Suzanne Wasserman

Wasserman died on June 26, 2017 at her home in Stuyvesant Town in Manhattan. According to her son, Raphael Stern, the cause of death was progressive supranuclear palsy, a rare brain disorder.

Wasserman also consulted with director Ron Howard on the film "Cinderella Man" (2005), providing information on New York's Lower East Side during the depression.

In 2000, she was hired as Associate Director of the Gotham Center for New York City History, then a start-up organization at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She was later promoted to Director. The group brought together teachers, students, scholars, librarians, archivists, filmmakers and museum curators to make the city's history more accessible. As the Gotham Center's Director, Wasserman created and organized seminars and conferences, built its website, and managed teaching programs that brought New York history into school classrooms. One historian noted that Wasserman's work "was aimed at understanding the deep cultural and social networks that still supported certain ethnic institutions on the Lower East Side". While at New York University, she worked as an instructor of museum studies and public history in conjunction with her position as Director of the Gotham Center.

In the 1980s, she made New York City, particularly the Lower East Side, her residence and the center of her work in a wide array of publications, exhibitions and educational programs. After completing her Phd. at New York University, she worked as a Professor at the New School for Social Research, and at Iona College teaching American History, World History, Urban Studies and other topics. She published widely on the Great Depression, Jewish nostalgia, housing, restaurant culture, tourism, pushcart peddling, silent films, the Jewish silent screen siren Theda Bara, 19th century saloons and 21st century street fairs. In the 1990s, she worked as a consultant and then staff member for the Lower East Side Tenement Museum on Orchard Street.

Wasserman earned a Bachelor's degree in History from the University of Wisconsin after transferring from Brandeis University, and a Phd. in American History from New York University. Brandeis had a large Jewish enrollment and it likely influenced her future career focus as did her senior thesis at Wisconsin where she studied her college town, writing on life in Madison in the 1960s. She obtained her Phd. from New York University in American History, writing her doctoral dissertation on life on the Lower East Side during the Depression.

Suzanne Wasserman (May 26, 1957 – June 26, 2017), was a Chicago-born historian, Professor, writer, and film director. Besides her exceptional tenure as Director of the Gotham Center for New York City history, she is best known for her first film, completed in 2003, Thunder in Guyana, which she wrote, produced, and directed. The film documented the remarkable life of her mother's first cousin, Chicago-born Janet Rosenberg Jagan, who served as the President of Guyana, South America from December 19, 1997 to August 11, 1999.

Wasserman was born Suzanne Rachel Wasserman on May 26, 1957 in Hyde Park, Chicago, Illinois, the daughter of Jewish parents Edward Wasserman, a psychoanalyst and social progressive and Eileen (née Kronberg), an artist and activist for peace who started an artists' cooperative gallery in Hyde Park. Her paternal grandfather Samuel Wasserman, from an old world religious Jewish family, immigrated to America around 1920 from the Western Ukrainian town of Kamianets-Podilskyi, than part of the Russian Empire. Samuel had an interest in social causes, and was briefly active in the labor movement in the 1930s.