Soma Golden Behr, a longtime senior editor at The New York Times who was a centrifuge of story concepts — they flew out of her in all instructions — and whose journalistic passions had been poverty, race and sophistication, which led to reporting that received Pulitzer Prizes, died on Sunday in Manhattan. She was 84.
Her dying, within the palliative care unit of Mount Sinai Hospital, got here after breast most cancers had unfold to different organs, her husband, William A. Behr, stated.
Ms. Golden Behr, whose economics diploma from Radcliffe led to a lifetime curiosity in points round inequality, was instrumental in overseeing a number of main collection for The Times that examined class and racial divides. Each enlisted squads of reporters and photographers for intensive, typically yearlong assignments.
“How Race Is Lived in America,” overseen with Gerald M. Boyd, who would develop into the paper’s first Black managing editor, peeled away the traditional knowledge that the nation on the flip of the twenty first century had develop into “publish racial.” Its deep dives into an built-in church, the army, a slaughterhouse and elsewhere received the paper the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 2001.
Another collection, “Class in America,” was an examination in 2005 of how social class, usually unstated, produced obvious imbalances in society.
And earlier, Ms. Golden Behr oversaw a 10-part collection in 1993, “Children of the Shadows,” which pushed previous stereotypes of younger folks in internal cities. The reporter Isabel Wilkerson received a Pulitzer in function writing for her searing portrait within the collection of a 10-year-old boy caring for 4 siblings.
Hired by The Times as an economics reporter in 1973 after 11 years at Business Week, Ms. Golden Behr was usually one of many few ladies, or the one girl, on the desk. She was the primary to guide the nationwide desk, appointed in 1987, and after a promotion to assistant managing editor in 1993, she was solely the second girl from the newsroom to seem on the masthead.
“At 5 ft, 10-and-a-half inches tall, her presence might fill nearly any room, and she or he not often needed to fear about males speaking over her, which gave her a bonus over many ladies at The Times,” Adam Nagourney wrote in “The Times,” a 2023 e book on the modern historical past of the paper.
Mr. Nagourney described her as “cerebral, contemplative and explosive, suddenly,” and quoted her in an interview: “I’m a phrase salad; I explode loads.”
Jonathan Landman, a former deputy managing editor of The Times, whom Ms. Golden Behr plucked from the copy desk to edit nationwide correspondents, stated her model was markedly totally different from different desk heads.
“She wasn’t an editor who stated we want x to write down y,” he stated. “She’d say, ‘We gotta take into consideration housing!’ What would then come after that was fascinating conversations and memos, and she or he’d get folks pondering thematically in ways in which had been totally different. It was one thing.”
Though Ms. Golden Behr was a pioneer, and she or he mentored different ladies on the paper, she didn’t see herself as an ideological feminist.
In 1991, throughout her tenure as nationwide editor, the paper got here underneath heavy hearth over a profile of a younger girl who accused William Kennedy Smith, a nephew of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, of rape. Critics inside and outdoors the newsroom accused the newspaper of voyeurism and shaming the girl by quoting a good friend who stated she had “somewhat wild streak.”
At a contentious newsroom-wide assembly, Ms. Golden Behr defended the article. “I’m shocked by the depth of the response,” she stated, including, “I can’t account for each bizarre thoughts that reads The New York Times.’’
Soma Suzanne Golden was born on Aug. 27, 1939, in Washington, D.C., the oldest of three kids of Dr. Benjamin Golden, a surgeon, and Edith (Seiden) Golden.
She graduated with a B.A. from Radcliffe College and an M.S. from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia. In 1974, she married Mr. Behr, a social employee and a psychoanalyst. The couple lived in Manhattan and Hopewell Junction, N.Y.
Steven Greenhouse, a former enterprise and labor reporter at The Times, recalled that when Ms. Golden Behr was lured from Business Week in 1973, the place she was chief economics author in Washington, it was thought of a coup.
“Making the coup even larger on the time, Soma was a star who was a girl,” Mr. Greenhouse stated. “She was massively revered within the economics area.”
Four years later, Ms. Golden Behr was named to the editorial board. She was the one girl solely writing editorials, usually on ladies’s points, homosexual rights and inequality.
“After a couple of years she stated one thing like, I don’t know that I’ve any extra opinions, I’ve stated all of it,” Mr. Behr recalled. She moved on to edit the Sunday enterprise part for 5 years.
Besides her husband, she is survived by their daughter, Ariel G. Behr, who works for a nonprofit that funds reasonably priced housing; their son, Zachary G. Behr, an govt on the History Channel; 4 grandchildren; and a sister, Carol Golden.
On retiring from journalism in 2005, Ms. Golden Behr turned director of The New York Times College Scholarship Program, which paid 4 years of bills for college students who had excelled academically regardless of tough circumstances like homelessness.
When its funding was reduce, Ms. Golden Behr and a companion, Melanie Rosen Brooks, created the same unbiased program in 2010, Scholarship Plus — an extension of Ms. Golden Behr’s want to deal with inequality. Scholarship Plus, funded by donors, helps 20 college students from poor backgrounds yearly, supplementing their school monetary support to allow them to keep away from pupil loans, making an attempt to place its students on equal footing with prosperous friends.
Ms. Golden Behr typically missed the camaraderie of the newsroom. She would invite journalists she had labored with over time — all of them ladies — to her house on the Upper West Side. Until the pandemic ended the gatherings, as many as 30 ladies would attend, driving from as far-off as Boston.
