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 [...]

Edward H. Meyer, an empire-building chief executive who transformed a midsize New York advertising agency into a global power, died April 11at his apartment in Manhattan. He was 96. Mr. Meyer joined Grey Advertising as an account services executive in 1956, when the agency was billing about $34 million a year. He was named president in 1968 and chairman and chief executive in 1970. Over the next 35 years, he built Grey into a behemoth [...]

Hedda Kleinfeld Schachter, who with her husband, Jack, built the empire of tulle and satin known as Kleinfeld’s, the bridal superstore that for decades drew women from all over the world to Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, died on March 29 in Manhattan. She was 99. I Kleinfeld & Son was a family business, originally a small fur concern started by Ms. Schachter’s father, Isadore Kleinfeld. But it was Ms. Schachter, known as Miss Hedda, who with [...]

Jessica Burstein, a photographer best known for her candid shots taken at Elaine’s, the restaurant and celebrity hangout, died on April 11 at her home in Manhattan. She was 76. In 1992, Ms. Burstein became the official photographer at Elaine’s, her framed photos displayed on the restaurant’s walls. Ms. Burstein met Dick Wolf, the creator of the “Law & Order” franchise at Elaine’s in 1993, and he soon hired her to photograph the crime scenes [...]

Leon Levine, an American businessman and philanthropist who founded the Family Dollar chain of discount stores, died on April 5 in Charlotte, NC. He was 85. In 1959, he visited a store in Kentucky that sold nothing costing more than a dollar. He liked the simple concept and, in November 1959, at age 22, he opened a similar store in Charlotte. The company grew rapidly. In 1962, Family Dollar did about $2 million in business [...]

Israeli songwriter, playwright, author and columnist Yehonatan Geffen, nephew of Moshe Dayan and father of pop star Aviv Geffen and filmmaker Shira Geffen, died April 19 in Israel. He was 76. Geffen also wrote novels and penned hundreds of columns for Ma’ariv from 1972 to 2013, which made him a popular commentator. He was a member of the legendary group Lool (Chicken Coop), and performed with the top entertainers in the country.

Bernice Rose, an art historian and curator whose groundbreaking exhibitions put traditional drawing on an equal footing with painting and sculpture, died on April 16 at her home in Manhattan. She was 87. As a drawing curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, she organized exhibitions showing that drawings were far more than preliminary works executed mainly on paper. In a catalogue that accompanied “Drawing Now: 1955-1975,” she wrote that drawing had [...]