Milton Himmelfarb: Wry Essayist, 87, Dies
Milton Himmelfarb, a leading essayist for Commentary and other publications who was known for his well wrought and witty observations on Jewish affairs, died on Jan. 4 at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan. He was 87 and lived in White Plains.
The cause was complications of skin cancer, his nephew William Kristol said.
Mr. Himmelfarb was a member of an astonishingly accomplished intellectual clan with working-class and liberal roots that evolved into neoconservative royalty. His younger sister, Gertrude Himmelfarb, is a historian of Victorian thought who has criticized the distortion of American scholarship by deconstruction and other fashionable schools of thought. His brother-in-law, Irving Kristol, is a founder of neo-conservatism; and his nephew is the founding editor of the influential conservative periodical The Weekly Standard....
Perhaps Mr. Himmelfarb's best-known essay was "No Hitler, No Holocaust," published in a 1984 issue of Commentary, in which he confronted historians who attributed the Holocaust to larger socioeconomic forces and shrugged off the role of demonic individuals.
"Hitler willed and ordered the Holocaust, and was obeyed," he wrote. "Traditions, tendencies, ideas, myths - none of these made Hitler murder the Jews. All that history, all those forces and influences could have been the same and Hitler could as easily, more easily, not have murdered the Jews."
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The cause was complications of skin cancer, his nephew William Kristol said.
Mr. Himmelfarb was a member of an astonishingly accomplished intellectual clan with working-class and liberal roots that evolved into neoconservative royalty. His younger sister, Gertrude Himmelfarb, is a historian of Victorian thought who has criticized the distortion of American scholarship by deconstruction and other fashionable schools of thought. His brother-in-law, Irving Kristol, is a founder of neo-conservatism; and his nephew is the founding editor of the influential conservative periodical The Weekly Standard....
Perhaps Mr. Himmelfarb's best-known essay was "No Hitler, No Holocaust," published in a 1984 issue of Commentary, in which he confronted historians who attributed the Holocaust to larger socioeconomic forces and shrugged off the role of demonic individuals.
"Hitler willed and ordered the Holocaust, and was obeyed," he wrote. "Traditions, tendencies, ideas, myths - none of these made Hitler murder the Jews. All that history, all those forces and influences could have been the same and Hitler could as easily, more easily, not have murdered the Jews."