Soma Golden Behr, a longtime senior editor at The New York Occasions who was a centrifuge of story concepts — they flew out of her in all instructions — and whose journalistic passions have been poverty, race and sophistication, which led to reporting that gained 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, mentioned.
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 sequence for The Occasions that examined class and racial divides. Every enlisted squads of reporters and photographers for intensive, typically yearlong assignments.
“How Race Is Lived in America,” overseen with Gerald M. Boyd, who would turn into the paper’s first Black managing editor, peeled away the standard knowledge that the nation on the flip of the twenty first century had turn into “submit racial.” Its deep dives into an built-in church, the navy, a slaughterhouse and elsewhere gained the paper the Pulitzer Prize for nationwide reporting in 2001.
One other sequence, “Class in America,” was an examination in 2005 of how social class, typically unstated, produced obtrusive imbalances in society.
And earlier, Ms. Golden Behr oversaw a 10-part sequence in 1993, “Kids of the Shadows,” which pushed previous stereotypes of younger folks in inside cities. The reporter Isabel Wilkerson gained a Pulitzer in characteristic writing for her searing portrait within the sequence of a 10-year-old boy caring for 4 siblings.
Employed by The Occasions as an economics reporter in 1973 after 11 years at Enterprise Week, Ms. Golden Behr was typically one of many few girls, 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 he or she not often needed to fear about males speaking over her, which gave her a bonus over many ladies at The Occasions,” Adam Nagourney wrote in “The Occasions,” a 2023 guide on the modern historical past of the paper.
Mr. Nagourney described her as “cerebral, contemplative and explosive, unexpectedly,” and quoted her in an interview: “I’m a phrase salad; I explode quite a bit.”
Jonathan Landman, a former deputy managing editor of The Occasions, whom Ms. Golden Behr plucked from the copy desk to edit nationwide correspondents, mentioned her type was markedly completely different from different desk heads.
“She wasn’t an editor who mentioned we’d like x to put in writing y,” he mentioned. “She’d say, ‘We gotta take into consideration housing!’ What would then come after that was fascinating conversations and memos, and he or she’d get folks considering thematically in ways in which have been completely different. It was one thing.”
Although Ms. Golden Behr was a pioneer, and he or she mentored different girls on the paper, she didn’t see herself as an ideological feminist.
In 1991, throughout her tenure as nationwide editor, the paper got here below heavy fireplace 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 pal who mentioned she had “a bit wild streak.”
At a contentious newsroom-wide assembly, Ms. Golden Behr defended the article. “I’m shocked by the depth of the response,” she mentioned, including, “I can’t account for each bizarre thoughts that reads The New York Occasions.’’
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 Faculty and an M.S. from the Graduate Faculty 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 Occasions, recalled that when Ms. Golden Behr was lured from Enterprise Week in 1973, the place she was chief economics author in Washington, it was thought-about a coup.
“Making the coup even larger on the time, Soma was a star who was a lady,” Mr. Greenhouse mentioned. “She was massively revered within the economics subject.”
4 years later, Ms. Golden Behr was named to the editorial board. She was the one girl completely writing editorials, typically on girls’s points, homosexual rights and inequality.
“After just a few years she mentioned one thing like, I don’t know that I’ve any extra opinions, I’ve mentioned all of it,” Mr. Behr recalled. She moved on to edit the Sunday enterprise part for 5 years.
Moreover 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 Historical past Channel; 4 grandchildren; and a sister, Carol Golden.
On retiring from journalism in 2005, Ms. Golden Behr grew to become director of The New York Occasions Faculty 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 in the reduction of, Ms. Golden Behr and a companion, Melanie Rosen Brooks, created an identical 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 help 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 through the years — all of them girls — to her dwelling on the Higher West Facet. Till the pandemic ended the gatherings, as many as 30 girls would attend, driving from as distant as Boston.