Isabel Lerner

Isabel Lerner - wife, mother, grandmother, aunt, patron of the arts and devotee of modern design – died peacefully in her sleep on Thursday, May 15, 2025. She was 93.

Born Isabel Lee Isaacs on March 12, 1932, to Hannah Johnson and Lisle Isaacs in Brooklyn, New York, Isabel graduated from Erasmus Hall High School, then worked as a model for a clothing company before marrying fellow Brooklynite Joseph Lerner in 1954. After the first of her three children was born, she took on a new role as a homemaker.

Isabel was a voracious reader who was partial to contemporary literature. She regularly attended ballet performances and the theater, where she was as much a fan of crowd-pleasers like "My Fair Lady" as the most obscure off-off-Broadway Tom Stoppard productions. She discovered and became infatuated with art as an adult, and she prided herself as being among the first to attend challenging new exhibits when they opened at the Museum of Modern Art or the Whitney Museum. She was also an adventurous world traveler whose sojourns took her off the beaten path on four continents.

Isabel's enthusiasm for interior design was showcased when she moved into a high-rise apartment in Whitestone overlooking the water. Rejecting traditional furnishings – and the services of a professional interior designer – she outfitted the unit with what would become mid-century totems, including chrome-and-leather Wassily chairs and a dramatic Castiglioni Arco lamp with a marble base. To camouflage a wall of dining room cabinets, she created a striking floor-to-ceiling laminate mural inspired by the grid-like red-blue-and-yellow paintings of Piet Mondrian.

But even as she indulged her passion for high culture, Isabel was a sports fan par excellence, typically rooting for the favorites – the New York Yankees in her youth, Bjorn Borg in middle age and Tom Brady later in life. She was at Shea Stadium when the New York Mets won the World Series in 1969, and she was in Miami six years later watching her beloved Roger Staubach and the Dallas Cowboys lose to the Pittsburgh Steelers in Super Bowl X.

Isabel was a classic beauty with an unerring sense of fashion, a regal bearing and precise diction. Assertive, sophisticated and uncompromising, she was always willing to demand a better table in a busy restaurant or – in an incident enshrined in family lore – to order playwright Arthur Miller to stop smoking during a revival of "Death of a Salesman". But when it came to family, she was fiercely loyal and ferociously protective. And there was nothing – nothing – that she wouldn't do for her children and grandchildren.

Isabel was preceded in death by her husband, Joe, and her brother, Ed Isaacs. She is survived by her children, Preston, Dorian and Craig; daughters-in-law, Emily Young and Renée Lerner; grandchildren, Anna, Elias and Maria Lerner; sisters-in-law, Dorine Lerner and Edith Isaacs; nieces and nephew, Tammy Russeck, Ilissa Marks, Andrea Need and Lowell Isaacs; and devoted caregivers Fabiola "Fayezy" Joseph and Carmen Figueroa.

Services will be at 9 a.m. Tuesday, May 20, at Beth Israel Memorial Chapel in Boynton Beach, with burial to follow at 10:30 a.m. at South Florida National Cemetery in Lake Worth.

In lieu of flowers, memorial donations may be made to Smile Train, Lighthouse for the Blind, the Wounded Warrior Project or the Jewish Federation.

The Service will be webcasted: https://webcast.funeralvue.com/events/viewer/112626/hash:0F836BB6D44FC6C7