Gertrude Himmelfarb died on December 30th of 2019 in the Watergate apartment she and her husband Irving Kristol had made their home after leaving New York in 1987. She was 97.
Both, though in rather different ways, were major influences on American public discourse and thus natural adornments to the capital’s intellectual life. But they were also quintessential New York intellectuals as well as part of its greatest generation, the one matured in economic depression and world war, rising to influence during the tense, troubled peace that followed. This brilliant circle, or at least those within it who didn’t succumb to utopian temptations, midwifed the birth of the National Association of Scholars. Though the NAS now has a nationwide reach and flavor, the organization’s founders, and its foundational principles, took their inspiration from these cognoscenti. Most were Jewish, most
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