​Judy was a beautiful person. We met at the School of Visual Arts in 1964. By chance we were in the same class trying to learn things to better our careers. We went out for coffee. I thought she was worldly; she thought I was good looking. Those first impressions held true, even after fifty-eight years of marriage.

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Early Years

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Judy was born Judith Moore on May 25, 1936, to George and Louise Moore. She was the only child and grew up in Millburn, New Jersey. Her father, a Princeton graduate, served in Europe during WWI. After the war he managed a succession of A&P supermarkets. She idealized her father and was heartbroken when he died. Judy was fourteen.

 

It was difficult for her mother, who had bipolar disorder, to care for Judy, so Judy spent most weekends with her maternal grandmother and her dog Mike. They would often go to the movies, which sparked a lifelong love of the silver screen. By the time she was thirteen she was already going to Manhattan to watch the latest films, like Gone With The Wind, which she saw four times. 

 

The family’s Episcopal minister intervened and helped enroll Judy in a girls’ boarding school in Vermont. It was a confining and highly regulated life, but she excelled in English and languages, making the honor roll and translating The Hunchback of Notre Dame from the French. 

 

Once back in Millburn, Judy was determined to earn a living and have an independent creative life. She began studying art and graphic design at the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Arts. She would later go on to work for some of the most prominent graphic design firms in New York as an accomplished production designer. 

 

While building her career, Judy met and married Victor Vyssotsky, a mathematician working at Bell Labs. Judy gave birth to a wonderful boy, Alexander (Andy), on March 22, 1959. Sadly, Vic wanted a stay-at-home wife, a suburban life that was the antithesis of what Judy aspired to. They separated and then divorced when Andy was four. Judy, by then a skilled commercial artist, had moved to New York.

 

It was around this time, the early sixties, that Judy and I enrolled in the same night class at the School of Visual Arts. We were fated to meet, fall in love, and share our lives together. I readily embraced Andy as my own, along with Andy’s beloved stuffed animals, Slouchy, Tigger and Morgan. I was twenty-six, Judy was thirty.

 

Soon after our marriage in 1966, we moved from the Lower East Side to a spacious, rent controlled apartment on the Upper West Side. And I opened my Industrial Design firm in 1972 in a four-story building across the street from Lincoln Center.

 

Our home was always bursting with friends for dinners and special occasions: Claire and Ted, Marc and Sara, Ben, Dan and June and so many others. Because of Judy’s love of entertaining, I was learning to socialize after all. Judy’s influence even helped my design business. However, I didn’t share Judy’s passion for Scrabble but had interesting conversations with her wordsmith friends when they came for game nights.

 

Andy, from the age of four, spent weekends, summers, and vacations with us. One memorable trip occurred in August 1970. As a family, we took a three-week vacation in France, driving from Paris to Mas Audran, a small village in the south. We spent several days in Paris before heading south. There was a Henri Matisse exhibit at the Grand Palais. Look for the photo of Judy and Andy sitting on the grass under the huge Matisse museum sign.

 

Another day we got lost while I was driving around the Arch of Triumph. I could not figure out which of 14 avenues to take to get back to our hotel. I stopped the car to look at the map. With horns blaring, a cop read me the riot act. Not speaking French, I just smiled and raised my arms in happy surrender. Exasperated, the cop waved us along. I thought it was hilarious but Judy was upset that we had been chewed out by the cop.

 

By the mid-1970s Judy was about to make a major career change.  She wanted to pursue her love of film. She began by earning a degree in film studies at Empire State College. After graduating, she became the first Film Programmer at The New York Cultural Center a museum at Columbus Circle. She was a great success drawing large crowds to her film programs.

 

She also worked with the Film Society of Lincoln Center and MoMA’s Film Department on many special projects. Judy went on to publish five books about film directors and actors including director Don Siegel, and actors Montgomery Cliff and Ava Gardner. And Academy Award-winner Olivia de Havilland became a friend during the year Judy wrote a book about her film career. She and I visited Ms. de Havilland at her Paris home on our frequent vacations to that beautiful city. They corresponded for several decades. Judy asked that the many letters to her from Ms. de Havilland be donated to MoMA’s Film Study Center.

 

In later years, during the 1980s Judy hosted a radio show on WBAI, interviewing many of the world’s leading filmmakers.

 

During her writing career she wrote about and interviewed film directors for MGM’s 16MM Division. Early on, she purchased a 16MM projector and held screenings at home for her many film world friends. She was often invited to contribute to many film books and journals.

 

Most of our family and friends knew only a little about Judy’s accomplishments. She was uncommonly modest and would hardly speak about herself and her work.

 

Judy eventually scaled back writing about film, enjoying time with her Scrabble friends, and reveling in her new home, a light filled Classic-6 apartment which we bought in 1996 at 83rd and West End Avenue. She loved spending hours reading in the living room with the light streaming in. The building has a roof terrace overlooked the Hudson River. Judy would often organize sunset parties for friends and family.

 

Always a book lover, she volunteered at the special collections’ library of the American Museum of Natural History and served there for 27 years. 

 

And most important of all, she was grateful that her Andy had grown up, was doing well in his career and was happy.

 

Andy met his beautiful Lisa in New York. Just after their marriage in New Orleans they came to New York to join Judy’s splendid 50th birthday party. Close to 200 family and friends attended a formal evening dinner held on the Board of Director’s floor of the Time Life building. What a memorable night!

 

Andy and Lisa decided to move to Lisa’s hometown, Greenville, SC, where her parents, Don and Shirley Kline and her sisters Lori and Leslie could help as they started a family.  Grandson Nick was born there on February 8, 1990, and granddaughter Zelda on November 3, 1992.

 

Judy and I traveled five or six times a year to spend holidays or graduations with Andy, Lisa, and the grandkids in Greenville, a lovely, prosperous Southern city. During the 1990s and the early 21st Century, it was a joy for Judy to see her grandchildren grow up, as Nick and Zelda became creative adults with careers in the arts.

 

When our grandkids were very young we vacationed in Cancun. When they were older, we’d spent vacations on the Outer Banks near Charlestown. Once Nick and Zelda were out of college Andy and Lisa returned to New York. Andy’s career with Met Life had gone well. Being in senior management, he was needed at the NY Headquarters. Judy was delighted that they were now living in the same city, and could see them often.

 

Judy loved to travel. She traveled abroad with dear friend Karen O’Hara, to Egypt and Jordan; and to Italy with cousins Anita and Jay Graber, and on a small sailing vessel to explore the Galapagos. She was an experienced traveler, but Paris was her favorite city. She loved nothing more than having a glass of wine at the Les Deux Maggots while watching the world wonder by.

 

At the start of Covid, Met Life offered Andy an attractive early retirement package.  He and Lisa wanted a quieter life in a rural upstate New York. They purchased a lovely home in New Lebanon, NY with ponds, a pool, a tennis court, forty-four acres and close to the Berkshires. Judy had a new destination to visit her family. She loved reading next to their fireplace sitting in a rocking chair.

 

And in the precious final months of Judy’s life, I would often pass by our dining room to see Judy, now frail, sitting for hours at our dining table, reading yet another book. The light streaming through the west window and her walker ready at her side. She forgot all pain; summoning energy that now came only when reading, that for her, unlocked the age-old enigma of the human condition.

 

I sometimes still see Judy there, in my mind’s eye. And I bless the day this once young man met a beautiful girl in that special class at the School of Visual Arts.

 

In Judy’s living will, she donated her body to the NYU Grossman School of Medicine for medical research. The school held a Donor Memorial Ceremony on November 20, 2025. All the first-year medical students were there to thank and celebrate the donor’s lives and gifts.  I also attended and was as proud of Judy and her legacy just as I was when she was alive.

    

You are loved, dear Judy, always and forever, by so many.

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Judith M. Kass

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- Born May 25, 1936

- Wife, mother, grandmother, 

  great-grandmother and writer.

- Sadly, she left us January 15, 2024

 

Judy loved animals and sailed around 

the Galapagos to experience them closely.  

But the frog was her favorite creature.  

She collected ceramic and glass frogs, and hung photos of frogs throughout her home.  

These little critters must have been a comfort, although she never talked about that.