Gerald M. Levin, a media executive who ran the world’s largest media company, Time Warner, and who became an architect of its merger with America online, the world’s largest internet company, then headed by Steve Case, died on March 13. He was 84. The merger was widely considered the worst corporate marriage in American history. AOL’s stock price slid more than 30 percent between the deal’s announcement in January and its approval that December by [...]
Len Sirowitz, an award-winning advertising art director whose creative work in the 1960s included memorable print ads for the Volkswagen Beetle — like one declaring, “Ugly is only skin-deep” — and a campaign for Sara Lee, which introduced “Nobody doesn’t like Sara Lee, died on March 4 at his home in Manhattan. He was 91. “It was quite early in my career that I began to realize that my message needed to not only be [...]
Josette Molland, a French Resistance fighter during WWII, eventually captured by the Nazis, who deported her to concentration camps for women, died Feb. 17 at a nursing home in Nice. The horrors she endured took a visual form in the retelling. Many years after her liberation and return to France, she was worried that the story wouldn’t be told. She began to make a series of paintings depicting her life at Ravensbruck and Holleischen. “I [...]
David Seidler, a screenwriter whose Oscar-winning script for “The King’s Speech” — about King George VI conquering a stutter to rally Britain at the outset of WWII — drew on his own painful experience with a childhood stammer, died on March 16 on a fly-fishing trip in New Zealand. He was 86 and lived in Santa Fe, NM. On winning the Academy Award for best original screenplay for “The King’s Speech” (2010), Mr. Seidler said [...]
Ben Stern, a survivor of nine concentration camps, who spearheaded a defiance against a rally organized by a band of Nazis in Skokie, Ill., in 1977, died on Feb. 28, at his home in Berkeley, CA, where he had moved from his residence in Illinois. He was 102. The threat of Nazis rallying in his midst was intolerable to him, to many of his fellow Skokie residents, and to local government leaders. Efforts to [...]
Martin Greenfield, born in a part of Czechoslovakia that is now Ukraine and who was sent to Auschwitz as a teenager and later became a tailor for clients, including six U.S. presidents and numerous celebrities, died on March 18 at his home in Brooklyn. He was 95. Beaten in the camp for ripping a shirt, a fellow prisoner taught him to sew. At age 19, he was freed, and he boarded a ship to New [...]
Joseph I. Lieberman, the independent four-term U.S. senator from Connecticut, who was the Democratic nominee for vice president in 2000s, becoming thew first Jewish candidate on the national ticket of a major party, died on March 27 in New York City. He was 82. Mr. Lieberman served 10 years in the state Senate, the last six as majority leader before running the open U.S. House seat for the New Haven area. Following that loss, he [...]
Evan Gershkovich, a Jewish reporter for the Wall Street Journal, imprisoned for a year in Russia, has been ordered to remain in jail there on espionage charges until at least June, when his case may be reviewed. Friends and colleagues have organized fundraisers to bring attention to his plight in the hope that publicity may hasten his release.
Zach Hyman, a star hockey player for the Edmonton Oilers, scored his 50th goal of the 2023-24 season on March 24.
Ruth Levy Gottesman, an American educator, chair of the board of trustees of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine (AECOM) in the Bronx, New York, and a long-time professor there, last month donated $1 billion to the medical school to ensure that tuition would be free in perpetuity to all future students. It is the largest gift ever made to any medical school in this country. With her husband David, she donated $25 million to AECOM in 2008, which [...]
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