A crowd filled the New York Hilton for the America-Israel Friendship League’s Partners for Democracy Award Dinner on Tuesday night. Numerous diplomats, consul generals, and politicians were in attendance. To give a sense of the range: There was a state senator from Georgia, Don Balfour; Connecticut’s attorney general, Richard Blumenthal; New York City Comptroller William Thompson Jr., and Rep. Gregory Meeks.

Comverse Technology Incorporated CEO Kobi Alexander, Active International CEO Alan Elkin, and Israel Aircraft Industries CEO Moshe Keret were each awarded the Partners for Democracy Award. AIFL executive vice president Ilana Artman received the first Herbert Tenzer Lifetime Achievement Award, named for the late congressman and philanthropist who was the first AIFL president. She said she considered her work for AIFL a labor of love.

Israel’s permanent representative to the United Nations, Dan Gillerman, said he realized his speech was the last thing separating the audience from dessert and heading home. So he began by quoting the wit of Adlai Stevenson: “My job is to speak, yours is to listen. If you finish your job before I finish mine, you’re free to leave.”

Ambassador Gillerman spoke of several recent hopeful signs at the United Nations, an organization that once adopted a resolution equating Zionism with racism. He said the assembly unanimously passed an Israel-sponsored resolution promoting Holocaust education and remembrance – and included a budget for teaching and outreach. He spoke of the unprecedented playing of the Israeli national anthem at the United Nations in conjunction with a special session of the General Assembly in January that marked the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camps.

Upcoming AIFL events include a delegation of U.S. state attorneys general traveling to Israel next month. Robert Abrams, a former Attorney General of New York and Lynne Ross, executive director of the National Association of Attorneys General, will accompany the group.

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A WRISTON LECTURE WITH HUMOR

The McCormick professor of jurisprudence at Princeton, Robert P. George, says the secret to his success as a campus conservative is “roughly equal parts charm and aggression.” Mr. George displayed both on Tuesday night when he delivered the Manhattan Institute’s annual Wriston Lecture to a crowd of more than 300 people gathered at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel.

The humor, albeit somewhat grim, came in Mr. George’s references to student ignorance – not at Princeton, he took pains to emphasize – including that of one student who claimed that “Magellan had circumcised the globe with a 38-foot clipper.” Also in Mr. George’s aside, delivered with impeccable timing, after repeating the saying that “anti-Catholicism is the anti-Semitism of the intellectuals,” he noted that on campuses these days, “Anti-Semitism itself is making something of a run at being the anti-Semitism of the intellectuals.”

The aggression came in Mr. George’s insistent exhortation to the crowd of conservative donors and intellectuals “not to give up on the universities.”

“They are worth fighting for,” he said. “The reason is simple. They have the students.”

He acknowledged that the situation on campus is dire but said it wasn’t enough to just curse the darkness. “We have to light candles,” he said.

The three previous Wriston lectures – by Secretary of State Rice, George Will, and Victor Davis Hanson – had all in one way or another addressed the foreign policy and terrorism-related questions that rose to the fore after September 11, 2001. Mr. George’s remarks, which focused on the importance of educating students about the American founders’ principles of limited government and federalism, marked a return to the domestic agenda. But even Mr. George made reference to Iraqi men and women risking their lives to vote, comparing them to the American founders.

During the question and answers that followed the lecture, Robert George the Princeton professor took a question from Robert George, the editorial writer of the New York Post.

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AROUND TOWN While they say charity begins at home, on Tuesday night good works seemed to be happening all over town – with socialites contributing and celebrating at several fund-raisers. Dr. Ruth Westheimer and the Today Show’s Al Roker and Ann Curry were among those crowded into Cipriani’s to raise money for NYU’s Child Study Center for research in childhood psychiatric illnesses … Landmarks maven Kent Barwick elected to go to Christie’s. Mingling among paintings by Milton Avery and Asher Durand were supporters of the Alliance for the Arts’s Robert F. Wagner, Jr. Fellowship for Public Policy and the Arts. “I’m here because of friendship for Bob Wagner,” Mr. Barwick explained. “He was one of the great men of the city, and I want to support the fellowships to train cultural policy leaders that the alliance sponsors in his name.”… Guests of Honor Julia and David Koch introduced their son David Jr. at the Food Allergy Initiative benefit at the Pierre. Allergic to peanuts, eggs, milk, cats, dogs, and horses, young David exemplifies the FAI’s dedicated cause.

gshapiro@nysun.com