Rachel Pollack, a prolific writer about tarot and an early activist for transgendered people’s rights, died on April 7. She was 77. Admired for her science fiction and fantasy writing in novels and comic books, she began speaking out for transvestites, transsexuals and drag queens at a time when the trans community was largely unseen, said Religion News Service. “I hope that Rachel’s legacy both as activist and mystic will be a serious commitment to [...]

Emily Fisher Landau, a New Yorker who used a Lloyd’s insurance settlement from a spectacular jewel heist in her apartment to found what would become one of America’s premier collections of contemporary art, died on March 27 in Palm Beach, FL. She was 102. From 1991 to 2017, Ms. Landau opened her collection of 1,200 artworks to the public in the Fisher Landau Center for Art, a repurposed former factory in Long Island City, Queens. [...]

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 [...]