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The cause was congestive heart failure, said her son, William Kristol.
Himmelfarb was a respected scholar of the Victorian age whose writings on British political and cultural figures became guideposts for the growing conservative backlash against liberal values of the 1960s.
She, her husband and their son, William, a co-founder and editor of the now-defunct Weekly Standard, made up what became known as the first family of neoconservatism, a school of thought that sought a more assertive U.S. foreign policy and realignment of American social values.
Irving Kristol, who died in 2009, was an essayist and an editor of several influential journals, including Commentary, Encounter and the Public Interest, to which Himmelfarb often contributed elegant, forceful essays.
Her husband delivered the famous thumbnail definition of a neoconservative as a liberal who had been "mugged by reality." Where Irving Kristol was a polemicist with a gift for aphorism, his wife was a more deliberate thinker, pondering issues of history, ethics and personal responsibility.
Beginning in the early 1950s, Himmelfarb published a series of well-regarded books about 19th-century British intellectual history and political and cultural figures. She advanced the notion that the Victorians, with their rigorous standards of morality, hard work, self-reliance and public rectitude - and the British Empire's muscular economic and military presence - should be a model for modern American life and public policy.
Himmelfarb and her husband fashioned their ideas in spirited response to the liberal social norms that emerged in the 1960s, seeing their mission as an ideological war.
"For Victorians, virtues were fixed and certain," Himmelfarb wrote in her 1994 book "The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values."
"They were the standards against which behavior could and should be measured. When conduct fell short of those standards, it was judged in moral terms as bad, wrong or evil - not, as is more often the case today, as misguided, undesirable or (the most recent corruption of the moral vocabulary) 'inappropriate.' "
In more than a dozen books, she explored the Victorians' "moral imagination" - the title of her 2006 book and a term she borrowed from Edmund Burke, the 18th-century political philosopher who was a key influence on conservative thought. Himmelfarb's ideas were woven into modern conservative views on work, welfare, poverty, economics, religion, education, crime, military engagement and race relations.
"She was a pivotal figure in the neoconservative movement and more academically rigorous than Irving Kristol," Jacob Heilbrunn, author of "They Knew They Were Right," a history of the neoconservatives, said in an interview. "She pounded home the theme of moral responsibility through her books on Victorian values. She transferred that ethos to the United States - that welfare and the Great Society promoted values that were antithetical to the needs of the underclass and that measures taken to help the underclass were, in fact, hurting it."
Neoconservative ideas advocated by Himmelfarb and her husband gained perhaps their widest influence after the 1980 election of President Ronald Reagan, through such presidential advisers as William Bennett, Elliott Abrams, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle.
The philosophy was developed in the 1960s, when Irving Kristol was editor of the Public Interest, and took its name from a 1973 article in Dissent magazine by sociologist Michael Harrington. It differed from earlier forms of conservatism by being a self-consciously intellectual movement that emphasized a robust form of American triumphalism and leadership, rather than focusing on isolationism and the threat of communism.
There was also a strong undercurrent of Jewish identity among neoconservatives, whose members included not just Kristol and Himmelfarb but other Jewish intellectuals, such as Nathan Glazer, Norman Podhoretz and Kristol's co-editor of the Public Interest, Daniel Bell.
"The neoconservatives would play a surprising role in propagating nostalgia for the English aristocracy," Heilbrunn wrote in "They Knew They Were Right," "supposed by them to be a kind of benign ceremonial caste that might have been stuffy and hidebound but had never frozen out the Jews the way the WASPs back home had."
Early in her career, Himmelfarb was regarded as a dispassionate and discerning scholar who, as Harvard University historian John Clive wrote in 1968, "possesses in full measure one of the chief virtues of any successful intellectual historian: the ability to ask the right questions."
Skeptics pointed out that, in praise of the Victorian age, she wrote almost exclusively about the era's political and commercial elite and seldom addressed the concerns of ordinary people or the social and racial problems arising from British imperialism.
Over time, she and other neoconservative thinkers were largely defined by what they opposed: the "grievous moral disorder," as she called it, wrought by campus radicals and the Great Society federal aid programs of the 1960s. In her essays, Himmelfarb grew more strident in her antipathy toward postmodern academic trends, affirmative action, feminism and liberalism in general.
"Virtues are very hard," she told the Chicago Tribune in 1995. "Vices are easy to come by. Once young people had the leisure and money to indulge themselves, it was almost inevitable that they do it."
"Self-discipline is important for the upper classes, especially today in an affluent, consumerist, very highly individualistic society, where it is so easy to be self-indulgent materially, morally and sexually," she said in 1995. "It is very important for the working classes and should be for what is now called the underclass."
As a leading ideologue of neoconservatism, Himmelfarb became an intellectual heroine of former House speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., and Karl Rove, a leading adviser to President George W. Bush. The reception accorded her books seemed increasingly, even reflexively, colored by the political predilections of her readers. Conservative publications gushed over Himmelfarb, while others saw her as increasingly rigid and mean-spirited.
"The intellect on display here is about the caliber of the village biddy who sticks her blue nose into everyone else's business, offering opinions nobody asked for about how everybody else should live," wrote critic Charles Taylor, reviewing Himmelfarb's book "One Nation, Two Cultures" for Salon.com in 2000. "What did conservatives do before they had the '60s to blame?"
Gertrude Himmelfarb was born Aug. 8, 1922, in Brooklyn. Her father was a glass manufacturer, her mother a homemaker. An older brother, Milton, was an essayist and director of research for the American Jewish Committee.
Like many other young New Yorkers raised in the crucible of the Depression, Himmelfarb, who was known to friends as "Bea," had Communist leanings in her youth. She and Kristol were part of the New York Intellectuals, a group clustered around the Partisan Review and other small magazines known for intense disputes over politics and literature.
"We really read Marx," Himmelfarb later said. "We didn't just bandy around slogans. We argued vigorously."
She graduated from Brooklyn College in 1942 and married Kristol the same year. She then studied at the University of Chicago, receiving a master's degree in history in 1944 and a doctorate in 1950.
During the late 1940s and early 1950s, she and her husband lived in England, where she did research at the University of Cambridge and he became an editor of Encounter magazine, a cultural journal secretly funded by the CIA. Both became lifelong Anglophiles.
Himmelfarb gave hints of an intellectual shift as early as 1950, with an article in Commentary magazine, "Prophets of the New Conservatism." Her first book, about the 19th-century British political figure Lord Acton, appeared in 1952, followed by studies of other scientific and social theorists, including Charles Darwin, Thomas Malthus, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Carlyle and Adam Smith.
She was an independent scholar until 1965, when she joined the faculty of New York's City College and later taught at City University of New York's graduate school. She and her husband moved to Washington in 1987.
In addition to several essay collections, she published "The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot" (2009), about the 19th-century author's novel "Daniel Deronda," and "The People of the Book" (2011), about British acceptance of Jewish ideas and people.
Himmelfarb and her husband lived at the Watergate complex in Washington until his death at 89. In addition to their son, of McLean, Virginia, survivors include a daughter, Elizabeth Kristol Nelson of Charlottesville; five grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.
Himmelfarb continued to write into her 90s, never losing her sharp edge or the trenchant quality of her prose, as she sought to use history to illuminate the current age.
"Great minds are great for all time, not only for their own time," she wrote in her 2017 book "Past and Present." "Truth does not change; only beliefs do."
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