Dorothy Vogel a librarian who, with her postal-clerk husband, Herbert, bought thousands of works from future art stars, stashing them in their cramped one-bedroom New Yor apartment and eventually handling over the entire collection to the National Gallery of Art, died on Nov. 10 in Manhattan. She was 90. Throughout their decades as collectors, Ms. Vogel worked at the Brooklyn Public Library as a reference librarian, and Mr. Vogel, a high school dropout from Harlem, [...]

British playwright Tom Stoppard, a towering figure in theater and film, died on Nov. 29, 2025, at his home in Dorset, England. He was 88. Born Tomas Straussler on July 3, 1937, in Zlin, then part of Czechoslovakia, into a Jewish family, he and his family fled Nazi persecution — first to Singapore, then to India, before finally settling in Britain in 1946. He attended school in Yorkshire, and at age 17 began working as [...]

Mel Leipzig, an acclaimed figurative painter whose passion for detail transformed depictions of fellow New Jerseyans in mundane settings into mesmerizing enigmas, died on Nov. 1 in Princeton, NJ. He was 90. The New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote in 1979 that Mr. Leipzig’s “sense of mysterious emotional tensions in strongly characterized ordinary people makes him, perhaps, the Chekhov of Trenton, referring to the Russian dramatist who revealed the melancholy interior lives of his [...]

Frank Gehry, one of the most influential and acclaimed American architects, died on Dec. 5 at his home in Santa Monica, CA. He was 96, and still working on an 82,000-square-foot flagship store for Louis Vuitton on Rodeo Drive, and finalizing a 1,000-seat concert hall for the Colburn School of Music in downtown Los Angeles. Gehry is best known for his work building the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, which opened in 1997; the Walt Disney Concert [...]

Rabbi Eliezer Diamond, who taught at the Jewish Theological Seminary for more than three decades and left an indelible mark on generations of rabbis and Jewish scholars, died on Dec. 11. He was 73. Beyond the numerous eulogies that have been written for him, the rabbi’s reflections on life and faith endure. “What draws me back to Hashem, if not to my life as a whole, is Psalm 23: ‘Though I walk through the valley [...]

Cora Weiss, active for more than half a century in support of gender equality, international peace, the anti-Vietnam War movement, civil rights and nuclear disarmament, and who helped organize some of the important mass demonstrations of the 1960s, died on Dec. 8 in Manhattan. She was 91. In 196`1, when she was raising her children in the Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx, she heard about Women Strike for Peace, a new group organizing demonstrations against [...]

Rob Reiner, who rose from an early career as a sitcom star to direct a run of film classics that included “When Harry Met Sally...” and “The Princess Bride,” died at age 78 along with his wife, Michele Singer. 70, the daughter of Holocaust survivors. Los Angeles authorities say the two were found dead in their home on Dec. 13 in what they are investigating as a homicide. Describing his Jewish childhood to The Forward, [...]

Robert J. Samuelson, an economics columnist for Newsweek and The Washington Post who explored, in reader-friendly vernacular the perils of inflation, the fiscal consequences of entitlement spending, and the slow-motion crisis of the bulging national debt, died on Dec. 13 in Bethesda, MD. He was 79. Upon retiring in 2020, Mr. Samuelson wrote a final column assessing his career: “So far as I can tell,” he wrote, “nothing that I have written has ever had [...]

Norman Podhoretz, the long-time editor of Commentary magazine and a lion of neoconservatism, died on Dec.16 in Manhattan. He was 95. His intellectual odyssey took him from an ardent embrace of the left to a condemnation of a world order that in his eyes had become spineless in the face of Soviet expansionism and, later, Islamist militancy. In his 35 years at the helm of Commentary, published by the American Jewish Committee, Mr. Podhoretz transformed [...]

Emily Faust Korzenik, who in midlife became part of the first generation of women ordained as rabbis in the United States and who in 1985 presided over the first bar mitzvah in Krakow in decades, died on Dec. 15 at her home in Scarsdale, NY. She was 96. Ordained in 1981, for 25 years, she presided over the Fellowship for Jewish Learning, a congregation in Stamford, CT. Four years after her ordination, she led a [...]