Gertrude Himmelfarb on Recovering the Virtues That Once Undergirded Civil Society

Historian Gertrude Himmelfarb passed away Dec. 30, 2019, at age 97. 

In an editorial tribute, The Wall Street Journal wrote that she was "known for rigorous scholarship, brilliant essays, and her forceful defense of morality in democratic politics," 

Her books include Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians (Knopf, 1991) and The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values (Knopf, 1995).

Gertrude Himmelfarb was born in 1922 in Brooklyn, New York. She went on to study at England's Cambridge University and New York's Jewish Theological Seminary before earning her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1950.

Himmelfarb (also known as Bea Kristol) was married to the influential editor and essayist Irving Kristol from 1942 until his death in 2009.

The address was recorded in March 1996 at Ashland University in Ohio. It has been condensed slightly for this podcast.

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