Milton Himmelfarb, RIP

Our friends at Commentary are mourning the death of Milton Himmelfarb, a former contributing editor of the magazine, by posting (in pdf) many of his articles that graced the pages of Commentary for five decades. Brother of Gertrude Himmelfarb and uncle to Bill Kristol, Milton Himmelfarb was a brilliant intellectual and scholar whose scintillating and groundbreaking essays on Jews, Judaism, American life, and secular modernity were early harbingers of much neoconservative thought.
It was Himmelfarb who coined the phrase that Jews live like Episcopalians but vote like Puerto Ricans — and who explained the political significance of that fact. Himmelfarb’s articles, on topics from religion and the public square to Leo Strauss to the Jewish romance with modern liberalism, are both timely and stand the test of time. They are well worth a look.

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