Barbara Lovenheim

Barbara Lovenheim was born in Rochester, New York, and graduated from Barnard College. She received her Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Rochester and taught English at The City University of New York from 1966 to 1975. During her last year of teaching she sold an article to The New York Times Book Review exposing the duplicity of professors who used ghostwriters for their own books and flunked students who plagiarized term papers. Several months later she was fired due to budget cuts. “I knew then that as much as I loved teaching, I would make my way as a writer. I have never regretted my decision.”

She began publishing articles in The Soho News, The Village Voice, and Working Woman that led to new assignments at The New York Times. In 1979 she traveled to London, where she contacted a former New York Times editor in Paris who was starting a new arts section for The International Herald Tribune. After writing a few articles for The Tribune, she was hired as a free-lance correspondent to cover the arts in London. “It was a dream job, covering theater and interviewing talented personalities, ranging from Dame Margot Fonteyn and Harold Prince to Arianna Stassinopolous [now Huffington]. The experience was invaluable and I still savor that year.”

In 1980 she returned to New York City and began writing steadily for The New York Times. She worked as an editor for Glamour and a press reporter at the UN. In 1984 she decided to free-lance full time and was asked to write for the new arts page of The Wall Street Journal. She also wrote for national magazines. She wrote on social issues, like adoption and foster care, and continued interviewing high-level arts personalities—Katharine Hepburn, Robert Redford, Alec Guinness, Gregory Peck, Mia Farrow and Hillary Clinton—earning a reputation for obtaining hard-to-get interviews and writing incisive profiles that were perceptive without being offensive.

In the mid-1980’s she pitched an article to New York challenging a new study claiming that single women over 40 were too old to marry. “I was seized with a mission to defend my friends; all of us were single and in our 40’s and we were hardly old maids!” The article became a talked-about cover story and led to her first book Beating the Marriage Odds (Wm. Morrow/​Berkeley) in 1990.

She continued writing for New York, but as it became increasingly edgy and removed from mainstream New Yorkers, she decided to start her own city magazine that would focus on the realities of city living. NYcitylife was launched in 1998. It was popular with readers and the media, but investors were reluctant to compete with New York and the venture collapsed.

Shortly afterwards she was introduced to two Holocaust survivors who had survived in hiding in Berlin for two-and a half years with five other family members. “I was amazed by their saga and, if there wasn’t a book about their experience, I was determined to write it.” Survival in the Shadows: Seven Jews Hidden in Hitler’s Berlin was published in London (Peter Owen) and Berlin (Siedler Verlag/​Random House) in 2003. The book generated lengthy articles in top newspapers in Germany and was optioned by UFA-Teamworx, a Bertelsmann media company.

In 2000 she also began producing books and brochures for nonprofit organizations, ranging from the Museum of Jewish Heritage and The American Folk Art Museum to small start-ups. She donated design and editorial, using funds from the BIL Charitable Trust to do so.

She has appeared on numerous radio and TV shows, including Good-Morning America, CNN, New York One, New York Non-Stop and ABC radio. Articles about her books have appeared in The New York Times, The London Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, The Chicago Tribune, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Frankfurter Allgemeine, and many other publications.

She lives in New York City with John Grimes, a former news correspondent for ABC radio.