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gertrude Himmelfarb, a historian who helped resuscitate the reputation of the Victorians and a public intellectual who shaped neoconservatism, died this week at the age of 97.}:

In a writing career astonishingly long—some seven decades separate her first and final publications—Himmelfarb revealed the complicated ways in which ideas and culture influence one another. And, as she showed in profiles of such figures as Burke and Bagehot, Malthus and Mill, often the best way to understand ideas and culture is through biography, with its untidiness of context and character and contingency.

The revisionist portrait of the Victorians that Himmelfarb painted was far subtler than the popular caricature. We tend to think of the Victorians as pompous prudes. Or as the vain hypocrites whose pretensions Lytton Strachey punctured. Or as the denizens of Dickens’s grim, gray London. But Himmelfarb’s Victorians were passionate seekers, arguing and stumbling their way toward answers to difficult questions: How can we best care for the needy and the sick? How should we prevent crime and punish criminals? How can we cope with the social and economic consequences of rapid technological change? How should the sexes live together? How can we work out the tensions between liberty and democracy? How, in the face of unsettling scientific discoveries, are we to understand ourselves and our place in the world?

All these moral and political questions demand answers of us, too. By explaining the Victorians’ attempts to answer them, Himmelfarb’s many books and essays help us to think more clearly about both the questions and our own answers.

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Himmelfarb was born in Brooklyn in 1922, the second child of Russian Jewish immigrants most comfortable speaking Yiddish. “My parents had no formal education at all, but it was understood from the very beginning that both my brother and I would go to college,” she said in a 1995 C-SPAN interview: 

It was an enormous respect for learning . . . an enormous respect for the book. There was a tradition among Jewish families, and mine was a rather observant Jewish family . . . that when a book of the Bible or the prayer book fell on the floor, you kissed it when you picked it up in order to preserve its kind of purity. I must say, that respect for the book transferred itself to secular books as well. I’m not suggesting that we kiss secular books when we—we’re rather hard on books, in that we annotate them wildly and so on—but there was that respect for the book. There was a respect for learning.

She studied history, philosophy, and economics at Brooklyn College, while also taking classes—as her older brother Milton Himmelfarb had—in Hebrew literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary.

In 1940, she met Irving Kristol, also a Brooklyn-born child of Russian immigrants, at a gathering of the Young People’s Socialist League. She was 18; he was 20; they were both Trotskyists. Kristol described their courtship in a 1995 autobiographical memoir:

At these meetings I noticed a girl . . . who sat quietly at the other end of the small room. Her name was Gertrude Himmelfarb, but she was called “Bea.” She had a trim figure and a strong, handsome face that radiated intelligence and sensibility. I noticed her for some weeks before approaching her and asking her out. In truth, I was already in love with her without even knowing her. She said “yes” quietly. And so we “went out,” which is to say we went to the Saturday night movies . . . and saw only foreign movies since we were cultural snobs.

Six weeks after Pearl Harbor, Himmelfarb and Kristol were married. They would raise two children—William Kristol and Elizabeth Kristol Nelson—and enjoy a long and fruitful intellectual partnership: She advised him on his magazines and other projects, he helped her edit and think through her many books.

Himmelfarb and Kristol had been among the junior associates of the busy, buzzy “New York intellectuals”—the literary critics and political writers, mostly a generation older and mostly big-egoed, associated with Partisan Review. Some of that set, like Lionel and Diana Trilling, would remain their friends for decades. Himmelfarb and Kristol would each write for Partisan Review, but they were more at home in another new “little magazine,” Commentary, where Himmelfarb was a frequent contributor and Kristol was for several years an editor.

Meanwhile, when Himmelfarb interviewed at the University of Chicago for graduate school, her interviewer warned her that “you have three strikes against you,” as she later recalled. “You will never have a teaching job. If you’re entering this program with the expectation of teaching in a university, I want to disabuse you of that. That’s not going to happen.” Strike one: She was a Jew. Strike two: She was a woman. Strike three: She was a New Yorker, “and midwestern colleges had a strong bias against easterners.”

That interviewer, the distinguished historian Louis Gottschalk, who would go on to be Himmelfarb’s mentor at Chicago, was wrong about her teaching career, although maybe not about the geography: She would become a professor and teach for more than two decades at the City University of New York, including Brooklyn College.

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Himmelfarb did not set out to become an authority on the Victorians. “It is with some awe,” she would write, that Americans view the tangled lives and ideas of the Victorian intellectuals. Besides, it wasn’t obvious in the 1940s that there was much left to write about them, since they had written so voluminously about themselves. And a clear-eyed historical assessment was made more difficult by the fact that the Victorian era was not far from living memory—indeed, the last of the late Victorians, such as Winston Churchill and Bertrand Russell, were still active in politics and letters.

It was while working toward her master’s degree in history, with a thesis on Rousseau and the French Revolution, that Himmelfarb first became fascinated by a Victorian intellectual—Lord Acton, the Cambridge historian who had delivered uneven lectures on the revolution. Here was a puzzle: A man of astonishing erudition, fluent in several languages and possessed of a library of some 60,000 volumes, Acton was remembered by posterity only for epigrammatic gems dug out of his scattered lectures and letters—most famously the phrase “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Himmelfarb picked Acton as the subject of her doctoral dissertation. She and Kristol spent part of 1946-47 on a fellowship in Cambridge, where, Kristol would recall, “food was still stringently rationed” and the winter was uncommonly cold: “Poor Bea, who had developed chilblains, had to wear gloves when she worked on the Acton papers lest her bloody fingers stain them.” She edited and in 1948 published a collection of Acton’s writings, and in late 1950 submitted her dissertation.

Himmelfarb explained how Acton’s character had caused his professional tragedy: After decades of labor, he never completed his ambitious History of Liberty—or any other book—because he was too much a perfectionist, too much a completist, too easily drawn into other time-consuming projects.

But Himmelfarb’s goal was to produce “not a biography of a life but the biography of a mind.” Acton, she wrote, was a man of his own times yet in a sense also “one of our great contemporaries,” an improbable combination of a “high moralist and man of the world.” On the great subjects that occupied him—politics and religion, liberty and morality—his ideas evolved as he aged. In his twenties, he had admired Edmund Burke’s un-idealistic conservatism; by his forties, he had begun to embrace natural law and ideal politics. A devout Catholic, he found odious the notion of papal infallibility. (It was in the context of a debate about the papacy that he wrote his famous “power corrupts” line Once convinced that liberty and morality were inseparable from religion, in time he came to see moral wisdom in George Eliot’s brand of atheism.}:

Acton was a conservative liberal, a liberal conservative, and a deeply pessimistic optimist. He may have been doomed to leave his magnum opus unfinished, but his thoughts, with their seeming paradoxes intact, at last appeared in book form when Himmelfarb’s judicious dissertation was published in 1952.

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Kristol and Himmelfarb spent much of the 1950s in England, where he was busy launching and editing the monthly journal Encounter. As a result of Himmelfarb’s Acton biography, “she was of interest to the British,” Kristol recalled. The couple befriended British conservative thinkers, including Malcolm Muggeridge and Michael Oakeshott, as well as several “older Jewish ex-radicals.”

Busy though the couple was raising their two small children—being able to afford an au pair helped—Himmelfarb still tackled her next big project, an intellectual biography of Charles Darwin and an account of how his ideas were received. Published in 1959, the centennial of On the Origin of Species, Himmelfarb’s Darwin book is that rare thing: a 400-pager that feels half as long. Aspects of her interpretation of evolutionary theory have justifiably been criticized, but the book remains a wonderful introduction to the Victorian debate over Darwin’s ideas.

A description that Himmelfarb pinned on Lord Acton—“an unsystematic although profound thinker”—could be applied to her, too. She was certainly profound; her Acton and Darwin books are evidence enough of that. And she was unsystematic in two senses. First, she was suspicious of systematic new approaches to historical scholarship, like using social-science methodologies or focusing narrowly on race, class, or gender. As she argued in The New History and the Old (1987), these approaches, when taken to extremes, turn history into ideology.

Second, Himmelfarb was unsystematic in that her writings did not unfold according to a grand plan. She was guided by her shifting interests, and by the opportunities of reviewing books for Commentary, The New Republic, and The American Scholar. Several of Himmelfarb’s books are largely made up of these review-essays, including the dozen or so biographies in The Moral Imagination (2006), each a glimmering mother-of-pearl cameo.

Among Himmelfarb’s many learned books on the Victorians and their forebears and successors, the finest is the two-volume work The Idea of Poverty (1983) and Poverty and Compassion (1991). She critiques Malthusianism—the “de-moralized” economics that Dickens famously put in the mouth of Ebenzer “decrease the surplus population” Scrooge. She explains the evolution of Victorian thinking about the poor, morality, and reform. And she pinpoints the origins of concepts we take for granted, such as the “poverty line.” These two books are an extraordinary achievement, showing Himmelfarb’s considerable powers in peak form.

The concluding lines of Poverty and Compassion could respectably serve as a summary of much of Himmelfarb’s body of work:

The Victorians have no solutions for our problems, if only because their problems are not ours. Today it requires a strenuous exercise of the moral imagination to recover the sensibility that came so naturally to them. To make that effort, to try to understand them as they understood themselves, is to understand ourselves better than we have done of late.

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It is worth taking a moment to discuss Himmelfarb’s writerly craft and style.

When reading the work of some historians, it is obvious that they have put everything they have learned into the book or article, cramming in every last morsel of fact and wafer of conjecture. They lack the judgment or confidence to hold back.

That was not Himmelfarb’s way. When reading her work, you get the sense that just a fraction of what she knew made it into print, that there are hidden depths to her knowledge and analysis. What does show up on the page is evenhanded and prudently caveated.

As could be expected of an inveterate reviser—“I rewrite constantly, compulsively”—her prose is precise and tightly controlled, but still inviting. She never indulges in flamboyance. And her wit is cracklingly dry. (A notable exception is a hilarious short piece lamenting the decline of the footnote, and even that argument is only partly playful.)

It may be that her eminently clear writing style owed something to the negative example of Lord Acton, who for many years wrote only for fellow academics, producing work “absolutely unintelligible” to ordinary readers, as Himmelfarb noted in her dissertation.

I don’t know if it’s unfair to Acton to say that his scholarly prose revealed something about his character. But as a longtime reader, one-time editor, and friend of Himmelfarb’s, I can say that the elegance and exactness of her writing revealed a great deal about her character.

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In a provocative 2014 article in National Affairs, Jonathan Bronitsky argued that Gertrude Himmelfarb was more central to the origins of neoconservatism than is generally understood. Long before Irving Kristol cofounded *The Public Interest* in 1965, he was learning from, and thinking alongside, his wife—about Burke and Smith and liberty and society and human nature. “I am astonished how intellectually twinned Bea and I have been over the years,” Irving would later write, “pursuing different subjects while thinking the same thoughts and reaching the same conclusions.”

The influence of Himmelfarb’s ideas on neoconservatism, and conservatism more generally, was readily apparent by the 1980s and ’90s. Although she rarely wrote about contemporary policy, her examination of the virtues prized by the Victorians and her concern about the “de-moralizing” of our own day shaped generations of conservative thinkers, writers, and policy analysts.

In 1987, the Kristols retired from teaching and quit New York for Washington, D.C., not only for reasons of family and friends but because “New York intellectual and cultural life,” as Irving put it, was becoming “ever more parochial and sterile,” while Washington “has witnessed a surge of intellectual vitality” and “inches along toward greater hospitality toward the life of the mind.” In this new scene and stage of life, Himmelfarb became more productive, publishing books and essays at a rapid clip all through the 1990s.

After Irving died in 2009, and even into her nineties as health ailments increasingly confined her to home, Himmelfarb continued to write—and I got a chance to work with her. In 2014, she wrote a piece, short and sharp, about Thomas Henry Huxley for the quarterly journal I edited, The New Atlantis. Like everybody else running little magazines, I kept in my head a list of writers I dreamed of editing; she had long been on it.

But then, unexpectedly, we became friends. I was told that Bea needed occasional tech support—nothing too tricky—and I volunteered so I could visit with her. Off and on over the next few years, I’d leave my office, stroll across town to her book-lined apartment, spend a few minutes fixing a Windows error or some printer problem, and then just sit for an hour listening and chatting. Bea was a wonderful conversationalist, strong of memory and formidable of opinion. We’d talk about Henry James and Jane Austen, Disraeli and Churchill, the New York intellectuals, the majesty of elephants, and—always this—little magazines: the best of yesterday and the need for better ones now.

We’d talk, too, about her old friends, like Lionel Trilling. In the introduction to one of her collections, Himmelfarb offered a touching tribute to her late friend. She noted his “seriousness about ideas that was not ‘academic,’” his “seriousness about public affairs that went beyond (or stopped short of) politics in the ordinary sense,” and his “moral gravitas.”

Himmelfarb was right to praise Trilling for these rare qualities. But she was wrong to say they were “uniquely his.” They were hers as well.

Gertrude Himmelfarb, Selected Essays

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Gertrude Himmelfarb (August 8, 1922 – December 30, 2019), also known as Bea Kristol, was an American historian. She was a leader of conservative interpretations of history and historiography. She wrote extensively on intellectual history, with a focus on Great Britain and the Victorian era, as well as on contemporary society and culture.

Contents

Background

Himmelfarb was born in Brooklyn, New York, the daughter of Bertha (née Lerner) and Max Himmelfarb, both of Russian Jewish background.[4] She received her undergraduate degree from Brooklyn College in 1942 and her doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1950. Himmelfarb later went on to study at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom, and the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York.

In 1942, she married Irving Kristol, known as the "godfather" of neoconservatism, and had two children, Elizabeth Nelson and William Kristol, a political commentator and editor of The Weekly Standard. She never changed her last name. Sociologist Daniel Bell wrote that theirs was "the best marriage of our generation" and her husband wrote that he was “astonished how intellectually twinned” the two were “pursuing different subjects while thinking the same thoughts and reaching the same conclusions”.[5]

She was long involved in Jewish conservative intellectual circles.[6] Professor Emerita at the Graduate School of the City University of New York, she was the recipient of many awards and honorary degrees. She served on the Council of Scholars of the Library of Congress, the Council of Academic Advisors of the American Enterprise Institute, and the Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities. She was a Fellow of the British Academy and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1991, she delivered the Jefferson Lecture under the auspices of the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2004, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by the president of the United States of America. She died on December 30, 2019 at the age of 97.[7]

Historiography

Himmelfarb long nurtured the neoconservative movement in U.S. politics and intellectual life; her husband, Irving Kristol, helped found the movement.[8]

Himmelfarb was a leading defender of traditional historical methods and practices. Her book, The New History and the Old (published in 1987 and revised and expanded in 2004), is a critique of the varieties of "new history" that have sought to displace the old. The "New Histories" she critiqued include: quantitative history that presumes to be more "scientific" than conventional history, but relies on partial and dubious data;[9] Marxist historiography derived from economic assumptions and class models that leave little room for the ideas and beliefs of contemporaries or the protagonists and events of history;[10] psychoanalytic history dependent on theories and speculations that violate the accepted criteria of historical evidence;[11] analytic history that reduces history to a series of isolated "moments" with no overriding narrative structure;[12] social history, "history from the bottom", that denigrates the role of politics, nationality, and individuals (the "great men" of history);[13][14][15] and, later, postmodernist history, which denies even the ideal of objectivity, viewing all of history as a "social construct" on the part of the historian.[16]

Himmelfarb criticized A.J.P. Taylor for seeking to "demoralize" history in his 1961 book The Origins of the Second World War, and for refusing to recognize "moral facts" about interwar Europe.[17] Himmelfarb maintained that Taylor was wrong to treat Adolf Hitler as a "normal" German leader playing by the traditional rules of diplomacy in The Origins of the Second World War, instead of being a "world-historical" figure such as Napoleon.[17]

Himmelfarb energetically rejected postmodern academic approaches:

[Postmodernism in history] is a denial of the objectivity of the historian, of the factuality or reality of the past, and thus of the possibility of arriving at any truths about the past. For all disciplines it induces a radical skepticism, relativism, and subjectivism that denies not this or that truth about any subject but the very idea of truth – that denies even the ideal of truth, truth is something to aspire to even if it can never be fully attained.[18]

Ideas

Himmelfarb was best known as a historian of Victorian England, but she put that period in a larger context.[19] Her book, The Idea of Poverty, opens with an extended analysis of Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus, who helped shape debate and policies through much the nineteenth century and beyond. Nominated for the National Book Award,[20] Victorian Minds features such eighteenth-century "proto-Victorians" as Edmund Burke and Jeremy Bentham, concluding with the "last Victorian", John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir, whose novels depict a twentieth-century imbued with Victorian values. The Moral Imagination ranges from Burke to Winston Churchill and Lionel Trilling, with assorted Victorians and non-Victorians in between. On Looking into the Abyss has modern culture and society in the forefront and the Victorians in the background, while One Nation, Two Cultures is entirely about American culture and society. The Roads to Modernity enlarges the perspective of the Age of Enlightenment, both chronologically and nationally, placing the British Enlightenment in opposition to the French and in accord with the American. The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot and The People of the Book focus on attitudes to Jews, Judaism, and Zionism in England from their readmission in the seventeenth century to the present.

In scores of essays she demonstrated that Victorian "values" ("virtues", she calls them) were not unique to that time and place. "The Victorian Ethos: Before and after Victoria" is the title of one essay;[21] "Victorianism before Victoria" are the opening words of another.[22] Today, the word "Victorian" may have a disagreeable and crabbed connotation, conjuring up repressive sexual and social mores. Himmelfarb humanized and democratized that concept. In an interview after receiving the National Humanities Medal, she explained that the Victorian virtues – prudence, temperance, industriousness, decency, responsibility – were thoroughly pedestrian. "They depended on no special breeding, talent, sensibility, or even money. They were common, everyday virtues, within the capacity of ordinary people. They were the virtues of citizens, not of heroes or saints – and of citizens of democratic countries, not aristocratic ones".[23] Himmelfarb has argued "for the reintroduction of traditional values (she prefers the term 'virtues'), such as shame, responsibility, chastity, and self-reliance, into American political life and policy-making".[24]

While she is identified in America as a conservative, in Britain people on the left admire her work. One of her most outspoken admirers is Gordon Brown, the former Labour Party Prime Minister. His introduction to the British edition of Roads to Modernity opens: "I have long admired Gertrude Himmelfarb's historical work, in particular her love of the history of ideas, and her work has stayed with me ever since I was a history student at Edinburgh University."[25]

In an obituary, David Brooks described Himmelfarb as "The Historian of Moral Revolution".[26]

Bibliography

This list is incomplete; you can help by adding missing items with reliable sources.

Books...

Lord Acton: A Study of Conscience and Politics (1952) OCLC 3011425

    Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (1959) online free

    Victorian Minds (1968) OCLC 400777

    On Liberty and Liberalism: The Case of John Stuart Mill (1974) OCLC 805020

    The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (1984) online free

    Marriage and Morals Among the Victorians (1986) online free

    The New History and the Old (1987, 2004) online free

    Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians (1991) online free

    On Looking into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society (1994) online free

    The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values (1995) OCLC 30474640

    One Nation, Two Cultures (1999) OCLC 40830208

    Himmelfarb, Gertrude (2008) [2004], The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments, OCLC 53091118

    The Moral Imagination: From Edmund Burke to Lionel Trilling (2006) OCLC 61109330

    The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot (2009) OCLC 271080989

    The People of the Book: Philosemitism in England, from Cromwell to Churchill (Encounter Books, 2011) OCLC 701019524

    Past and present : the challenges of modernity, from the pre-Victorians to the postmodernists. Encounter Books. 2017.

Edited

    Lord Acton, Essays on Freedom and Power (Free Press, 1948) OCLC 1052339

    Milton Himmelfarb, Jews and Gentiles (Encounter Books, 2007) OCLC 70883212

    Irving Kristol, The Neoconservative Persuasion (Basic Books, 2011) online free

    Thomas Robert Malthus, Essay on Population (Modern Library, 1960) OCLC 4901335

    John Stuart Mill, Essays on Politics and Culture (Doubleday, 1962) OCLC 193217

    John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (Penguin, 1974) OCLC 1941475

    Alexis de Tocqueville, Memoir on Pauperism (Ivan Dee, 1997) OCLC 36719602

    The Spirit of the Age: Victorian Essays (Yale University Press, 2007) OCLC 171111099

Critical studies and reviews of Himmelfarb's work

Past and present

    Mingardi, Alberto (January–February 2018). "Gertrude Himmelfarb and the resonance of history". Quadrant. 62 (1–2 [543]): 18–21.

References

    Brooks, David (December 31, 2019). "The Historian of Moral Revolution". The Atlantic. Retrieved January 1, 2020.

External links

    Himmelfarb, Gertrude (March 9, 1995). "The De-Moralization of Society" (interview). Booknotes 1995. Interviewed by Brian Lamb. C-SPAN. Archived from the original on July 5, 2012. Retrieved February 9, 2014.

    Appearances on C-SPAN

    Conway, Jill Ker; Denby, David; Edmundson, Mark; Foote, Shelby; Friedman, Milton; Giovanni, Nikki; Himmelfarb, Gertrude; Hitchens, Christopher (October 27, 2004). "Book Discussion on Why Read?". Booknotes. Retrieved February 9, 2014. also Paul Johnson, Brian Lamb, Frank McCourt, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Cornel West, Simon Winchester

    Balch, Stephen; Berns, Walter; Galston, William A.; Gitlin, Todd; Goeglein, Timothy; Himmelfarb, Gertrude; Lenkowsky, Leslie (May 31, 2002). "Higher Education and Democracy". Book TV. National Association of Scholars. Retrieved February 9, 2014.

    Bottum, Joseph; Dannhauser, Werner; Himmelfarb, Gertrude; McGrail, Mary Ann; Weinstein, Kenneth R. (May 18, 2000). "The Legacy of Allan Bloom". Book TV. Hudson Institute. Retrieved February 9, 2014.

    Bork, Robert H.; Dezenhall, Eric; Himmelfarb, Gertrude (October 14, 1999). "The Politics of Personal Destruction". Book TV. Independent Women's Forum. Retrieved February 9, 2014.

    Himmelfarb, Gertrude; Leuchtenburg, William E.; Nasaw, David; Thomas, Inigo (May 16, 1997). "Historian as Public Intellectual". Book TV. City University of New York. Retrieved February 9, 2014.

    Himmelfarb, Gertrude; Kristol, Irving (September 5, 1995). "Book Discussion on Neoconservatism". Book TV. C-SPAN.

    Himmelfarb, Gertrude (February 13, 1995). "From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values". Book TV. American Enterprise Institute: C-SPAN.

    DeMuth, Christopher; Himmelfarb, Gertrude (May 8, 1990). "From Hegel to Marx to Lenin". Book TV. American Enterprise Institute: C-SPAN.

ORWELL AWARD

Historians of Europe

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Gertrude Himmelfarb - Bio | NAS

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Gertrude Himmelfarb - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gertrude_Himmelfarb

Gertrude Himmelfarb (August 8, 1922 - December 30, 2019), also known as Bea Kristol, was an American historian.She was a leader of conservative interpretations of history and historiography. She wrote extensively on intellectual history, with a focus on Great Britain and the Victorian era, as well as on contemporary society and culture.

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A consummate scholar of the first rank, Dr. Himmelfarb was Fellow of the British Academy, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and served on the Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities in the 1980s, Council of Scholars of the Library of Congress until 2008 for nearly a quarter ...

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Gertrude Himmelfarb, influential conservative scholar, dies at 97 A manufacturer's daughter from New York, she was a scholar on Victorian England, forceful voice in the 'culture wars' and ...

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The National Association of Scholars mourns the passing of Foster S. Friess. Foster was a first-generation college graduate, born in Rice Lake, Wisconsin. He was valedictorian, class president, student council president, and captain of the basketball, track, golf, and baseball teams.

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https://blog.acton.org/archives/114086-gertrude-himmelfarb-as-teacher-of-the-free-and-virtuous-society.html

Since the passing of Gertrude Himmelfarb I have been reflecting on just how much she taught me through her voluminous historical scholarship. In this week's Acton Line Podcast I interviewed Yuval Levin, Resident Scholar and Director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at AEI, who was also her student.Levin's recent essay in the National Review, "The Historian as Moralist ...

Gertrude Himmelfarb, scholar of Victorian era and ...

jewishworldreview.com/0120/himmelfarb_obit.php3

Gertrude Himmelfarb was born Aug. 8, 1922, in Brooklyn. Her father was a glass manufacturer, her mother a homemaker. An older brother, Milton, was an essayist and director of research for the ...

Gertrude Himmelfarb, 1922-2019 - The Bulwark

https://thebulwark.com/gertrude-himmelfarb-1922-2019/

Gertrude Himmelfarb, a historian who helped resuscitate the reputation of the Victorians and a public intellectual who shaped neoconservatism, died this week at the age of 97. In a writing career astonishingly long—some seven decades separate her first and final publications—Himmelfarb revealed the complicated ways in…

Gertrude Himmelfarb, renowned Jewish scholar, dies aged 97 ...

https://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/Gertrude-Himmelfarb-renowned-Jewish-scholar-dies-aged-97-612715

Gertrude Himmelfarb, renowned Jewish scholar, dies aged 97 Those in the US tend to hold her as a conservative, but Himmelfarb is admired by those on the Left in the UK. By JERUSALEM POST STAFF .

What To Do About Education: The Universities - Gertrude ...

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/gertrude-himmelfarb/what-to-do-about-education-the-universities/

by Gertrude Himmelfarb. ... Here we may be encouraged by the example of the National Association of Scholars (NAS), an organization of professors dedicated to a more traditional view of the university and expressing that view through conferences, publications, and other activities. Professors who formerly felt too beleaguered to make public ...

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