Milton Himmelfarb, who died January 4 at 87, was a former editor of the American Jewish Year Book and an erudite and witty writer on Judaism, politics, and modernity, whose essays often appeared in Commentary.

He was perhaps best known and certainly most often cited for his observation that American Jews “earn like Episcopalians, but vote like Puerto Ricans.” It was a nice way of formulating the paradox that Jews are perhaps the only significant ethnic group in America not to have become more conservative in its voting patterns as it climbed the economic ladder. In a 1989 essay, Himmelfarb somewhat peevishly labeled them “diehard conservatives” for refusing to vote against Democrats, even when confronted by a presidential candidate like Jesse Jackson, whom a majority of Jews considered an outright anti-Semite.”All that education must have addled their faculties,” Himmelfarb wrote.

Himmelfarb conducted decades of demographic research on voting and marriage patterns while working for the American Jewish Committee, where he served as the director of information and research.

In another well-known essay, titled “No Hitler, No Holocaust,” Himmelfarb assailed historians who chalked up genocide to a vague tendency of Christian culture or other deterministic causes. “Hitler has been disappearing behind abstractions,” he wrote in the 1984 Commentary essay.”Traditions, tendencies, ideas, myths – none of these made Hitler murder the Jews.”Speculating on why some historians would try to assign responsibility elsewhere, he wrote, “That one man made so much difference may be even harder to accept emotionally than intellectually. The disproportionate frightens us. We need to believe that causes are proportionate to effects.”Himmelfarb concluded that Jews had more to fear from anti-Christians (like Hitler) than from Christians, and more from the Christian left than from the Christian right.

If his thought seemed allied with some of what became known as neoconservatism, Himmelfarb was hardly a vocal proponent of that movement’s grander ambitions,but instead exemplified a more ironic stance toward history. “The late Sam Levenson used to say that Jewish kids don’t go to summer camp, they’re sent,” he wrote. “That’s funny. What is less funny is that in 1967, the year when Israel had the impudence to win the Six-Day War, Jews did not leave Poland, they were pushed out.”

Himmelfarb was raised in Brooklyn in an orthodox, Yiddish-speaking household where conversation must have been intense – his sister Gertrude became a prolific historian. He was a bookworm from the beginning, family members said, and excelled at languages. Later in life, he liked to amuse himself by reading classical authors in the original Greek, and investigating gematria, Kabbalistic alphabetic numerology, with the help of a pocket calculator.

After attending Townsend Harris High School, Himmelfarb graduated from City College in 1938. He also received a degree in Hebrew Literature from the Jewish Theological Seminary. He went to work for the American Jewish Committee as a researcher and editor, and stayed there for over 40 years. In 1959, he became editor of the American Jewish Year Book.

In the 1960s, he began writing frequently for the AJC-affiliated Commentary and became known for his droll style in occasionally pugnacious debates. At one point, the newspaper columnist Murray Kempton wrote to complain about “vulgar” and “meanspirited” remarks about white Anglo-Saxon Protestants that had appeared in the magazine under his byline and those of others.”I am not vulgar; I am very refined. Neither am I mean-spirited; I am known far and wide for magnanimity,” was Himmelfarb’s response.

In addressing problems like the lack of youth participation Judaism faced in the 1960s, Himmelfarb in 1968’s Jewish Year Book puckishly suggested proselytizing the African-American community.This would “introduce such a spirit, such verve, and such controversy that a young person would feel he is where something serious is happening … it would be the kind of healthy trouble about which young people could feel: ‘I want in; that looks like a good fight.'” He assailed overzealous modernization that resulted in such devices as “push-button” automatically opening Arks of the Torah. Yet he switched synagogues when he refused to abide increased participation of women.

His father’s death and several months of saying Kaddish at his orthodox temple in White Plains were the inspiration for a 1966 essay, “Going to Shul,” in which Himmelfarb meditated on the uses of ritual and the problems of maintaining morale in the minyan, the 10-man gathering needed for services.

“To think of my father, to recall him, is to hold off his mortality – and because ritual is eloquent, to hold it off still one generation further,” he wrote. “Where has Daddy gone? To shul, to say Kaddish for Grandpa.”

In a style that occasionally echoed Talmudic debate, Himmelfarb was fond of hypothetical questions such as, “What if I were rich and had my own shul?” and “What if no Hitler?” He also worried about the future of the Jews. In a symposium on faith sponsored by Commentary in 1996, he said, “As to the possibility of a large-scale revival, ‘Is any thing too hard for the Lord?’ More probably, there will be – to echo Ninotchka’s sinister justification of Stalin’s purges in the eponymous film, ‘Therrre will be fewerrr but betterrr Rrrussians’ – fewer but better Jews.”

Plagued by an ulcer that kept him out of the armed services during World War II,Himmelfarb – and his family – finally found relief when he underwent an operation in 1965 that allowed him to eat normally for the rest of his life. While evincing the occasional barb in writing or conversation, he was at most times a most placid and scholarly man. Had things been otherwise in the early 1940s, he probably would have found himself a place in academia, but instead spent a part of his career studying and commenting on anti-Semitism. His book “The Jews of Modernity” was published in 1973.

Milton Himmelfarb

Born October 21, 1918, in Brooklyn; died January 4 at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center of complications of treatment for a squamous cell carcinoma; survived by his wife, Judith nee Suskind; seven children, Martha, Edward, Miriam, Anne, Sarah, Naomi, Dan; and 12 grandchildren.