The historian Arno Mayer has died at the age of ninety-seven, quietly in peace. Mayer was born in Luxembourg in 1926 into what he called a “fully emancipated and largely acculturated” Jewish middle-class family that had fled in their Chevrolet for France just minutes before the arrival of the Wehrmacht. He credited his father’s left-wing Zionism for recognizing the Nazis for what they were and preparing an escape in advance: Verdun, Marseille, Oran, Casablanca, Tangiers, Lisbon, and, finally, New York City — a “vast and varied commonwealth of refugees,” as Mayer described his family’s refuge, “trembling for the world that was ours.”

Mayer was part, as the Cornell historian Enzo Traverso writes, of that “extraordinary generation of German-speaking Jewish scholars” born between the world wars and exiled to the United States, among them Raul Hilberg, Peter Gay, and Fritz Stern. Mayer, though, was more explicitly left-wing, irreverent, and iconoclastic than others in this cohort, and, as time went by, more pointedly critical of Israel.

I first met Arno when he was well into his eighties, his mind and wit still sparking fire. He had retained a European graciousness but was easy with the profanities, and quickly made you feel as if you had known him your whole life.