Sally Kempton

Sally Kempton, who was once a rising star in the New York journalism world and a fierce exponent of radical feminism, but who later pivoted to a life of Eastern asceticism and spiritual practice, died on Monday July 17 2023 at her home in Carmel, Calif. She was 80. Her brother David Kempton said the cause was heart failure. Her father was Murray Kempton, the erudite and acerbic newspaper columnist and a lion of New York journalism, the ranks of which she joined in the late 1960s as a staff writer for The Village Voice and a contributor to The New York Times. She described her husband, the movie producer Harrison Starr, who was 13 years her senior, as “a male supremacist in the style of Norman Mailer.” Her marriage did not survive. Ms. Kempton essentially vanished, to follow an Indian mystic named Swami Muktananda, otherwise known as Baba, a proponent of a spiritual practice known as Siddha Yoga. By 1982, Ms. Kempton had taken a vow of chastity and poverty to live as a monk in Baba’s ashrams, first in India and then in a former borscht belt hotel in the Catskills. He gave her the name Swami Durgananda. Sally Kempton was born on Jan. 15, 1943, in Manhattan and grew up in Princeton, N.J., the eldest of five children. She attended Sarah Lawrence College, graduating in 1964. In 2002, she put away her robes and left the ashram, moving to Carmel, where she became a well-respected teacher of meditation and spiritual philosophy. In addition to her brother David, Ms. Kempton is survived by two other brothers, Arthur and Christopher. Another brother, James Murray Kempton Jr., known as Mike, was killed in a car crash with his wife, Jean Goldschmidt Kempton, a college friend of Sally’s, in 1971. Murray Kempton, who died in 1997, was supportive and visited the ashram and met with Baba a number of times.