Hessy Levinsons Taft, who as an infant appeared on the cover of a Nazi magazine in Germany, promoting her as the ideal Aryan baby, a distinction complicated by the fact that she was Jewish and had been exploited as part of a hoax, died on Jan. 1 at her home in San Francisco. She was 91. Th episode began in 1934, when Hessy was 6 months old and her parents hired a photographer to [...]
Georges Borchardt, a literary agent who arranged for the publication in English of Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir, Night, after it was rejected by 14 American publishers, and who introduced American readers to masters of the avant-garde, like the playwright Samuel Beckett, died on Jan. 18 at his home in Manhattan. He was 97. Mr. Borchardt had an astute eye for literary talent. At various times, he or the Manhattan agency that he and his wife, [...]
Barbara Aronstein Black, a legal historian who achieved a milestone as the first woman to lead an Ivy League law school, at Columbia University, died on Jan. 20 in Philadelphia. She was 92. As dean, Professor Black, a scholar of law in colonial America, influenced curricular reform, bolstered Columbia’s corporate law program, brought more women and people of color onto the faculty, adopted a maternal leave policy, and introduced a part-time program for mothers. After [...]
David Rosen, a Brooklyn-born entrepreneur who transformed his photo booth business in Japan into Sega enterprises, the video game giant that dominated arcades, basements and dorm rooms with blockbusters like Mortal Kombat, Sonic the Hedgehog, and N.H.L. ’94, died on Dec. 25 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 96. During a four-decade career that began in the 1950s with coin-operated machines and culminated with the introduction of cutting-edge home gaming systems, Mr. Rosen [...]
To the members and friends of Congregation Tifereth Israel, Owing to the threat snow, plunging temperatures, and high winds, which could impact ferry service from Connecticut for Rabbi Cantor, I am closing the shul for in-person services. We will observe and celebrate Shabbat on Zoom only. Please join us on Zoom Friday evening at 7:30 p.m., and again Saturday morning at 9:30 a.m. to welcome Rabbi Cantor and to enjoy her always inspirational services. [...]
Dear members and friends, I am not a rabbi. At times like this, I wish I had at hand the depth of a Rabbi’s holy insight and the eloquence of a Rabbi’s spiritual vocabulary. With those special gifts, the better to express the joy and gratitude I feel at this moment, thoughts bestowed upon me by a simple act — a keystroke on my computer. Those of you who attend Saturday morning services may have [...]
Dear members and friends, This weekend’s weather is forecast to be wicked cold with enough snow to keep the plows busy for days. I encourage you to stock up on essentials early, and to plan on staying safe inside your homes. To that end, we are closing the shul for the weekend. We will observe Shabbat services at the usual times — 7:30 p.m. Friday, and 9:30 a.m. Saturday, ON ZOOM ONLY. [Even if [...]
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 [...]
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