[1][2] Born Marilyn Cohen, into a Jewish family in Pennsylvania, Henry, was described as a "quintessential old-school girl reporter", and a "fierce advocate" for Holocaust survivors.

[5] Henry focused much of the latter part of her journalism career in advocacy for survivors of the Nazi Holocaust,[6] but kept a neutral stance in her coverage of the myriad thorny issues involved.

[5] She also sought to pressure U.S. and Czech officials to look into the apparent murder in 1967 of Charles Jordan,[10] a top professional of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) at the time whose body was found floating in the Vltava.

As she faced her cancer and treatments, Henry also focused her life's ending work on the advocacy of hospice care for people suffering from terminal illness.

[11]" She was the author of Confronting the Perpetrators: A History of the Claims Conference (Vallentine Mitchell), with a foreword by Sir Martin Gilbert (2007), a contributor to the Encyclopedia Judaica and the American Jewish Year Book.