Dan Ben-Amos, a folklorist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was chair of the Department of Folklore and Folklife, died March 26. He was 88. An interest in folklore while studying at Hebrew University of Jerusalem determined his life’s work. He began by conducting folklore research in Nigeria on the oral tradition of the Edo people in Benin City and its rural surroundings. His scholarly interests included Jewish folklore, African folklore, humor, [...]

Seymour Stein, whose Sire Records launched Madonna’s career and signed early punk rock and new wave icons as The Ramones and Talking Heads, died April 2. He was 80. Although Mr. Stein’s imprint, founded in 1966, enjoyed major distribution, he also took risks on unproven, underground talent that paid off on the charts, Variety said. Lou Reed, the Pretenders, Ice-T and many others released some of their best music on Sire. Gary Kurfirst, late manager [...]

Mimi Sheraton, the food writer and restaurant critic who chronicled culinary scenes in New York and around the world that captured the nuances of haute cuisine, died on April 6 in Manhattan. She was 97. In a six-decade career, Ms. Sheraton was The New York Times’s food and restaurant critic; worked for Vanity Fair, Time, New York, Condé Nast Traveler and other magazines; and wrote 16 books, including restaurant guides, cookbooks, and a memoir. She [...]

Harry Lorayne, who enjoyed an international career as a memory expert, dazzling audiences with feats of memory from telephone books and magazines, died April 7 in Newburyport, MA. He was 96. In a demonstration of his ability on July 23, 1959, he went into the audience of the Garry Moore Show and asked the names of hundreds of people. Then, when called on stage, he recited the names of all the people and where they [...]

Benjamin B. Ferencz, the last surviving prosecutor of the Nuremberg trials, who convicted Nazi war criminals of organizing the murder of a million people, and German industrialists of using slave labor to build Hitler’s war machine, died on April 7 in Boynton Beach, FL. He was 103. Thirteen trials were held in Nuremberg. Mr. Ferencz was assigned to prosecute the Einsatzgruppen case, which for its staggering volume of victims has been called the biggest murder [...]

Al Jaffe, a cartoonist who created the fold-in, one of Mad magazine’s most recognizable features, died April 10 in Manhattan. He was 102. In 1964, Mr. Jaffee created the “Mad Fold-In,” an illustration-with-text feature on the inside of the magazine’s back cover that seemed at first glance to deliver a straightforward message. When the page was folded in thirds, however, both illustration and text were transformed into something entirely different and unexpected, often with a [...]

Michael Lerner, a veteran character actor whose dozens of film and television credits include small but memorable roles in “Barton Fink” and “Elf,” died on April 8 at a hospital in Burbank, CA. He was 81. Mr. Lerner was a busy working actor, who started out with roles in theater productions and episodic television before embarking on a five-decade film career. His role as Jack Lipnick, a volatile movie studio mogul, in Joel and Ethan [...]

Meir Shalev, whose novels made him one of Israel’s leading writers, died on April 11 at his home in the village of Alonei Abba in northern Israel’s Jezreel Valley. He was 74. Often compared to Mark Twain for the humor lacing his novels, and to Gabriel Garcia Márquez for his use of magical realism, Mr. Shalev focused most of his seven novels on the half century before Israeli independence in 1948. He also wrote eight [...]

Edward Koren, the New Yorker cartoonist who for six decades created a fantasy world of creatures that articulated the neuroses and banalities of middle-class America, died on April 14 at his home in Brookfield, VT. He was 87. With Charles Addams, James Thurber and Saul Steinberg, Mr. Koren was one of the most popular cartoonists in The New Yorker’s pantheon of humorists. In addition to his work for the magazine and some commercial clients, he [...]

Leonard Abrams, the founder of the East Village Eye, a community newspaper dripping with attitude that, according to The New York Times, “captured in newsprint the do-it-yourself post-punk ethos that ignited the explosion of groundbreaking art, music and fashion in downtown Manhattan in the 1980s,” died of a heart attack on April 1, at a rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike on his way home to Queens. He was 68. The Eye, a monthly [...]