Gertrude Himmelfarb

Gertrude Himmelfarb, a historian of ideas who applied cool intelligence and elegant writing to making the case that Victorian-era morals should invigorate contemporary social policies, died on Monday night December 30 2019 at her home in Washington. She was 97. Her son, the writer and commentator William Kristol, said the cause was congestive heart failure. As a public intellectual, she became a heroine to conservatives and a bête noire of liberals, particularly for her arguments that a little more virtuousness trumps any number of government social programs. Ms. Himmelfarb was long married to Irving Kristol, who was often called the godfather of neoconservatism, and her histories coalesced with his journalistic polemics to make them, as a couple, a double-barreled force as the United States became more conservative in the 1970s and ’80s. Ms. Himmelfarb was a member of an accomplished intellectual clan that sprung from working-class roots. Her brother, Milton Himmelfarb, who died in 2006, was an essayist known for his observations on Jewish affairs. Mr. Kristol, through his writing and editing of journals like Commentary and Encounter, helped forge what came to be called neoconservatism, an intellectual movement begun by disillusioned liberals. Their son, Bill Kristol, was the founding editor of The Weekly Standard, the influential conservative periodical published from 1995 to 2018. Their daughter, Elizabeth Nelson, has written for conservative publications. Ms. Himmelfarb went on to Brooklyn College, where she completed a triple major in history, economics and philosophy. She simultaneously studied Judaic literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary. She met Mr. Kristol, at the time a committed leftist, at a meeting of Trotskyists in Brooklyn when she was 18. Mr. Kristol died in 2009. In addition to her son and daughter, she is survived by five grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.