Alison Rose Levy, a longtime resident of New York city and Aquinnah, died after a long illness on Dec. 31, 2022 at her family home near Menemsha Pond. She was 72.

She was a journalist and activist.

Alison was born in Yonkers and spent her childhood in Queens until the family moved to the Upper West Side of Manhattan so her father, Henry Cohen, could be closer to his work as a New York city deputy mayor.

She was imbued with a sense of social justice and even as a young girl engaged with the stream of political and civil rights figures who visited their apartment on 90th Street. Her mother, Evelyn Cohen, was a social worker and writer who enriched her life with music, art and her love of Shakespeare and French, a language Alison began learning from a very early age and spoke fluently. Her gifts as a writer emerged early on, when she won first prize in a citywide essay contest.

She attended Hunter College High School but also received the wider education that the city’s diversity and wealth of cultures afforded. She was a lover of its myriad cuisines and a good cook herself, a skill she picked up from her grandmothers.

As an undergraduate at Sarah Lawrence College, she studied with the poet and writer Grace Paley and the mythologist Joseph Campbell. She continued her studies at American University in Washington, D.C., where she earned an M.A. in film.

She embarked on multiple careers in the media, at first for the Smithsonian, as a producer and director of art, folklore and music events; cultural documentaries; and profiles of visual artists, including Robert Rauschenberg. She then began producing programs for the nascent Corporation for Public Broadcasting, including a 12-hour Labor Day special hosted by Studs Terkel, a film on the Three Mile Island disaster and early coverage of the reproductive rights battle.

Alison leaves a body of work that has touched and inspired many. She ghost-wrote and co-wrote books for doctors in the integrative health field, among them best-selling books about diet, fibromyalgia and Lyme disease. She spoke and wrote incisively about the irony that so many practitioners of progressive medicine were conservative politically and had opted out of the health care system, seeming to give with one hand what they were taking away with the other. She believed fervently that health was not merely a personal matter but a collective, systemic endeavor that concerns us all.

In later years, she began writing pieces about progressive politics for Truthout, AlterNet, Common Dreams and other publications in the alt press, covering Occupy Wall Street, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, corporatism, fracking, the Green New Deal, Standing Rock and the Bernie Sanders campaign. Her podcast, Connect the Dots, in which she interviewed thought leaders, ran for many years on the Progressive Radio Network and episodes of it remain available on the Internet. She felt fortunate to be mentored by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers.

She treasured the dear friends she made in recent years, among the first contact Native Americans whose land her family home occupied.

Alison is survived by her husband of 27 years, Ed Levy; her brother, Dan Cohen; her nieces Anna and Rosalie Cohen; as well as her twin tabbies, Pete and Cubby.

Memorial contributions may be sent to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting in New York, CommonDreams.org in Portland, Me. and the Aquinnah Cultural Council in Aquinnah.