Cora Weiss, active for more than half a century in support of gender equality, international peace, the anti-Vietnam War movement, civil rights and nuclear disarmament, and who helped organize some of the important mass demonstrations of the 1960s, died on Dec. 8 in Manhattan. She was 91. In 196`1, when she was raising her children in the Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx, she heard about Women Strike for Peace, a new group organizing demonstrations against [...]

Rob Reiner, who rose from an early career as a sitcom star to direct a run of film classics that included “When Harry Met Sally...” and “The Princess Bride,” died at age 78 along with his wife, Michele Singer. 70, the daughter of Holocaust survivors. Los Angeles authorities say the two were found dead in their home on Dec. 13 in what they are investigating as a homicide. Describing his Jewish childhood to The Forward, [...]

Robert J. Samuelson, an economics columnist for Newsweek and The Washington Post who explored, in reader-friendly vernacular the perils of inflation, the fiscal consequences of entitlement spending, and the slow-motion crisis of the bulging national debt, died on Dec. 13 in Bethesda, MD. He was 79. Upon retiring in 2020, Mr. Samuelson wrote a final column assessing his career: “So far as I can tell,” he wrote, “nothing that I have written has ever had [...]

Norman Podhoretz, the long-time editor of Commentary magazine and a lion of neoconservatism, died on Dec.16 in Manhattan. He was 95. His intellectual odyssey took him from an ardent embrace of the left to a condemnation of a world order that in his eyes had become spineless in the face of Soviet expansionism and, later, Islamist militancy. In his 35 years at the helm of Commentary, published by the American Jewish Committee, Mr. Podhoretz transformed [...]

Emily Faust Korzenik, who in midlife became part of the first generation of women ordained as rabbis in the United States and who in 1985 presided over the first bar mitzvah in Krakow in decades, died on Dec. 15 at her home in Scarsdale, NY. She was 96. Ordained in 1981, for 25 years, she presided over the Fellowship for Jewish Learning, a congregation in Stamford, CT. Four years after her ordination, she led a [...]