This article is also available as a weekly newsletter, “Life Stories,” where we remember those who made an outsize impact in the Jewish world — or just left their community a better or more interesting place. Subscribe here to get “Life Stories” in your inbox every Tuesday.
Steve Ostrow, 91, a former cantor who became an icon of NYC gay life
(JTA) — Brooklyn-born Steve Ostrow was “an aspiring opera singer and the cantor in his local temple” in Matawan, New Jersey when he decided to rent the basement of Manhattan’s Ansonia Hotel and turn it into a gay men’s bath house, sex club and disco. The Continental Baths, in business from 1968-1977, was a mecca for men seeking men when homosexuality had only recently been decriminalized, and a draw for celebrities who came for entertainers like Bette Midler, whose poolside performances launched her career. Ostrow, 91, died Feb. 3 in Sydney, Australia, where he moved in the 1980s and ran Mature Age Gays, an organization for gay seniors. In his memoirs, “Live at the Continental,” Ostrow said he wasn’t drawn to the promiscuity of his liberated patrons. As a “Jewish boy, I never got into sex for the sport of it,” he wrote. “For me, sex was like the song from the movie ‘Casablanca’: ‘And when two lovers woo, they still say “I love you…”’”
Anthony Epstein, 102, pathologist who isolated the Epstein-Barr virus
Sir Anthony Epstein delivering a lecture at Wolfson College in 2014. (Stuart Bebb/Wolfson College Archives)
Anthony Epstein, a British pathologist who helped isolate the Epstein-Barr virus, died Feb. 6 at 102. A common virus — it infects nearly everyone in their teen or young adult years — EBV can cause mononucleosis, but is also suspected to be a “springboard” for some cancers and autoimmune diseases. Epstein was born in London, one of three children of Mortimer Epstein, a writer and translator, and Olga (Oppenheimer), who was involved in Jewish charitable work. Epstein and a research associate, Yvonne Barr, discovered the virus in 1964 at England’s Middlesex Hospital through what he once called “a series of accidents,” and Epstein spent a lifetime in an unfulfilled search for a vaccine.
Dick Waterman, 88. impresario who rekindled the careers of blues musicians
A 2019 biography of Dick Waterman descibes how an affluent Jewish kid from Massachusetts became one of the most influential figures in blues of the 20th century. (University Press of Mississippi)
Dick Waterman, a photographer and promoter who rekindled the careers of revered blues singers like Son House and Skip James, died Jan. 26 in Oxford, Mississippi. He was 88. Waterman grew up in “an affluent Jewish family in Plymouth, Massachusetts.” In 1964, he and two friends embarked on a journey in the Deep South in search of obscure blues musicians. “We were three Jews in a yellow Volkswagen with New York plates, and we didn’t feel too welcome in Mississippi,” he told the New York Times in 2015. As a result of that trip and others, he revived and managed the careers of several older Black musicians, promoted a younger cohort that included B. B. King, Buddy Guy and Taj Mahal, and discovered and represented a young Bonnie Raitt. His photographs, meanwhile, “reflected the intimacy and rapport he had with the musicians he chronicled and represented.”
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