56 | APRIL 20 • 2023 

S

eymour Stein, one of the 
most influential music 
executives of the 20th 
century, who frequently throughout 
his career referred to his Jewish 
Brooklynite roots, died at 80 on 
April 2, 2023, at his home in Los 
Angeles.
The cause was an unspecified 
form of cancer, according to 
reports.
Stein, born Seymour Steinbigle 
in 1942 and raised near 
Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, signed 
artists to his Sire record label ranging 
from pop superstars like Madonna to 
punk rockers like The Ramones to New 
Wave pioneers like the Talking Heads. 
He also helped found the Rock & Roll 
Hall of Fame in the early 1980s and was 
inducted with a lifetime achievement 
award in 2005.
As he details in his 2018 
autobiography, Stein’s father became 
closer to Orthodox Judaism in his 30s 
and 40s, regularly bringing his family 
to a nearby synagogue, where he was 
a vice president. Stein wrote that his 
father stopped by the synagogue at 6 
a.m. before working in Manhattan’s 
Garment District and then again after 
work on his way home every day.
He described the Jews of 1940s 
Brooklyn in detail in Siren Song: My Life 
in Music:
“We had every flavor of Ashkenazim 
— Russian, Polish, Baltic, Romanian, 
Austrian, Hungarian, German and 
Czech Jews, including about 50,000 
survivors from the concentration 
camps. We had lost tribes you didn’t 
even know existed — Syrian, Iraqi, 
Persian, Yemeni, Ethiopian, even some 
Sephardic Jews whose family trees had 
curled through Spain, North Africa, 
the Middle East and South America…. 

[E]ach Jewish community was distinct, 
often with its own native food and 
language.”
In 1966, Stein — who shortened 
his last name on advice from an early 
mentor, the Jewish executive Syd 
Nathan — co-founded Sire Records, 
which would go on to sign and promote 
artists from a range of burgeoning 
genres in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s: 
British indie rockers like The Smiths 
and The Cure, electronic innovator 
Aphex Twin, the rapper Ice-T.
“He knows all the lyrics to every song 
you’ve ever heard,” said Chrissie Hynde, 
the famed leader of The Pretenders, 
another Sire band.
Along the way, Stein wrote and 
mentioned in interviews how he 
found camaraderie with other Jewish 
executives and stars, after having grown 
up in an era when Jews were implicitly 
banned from some professions in 
the United States but found a haven 
in the entertainment industry. In his 
autobiography, for instance, he calls 
Lou Reed and New Wave electro-rocker 
Alan Vega fellow Brooklyn Jews.
“It’s amazing now that so many 
doctors and lawyers are Jewish,” he 
said in a 2013 interview with Tablet 
magazine. “Jews in America weren’t 

allowed in those professions 120 
years ago. Music is something Jews 
were good at and they could do. All 
immigrants into America tried their 
hand at show-business.”
Stein signed Madonna from 
his hospital bed, where he was 
recovering from an open-heart 
surgery in 1982. She would release 
three top-of-the-charts albums with 
Sire before creating her own imprint 
in 1992.
In 1975, his wife, Linda, 
encouraged him to look into The 
Ramones, a group of scrappy punks 
in ripped jeans from Queens (two 
of whom were Jewish). She would 
co-manage the band for a time before 
becoming a real estate agent.
Stein, who later came out as gay, 
wrote that “the roles were a little 
confused” in his marriage and that he 
felt pressured to hide his attraction to 
men in part because of his traditional 
Jewish upbringing. “Just because I may 
have been gay didn’t mean I wasn’t 
Jewish,” he wrote. He and Linda had 
two children but eventually divorced.
In the Tablet interview, Stein 
mentioned that he stayed observant, 
though not Orthodox, throughout his 
life. He visited Israel several times and 
worked with Israeli pop star Ofra Haza 
on multiple albums. In the 1990s, he 
visited the grave of Rabbi Nachman of 
Breslov in Uman, Ukraine, a small town 
where thousands of Orthodox Jews 
gather each year on Rosh Hashanah.
“I feel a strong attachment to 
Nachman’s teachings,” he said.
Linda Stein was murdered by her 
assistant in 2007, and their daughter 
Samantha died in 2013 from brain 
cancer. Stein is survived by their other 
daughter Mandy, a sister and three 
grandchildren. 

Music Mogul Seymour Stein 
Signed the Top Rock Stars

GABE FRIEDMAN JTA 

OBITUARIES
OF BLESSED MEMORY

KMAZUR/WIREIMAGE/GETTY IMAGES

Seymour Stein with David Byrne and Madonna in 1996.

