Sonia Handelman Meyer, whose memorable black and white street photography around New York City in the 1940s and ‘50’s reflected her training at the Photo League, a left-leaning collective of photographers who believed their work could change poor social conditions, died on Sept. 11 at her home in Charlotte, NC. She was 102. She joined the progressive New York-based Photo League in 1943, learning about socially-engaged photography in workshops from one of its founders, Sid [...]

Rita Gardner, who in a long cabaret theater career earned a place in stage history in 1960, when she originated the role of Luisa in the musical “The Fantasticks,” died on Sept. 24 in Manhattan. She was 87. Ms. Gardner was in her mid-20s and not particularly well known when she responded to an audition notice for “The Fantasticks.” She sang the song she had once used to win an “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts” contest, [...]

Donald Blinken, a financier, patron of the arts and Democratic party donor who became an ambassador to Hungary, helping to inspire the career in politics and diplomacy of his son, Antony, the current U.S. Secretary of State, died on Sept. 22 at his home in East Hampton. He was 96. Donald Blinken was appointed ambassador to Hungary by President Bill Clinton in 1994. It was not long after the fall of the Soviet Union, and [...]

Ilse Nathan and Ruth Siegler, sisters and Holocaust survivors, died 11 days apart — Ilse Scheuer Nathan at her home in Birmingham, on August 23, at age 98, and Ruth Scheuer Siegler in a hospital on Sept. 3, at age 95. The family’s odyssey through the Nazi killing machine began in August 1939, when the sisters traveled with their mother to the Netherlands, where Mr. Scheuer had escaped a year earlier after Kristallnacht. The war [...]

David Gottesman, a protégé of Warren Buffett who built a powerful Wall Street investment house, First Manhattan, which manages more than $20 billion for its clients, and who presided over it for a half-century, died on Sept. 28 at his home in Rye, NY. He was 96. Mr. Gottesman began First Manhattan in 1964 with the profits from a venture in which he bought Computer Systems Inc., a bankrupt maker of computers used on missile [...]

Leonard A. Cole, a dentist who became an expert on biological weapons and who chronicled in troubling detail a secret U.S. Army program that turned millions of Americans into unwitting germ-warfare guinea pigs in the 1950s and ’60s, died on Sept. 18 in Ridgewood, NJ. He was 89. Dr. Cole’s dental practice was firmly established when he began a second career s a political scientist, looking into the clandestine military tests. The program, which ran [...]

Judah Samet, who survived the Holocaust and decades later avoided the deadliest antisemitic attack in United States history by mere minutes, died Sept. 27, in Oakland, CA. He was 84. Mr. Samet survived the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp as a child during WWII, and was in the parking lot of the Tree of Life synagogue in 2018 when a gunman entered the building and killed 11 people. He had, indeed, lived a remarkable life, his nephew [...]

Laurence H. Silberman, a conservative federal appeals court judge and advocate of judicial restraint whose opinions on gun rights, press freedom, the Affordable Care Act, and other crucial issues resonated widely and sometimes presaged Supreme Court decisions, died on Oct. 4 at his home in Washington, DC. He was 86. Judge Silberman was unanimously confirmed by the Senate for six federal posts; was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, by [...]