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<\/a><\/p>\nSusan Stamberg is honored with a star on The Hollywood Walk of Fame on March 03, 2020 in Hollywood, California. (Tommaso Boddi\/WireImage)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Though that wasn\u2019t quite how they tended to phrase it, recalled a colleague. Instead, NPR board members feared that the \u201cAll Things Considered\u201d co-host was \u201ctoo New York\u201d for Midwest audiences.<\/p>\n
\u201cBesides being a woman, the Jewish element was another aspect,\u201d Jack Mitchell, an early producer on the daily afternoon program, told NPR. \u201cHere is somebody whose name is Stamberg. She had an obvious New York accent. Made no bones about it\u2026 And the president of NPR asked that I not put her in there for those \u2014 because of the complaints from managers.\u201d<\/p>\n
Stamberg went on the air anyway, and quickly became a defining personality for the nonprofit radio network. In subsequent decades, as NPR turned into a cultural juggernaut, Stamberg and her \u201cNew York\u201d personality became something of its unofficial mascot. In the elevators of NPR\u2019s Washington, D.C., headquarters, her voice guides visitors from floor to floor.<\/p>\n
Stamberg died Thursday at age 87, leaving behind years of her bubbly conversations and an annual, love-it-or-hate-it recipe for her family\u2019s \u201ccranberry relish.\u201d <\/p>\n
As one of NPR\u2019s \u201cfounding mothers\u201d in the 1970s, she helped shape the network\u2019s personality: warm, liberal-leaning, and \u2014 along with or laying the groundwork for fellow longtime marquee names like Nina Totenberg, Ira Flatow, Terri Gross and Robert Siegel \u2014 unmistakably, culturally Jewish. In later years, long after her retirement from regular on-air duties, Stamberg would still pop up to read the winners of NPR\u2019s annual \u201cHanukkah Lights\u201d short-story contest.<\/p>\n
\u201cI am very sociologically Jewish. Very ethnically Jewish, although not in an observant way. There are a lot of people like me,\u201d Stamberg told the Jewish Women\u2019s Archive in 2011, adding that she willingly participated in Torah study with her son Josh \u2014 today an actor \u2014 when he was becoming a bar mitzvah at her husband\u2019s request. \u201cI feel deeply Jewish and I deeply identify with my Jewishness, but it doesn\u2019t need a formal affiliation for me.\u201d <\/p>\n
Born Susan Levitt in Newark in 1938, she was a child of Manhattan\u2019s culturally Jewish scene. Stamberg grew up without regular Jewish observance, though she told the Jewish Women\u2019s Archive she was part of a confirmation class at Temple Rodeph Sholem, the Reform synagogue on the Upper West Side. Her father, a staunch Zionist, raised money for the Weizmann Institute, the research institute founded in 1934 in Rehovot. She earned an English literature degree at Barnard College, the first in her family to go to college.<\/p>\n
She married Louis Stamberg, who became a longtime USAID staffer, and the duo moved to Washington, D.C. Susan recalled that her husband, whose father founded a congregation in Allentown, Pennsylvania, grew up \u201cwhere being Jewish was really an issue.\u201d Her father-in-law \u201cwas insistent that we, too, join a temple in Washington. I said, \u2018Well, Why?\u2019\u201d she recalled in 2011. \u201cThat\u2019s how I came to know that the entire world was not Jewish like the world in which I had grown up.\u201d<\/p>\n
After stints at WAMU, the local public radio station, and for Voice of America in India, Stamberg initially joined NPR, after its founding by an act of Congress in 1971, to cut tape for radio interviews. When \u201cAll Things Considered\u201d launched in 1972 she became its co-host and thus also the first woman to anchor a broadcast news program, in her colleagues\u2019 estimation \u2014 overcoming considerable sexism from both the network\u2019s listeners and executives. <\/p>\n
Stamberg only held the anchor post for a few years, soon pivoting to the cultural correspondent stories she would become known for. She took on other hosting duties, too, including for \u201cWeekend Edition,\u201d where she introduced the show\u2019s trademark Sunday puzzles and first brought on the guests who would become the mega-popular program \u201cCar Talk.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI think all of that is very Jewish, the telling of stories, but also the seeking of opinions and also being open to the range of opinions that are out there,\u201d Stamberg would tell the Jewish Women\u2019s Archive about her work. <\/p>\n
Laughing, she added, \u201cI also feel that sometimes mine\u2019s right. I think that\u2019s very Jewish, too.\u201d<\/p>\n
Stamberg is survived by her son and two granddaughters.<\/p>\n