Jewish scholar Gertrude Himmelfarb dies at 97

Himmelfarb waged an ideological war of sorts against the liberal social norms that emerged in the 1960s.

By World Israel News Staff 

Gertrude Himmelfarb, a respected scholar of the Victorian age who continuously advocated for neoconservatism in politics and social issues, died on Tuesday from congestive heart failure in her Washington, D.C. home at the age of 97.

Himmelfarb taught for years at City College of New York and served at various times as an adviser for the Library of Congress, the National Council on the Humanities, and the American Enterprise Institute.

Himmelfarb was born to Russian Jewish immigrants Max and Bertha Himmelfarb in Brooklyn on Aug. 8, 1922. She attended Brooklyn College as an undergraduate, while also studying at the Jewish Theological Seminary. She received a master’s degree and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and published her first book, “Lord Acton: A Study In Conscience and Politics” in 1953.

She met her husband Irving Kristol, a fellow neoconservative, at a meeting of the Young People’s Socialist League. Together with her husband, Himmelfarb waged an ideological war of sorts against the liberal social norms that emerged in the 1960s.

“For Victorians, virtues were fixed and certain,” she  wrote in her book “The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values.”

“They were the standards against which behavior could and should be measured. When conduct fell short of those standards, it was judged in moral terms as bad, wrong or evil – not, as is more often the case today, as misguided, undesirable or (the most recent corruption of the moral vocabulary) ‘inappropriate.'”

Himmelfarb was very vocal about the degradation of America’s moral values during the 1994 impeachment trial of former President Bill Clinton over his affair with Monica Lewinsky.

“She was a pivotal figure in the neoconservative movement and more academically rigorous than Irving Kristol,” said Jacob Heilbrunn, author of “They Knew They Were Right,” a book about the history of neoconservatism.

“She pounded home the theme of moral responsibility through her books on Victorian values. She transferred that ethos to the United States – that welfare and the Great Society promoted values that were antithetical to the needs of the underclass and that measures taken to help the underclass were, in fact, hurting it,” he added.

In 2004, Himmelfarb received a National Humanities Medal for her literary works.

Gertrude HimmelfarbIrving Kristolneoconservatism