On Feb. 7, 1964, when the Beatles were greeted by thousands of screaming fans at John F. Kennedy International Airport, a radio reporter named Ed Rudy was there. When they performed in Washington, Mr. Rudy was there. And when they headed to Miami Beach, he was there. Mr. Rudy filed reports to a syndicate of radio stations throughout the Beatles’ two-week tour of the United States, their first performances in the country. Soon after, he [...]

In the summer of 2001, Harriet Bograd  visited her daughter Margie, who had taken a summer job in a remote village in Ghana. When Ms. Bograd and her husband, Ken Klein, arrived in the village, Sefwi Wiawso, they learned about its community of two dozen families who considered themselves Jewish. In the week she was there, Ms. Bograd turned her enchantment with the villagers into a practical project that has become a major source [...]

Charles Koppelman, a longtime music executive who worked with Barbra Streisand, Dolly Parton, the Lovin’ Spoonful, Tracy Chapman, Wilson Phillips and Vanilla Ice, among many other artists, and later steered the companies of Martha Stewart and the fashion designer Steve Madden through periods of turbulence, died Nov. 25 at his home in Roslyn Harbor, NY. He was 82. For decades, Mr. Koppelman was a player in the upper ranks of the music industry, acting variously [...]

Michael Feingold, whose learned writing about the theater was a fixture of The Village Voice for decades, and who was also a dramaturge, a translator, and a Tony Award-nominated lyricist and adapter, died on Nov. 21 in Manhattan. He was 77. Mr. Feingold had an encyclopedic knowledge of plays and musicals, which he drew upon as he sized up productions, beginning in the early 1970s and continuing until recently. He did not pull punches, even [...]

Probably more than any other individual, Michael Pertschuk was responsible for the government’s placing warning labels on cigarettes, banning tobacco advertising from television and radio, requiring seatbelts in cars, and putting in place other consumer protections — all by helping to draft those measures into law as the chief counsel and staff director of the Senate Commerce Committee and later as the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission under President Jimmy Carter. Michael Pertschuk died [...]

Freddie Roman, a stand-up comedian who told jokes to mostly Jewish audiences in the Catskills, then brought borscht-belt humor to Manhattan when he conceived and performed in the hit show “Catskills on Broadway,” died on Nov. 26 in Boynton Beach FL. He was 85. Mr. Roman began his comedy career in the Catskills in the early 1960s, when that resort area in upstate New York was thriving. At one hotel after another, he told one-liners [...]

Lord David Young, a British-Jewish member of the House of Lords who advised Conservative governments in the United Kingdom from Margaret Thatcher to David Cameron died Dec. 8. He was 90. Margaret Thatcher, who appointed Young to his first political post as an advisor in charge of privatization, famously said of him, “Other people bring me problems. David brings me solutions.” During his many years in politics, Young used his position to advance the needs [...]

Jay Goldberg, a former boxer, who became a comedian and a colorful lawyer who defended celebrity clients and a bevy of mobsters, died on Dec. 5 at his home in Bridgehampton. He was 89. Mr. Goldberg relished his role as a gladiator, first as a 6-foot-2, 140-pound welterweight who retired when a knockout in the third round ended his 10-0 winning streak, then as a “killer” in the courtroom, who also occasionally filled in at [...]

Philip Pearlstein, an artist whose nudes reclaimed the naked human body for painting, and who found a persuasive modern idiom for the portrait genre, died on Dec.17 in Manhattan. He was 98. In the early 1960s, Mr. Pearlstein turned from landscapes executed in a brushy Abs tract Expressionist style and began painting nude models from life. His icily lit nudes represented a shocking departure in American painting then dominated by color fields. His early paintings, [...]

Albert Madansky, a virtuoso statistician who sought to quantify the risks of accidental nuclear war, died on Dec. 8 in Chicago. He was 88. In 1959, in the thick of the Cold War, Dr. Madansky was a mathematician for the RAND Corporation, the research institute in Santa Monica, CA, where with colleagues he studied the risk of unauthorized nuclear explosion. Noting that any risk co7ld have serious consequences, his report recommended what became known as [...]