Eugene (“Gene”) Lichtenstein, journalist, filmmaker, psychotherapist, and former editor of the Los Angeles Jewish Journal died at home in Los Angeles on October 18 after a brief illness. He was 96.
Mr. Lichtenstein edited the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles from 1986 until 2000. He insisted on editorial independence, frequently bucking the expectations of some Jewish community leaders that the paper hew to a specific line on contentious matters, whether it be the state of Israel, the rights of Palestinians, or the advisability of interfaith marriages. “The role of a Jewish newspaper is to connect the Jewish community, not to unify it” he told an interviewer in 2006. He subsequently practiced as a clinical psychotherapist in the Los Angeles area.
Gene Lichtenstein was born in the Bronx, New York, on August 15, 1930, to parents deeply immersed in the local Jewish community. After graduating from the Bronx High School of Science in 1948, he briefly attended the University of Oklahoma before returning to New York to complete his bachelor’s degree at the New School for Social Research. After stints studying literature at Johns Hopkins University graduate school and attending the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, Mr. Lichtenstein became a journalist and an editor, working at The New York Times, The Economist, and as a fiction editor with L. Rust Hills at Esquire magazine. In the early 1960s he also worked as a U.S. Congressional aide and as a consultant for the Peace Corps.
In 1969, Mr. Lichtenstein produced “A Nice Kid Like You,” a short documentary film about the social, political, and sexual lives of college students at Yale and Sarah Lawrence College, for the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry. He then went on to academic positions at MIT, the University of Rhode Island, and the University of Bridgeport, while acquiring a degree in clinical psychology along the way.
In 1985 he moved to Los Angeles, where he soon took on the editorial leadership of the Jewish Journal. After his editorship ended in 2000, Mr. Lichtenstein returned to his career as a psychotherapist, working with clients at the Southern California Counseling Center, at Homeless Health Care Los Angeles, and in private practice.
Gene always claimed that his peripatetic career as a journalist, a critic, a filmmaker, and a psychotherapist contained a unifying thread: “I learned to listen–for what is said but also for what is left unsaid—and to recognize the impact that social structures have on our life stories,” he once said.
In addition to his wife, Jocelyn Gibbs, a former archivist at the Getty Research Institute and a former curator at the Art, Design & Architecture Museum at University of California, Santa Barbara. Mr. Lichtenstein is survived by a son, Alex Lichtenstein, a history professor at Indiana University; another son, Andrew Lichtenstein, a Brooklyn, NY freelance photographer; a daughter, Miranda Lichtenstein, an artist and professor at Rutgers University; a stepson, Eric Fisher, a sculptor and metalworker of Los Angeles, and grandchildren Hannah Lipschultz, Max Lichtenstein, Adrian Rosier, Jade Lichtenstein, Ayanda Langa, and Walker Martin. A memorial service will be held on November 14th.
