In her dispatches she often showed sympathy for Israel, but also felt free to criticize the Jewish state when she thought its policies were wrongheaded.

[1] Lewis received many awards for her journalism including for distinguished diplomatic reporting from Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service.

She received honorary doctorates from the University of California at Los Angeles, Columbia, Princeton, Mount Holyoke, Bucknell, Muhlenberg College, and Manhattan Marymount.

For her obituary, the New York Times wrote: Heads of government and ordinary readers in the United States and Europe, where she lived for much of her career, looked to Flora Lewis's columns not only for her access to people in high places, but also for the dogged reporting and the sophisticated analysis that resulted.

[1]Seymour Brody likens Lewis's life to "that of a juggler in trying to balance her role as a journalist, wife, and mother," concluding that her achievements in the male-dominated profession "opened the way for other women to enter and to succeed in the newspaper industry."

Rupert Cornwell stated that "Lewis had formidable assets, starting with an access to those in power that often made her colleagues green with envy.

"[5] By contrast, columnist Eric Alterman wrote that at the Times, Lewis "filed from Paris what was quite possibly the most boring regular column in the history of journalism," which "certainly contained no hint that the writer was a woman."