The Shofar and the Shofar’s editor join the City of Highland Park, Ill., in mourning those killed in a mass shooting at a July 4 parade. Among them were Steve Strauss, 88, Jacki Lovi Sundheim, 63, and Katherine Goldstein, 64. Before relocating to New York, my husband and I and our children lived in that picturesque city, within walking distance of Ravinia Park, the summer home of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. On nice afternoons, with [...]

David Weiss Halivni, a theologian and pioneer in the field of academic Talmudic scholarship, died June 29 in Israel, and was buried on Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives. Born in today’s Ukraine, Halivni was raised in Sighet, Romania, by a Talmudic scholar grandfather, who fostered his evident genius with rabbinic texts. In Sighet, he studied alongside Elie Wiesel, who remained a close, lifelong friend. Halivni was ordained as a rabbi at 15, but by age 16, [...]

Richard Taruskin, a musicologist and public intellectual whose scholarship and criticism upended conventional classical music history, died July 1 in Oakland, CA. He was 77. An emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley7 and a specialist in Russian music, Mr. Tasruskin was the author of a number of groundbreaking musicological studies, including the six-volume Oxford History of Western Music. Mr. Taruskin courted controversy in nearly everything he wrote. His most consequential flamethrowing was his [...]

Arnold Skolnick, who designed what became the iconic pop-culture images of its time — the poster for the original Woodstock music festival in 1969 — died on June 15 in Amherst, MA. He was 85. Mr. Skolnick’s poster design was a model of simplicity: it conveyed information and caught the sensibility of the moment. It had an attention-getting red background and the neck of a guitar with a white bird perched on it. “I got [...]

Peter Brook, whose creative stage work ranged across seven decades on both sides of the Atlantic and earned him a place among the greatest theater directors of the 20th century, died on July 2. He was 97. He spent years in commercial theater, winning Tony Awards in 1966 and 1971 for “Marat/Sade” and Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” He was equally at home directing Shaw, Beckett, Cocteau, Sartre and Chekhov. He “coaxed brilliance,” The New [...]