Гертруда Химмельфарб: Историк моральных ценностей и викторианской эпохи.

American historian (1922–2019)

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.

Himmelfarb was born in Brooklyn, New York, the daughter of Bertha (née Lerner) and Max Himmelfarb, both of Russian Jewish background. 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 the University of Cambridge 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”. She was long involved in Jewish conservative intellectual circles. 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, and a member of the American Philosophical Society. 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.

Himmelfarb was best known as a historian of Victorian England. Himmelfarb argued "for the reintroduction of traditional values such as shame, responsibility, chastity, and self reliance, into American political life and policy making". In an obituary, David Brooks described Himmelfarb as "The Historian of Moral Revolution".