25 Facts About Margot Adler

Margot Susanna Adler was an American author, journalist, and lecturer.

Margot Adler worked as a correspondent for National Public Radio for 35 years, became bureau chief of the New York office, and could be heard frequently on nationally syndicated All Things Considered and Morning Edition on National Public Radio.

Margot Adler was the only child of her mother Freyda Nacque Adler who was the daughter of uneducated immigrants, both of whom were dead by the time Margot was born.

Margot Adler's grandfather had brought his family to the United States to avoid persecution by Stalinist, anti-Trotsky factions in Austria.

Margot Adler's father, like her grandfather, was a psychiatrist, who remained a cipher to Margot.

Margot Adler devoted his life's work to analyzing his father's theories of human psychology and drawing parallels to those of Karl Marx's theories of economic socialism, although this work remained incomplete at the time of his death.

Margot Adler's mother retained the family apartment on Manhattan's West Side overlooking Central Park, which Margot inherited when it was still a rent-controlled apartment and which she and her husband subsequently purchased when the units became condominiums.

Margot Adler referred to the apartment as her bit of heaven on earth, high up on the western edge of Central Park with a view of the city.

Margot Adler received a Bachelor of Arts in political science from the University of California, Berkeley and a master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York in 1970.

Margot Adler was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 1982.

Margot Adler was a freshman at Berkeley when the Free Speech Movement erupted there in 1965 in response to the University of California's crackdown on student and faculty rights to meet and organize on political issues, specifically to enlist students as workers in the Civil Rights Movement in the South.

Margot Adler embraced it, drawn to issues, feeling matters deeply to the point where she willingly went to jail for 90 days for her protests in FSM when she might have escaped her punishment.

The experience left Margot Adler shaken and she decided to return home to New York.

Margot Adler stopped en route in Little Rock, to visit a family friend who lived in an all-white neighborhood and who shared with Margot her regret at the recent school desegregation in that city.

At the core of Heretic's Heart is the correspondence between Margot Adler and a GI in Vietnam that took place while she was a student at Berkeley.

Margot Adler's stay ended when she was called back to her mother's bedside in the final days of her battle with lung cancer.

In 1971 Margot Adler went to Washington, DC during the Nixon years to serve as bureau chief for Pacifica radio.

Margot Adler joined NPR in 1979 as a general assignment reporter, after spending a year as an NPR freelance reporter covering New York City, and subsequently worked on a great many pieces dealing with subjects as diverse as the death penalty, the right to die movement, the response to the war in Kosovo, computer gaming, the drug ecstasy, geek culture, children and technology and Pokemon.

Margot Adler was the host of Justice Talking up until the show ceased production on July 3,2008.

Margot Adler was a regular voice on Morning Edition and All Things Considered.

Margot Adler was co-producer of an award-winning radio drama, War Day.

Margot Adler wrote Drawing Down the Moon, a 1979 book about Neopaganism which was revised in 2006.

Margot Adler was drawn to paganism as the spiritual side of her feminism which rejected the hierarchy of monotheism.

Margot Adler was a Wiccan priestess, an elder in the Covenant of the Goddess, and she participated in the Unitarian Universalist faith community.

In early 2011, Margot Adler was diagnosed with endometrial cancer, which metastasized over the following three years.