Soma Golden Behr, a longtime senior editor at The New York Times who was a centrifuge of story ideas—they flew in all directions—and whose journalistic passions were poverty, race and class, resulting in reporting that won Pulitzer Prizes , died Sunday in Manhattan. She was 84.
Her husband, William A. Behr, said her death in the palliative care unit at Mount Sinai Hospital occurred after breast cancer spread to other organs.
Ms. Golden Behr, whose economics degree from Radcliffe led to a lifelong interest in issues of inequality, was instrumental in directing several major series for The Times examining class and racial divides. Each recruited groups of reporters, photographers and editors for intensive, sometimes year-long assignments.
“How Race Is Lived in America,” overseen by Gerald M. Boyd, the Times’ first black editor-in-chief, dispelled the conventional wisdom that the country had become “post-racial” at the start of the 21st century. His deep insights into an integrated church, the military, a slaughterhouse and elsewhere won the newspaper the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting.
Another series, Class in America, published in 2005, examined how the often unspoken social class led to glaring inequities in society. Both the race and the class series were subsequently published as books.
Previously, in 1993, Ms. Golden Behr oversaw the ten-part series “Children of the Shadows,” which challenged stereotypes about young people in inner cities. Reporter Isabel Wilkerson won a Pulitzer Prize in features for her powerful portrait in this series about a 10-year-old boy caring for four siblings.
Ms. Golden Behr was hired by the Times as a business reporter in 1973 after 11 years at Business Week magazine and was often one of the few women or the only woman at the table. She was the first to lead the national newsroom in 1987, and after her promotion to deputy editor in 1993, she became only the third woman from the newsroom to appear in the masthead, the top editorial level.
“At 5 feet 7 inches tall and 4 inches tall, her presence could fill almost any room, and she rarely had to worry about men talking about her, giving her an advantage over many of the women at The Times “, wrote Adam Nagourney “The Times”, his book on the contemporary history of the newspaper, published in 2023.
Mr. Nagourney, a Times reporter, described Ms. Golden Behr as “intelligent, thoughtful and explosive at the same time” and quoted her in an interview as saying, “I’m a word salad; I explode a lot.”
Jonathan Landman, a former Times deputy editor whom Ms. Golden Behr plucked from the newsroom desk to edit national correspondents, said her style was markedly different from that of other newsroom leaders.
“She wasn’t an editor who said we need X to write Y,” he said. “She said, ‘We need to think about housing!’ What followed were interesting conversations and memos, and she made people think differently thematically. It was something.”
Although Ms. Golden Behr was a pioneer and mentored other women at the newspaper, she did not consider herself an ideological feminist.
In 1991, during her time as national editor, the newspaper came under intense fire for its profile of a young woman who had accused William Kennedy Smith, a nephew of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, of rape. Critics inside and outside the newsroom accused the newspaper of voyeurism and shaming the woman, who was named and said by a friend quoted in the article to have “a little wild streak.”
At a contentious newsroom meeting in the Times auditorium, Ms. Golden Behr defended the article. “I’m shocked at the depth of the reaction,” she said, adding, “I can’t explain every strange mind that reads the New York Times.”
Ms. Golden Behr was the first woman to serve as national editor of the newspaper and only the third to appear on the masthead.Credit…The New York Times
Soma Suzanne Golden was born on August 27, 1939 in Washington, D.C., the oldest of three children of surgeon Dr. Benjamin Golden and Edith (Seiden) Golden were born.
She graduated from Radcliffe College with a BA and an MS from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia. In 1974 she married Mr. Behr, a social worker and psychoanalyst. The couple lived in Manhattan and Hopewell Junction, NY
Steven Greenhouse, a former Times business and labor reporter, recalled that it was considered a coup when Ms. Golden Behr was poached in 1973 from Business Week, where she was executive editor of economics in Washington.
“To make the coup even bigger at the time, Soma was a star who was a woman,” Mr. Greenhouse said. “She was very well respected in the business world.”
Four years later, Ms. Golden Behr was appointed to the Times editorial board. She was the only woman who wrote exclusively editorials, often on women’s issues, gay rights and inequality.
“After a few years she said something like, ‘I don’t know if I have any more opinions, I’ve said it all,'” Mr. Behr recalls. She then headed the “Sunday business” department for five years.
In addition to her husband, she is survived by her daughter Ariel Behr, who works for a nonprofit organization that funds affordable housing. her son Zachary Behr, an executive at the History Channel; four grandchildren; and a sister, Carol Golden.
After retiring from journalism in 2005, Ms. Golden Behr became director of the New York Times College Scholarship Program, which covered four years of expenses for students who had excelled academically despite difficult circumstances such as homelessness.
When funding was cut, Ms. Golden Behr and a partner, Melanie Rosen Brooks, founded a similar independent program, Scholarship Plus, in 2010 — an extension of Ms. Golden Behr’s desire to combat inequality. The donor-funded Scholarship Plus supports 20 students from poor backgrounds each year, supplementing their financial aid to help them avoid student loans and attempting to put its scholarship recipients on an equal footing with wealthy peers.
Ms. Golden Behr sometimes missed the camaraderie of the newsroom. She invited journalists she had worked with over the years – all women – to her home on the Upper West Side. By the end of the pandemic, up to 30 women attended the meetings, traveling from as far away as Boston.
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2024-07-01 16:55:24
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