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The poor were closer to the kingdom of God.īut with the economic growth fueled by industrialization, the possibility of reducing poverty became apparent. Christianity offered a clear response: Christ was in the poor and in service to the poor. For most of human history, poverty was an inevitable fact of life. One burning question was how a decent person should regard poverty. Read: Three decades ago, America lost its religion.
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Britain in the 19th century, like America in the 20th century, was losing its religious faith and searching for a moral code to replace it. It’s easy to see why the period attracted her. She became a historian of Victorian England, eventually one of the most eminent in the world. Himmelfarb focused her attention there, too, on the moral imagination. To understand a nation, you have to understand its literary and moral imagination-the way artists and writers reflect the times, the way the greatest minds of the day express their ideals and spread beliefs. Trilling believed that the manners, mores, and morals of a nation touch people everywhere, while politics touches people only in some places, and so morals are more important than day-to-day politics. Himmelfarb’s great hero, and in some ways the de facto leader of that circle, was Lionel Trilling, the one Jew in Columbia University’s English department. Himmelfarb was one of the last remaining members of that set, and her passing marks the dusk of what was arguably the high-water mark of American intellectual life. Himmelfarb and Kristol were part of all that-the earthshaking essays, the feuds, public statements, and cocktails. It meant wrestling with the big questions, upholding the high ideals, and using the power of ideas to shape the mental life of the nation. The intellectual vocation, Irving Howe wrote, meant standing up for values that have no currency in commercial culture. They were more of a secular priesthood than today. Intellectuals played a different role then. Auden, Mary McCarthy, Robert Lowell, Norman Podhoretz, T. So she found some roommates, including Saul Bellow.Īfter the war, she and Kristol went back to New York and joined the New York Intellectual set that surrounded Partisan Review, the small powerhouse magazine that published figures such as James Baldwin, W. Kristol, who’d trailed out to Chicago with her, was drafted into the Army. “The future was not something I worried about, because I wasn’t sure I was going to have a future,” she told The University of Chicago Magazine decades later. World War II was raging the Holocaust was her daily obsession and horror the atmosphere was apocalyptic. She was a woman, a Jew, and a New Yorker. She went to the University of Chicago for graduate school and was told that she would never get an academic job. At a Trotskyite gathering, she met her husband, Irving Kristol. She made it into Brooklyn College, where she amassed enough credits to have majored in history, economics, and philosophy, while taking the subway at night up to the Jewish Theological Seminary and earning a simultaneous degree there. Her father cut glass and sold engraved saucers and jars to department stores, going bankrupt a few times during the Depression. Her parents immigrated from Russia and spoke Yiddish at home. Himmelfarb was born in 1922 and grew up with her parents and brother in a one-bedroom apartment in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. She was a physician for the national soul. (Sylvia Johnson)Įconomists measure economic change and journalists describe political change, but who captures moral change? Who captures the shifts in manners, values, and mores, how each era defines what is admirable and what is disgraceful? Gertrude Himmelfarb, who died at 97 last night, made this her central concern. You need to live a little too.Gertrude Himmelfarb, also known as Bea Kristol, spent much of her time thinking about and writing on the moral questions of the Victorian era.
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