Soma Yellowish Behr, an established senior writer at The Fresh York Occasions who was once a centrifuge of tale concepts — they flew out of her in all instructions — and whose journalistic passions had been poverty, race and sophistication, which ended in reporting that gained Pulitzer Prizes, died on Sunday in Big apple. She was once 84.
Her dying, within the palliative help unit of Mount Sinai Health facility, got here later breast most cancers had unfold to alternative organs, her husband, William A. Behr, mentioned.
Ms. Yellowish Behr, whose economics stage from Radcliffe ended in an entire life hobby in problems round inequality, was once instrumental in overseeing a number of primary order for The Occasions that tested magnificence and racial divides. Each and every enlisted squads of journalists and photographers for extensive, once in a while yearlong assignments.
“How Race Is Lived in America,” overseen with Gerald M. Boyd, who would transform the paper’s first Dull managing writer, peeled away the traditional knowledge that the rustic on the flip of the twenty first century had transform “post racial.” Its deep dives into an built-in church, the army, a slaughterhouse and somewhere else gained the paper the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 2001.
Some other order, “Class in America,” was once an exam in 2005 of ways social magnificence, regularly unstated, produced evident imbalances in people.
And previous, Ms. Yellowish Behr oversaw a 10-part order in 1993, “Children of the Shadows,” which driven moment stereotypes of younger family in internal towns. The reporter Isabel Wilkerson gained a Pulitzer in attribute writing for her searing portrait within the order of a 10-year-old boy taking good care of 4 siblings.
Rented via The Occasions as an economics reporter in 1973 later 11 years at Industry Age, Ms. Yellowish Behr was once regularly one of the vital few ladies, or the one lady, on the desk. She was once the primary to manage the nationwide table, appointed in 1987, and later a promotion to associate managing writer in 1993, she was once most effective the second one lady from the newsroom to seem at the masthead.
“At five feet, 10-and-a-half inches tall, her presence could fill just about any room, and she rarely had to worry about men talking over her, which gave her an advantage over many women at The Times,” Adam Nagourney wrote in “The Times,” a 2023 accumulation at the recent historical past of the paper.
Mr. Nagourney described her as “cerebral, contemplative and explosive, all at once,” and quoted her in an interview: “I’m a word salad; I explode a lot.”
Jonathan Landman, a former deputy managing writer of The Occasions, whom Ms. Yellowish Behr plucked from the book table to edit nationwide correspondents, mentioned her taste was once markedly other from alternative table heads.
“She wasn’t an editor who said we need x to write y,” he mentioned. “She’d say, ‘We gotta think about housing!’ What would then come after that was interesting conversations and memos, and she’d get people thinking thematically in ways that were different. It was something.”
Although Ms. Yellowish Behr was once a pioneer, and she or he mentored alternative ladies on the paper, she didn’t see herself as an ideological feminist.
In 1991, all over her tenure as nationwide writer, the paper got here beneath large fireplace over a profile of a tender lady who accused William Kennedy Smith, a nephew of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, of rape. Critics outside and inside the newsroom accused the newspaper of voyeurism and shaming the girl via quoting a pal who mentioned she had “a little wild streak.”
At a contentious newsroom-wide assembly, Ms. Yellowish Behr defended the thing. “I am shocked by the depth of the response,” she mentioned, including, “I can’t account for every weird mind that reads The New York Times.’’
Soma Suzanne Golden was born on Aug. 27, 1939, in Washington, D.C., the oldest of three children 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 worker and a psychoanalyst. The couple lived in Manhattan and Hopewell Junction, N.Y.
Steven Greenhouse, a former business and labor reporter at The Times, recalled that when Ms. Golden Behr was lured from Business Week in 1973, where she was chief economics writer in Washington, it was considered a coup.
“Making the coup even bigger at the time, Soma was a star who was a woman,” Mr. Greenhouse mentioned. “She was hugely respected in the economics field.”
4 years next, Ms. Yellowish Behr was once named to the editorial board. She was once the one lady solely writing editorials, regularly on ladies’s problems, homosexual rights and inequality.
“After a few years she said something like, I don’t know that I have any more opinions, I’ve said it all,” Mr. Behr recalled. She moved directly to edit the Sunday industry category for 5 years.
But even so her husband, she is survived via their daughter, Ariel G. Behr, who works for a nonprofit that price range reasonably priced housing; their son, Zachary G. Behr, an govt on the Historical past Channel; 4 grandchildren; and a sister, Carol Yellowish.
On retiring from journalism in 2005, Ms. Yellowish Behr turned into director of The Fresh York Occasions School Scholarship Program, which paid 4 years of bills for college students who had excelled academically in spite of tricky cases like homelessness.
When its investment was once short again, Ms. Yellowish Behr and a spouse, Melanie Rosen Brooks, created a indistinguishable separate program in 2010, Scholarship Plus — an extension of Ms. Yellowish Behr’s need to handle inequality. Scholarship Plus, funded via donors, helps 20 scholars from broke backgrounds once a year, supplementing their school monetary help so they may be able to keep away from scholar loans, making an attempt to position its students on equivalent understructure with prosperous friends.
Ms. Yellowish Behr once in a while neglected the camaraderie of the newsroom. She would ask over reporters she had labored with over time — they all ladies — to her house at the Higher West Facet. Till the pandemic ended the gatherings, as many as 30 ladies would attend, using from as a ways away as Boston.
