was a “new term of art.”

“Here was a Catholic college with a laudable interest and emphasis on trying to educate its students about the genocide of the European Jews, squeezed in what is being presented as a dispute between pro-Israeli Jews and critical-of-Israeli Jews. That seemed obscene, and so I withdrew.”

THIS WEEK, MANY E-MAIL INBOXES of intellectuals, policy wonks and media types have blink-blinked with commentary about the divisive Mr. Judt, whose own e-mail listserve, he said, erupted with an “avalanche” of sympathy as well as some minor attacks. Brown University professor of history Omer Bartov asserted that Mr. Judt was in the wrong for joining “the chorus of those who negate Israel’s right to exist,” a charge that Mr. Judt vehemently denied. “Hard to resist the thought that the tactic you are now employing makes you sound an awful lot like Abe Foxman,” Mr. Judt replied.

Then came Peter Beinart of the New Republic. On Friday, Oct. 6, he wrote in a three-point e-mail that the abuse of free speech, if it actually happened, was “dead wrong.” But: “It is also unclear that readers would know that you are on record as opposing the continued existence of Israel as a Jewish state—a position I find profoundly misguided and dangerous.”

At this point, Mr. Judt seemed to lose his cool. “Foxman, Harris and some others in the leadership of ‘official’ American Jewry are illiberal lying bigots—Fascists, as we used to say—and as a good liberal you’d not have one minute’s difficulty seeing that if they weren’t also Jewish. And I can get away with telling you that because I’m Jewish.”

“Foxman isn’t the problem—pollution like him swirls in the gutters of every democracy,” Mr. Judt also wrote. “Those who refuse to stand up to him are the problem. Ciao, Tony.”

Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic and longtime writer about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, called the week’s virtual back-and-forth a sort of “highbrow spam.” “It reached the point where I had to start erasing e-mails because the program wouldn’t let me send anymore,” he said.

Mr. Wieseltier has known Mr. Judt for eight or nine years and has sparred with his friend in print before; he attacked Mr. Judt’s “Israel: The Alternative.” (The two remained on friendly terms, though Mr. Judt was subsequently removed from the masthead of The New Republic as a contributing editor.)

Mr. Judt named Mr. Wieseltier as one of the guilty liberals in the essay “Bush’s Useful Idiots.”

“I don’t like being called a useful idiot,” said Mr. Wieseltier. “Tony seems to think that people with whom he disagrees are the pawns of interests and powers, while he sits at his desk writing purely in service of truth. The fact is that in political debate, everyone serves some interest, whether they intend to or not.

“Tony is suffering from an excessively heroic conception of himself,” he continued. “He’s under some illusion that nobody knows what he thinks or has never before heard anything like what he thinks. I admired Tony’s work because he was a staunch and learned defender of liberalism against precisely the kind of radicalism he now champions when it comes to the Middle East. He was the great student of Aron and Camus and the intellectually responsible people who understood how complicated the morality of power is, and refused to take any simple ideological line. But when it comes to Israel, he has become precisely the kind of intellectual whom his intellectual heroes would have despised.”

Mr. Wieseltier plans to write about Mr. Judt for The New Republic this Wednesday evening. “We’ll know by the end of the week,” said Mr. Wieseltier about whether the two would remain friends. But he planned to sign the Lilla-Sennett petition, because Mr. Judt “has every right to express his contemptible views.”

But why is Mr. Judt so popular among many liberals?

“We’re in the middle of another Peter, Paul and Mary concert,” said Mr. Wieseltier of Mr. Judt’s fans at the Cooper Union debate. “He’s an old-fashioned radical intellectual of a kind that liberals haven’t seen in a long time, of a kind that Clinton and Clintonism made impossible. And the left is pleased to be unburdened by the complications Clinton introduced to liberalism.”

As for Mr. Judt: “I regard Leon Wieseltier as a wonderful thing,” he said. “The front of The New Republic is a catastrophe; it’s run by smart young men out of Yale who know nothing about the world and think they know everything and are completely blocked on the Israel question. The back of the magazine is culturally fantastic, one of the best things going, and I think Leon does a great job there. But he simply can’t talk to me about my views on the Middle East.

“You’d have to ask Leon if he still considers me a friend—but we’ve not lost touch,” said Mr. Judt.

MR. JUDT GREW UP IN LONDON'S EAST END and has lived in the States since 1987 with dual citizenship. (He likes to marvel about the difference between the two continents.) He is married to Jennifer Homans, an American “from 20 generations of Dutch Episcopalians”—who, incidentally, works for Mr. Wieseltier as a dance critic at The New Republic. They have two children, ages 12 and 9.

Mr. Judt, a member of the Zionist Youth Movement in England, lived in Israel on and off throughout the 60’s as a young man. He volunteered with the Israeli army (not as a soldier) after the 1967 war. Mr. Judt doesn’t always include this bio with his writings.

“I deeply resent—not on my own behalf, but as a general point of principle about liberal society—that one should have to stick a legitimizing identity tag on one before one says something controversial,” he said.

In 1967, his opinion of Israel began to change. “I can probably identify the moment,” he said. “I was sitting around listening to young Israeli officers talking, and there was an inevitable macho: ‘Now we’re in charge, we’re the Jews with guns, and we’ve got all this land—and boy, we’re never going to give it back, and if they don’t like it, they can just leave.’ I was a 19-year-old left-winger, and I’d never heard this kind of language on a sustained basis.” Mr. Judt said he hasn’t been to Israel in three decades but plans to visit in January.

“I got involved in writing about Israel really only in the year 2002, when I began to realize that there was a sort of suffocating silence not only about what was happening in the occupied territories and in Israel and Israeli political culture,” he said, “but also that the suffocating silence was largely focused on the illegitimacy of anyone speaking lest they be accused of anti-Semitism.”

He said he lost one friend over his writings, which had made him “sad.”

“I’m not backtracking on anything I said,” Mr. Judt continued, “but I never said, ‘I advocate A, B or C.’ Who am I to advocate? All I said was: Look, Israel is structured as, in the 19th-century way, rather like Greece or Poland in their early national years. Everything is ethnically defined. So I said: That’s an anachronism, a dysfunctional anachronism in the Middle East—and in any case, it ain’t gonna last, because there’s going to be an Arab majority if we insist on occupying all of these Arab lands, and then how can it be a Jewish state? Because then it will be an apartheid state.”

He called the hot-button word “anachronism” an “analytical term.”

What, then, was the point? Was it an intellectual exercise or a plan for policy? Mr. Judt tried to explain his motivation. “I don’t always know,” he said. “Like anyone else, I’m not always in charge of my trajectory. But I do have the following thoughts: I’m an historian. But an historian is also a citizen; you don’t, as it were, switch off your civic responsibilities and put on the hat called historian—sometimes you have a civic view.”

Mr. Judt said he wasn’t opposed to a two-state solution. “If I thought that an Israeli political leadership would emerge that would withdraw to the 1967 borders, but would rein in its army on crossing those borders at will and was capable of convincing the Palestinians it meant it—yeah, I’d love to believe in it,” he said. “I just don’t think it’s going to happen.”

As to the charges regarding his own self-hatred, Mr. Judt said: “First of all, I deny it. But it’s like asking, ‘When did you stop beating your wife?’ To have to deny something so nuts is weird. But there it is.”

How does he know real anti-Semitism when he reads pieces about Israel?

“It’s a tone—it’s a sort of insensitivity to the implications of your own words,” Mr. Judt said. “I suffer from a sort of cognitive dissonance on these sort of things, but yeah—I’ll read something and part of me will think: ‘Yes, you are analytically correct.’ And part of me says, ‘Eh, I didn’t like the way you said that.’”

The effect is startling, particularly when passersby glimpse the cool creaminess of the refurbished interior, their eyes slowly focusing on a telltale lump of brown leather. It’s a bag, maybe the perfect bag, gleaming behind a broad, pretty expanse of prohibitive storefront glass.

But the door’s open. Magic. It’s a boutique. A Brooklyn boutique!

Gentrifiers are hyper-attuned to wavelets of gentrification. Grouchy Brooklynites declare, with characteristic condescending toughness, a neighborhood completely transformed after the first five white people invade. But most still obsess over the changes that occur after their own momentous arrival. It’s a preoccupation even now, decades into Brooklyn’s massive absorption of Manhattan émigrés (the trendily tired and poor), who keep scrambling over the bridge, battered futons and pregnancy tests in tow.

So certain bourgeois-ification milestones— the first rehabbed Italianate brownstone, the first French restaurant, the first house to go for a million—inspire endless gossip, pride and, increasingly, a good deal of panic. These days, locals wring hands over even grander things: the first Hollywood celebrity, the first brownstone to go for four million, the first time you spy a red tour bus racing down DeKalb Avenue, loudspeaker blaring God knows what sights to see.

STUART & WRIGHT IS FORT GREENE'S first truly expensive (by Manhattan standards) clothing store, even though the neighborhood has been well invaded by rich people for the last six to 10 years. When a store is hawking $658 boots (Loeffler Randall, brown leather embossed to look like anaconda), something has changed on the street.

Stuart & Wright faces Moe’s, the popular bar. Just down the street is B.A.M., and Frank’s, and what was once the quick and cheap Cambodian Cuisine before it abandoned Brooklyn for a safe spot on the Upper East Side. On a recent Thursday evening, well-dressed people of various colors and only beautiful shapes spilled out onto the sidewalk in front of Stuart & Wright, celebrating its opening, cups carefully filled with clear alcohols: vodka, gin, white wine. A few cases of red had been canceled at the last minute, but the clothes—periodically caressed by the guests like a mother would her child—were still left out on display and vulnerable to drunks.

“I can’t believe this party is happening in Fort Greene,” said one of the owners, Alec Stuart, standing outside with the smokers. He’s slight, wears thick-rimmed glasses and recalls a cuter version of the cute, young Woody Allen. His partner, Celeste Wright, dressed in a black-and-white-striped dress and enviable heels, her black curls boinging about her head, was inside greeting the large crowd of friends, well-wishers and fashion types. Two women, not together, wore black stockings in exaggerated fishnet under white cotton dresses. Men wore hoodies and hairstyles. Later, Mr. Stuart said that the partygoers, a merry bunch, came from as far as Atlanta, Philadelphia and Manhattan. A WWD reporter was rumored to be in the mix.

Together, the owners accurately represent the population—Fort Greene evangelists would also say spirit—of this neighborhood, where detail-oriented hipsters and blasé sophisticates enjoy almost remarkable (and aesthetically pleasing) racial diversity and economic homogeneity. (Except, perhaps, when the bad kids smoke weed on the corner and the Fort Greene moms’ listserve erupts in e-mails of despair.)

The proprietors exhibit a pointedly friendly attitude—as they explained, they live in the neighborhood, they like the neighborhood, they want neighbors to feel comfortable in their obviously upmarket space. “No doorbells or anything like that,” said Ms. Wright. Many of the labels are Brooklyn-based, too. Elsewhere, though, in Brooklyn boutiques with dramatically simple names (Bird, Butter, Diane T.) undoubtedly meant for hushed tones, the shopgirls palpably strive for Manhattan’s special brand of haute-consumerist frigidity. What a relief for Fort Greene that they got Stuart & Wright.

“Welcome to the neighborhood,” said a female customer in red fashion-sneakers and straightened hair to Mr. Stuart. “We’re happy to have you,” the customer also said, breezing through the store.

“A.P.C.—they have this in Soho,” said another shopper, appropriately disheveled, a baby slung around her neck. A.P.C. is a store on Prince Street. An A.P.C. winter cap at Stuart & Wright costs $84. An A.P.C. scoop-neck sweater costs $209. “And now it’s here,” replied her male friend/husband with ho-hum satisfaction, leading her out the door.

RELIEF IS ONE REACTION to a boutique. The other might be anger. And somewhere in between lies pure anxiety: For a certain type of Brooklyn renter, $200 black-and-white flannel dresses (Samantha Pleet, the I Woke Up With a Lumberjack), $410 forest green silk-chiffon café dresses with puckered sleeves (Lyell) and $378 wedges (Loeffler Randall again—so pretty!) are merely a reminder that the party is over.

Women who live in Brooklyn chose “creative fields” over law or Wall Street. The boutiques make them regret that decision, even though they tailor themselves to the tastes of those who made it. From the lushly lit storefronts of Smith Street, Seventh Avenue and now Lafayette, the message is: Even freelance graphic designers deserve Diane von Furstenberg.

Ms. Wright’s retail philosophy suggests that most Brooklyn shoppers will select two or four items a season that they’ll splurge on. She’s probably right. But many of those doing the splurging on just one item—say, that $550 Lyell navy peacoat—likely can’t afford it. They just tell themselves that living in Brooklyn, an ostensibly money-saving venture, entitles them to some pat-on-the-back spending, a reward for having relocated to this special place.

“I heard 80 percent of the customers live on South Portland Street,” said a long-time Fort Greene resident with frustration. Her claim was confirmed only jokingly by Ms. Wright, who acknowledged that it sometimes seems that way. South Portland Street stretches from Fort Greene Park to Flatbush Avenue, a wonderland of trees and quiet and multimillion-dollar brownstones with ground-floor rentals that can cost as much as $2,500 a month and whose owners require prospective tenants to make more than $100,000. People who own on South Portland can afford the $800 Olivia bag by Gryson, with its braided handles and large front pockets made out of “slightly distressed” calfskin worked into the shape of large cannolis. Those shelling out all of their salaries for rent—and now, anaconda boots—are lost in the sort of deep denial and self-deception only possible when engaged in en masse.

Speaking of the masses: What’s so great about shopping in Brooklyn is that you won’t look like everyone in Manhattan—just everyone in Brooklyn. (No vintage-store rummagers here!)

Not far away from Stuart and Wright, the Boerum/Cobble Hill shopping circuit wends its way down Atlantic Avenue and over to Smith and Court streets. For years now, Butter and Diane T. have served as the area’s major shopping destinations. Bird, on Smith Street, recently opened to a stunning crowd of anxious women who’d frequented the Bird on Seventh Avenue in Park Slope and were grateful to have their very own Bird branch just minutes from their stoop.

On a sale day at these places, happily, Brooklynites find themselves surrounded by people like themselves—young people without savings, without down payments, but with some really awesome $200 Theory black pants, marked down just a tad. On those rare occasions (holidays, really), the closet fashionistas—women who can’t afford expensive clothes, know only vaguely the difference between See by Chloé and Isabel Marant, yet work in industries where they’re subjected daily to cruelly trendy rich chicks—bare their teeth and wield their credit cards. (They could cut you with those things.) Otherwise, they’d have to wait until Mom or Dad pops in for a pity visit.

“Bird’s a great place to meet women,” said a male friend at a house party in Prospect Heights where fig tart was served.

THE WOMEN ENDURE MORE THAN male attention in their quest for expensive-looking pants. In a neighborhood so small, shop owners can deduce immediately—maybe after you’ve visited once or twice or three times—whether or not you’re a buyer. At least in Manhattan, you have anonymity on your side. But in Brooklyn, as the real-estate agents say, you sure are treated like a familiar face.

“They have this great black dress,” said a friend on the way into Bird in Park Slope. “But it’s like $600 or something. They never used to have dresses that expensive.”

In the store, the black dress was on the mannequin—short-sleeved eyelet, fitted to the knees, flesh revealed in all the right places, the sort of “teaspoon of skin” sexiness that fundamentally conservative women wear to feel bold and kicky. It was made by Mayle, said the clerk, a label based on Elizabeth Street. Instead, Elizabeth Street came to me.

The Park Slope Bird is friendlier than the Smith Street Bird, but they say hello. The women at Diane T., on Court Street, a hodgepodge of Marc Jacobs and Diane von Furstenberg and other things you can get at Bloomingdale’s, won’t even assist you in the dressing rooms once you’re classified a promiscuous browser with shallow pockets. There are exceptions: the owner of Dear Fieldbinder on Smith Street exudes sweetness; ditto the overworked, admirably all-business duo at the shoe store Soula, and the complimentary ladies at Sir, on Atlantic.

And then there’s Butter. Butter, a seven-year-old Atlantic Avenue shop with frosted glass, a doorbell and, now, an outlet store down the street, is the most intimidating of all. Step inside and hold on tight. One death stare from a Butter employee can make you feel like a servant with chocolate-smeared fingers fumbling in the Queen’s closet. It is worth noting that Times critical shopper Alex Kuczynski wrote that the owners, Eva and Robin Weiss, “could not have been nicer.” According to the first Ms. Weiss, the most popular labels are Dries Van Noten, Rick Owens and Kristensen. Rogan is the top-selling denim. Many of the dark clothes hang formlessly, drapily, like funeral shrouds. When you put them on, they suddenly take shape, and it feels like a favor.

The evening I spoke with Eva by phone (she was about to take off to Milan), she said that three celebrities had been in the store that very day, but she wouldn’t disclose their names (“I want to respect them”). She disagreed that the store was daunting.

“We’re the same people we always were. We treat everybody the same,” she said. “It’s a nice store—my background is in design, and I want my store to look perfect. But I’m still the same person. I’m still wearing the same jeans I was wearing two years ago.

“I want the store to be fun,” she continued. “Some of my customers say, ‘Oh, I feel so underdressed’—but they’re kidding, you know?”

A shopgirl’s scorn is a shopgirl’s scorn; that’s what high fashion is for. But that scorn might also reflect the shopper’s shame of aspiring without means, of the folly of believing that consumption in Brooklyn is somehow different from the rank materialism of Manhattan. The excitement that surrounds the arrival of a new Brooklyn boutique masks a lazy entitlement particular to the expensively educated but professionally romantic: Thank you for bringing the rewards to my doorstep; maybe someday I’ll afford them. Then these rich people with no cash continue to rent and have brunch and shop.

“I live in Ditmas Park,” Ole Sondresen, the architect who fixed up Stuart & Wright, had told me at the party. I said he should prepare for an onslaught of new neighbors fleeing brownstone Brooklyn for cheap housing. He looked at me, raised eyebrows telegraphing the message: There, too, it’s already too late.

The effect is startling, particularly when passersby glimpse the cool creaminess of the refurbished interior, their eyes slowly focusing on a telltale lump of brown leather. It’s a bag, maybe the perfect bag, gleaming behind a broad, pretty expanse of prohibitive storefront glass.

But the door’s open. Magic. It’s a boutique. A Brooklyn boutique!

Gentrifiers are hyper-attuned to wavelets of gentrification. Grouchy Brooklynites declare, with characteristic condescending toughness, a neighborhood completely transformed after the first five white people invade. But most still obsess over the changes that occur after their own momentous arrival. It’s a preoccupation even now, decades into Brooklyn’s massive absorption of Manhattan émigrés (the trendily tired and poor), who keep scrambling over the bridge, battered futons and pregnancy tests in tow.

So certain bourgeois-ification milestones— the first rehabbed Italianate brownstone, the first French restaurant, the first house to go for a million—inspire endless gossip, pride and, increasingly, a good deal of panic. These days, locals wring hands over even grander things: the first Hollywood celebrity, the first brownstone to go for four million, the first time you spy a red tour bus racing down DeKalb Avenue, loudspeaker blaring God knows what sights to see.

STUART & WRIGHT IS FORT GREENE'S first truly expensive (by Manhattan standards) clothing store, even though the neighborhood has been well invaded by rich people for the last six to 10 years. When a store is hawking $658 boots (Loeffler Randall, brown leather embossed to look like anaconda), something has changed on the street.

Stuart & Wright faces Moe’s, the popular bar. Just down the street is B.A.M., and Frank’s, and what was once the quick and cheap Cambodian Cuisine before it abandoned Brooklyn for a safe spot on the Upper East Side. On a recent Thursday evening, well-dressed people of various colors and only beautiful shapes spilled out onto the sidewalk in front of Stuart & Wright, celebrating its opening, cups carefully filled with clear alcohols: vodka, gin, white wine. A few cases of red had been canceled at the last minute, but the clothes—periodically caressed by the guests like a mother would her child—were still left out on display and vulnerable to drunks.

“I can’t believe this party is happening in Fort Greene,” said one of the owners, Alec Stuart, standing outside with the smokers. He’s slight, wears thick-rimmed glasses and recalls a cuter version of the cute, young Woody Allen. His partner, Celeste Wright, dressed in a black-and-white-striped dress and enviable heels, her black curls boinging about her head, was inside greeting the large crowd of friends, well-wishers and fashion types. Two women, not together, wore black stockings in exaggerated fishnet under white cotton dresses. Men wore hoodies and hairstyles. Later, Mr. Stuart said that the partygoers, a merry bunch, came from as far as Atlanta, Philadelphia and Manhattan. A WWD reporter was rumored to be in the mix.

Together, the owners accurately represent the population—Fort Greene evangelists would also say spirit—of this neighborhood, where detail-oriented hipsters and blasé sophisticates enjoy almost remarkable (and aesthetically pleasing) racial diversity and economic homogeneity. (Except, perhaps, when the bad kids smoke weed on the corner and the Fort Greene moms’ listserve erupts in e-mails of despair.)

The proprietors exhibit a pointedly friendly attitude—as they explained, they live in the neighborhood, they like the neighborhood, they want neighbors to feel comfortable in their obviously upmarket space. “No doorbells or anything like that,” said Ms. Wright. Many of the labels are Brooklyn-based, too. Elsewhere, though, in Brooklyn boutiques with dramatically simple names (Bird, Butter, Diane T.) undoubtedly meant for hushed tones, the shopgirls palpably strive for Manhattan’s special brand of haute-consumerist frigidity. What a relief for Fort Greene that they got Stuart & Wright.

“Welcome to the neighborhood,” said a female customer in red fashion-sneakers and straightened hair to Mr. Stuart. “We’re happy to have you,” the customer also said, breezing through the store.

“A.P.C.—they have this in Soho,” said another shopper, appropriately disheveled, a baby slung around her neck. A.P.C. is a store on Prince Street. An A.P.C. winter cap at Stuart & Wright costs $84. An A.P.C. scoop-neck sweater costs $209. “And now it’s here,” replied her male friend/husband with ho-hum satisfaction, leading her out the door.

RELIEF IS ONE REACTION to a boutique. The other might be anger. And somewhere in between lies pure anxiety: For a certain type of Brooklyn renter, $200 black-and-white flannel dresses (Samantha Pleet, the I Woke Up With a Lumberjack), $410 forest green silk-chiffon café dresses with puckered sleeves (Lyell) and $378 wedges (Loeffler Randall again—so pretty!) are merely a reminder that the party is over.

Women who live in Brooklyn chose “creative fields” over law or Wall Street. The boutiques make them regret that decision, even though they tailor themselves to the tastes of those who made it. From the lushly lit storefronts of Smith Street, Seventh Avenue and now Lafayette, the message is: Even freelance graphic designers deserve Diane von Furstenberg.

Ms. Wright’s retail philosophy suggests that most Brooklyn shoppers will select two or four items a season that they’ll splurge on. She’s probably right. But many of those doing the splurging on just one item—say, that $550 Lyell navy peacoat—likely can’t afford it. They just tell themselves that living in Brooklyn, an ostensibly money-saving venture, entitles them to some pat-on-the-back spending, a reward for having relocated to this special place.

“I heard 80 percent of the customers live on South Portland Street,” said a long-time Fort Greene resident with frustration. Her claim was confirmed only jokingly by Ms. Wright, who acknowledged that it sometimes seems that way. South Portland Street stretches from Fort Greene Park to Flatbush Avenue, a wonderland of trees and quiet and multimillion-dollar brownstones with ground-floor rentals that can cost as much as $2,500 a month and whose owners require prospective tenants to make more than $100,000. People who own on South Portland can afford the $800 Olivia bag by Gryson, with its braided handles and large front pockets made out of “slightly distressed” calfskin worked into the shape of large cannolis. Those shelling out all of their salaries for rent—and now, anaconda boots—are lost in the sort of deep denial and self-deception only possible when engaged in en masse.

Speaking of the masses: What’s so great about shopping in Brooklyn is that you won’t look like everyone in Manhattan—just everyone in Brooklyn. (No vintage-store rummagers here!)

Not far away from Stuart and Wright, the Boerum/Cobble Hill shopping circuit wends its way down Atlantic Avenue and over to Smith and Court streets. For years now, Butter and Diane T. have served as the area’s major shopping destinations. Bird, on Smith Street, recently opened to a stunning crowd of anxious women who’d frequented the Bird on Seventh Avenue in Park Slope and were grateful to have their very own Bird branch just minutes from their stoop.

On a sale day at these places, happily, Brooklynites find themselves surrounded by people like themselves—young people without savings, without down payments, but with some really awesome $200 Theory black pants, marked down just a tad. On those rare occasions (holidays, really), the closet fashionistas—women who can’t afford expensive clothes, know only vaguely the difference between See by Chloé and Isabel Marant, yet work in industries where they’re subjected daily to cruelly trendy rich chicks—bare their teeth and wield their credit cards. (They could cut you with those things.) Otherwise, they’d have to wait until Mom or Dad pops in for a pity visit.

“Bird’s a great place to meet women,” said a male friend at a house party in Prospect Heights where fig tart was served.

THE WOMEN ENDURE MORE THAN male attention in their quest for expensive-looking pants. In a neighborhood so small, shop owners can deduce immediately—maybe after you’ve visited once or twice or three times—whether or not you’re a buyer. At least in Manhattan, you have anonymity on your side. But in Brooklyn, as the real-estate agents say, you sure are treated like a familiar face.

“They have this great black dress,” said a friend on the way into Bird in Park Slope. “But it’s like $600 or something. They never used to have dresses that expensive.”

In the store, the black dress was on the mannequin—short-sleeved eyelet, fitted to the knees, flesh revealed in all the right places, the sort of “teaspoon of skin” sexiness that fundamentally conservative women wear to feel bold and kicky. It was made by Mayle, said the clerk, a label based on Elizabeth Street. Instead, Elizabeth Street came to me.

The Park Slope Bird is friendlier than the Smith Street Bird, but they say hello. The women at Diane T., on Court Street, a hodgepodge of Marc Jacobs and Diane von Furstenberg and other things you can get at Bloomingdale’s, won’t even assist you in the dressing rooms once you’re classified a promiscuous browser with shallow pockets. There are exceptions: the owner of Dear Fieldbinder on Smith Street exudes sweetness; ditto the overworked, admirably all-business duo at the shoe store Soula, and the complimentary ladies at Sir, on Atlantic.

And then there’s Butter. Butter, a seven-year-old Atlantic Avenue shop with frosted glass, a doorbell and, now, an outlet store down the street, is the most intimidating of all. Step inside and hold on tight. One death stare from a Butter employee can make you feel like a servant with chocolate-smeared fingers fumbling in the Queen’s closet. It is worth noting that Times critical shopper Alex Kuczynski wrote that the owners, Eva and Robin Weiss, “could not have been nicer.” According to the first Ms. Weiss, the most popular labels are Dries Van Noten, Rick Owens and Kristensen. Rogan is the top-selling denim. Many of the dark clothes hang formlessly, drapily, like funeral shrouds. When you put them on, they suddenly take shape, and it feels like a favor.

The evening I spoke with Eva by phone (she was about to take off to Milan), she said that three celebrities had been in the store that very day, but she wouldn’t disclose their names (“I want to respect them”). She disagreed that the store was daunting.

“We’re the same people we always were. We treat everybody the same,” she said. “It’s a nice store—my background is in design, and I want my store to look perfect. But I’m still the same person. I’m still wearing the same jeans I was wearing two years ago.

“I want the store to be fun,” she continued. “Some of my customers say, ‘Oh, I feel so underdressed’—but they’re kidding, you know?”

A shopgirl’s scorn is a shopgirl’s scorn; that’s what high fashion is for. But that scorn might also reflect the shopper’s shame of aspiring without means, of the folly of believing that consumption in Brooklyn is somehow different from the rank materialism of Manhattan. The excitement that surrounds the arrival of a new Brooklyn boutique masks a lazy entitlement particular to the expensively educated but professionally romantic: Thank you for bringing the rewards to my doorstep; maybe someday I’ll afford them. Then these rich people with no cash continue to rent and have brunch and shop.

“I live in Ditmas Park,” Ole Sondresen, the architect who fixed up Stuart & Wright, had told me at the party. I said he should prepare for an onslaught of new neighbors fleeing brownstone Brooklyn for cheap housing. He looked at me, raised eyebrows telegraphing the message: There, too, it’s already too late.

Moments later, the thin man’s girlfriend was beside him, just checking in, just saying hi, just seeing what he was up to. He pointed to his purchase, tentatively, which was being carefully sliced and packaged behind the counter.

“A quarter of a pound of Portugal Serpa,” he told her, in a whisper, as if not to disturb this bit of cross-cultural commerce. She nodded, or said “good”—whatever, she was satisfied—and left him to his further responsibilities, perhaps somewhere in “Ham, I Am” Land, home of the preposterously un-Italian Iowa Organic Prosciutto and the cheerfully pornographic Cherry Wood-Smoked Bone-In Iowa Ham, or toward the giant round fish station, mobbed all around by a heaving, panting mass of Brooklynites. DeLillo’s supermarkets were dignified in comparison.

Even a couple months after it opened in May, the pious whispers can still be heard on the F train, recounting visits to the Fairway like pilgrims bearing witness: “Have you been to the new Fairway yet?” As though the Cathedral of Notre Dame had just been erected in their backyards.

A visit to Fairway on a weekend day in Brooklyn these days is a redundant proposition. A weekend day is Fairway day. And in the religious calendar that has formed among the Brooklyn faithful, for whom a certain connoisseurship of groceries serves as a stand-in for the contemplative life, Fairway Day is a holy day of obligation.

There are gourmet Belgian beer battles and nuzzling around the nectarines, fighting in front of the Israeli salad and whining before the baby carrots. There are loving couples to envy and squabbling couples to not; nuclear families wielding torn-out recipes. That person smeared in free samples you glimpsed in the nightmarish Make Your Own Granola station will probably pop up again in the Totally Environmentally Apocalyptic Plastic Packaged Dried Fruits, Nuts and Candy aisle. Shoppers eye each other—coveting either their bounty or their light load or something else.

Never was there such a garish incubator of aspirational thoughts as the destination grocery store (and this is perhaps Brooklyn’s first real one), and a day spent there is a window on your neighbors’ domestic lives, how they might behave in their own kitchen.

It’s stressful. So there’s a lot of communication, and even more reading. Fair-Maidens and Fair-Lads will spend hours taking cues and studying up on, say, chocolates—sorting the Toffifee (Germany) from the Valrhona (France), the Hachez (Germany) from the Scharffenberger (German-American), and all of it, hopefully, from the unfortunate Plantations (Ecuador). The honey, too, presents a bevy of international options for mostly unilingual folks: Ours Brun, Miel de Fleurs, Waben Quell, Marco Polo. “Provencale Honey” read one section heading, and a yuppie-ish, Duke lacrosse type, grabbing at the elegant jars with meaty hands, actually seemed to know what this meant.

He’d better, because in the family-friendly Fairway, he probably had someone to answer to.

Men, it seemed, entered Fairway at their peril, engaging in what must be endless checkpoints of tiny relationship tests. Over here was a tattooed, CBGB T-shirt-wearing and shaved-head dad, overcome—hypnotized, really—by the gourmet beer department. His wife chattered on, exasperated, with their two kids, trying to distract them while Pa loitered. “I’ll check this out for a buck 69,” he said in an “oh yeah” voice to no one in particular, cockily placing the St. Peter’s Cream Stout into their cart. CBGB then examined the Hitachino, a nest beer white ale and Japanese Belgian-Style Winner of Medals in Beer Competitions in the U.S. and the U.K. “Are you happy?” said the kid. “Yes, and why?” said the mom. “Because you love me,” said the kid. Dad then picked up some Magic Hat, something with “fruity apricot notes” for $9.49, and just about tore himself away until, “Ohhhh, wait a second—goodness!”—it was the Grand Cru of the Emperor, another Belgian ale in a swanky big bottle.

Over there, a madras-wearing man, pleased with himself for locating two boxes of cookies, danced down the aisle toward his pregnant ladyfriend’s cart, where she, horrified and no longer chirping orders, held a magazine clipping in midair. A hipster couple, still carrying only the two avocados I’d seen them with 20 minutes ago, paused nearby. “See this?” the messy-haired tall man said to his pretty blue-wearing girlfriend softly, and gently touched something Ziploc-related. “Mmm-hmm,” she murmured, and pushed him on, like a mental patient.

“Do you like this?” asked another young husband. He was holding a value pack of toilet paper. His wife looked at him blankly. “What do you mean, do I like it?” she said. He looked at the Charmin, then at her. “It’s so … big.”

She walked away, past where a man and a woman, both slender-in-black and back-to-back and posed like Degas’ bronze tiny dancer, gazed upon the racks as if at a stuffy art opening. She pondering the aluminum foil, he musing on toilet paper. Angel Soft, Scott, Charmin—Aloft!

What was all the fuss? Their objets d’art weren’t even something respectably promiscuous like ravioli, or at all as terrifying as the spice rack—where later I’d overheard a neurotic thirtysomething sputter at an employee trapped on a ladder next to him: “Basil! Basil! Basil!”

“Yes, I will follow all your rules,” said a small father to his 3-year-old son, effectively obliterating all disciplinary work no doubt implemented by his wife, which is what she gets for sending them off alone to do the grocery shopping.

“You making hamburgers or dogs?” yelled Woman to Man.

“Frogs?” Man yelled back.

It was the couple in Vitamins, engaged in a frantic search for melatonin, that seemed sanest.

THE RED HOOK FAIRWAY IS ANOTHER SIGN that the brownstone-ish Brooklyn of now is the Upper West Side of the 1970’s/80’s. The two neighborhoods in their respective heydays have much in common: media intellectuals, burgeoning careerdom, the terror of the firstborn, Woody Allen by way of Meghan Daum wood floors. And now a big, glorious supermarket with lots and lots of ridiculously named stuff.

But, presumably, even during that dismal decade, the Upper West Side’s Fairway had something that the three-month-old Red Hook Fairway, by now in the throes of its own giddy weekend routine, mostly does not: single people.

Not just the romantically uncoupled, but the solo, the alone. And, in fact, despite their similarities, if a dim-witted New Jersey teen happened upon both Fairways on the same Sunday, she’d think the two boroughs were two different planets. One’s shades of the New York she’d imagined, populated by the self-sufficient and self-absorbed, the other reminiscent of the suburb she grew up in: home to the reliant and reliable, with a few Manhattany traits—the extraordinary luxury of neuroses, the curse of aspirations—thrown in.

Uptown, Fairway looks a bit like you’d expect from a New York supermarket. Schlumpy-dressed people, most of them alone, battle their way through the poorly lit, low-ceilinged aisles, forlorn baskets holding the half-dozen eggs and slender cartons of orange juice they’ll easily cart home to small apartments that are no doubt just blocks, maybe one subway stop, away. Just like stopping off at the deli to pick up a few things—but yummier things, perhaps cheaper things—where your Lebanese deli man couldn’t give a shit what you’re buying. Anonymity still reigns, and so it’s an unspoken rule, like omertà, that buying only a six-pack of Stella and a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Oatmeal Cookie Dough, maybe some butter, isn’t to be viewed as pathetic.

Not so in Red Hook. To get to this slowly flowering desert of a neighborhood—it looks a bit like comeback/dying cities such as Wilmington, N.C.—Brooklynites must trek to the end of the earth. The neighborhood doesn’t even have a subway stop, and so everyone drives, packs up their partner, their baby, their mom (lots of twentysomethings’ moms at Fairway), and loads them all into the four-door for a protracted Fairway Day, during which they buy as much crap as humanly possible.

Supermarkets have always served as little fishbowls of American society—society at it’s most intense and vulnerable and unnerving. So it’s a wonder what sort of mythology Brooklynites will create about this New York.

It won’t be the New York of Annie Hall, or Breakfast at Tiffany’s (American Psycho would be virtually unrecognizable).

Considering how much of the media, and the literary world, lives out here, it’s likely this Brooklyn will be the one dimwitted New Jersey kids hear about from now on: this New York of families, of domesticity and dependence.

Not the other one, the New York of aloneness and no strings attached.

This is the other thing to know about the new Fairwayified outer borough—everyone drives, and if you don’t, no tamarind paste for you.

“How did you get here?” my friends Caleb and Peter asked when I ran into them outside of the Brooklyn Fairway on a recent Sunday.

“I walked,” I said, sweating in what felt like an equatorial sun, even though I’d just left the ungodly, inhuman cold of the store. “Yeah.”

“Wow,” they said, concerned and sweet. “Well, if you want to wait, we could give you a ride. We have our car.”

They were on their way in, and they knew I was on my way out, and yet it didn’t seem odd that I might want to wait around while they shopped in order to grab that precious ride back to Fort Greene. It’s really far. But I thanked them and explained I was taking the 61 bus and miserably made my way out of the parking lot, a war zone of RAV4’s and other people’s children.

Public transportation can get you to Fairway. The 61 bus, the F train of Brooklyn buses, winds a lovely path from Williamsburg, through Clinton Hill and Fort Greene, into downtown Brooklyn and Boerum Hill and Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens right up to a couple blocks from the Fairway in Red Hook. But no one else got off there, and no one with Fairway bags got on to take it home either, because most everyone on the 61 bus gets off at the projects.

Which seem worlds away from this Brooklyn. At least, further than Serpa, Extramadura or wherever it is in Belgium that beer is made Grand Cru.

“He’s an institution,” said one. “He’s a matchmaker!” said another. And: “He’s insane!”

“I swore I wouldn’t speak to you tonight,” Mr. Gerovitz told me, with his characteristic acidity. He dressed natty-casual in a blazer and jeans, his delicate-framed glasses perched atop his head—Mr. Gerovitz has one of those blank-slate poker faces instantly transformed by a grin. The broker implied that the evening was supposed to be about pleasure, not business. Allan M. Gerovitz—the Man Who Owns Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens, some say—was trying to throw himself a party.

Most New Yorkers regard real-estate brokers as gutter scum; Brooklynites revere Mr. Gerovitz with a bizarre, often fearful obsessiveness. For over 20 years, Mr. Gerovitz has been the one-man co-op board for a string of random, pretty and pricy floor-throughs that have one big thing in common: They’re all inhabited by people deemed “good” by Mr. Gerovitz in buildings owned by landlords deemed “good” by him, too.

A neighborhood of Good People! Even with so many lawyers, so many media people, so many jewelry makers! It is Mr. Gerovitz who has overseen the change of neighborhoods into Manhattanized paradises for the bespectacled.

“It’s like stepping into another dimension. You think there must be some place where all the decent apartments are hiding,” said the novelist Susan Choi, who showed up at the party later. “When we worked with Allan, we thought, ‘Oh, this is where they are!’”

It works like this, or once upon a time it did: You decide to move to Brooklyn. Someone says, “Go see Allan.” Their confidence impresses you, and you think, “Yay!” And then come the more difficult instructions: “But be very nice, and say I referred you and— Jesus Christ!—be on time. He’ll only help you if he likes you.”

You will be offended in advance and return to your comfortable despair. (What indignity—to be rejected by someone you desperately want to give money to!) Then they’ll say again, “But, really, go see Allan.”

And perhaps you too shall rent 700 square feet near the subway. After a bit of ritual suffering, that is. (I know. He found me my first place.)

Mr. Gerovitz had divided his party into two shifts: landlords and renters. “You don’t often see a flamboyant guy like him hanging out with Italian guys, but there they are,” a former client said. At the party, men in floral button-downs and shorts and ladies in print dresses and pumps milled around, basking in their “I Own Property” confidence. A table of presents was packed—wine, cards, pretty gift baggies, some from as far as Martha’s Vineyard. A large blue hand-painted banner declared, “It’s About Us!” Signed: “AMG.”

The invitation had also declared “It’s About Us!” (The front read “The Party You’ve Requested.”) “Us!” apparently referred to all of Prudential Douglas Elliman, the enormous real-estate firm that bought mom-and-pop Marilyn A. Donahue Real Estate, Mr. Gerovitz’s longtime home, a few years ago.

But celebrating Allan, who endured quite a few changes during the corporate transition (technology, seminars, suits), seemed to be the point. At such a party, Mr. Gerovitz could show his new co-workers the result of two decades of work. And he could show the neighborhood that his man-of-the-street image hadn’t gone the way of Corcoran.

“He’s more like a matchmaker,” said Elizabeth Betteil, who’s lived on Henry Street for seven years. She and her husband admitted they’d rather charge under-market rates, as Allan suggests, than work with any other broker. “We told him we wanted a single female; he came back with a man with a child. He’s found us perfect tenants. Allan’s the reason I work in the industry.”

Laura James, a fund-raiser who’s owned in Carroll Gardens since the 80s, also invoked Cupid. “He’s the only broker I give an exclusive to; I love all my tenants,” she said. “Julianna Margulies was a tenant of mine.”

At some point in the evening, a younger and more boisterous group of people had gathered together, talking loudly, throwing their heads back, gesticulating in exaggeratedly joyful ways, every now and then pretending to dance. These were the Douglas Elliman brokers. Marilyn Donahue, Mr. Gerovitz’s old boss, dutifully led me to their new boss, Dottie Herman, the C.E.O. of Elliman. She was tan and blond, and dressed in a white blazer and white heels; a zebra-ish print skirt swung somewhere in between.

“Tell her how many rentals you do!” someone said to Mr. Gerovitz. “One hundred and fifty a year!”

“The cell phone! He has a cell phone!” Ms. Herman said of Mr. Gerovitz, who someone had dragged over.

“I never used a cell phone before. I hate cell phones,” he said.

“One hundred and fifty apartments?” I said.

“One hundred and twenty, 150,” he said.

“What’s normal?”

“Thirty,” another guy said.

“Is this true?”

“He’s an icon. An icon!” Ms. Herman said. “In rentals.”

Real-estate brokers are chatty and tiring, so I sat down next to three middle-aged native Brooklynites. They were not going to the French bistro Bar Tabac. “I’m hungry, you hungry?” “I’m hungry.” “We’ll go to the dinah.” “The appetizas didn’t quite do it!” “You got a big appetite!” “Where will we go?” “The dinah! I said, the dinah across the street!”

A young lawyer named Rachel Zublatt showed up. Before finding her and her boyfriend Andrew their apartment on Baltic between Court and Smith, Mr. Gerovitz said to her: “I think you’re a strong couple—you’re a little too loud and he balances that.” Andrew, standing nearby, pretended to choke to death.

“We canceled a trip to Napa to take this apartment,” Ms. Zublatt said gravely.

A FEW DAYS LATER IN HIS OFFICE, Mr. Gerovitz was only too happy to dwell on his customers’ satisfaction. And, as if it has been staged, a woman eventually shuffled in bearing gifts: She’d painted him a small watercolor. “See, this is why I needed a new apartment. I do these on my floor,” she said.

“Look at this! Look at this! Right in front of the reporter!” he exclaimed, grinning broadly. Mr. Gerovitz happily pointed out his new gray-blue Theory blazer, found after three and a half hours at Bloomingdale’s, and sipped on a Dr. Pepper. He merely smiled when asked his age. At one point, he put his bare feet on the desk. Books were lined up: The Tipping Point, Change the Way You See Everything, Ken Blanchard’s Raving Fans, Never Eat Alone, by Keith Ferrazzi. When I had first stepped into Mr. Gerovitz’s office, as a client, some years ago, the desk had been decorated with thank-you letters. They were gone.

“A couple of years ago, I threw about 100 letters out,” he said, citing depression. But Mr. Gerovitz eventually revealed two binders stuffed with thank-you letters; he encourages clients to write in. One was from Ms. Choi, printed on New Yorker letterhead and titled “Annals of Apartment Hunting.” Another was from the novelist Rick Moody (“P.S. Book collectors pay money for my signature, so save this letter.”)

Mr. Gerovitz laid out his philosophy. He gives weight to referrals and repeaters. He demands that clients see no other brokers. When people come to see him, they must pass “sit-down time,” in which he figures out why they’re moving and what their needs are: And the couple counseling? “I don’t want to see one person dragged into an apartment that won’t be good for them,” he said. Lastly: “The most important thing,” he said, “is that people don’t overspend so they can save money and buy eventually.”

As for landlords, he’s stopped working with them if they aren’t up to snuff. If they reject someone with a baby, “I read them the riot act,” he said. Once, he told a landlord to spend more time with her noisemaking child. “It’s nice that everybody doesn’t feel they have to gouge,” he said. “It’s going to be pretty boring around here if everybody pays over $2,000 in rent—that’s not the kind of neighborhood I want to live in.

“I like to like the customer. And if somebody is like this”—he turned his nose up with his pointer finger—“it doesn’t work for me,” he said, and acknowledged his own blue-collar roots. He’s from Bloomfield, Conn.

But what about the yelling?

“Yeah,” he said, matter-of-factly. “It’s fair, as long as you’re tough on everyone. I want to believe your story, to learn what I’m hearing is real. So I push a little bit.”

THE INITIAL VISIT TO MR. GEROVITZ'S involves a combination of demands, suspicion and odd insults. And some people—frightened, angry—never go back.

“There’s something Machiavellian about what he does,” said one former client, who added that the broker “worked a fucking miracle” for him. “It’s 60-40: his own craziness and the Machiavellian thing. His way of testing your reliability is to press you, and it isn’t pleasant …. A lot of kids who come and want to live in Brooklyn, and they think they know everything about the world because they read Gawker, and they want a real-estate broker to be a certain way—his method goes against that grain.”

In my case, Mr. Gerovitz took note of my height (I’m tall). One meeting, he didn’t like my hat; the next, it was my skirt that disappointed him. A friend recalled the time the broker called him a “pig” in Yiddish—merely for wondering if there were any places in the neighborhood closer to his partner’s work.

But rarely is the thick-skinned Allanite disappointed with their apartment. Mr. Gerovitz is typically insightful enough to land a client a dwelling on the first try, often in mere hours and—most surprisingly in this post-gentrification depression era—for a relatively decent price. (“Suzy,” he said to me like a game-show host, “I think I have the apartment for you.”)

The referrals help. Ms. Choi hired Mr. Gerovitz on novelist Francisco Goldman’s word; Mr. Goldman, by e-mail from Mexico, expressed guilt for having not visited Mr. Gerovitz in a while. (Mr. Gerovitz is good at eliciting guilt.) Of Brooklyn, it’s tough to say which came first, the writers or Mr. Gerovitz.

But it’s true that he likes “creative types.” Mr. Gerovitz particularly loves New York Times Magazine editor Alex Star, who used Mr. Gerovitz twice, and recommended Mr. Gerovitz to New Yorker writer Alex Ross.

Mr. Ross, in turn, said that during his introductory interview with Mr. Gerovitz, he met Ted Koppel, who’d come into the office with his son. “It’s the closest I came to being a guest on Nightline,” Mr. Ross said. He recalled a bit of dialogue from the day: “Mr. Koppel, this is Alex Ross. He writes for New York magazine,” said Mr. Gerovitz. “Indeed!” said Mr. Koppel. “Uh, actually, The New Yorker,” said Mr. Ross. “Well, I won’t hold that against you,” said Mr. Koppel.

Urban legend has it that another magazine writer was thrown out of Mr. Gerovitz’s car. A couple of people suggested it was Mr. Ross (it was not). Instead, this unfortunate writer, who requested anonymity, clarified that “it was not quite that dramatic,” but that after seeing three apartments and finding them sub-par, Mr. Gerovitz did in fact say, “That’s it! You’re hopeless! Get out of my car!”

New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor endured a sort of rental bake-off with other potential clients, in which the landlord got to choose who they liked better—as they anxiously stood around in the landlord’s living room. On another occasion, back in the slightly sketchier late 90’s, Ms. Kantor, just out of college, had brought her mother along on the hunt. Ms. Kantor hesitated before jumping at an apartment that Mr. Gerovitz had shown them. “Your daughter is a princess!” Mr. Gerovitz said. “If my daughter were a princess,” Kantor mère replied, “she wouldn’t be looking in this neighborhood.”

Sadly, Ms. Kantor didn’t make it to the party, though she expressed affection for Mr. Gerovitz. Two journalism types who did show up for the late-night festivities were New York magazine editor Jared Hohlt (who also said it might have been the ubiquitous Mr. Ross who recommended him, but he’s not sure) and reporter Felipe Ossa.

“When he met me and my boyfriend, Allan declared that I was the ‘dry white wine of the relationship,’” Mr. Hohlt said later by e-mail, “which wasn’t exactly flattering but wasn’t entirely inaccurate, either.”

Mr. Gerovitz was right about my hat, too. Perhaps that’s why he did not invite me to the party, but word travels fast in his weird sub-community. That night, across the room, I spotted the woman who rents to my friends, the ones who told me to go through Mr. Gerovitz. And standing outside the restaurant later, the music having faded from Motown to the Killers, I ran into someone I’d sent along to him: Mina Mishrikey, a 28-year-old sales trader.

Inside, Mr. Mishrikey introduced me to two lawyers he’d just met: Vivian Huelgo, 33, and Emilia Sicilia, 32. “We totally love Allan,” Ms. Huelgo said. “We developed a relationship—we even asked him about single men.”

I mentioned this to Mr. Gerovitz later. “Well, you can say: I’m looking too,” he said. “I’m ready.”