Tom Lehrer, the Harvard-trained mathematician whose wickedly iconoclastic songs made him a favorite satirist in the 1950s and ‘60s on college campuses and in all the Greenwich Villages of the country, died on August 9 at his home in Cambridge, MA. He was 97. Mr. Lehrer’s lyrics were clever, sometimes salacious, and almost always satirical. Accompanying himself on the piano, he performed in nightclubs, in concert, and on records that his admirers purchased originally by [...]

Morton Mintz, a journalist who in articles and books exposed the perils of prescription medical products like thalidomide and the Dalkon Shield, and who challenged the auto industry to be more accountable to consumers, died on August 4 at his home in Washington. He was. 103. From 1946 to 1958, Mr. Mintz was a reporter in St. Louis first for The Star-Times and then for The Globe-Democrat, where he exposed the plight of vulnerable people [...]

Zelig Eshhar, an immunologist whose breakthrough research in the 1980s created a critical pathway to developing immunotherapies that attack particular cancers, died on July 3 at Tel Yitzhak, a kibbutz in central Israel. He was 84. Dr. Eshhar’s exploration of the human immune system began in the 1960s, during his Ph.D. studies at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, near Tel Aviv. There, he focused on the T-cell, a type of white blood cell [...]

Wallis Annenberg, who in more than 20 years in leadership positions at her family’s Annenberg Foundation oversaw more than $3 billion in grants and donations to projects that include the arts, wildlife, and older adults, died on August 11 at her home in Los Angeles. She was 86. Philanthropic projects have included the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; PetSpace, an animal adoption hospital and humane education [...]

Across more than 40 years as a popular New York talk-show host on WNYC and WBAI, Leonard Lopate interviewed writers, artists, actors, directors, politicians, scientists, journalists, musicians, athletes, designers, and explorers, including 42 Nobel Prize winners, one U.S. President (Jimmy Carter), and two future presidents (Barack Obama and Joseph R. Biden Jr.) Mr. Lopate died on August 5 at his home in Brooklyn. He was 84. In 2010, he told The Brooklyn Rail, an arts [...]

Daniel Warren Hoffman, an American-Israeli klezmer violinist, composer, and documentary film producer, died on July 18, 2025, in Tel Aviv, Israel. Mr. Hoffman founded the klezmer-jazz fusion ensemble, the Klez-X and co-founded Davka and Trio Carpion. He also produced the documentary film “Otherwise It’s Just Firewood,” the pilot film for a television series that explores the role of the Italianate violin in disparate cultures worldwide. The film was aired widely on American PBS stations in [...]

Morton Meyerson, an understated Texas businessman who helped H. Ross Perot build Electronic Data Systems into a world-leading data processing company, and who later advised Mr. Perot during his 1992 presidential campaign, died on August 4 at his home in Dallas. He was 87. Mr. Meyerson was the quiet, stubborn, moneymaking computer programmer in the backroom who helped make his boss a billionaire. Mr. Perot had started E.D.S. in 1962 with a $1,000 check. In [...]