Miriam Reinharth, who organized community forums and literary events for the New York Jewish Week from 2007 to 2012, died Tuesday after being hit by an ambulance near West 96th Street on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. She was 69.
According to police, Reinharth, who lived on West 93rd Street, was struck by the ambulance Tuesday afternoon near the intersection of Amsterdam Avenue and West 96th Street, described by the Curbed real estate website last year as a treacherous stretch that includes a truck route and a double-wide east-west artery.
The ambulance that hit her took her to St. Luke’s Hospital, according to Reinharth’s husband of 39 years, former New York Times labor and workplace reporter Steven Greenhouse, in a Facebook post announcing her death.
“The police officer said the accident was not Miriam’s fault at all,” Greenhouse wrote. “The doctors there at first told me that Miriam had a broken leg (with several fractures), and I thought Miriam, with her strong will and fighting spirit, would be as good as new in a few months. She was conscious and gave me the warmest smile as she was being wheeled out of the ER for a CT scan and surgery.”
Physicians later informed Greenhouse that several fractures in her pelvis were serious and bleeding profusely; she died after receiving repeated transfusions.
Reinharth was a communications professional who since 2016 worked as public engagement manager at the Community Service Society, an advocacy agency for affordable health care. Prior to that, she organized events and publicity for Zeitgeist Films, the Cardozo School of Law and the Reece School, a special education school in Manhattan.
At the New York Jewish Week, she organized special events and fundraisers with guests that included the writers Christopher Hitchens, David Brooks, Jonathan Safran Foer and Diane Ackerman.
“Miriam was intelligent, energetic, creative, warm and well-connected in the literary world, and used all of those talents to design innovative programs and projects,” said Sandee Brawarsky, who worked with Reinharth at the Jewish Week.
“At each program, she handled every detail behind the scenes and was also out greeting the public, making sure everything went smoothly, and doing all of this with grace and kindness. She was very determined, very successful and much admired in the office,” Brawarsky added. “And she was a wonderful, thoughtful, loyal friend to me and to many others.”
Gary Rosenblatt, the former editor and publisher of the Jewish Week, said he had warm memories of Reinharth when she served as the paper’s program director. “She was bright, creative, highly educated, committed to her work and a kind and caring colleague,” he said Wednesday. “Her loss is a shock to all of us who knew her.”
Reinharth was raised in Queens, New York, and attended Jamaica High School. She earned a B.A. in comparative literature and theater arts at Brandeis University and an MFA in arts administration from Columbia University.
Reinharth is survived by her husband; their children Emily Greenhouse, the editor of The New York Review of Books, and Jeremy Greenhouse, a data scientist; and four grandchildren.
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“On Monday, Miriam spent the most splendid, happy day with our grandson Eli at Prospect Park Zoo,” Greenhouse wrote. “That night she and I agreed to take a week-long vacation in San Miguel de Allende in January, and Miriam was saying we should spend a month soon in her beloved France, where her mother was born. Miriam was so full of life and so looking forward to many more happy years.”
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