Soma Golden Behar, a longtime senior editor at The New York Times who was a hub for ideas for stories — they emanated from her in all directions — and whose journalistic obsessions were poverty, race and class, leading to reporting that won Pulitzer Prizes, died Sunday in Manhattan. She was 84.
She died in the palliative care unit at Mount Sinai Hospital after the breast cancer had spread to other organs, her husband, William A. Behr, said.
Ms. Golden Behr, whose economics degree from Radcliffe fueled a lifelong interest in inequality issues, played a key role in overseeing several major series for The Times that examined class and racial divisions. Each recruited squads of reporters and photographers for intensive, sometimes yearlong assignments.
overseeing “How Race Lives in America.” Gerald M. Boyd, who became the paper's first black managing editor, dispelled the conventional notion that the country had become “anti-racist” at the turn of the 21st century. His in-depth research into an integrated church, the military, a slaughterhouse and elsewhere led the paper to victory Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2001,
Another series, “Class in America”, was a 2005 examination of how social class, which is often latent, creates terrible imbalances in society.
And before that, Ms. Golden Behr oversaw a 10-part series in 1993 called “Children of the Shadows,” which dispelled stereotypes of young people in inner cities. Isabel Wilkerson Won the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing Burning picture The series follows a 10-year-old boy looking after his four siblings.
Hired by the Times in 1973 as an economics reporter after working 11 years at Business Week, Ms. Golden Behr was often one of the few women at the table, or the only one. She was the first woman to lead the national desk, appointed in 1987, and, after being promoted to assistant managing editor in 1993, was only the second woman in the newsroom to appear on the masthead.
“At five feet, ten and a half inches tall, her presence could fill any room, and she rarely had to worry about men talking over her, giving her an edge over many women at the Times,” Adam Nagourney wrote in “The Times,” a 2023 book on the newspaper’s contemporary history.
Mr. Nagourney described him as “at once cerebral, contemplative and explosive,” and quoted him saying in an interview: “I'm a word salad; I'm very explosive.”
Jonathan Landman, a former deputy managing editor at The Times whom Ms. Goldenbehr hired from the copy desk to edit national correspondents, said her style was markedly different from that of other desk chiefs.
“She wasn’t an editor who would say we need to do x to write y,” he said. “She would say, ‘We have to think about housing!’ What followed were interesting conversations and memos, and she would push people to think thematically in different ways. That was something special.”
Although Ms. Golden Behr was a pioneer, and offered guidance to other women at the newspaper, she did not see herself as an ideological feminist.
In 1991, while she was serving as national editor, the paper faced strong criticism for its profile of a young woman who accused William Kennedy Smith, a nephew of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, of rape. Critics inside and outside the newsroom accused the paper of voyeurism and shaming the woman, citing a friend who said she had “a little bit of a wild streak.”
In a contentious meeting in the newsroom, Ms. Golden-Behr defended the article. “I am shocked at the depth of the reaction,” she said, adding, “I can’t account for every strange mind that reads The New York Times.”
Soma Suzanne Golden was born on August 27, 1939, in Washington, D.C., the eldest of three children of surgeon Dr. Benjamin Golden and Edith (Seiden) Golden.
She earned a BA from Radcliffe College and an MS from Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism. In 1974, she married Mr. Behar, a social worker and psychoanalyst. The couple lived in Manhattan and Hopewell Junction, New York
Steven's GreenhouseThe former Times business and labor reporter recalled that when Ms. Golden Behr was lured away in 1973 from Business Week, where she had been the chief economics writer in Washington, it was considered a coup.
“Making the coup even bigger at the time was that Soma was a star who happened to be a woman,” Mr. Greenhouse said. “She was highly respected in the field of economics.”
Four years later Ms. Golden Behr was added to the editorial board. She was the only woman who exclusively wrote editorials, often on women's issues, gay rights, and inequality.
“After a couple of years, she said something like, ‘I don’t know if I have any more opinions, I’ve said everything,’” Mr. Behr recalled. She went on to edit the Sunday business section for five years.
In addition to her husband, she is survived by her daughter, Ariel G. Behr, who works for a nonprofit that funds affordable housing, her son, Zachary G. 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 paid four years of expenses for students who excelled academically despite difficult circumstances, such as homelessness.
When its funding was cut, Ms. Golden Behr and her partner, Melanie Rosen Brooks, created a similar independent program in 2010. Scholarship Plus – An extension of Ms. Golden Behr's desire to eliminate inequality. Scholarships Plus, funded by donors, supports 20 students from poor backgrounds annually, increasing their college financial aid so they can avoid student loans, striving to put its students on par with wealthier peers.
Ms. Golden Behar sometimes missed the camaraderie of the newsroom. She would invite the reporters she had worked with over the years to her home on the Upper West Side — all of them women. By the time the pandemic ended, the gatherings were attended by more than 30 women from places as far away as Boston.
