David Seidler, a screenwriter whose Oscar-winning script for “The King’s Speech” — about King George VI conquering a stutter to rally Britain at the outset of WWII — drew on his own painful experience with a childhood stammer, died on March 16 on a fly-fishing trip in New Zealand. He was 86 and lived in Santa Fe, NM.

On winning the Academy Award for best original screenplay for “The King’s Speech” (2010), Mr. Seidler said from the Hollywood stage that he was accepting on behalf of all stutterers. “We have a voice; we have been heard,” he said.

Ben Stern, a survivor of nine concentration camps, who spearheaded a defiance against a rally organized by a band of Nazis in Skokie, Ill., in 1977, died on Feb. 28, at his home in Berkeley, CA, where he had moved from his residence in Illinois. He was 102.

          The threat of Nazis rallying in his midst was intolerable to him, to many of his fellow Skokie residents, and to local government leaders. Efforts to block the demonstration failed. The Supreme Court denied the request for a stay, clearing the path for the Nazis to demonstrate.

Although Skokie lost the legal fight, the village was spared the Nazi rally The group moved the event to Chicago, knowing that a rally in Skokie would face a counterdemonstration, which Mr. Stern had helped to plan and which was expected to draw about 50,000 people.

In Chicago, an estimated 5,000 turned out to protest the really. In the end, the demonstration outside a federal building included 29 Nazis and lasted 10 minutes, The Los Angeles Times reported.

Mr. Stern was quoted saying “Today you prove we stand together against the threat of Nazism.”

Joseph I. Lieberman, the independent four-term U.S. senator from Connecticut, who was the Democratic nominee for vice president in 2000s, becoming thew first Jewish candidate on the national ticket of a major party, died on March 27 in New York City. He was 82.

Mr. Lieberman served 10 years in the state Senate, the last six as majority leader before running the open U.S. House seat for the New Haven area. Following that loss, he ran for state attorney general and swept to victory. He won reelection four years later and then took o U.S. Sen. Lowell P. Weiker, Jr., a three-term liberal Republican.

In Washington, Mr. Lieberman became known as a serious-minded legislator, adept at working with colleagues on both sides of the aisle. In private life, Mr. Lieberman was a strict observer of Orthodox Jewish practice. He kept a kosher4 diet, prayer daily, and declined to campaign on the Sabbath. He brought moral certitude to his public life as well, denouncing gratuitous sex and violence in films, television shows, and pop music. One of Mr. Lieberman’s enduring themes was that religion in general, not just the Jewish faith, deserved a more prominent place in public life.

In his 2012 farewell Senate speech, he said, “The greatest obstacle I see standing between us and the brighter American future we all want is  right here in Washington. It is the partisan polarization of our politics that prevents us from making the principled compromises on which progress in a democracy depends.”

 The Shofar joins the membership in mourning the deaths of two long-time shul members: Bill Adams on Feb. 15, at his home in Silver Spring, MD; and Alice Nadel on Feb. 23, at her home in Cutchogue.

May their memories be blessed. We extend deepest condolences to the families.

Marc Jaffe was at a New Year’s Eve party in Hollywood in 1967 when a screenwriter named William Peter Blatty began chatting him up. Mr. Blatty said he had tried and failed to sell an idea for a novel — about a young girl possessed by a demon and the tortured priest who tries to save her. But Mr. Jaffe, editorial director of Bantam Books, the paperback publishing house in New York City, thought the idea had merit, and Mr. Jaffe gave him an advance of $26,000 to secure the rights to the novel, The Exorcist, which sold nearly a half-million copies and made the best-seller lists. What followed was the 1973 movie adaptation, which in turn boosted more paperback sales. By 1974, 10 million copies had been sold, making it, at the time, the second-best-selling paperback of all time, behind Mario Puzo’s The Godfather and ahead of Erich Segal’s Love Story.

An editor is lucky,” Mr. Jaffe told Clarence Petersen, author of The Bantam Story: Thirty Years of Paperback Publishing, “if he has one like that in his career.” As it happened, Mr. Jaffe had many, including Catcher in the Rye and Jaws.

Marc Jaffe, died on Dec. 31 at his home in Williamstown, MA. He was 102.

Naomi Feil was only 8 years old when she moved into what was then known as a home for the aged, where her parents worked. Living there until she left for college, she learned firsthand how to comfort and communicate with older adults.

When she died on Dec. 24 at her home in Jasper, OR, at the age of 91, she had devoted her entire career to finding ways to comfort disoriented older people and their caregivers. Her method calls for caregivers to empathize with disoriented individuals in an effort to reduce their stress and support their dignity, rather than try to impose reality on them.

Charles Fried, a conservative legal scholar who as President Ronald Reagan’s solicitor general argued against abortion rights and affirmative action before the Supreme Court — but who later rejected the conservative legal movement’s rightward march, calling the current high court “reactionary” — died on Jan. 23 at his home in Cambridge, MA. He was 88.

In 2021, as the high court’s Republican-appointed supermajority looked likely to reverse Roe, Mr. Fried wrote in an opinion column for The New York Times, “To overturn Roe now would be an act of constitutional vandalism.” His reasoning was that a 1992 case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, had more firmly established the right to abortion than when he opposed it for the Reagan White House.

He became an outspoken critic of the Roberts Court over its rulings limiting voting rights, labor unions, campaign finance reform, and its refusal to limit blatant partisan gerrymandering, believing in change that is incremental and not radical.

Mr. Fried spent nearly 60 years on the Harvard Law School faculty.