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Soma Golden Behr, 84, Dies; Inspired Enterprising Journalism at The Times

The first woman to serve as the paper’s national editor, she focused on issues of race, class and poverty, drawing prizes, and rose to the newsroom’s top echelon.

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Soma Golden Behr stands at a microphone, gesturing with one hand and grasping the podium with the other.
Soma Golden Behr in 2007, hosting an event for The New York Times Scholarship Program. As the newspaper’s national editor and an assistant managing editor, she helped shepherd Pulitzer Prize-winning series.Credit...Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

Soma Golden Behr, a longtime senior editor at The New York Times who was a centrifuge of story ideas — they flew out of her in all directions — and whose journalistic passions were poverty, race and class, which led to reporting that won Pulitzer Prizes, died on Sunday in Manhattan. She was 84.

Her husband, William A. Behr, said her death, in the palliative care unit of Mount Sinai Hospital, came after breast cancer had spread to other organs.

Ms. Golden Behr, whose economics degree from Radcliffe led to a lifetime interest in issues involving inequality, was instrumental in overseeing several major series for The Times that examined class and racial divides. Each enlisted squads of reporters, photographers and editors for intensive, sometimes yearlong assignments.

“How Race Is Lived in America,” overseen with Gerald M. Boyd, who would become The Times’s first Black managing editor, peeled away the conventional wisdom that the country at the turn of the 21st century had become “post-racial.” Its deep dives into an integrated church, the military, a slaughterhouse and elsewhere won the paper the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 2001.

Another series, “Class in America,” published in 2005, was an examination of how social class, often unspoken, produced glaring imbalances in society. Both the race and the class series were subsequently published as books.

Earlier, in 1993, Ms. Golden Behr had overseen a 10-part series, “Children of the Shadows,” which pushed past stereotypes of young people in inner cities. The reporter Isabel Wilkerson won a Pulitzer in feature writing for her searing portrait in that series of a 10-year-old boy caring for four siblings.


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