Aliza Magen, who spent more than 40 years working for the Mossad, Israel’s national intelligence agency, eventually serving as deputy under three of its directors, making her the highest-ranking woman in the organization’s history, died on April 14 in Jerusalem. She was 87. She participated in some of the Mossad’s biggest operations, although many of the details of her work remain classified. It was often hard for a woman to rise in the ranks of [...]

Walter Frankenstein, who with his family hid from the Nazis for more than two years by taking refuge in abandoned buildings, cars, forests, craters, brothels, and wherever they could survive, died on April 21 in Stockholm, where he had lived since 1956. He was 100. To support his family, he worked as a mason, which brought him into contact with Adolf Eichmann, a pivotal architect of the Final Solution, who threatened him as he did [...]

Herbert J. Gans, an eminent sociologist who studied urban and suburban life in America, died on April 21 at his home in Manhattan. He was 97. A refugee from Nazi Germany, he became one of the nation’s most influential social critics. He taught at Columbia and other leading universities for 54 years, wrote a dozen books and hundreds of articles that shaped the thinking of government and corporate policymakers, colleagues in sociology, and a wide [...]

Leonard Zeskind, who tracked right-wing hate groups and who foresaw that anti-immigrant ideologies would move to the mainstream of American politics, died on April 15 at his home in Kansas City, at 75. Mr. Zeskind spent decades studying white nationalism, documenting how its leading voices had shifted their vitriol from Black Americans to nonwhite immigrants. His 2009 book, Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement From the Margins to the Mainstream, resulted [...]

Andrew Gross, a member of a prominent New York apparel family who abandoned a career in the so-called rag trade to write nearly 20 crime and political thrillers, including five with James Patterson that hit No. 1 on The New York Times best-sellers list, died April 9 at his home in Purchase, NY. He was 72. Mr. Gross was a grandson of Fred P. Pomerantz, the founder of Leslie Fay Inc., whose dresses and sportswear [...]

Joel Krosnick, the longtime cellist of the Juilliard String Quartet, who helped shape its championing of new American music as much as its commitment to the classics, died on April 15 at his home in Hastings-on-Hudson, NY. He was 84. Mr. Krosnick joined the Juilliard in 1974 and remained until his retirement in 2016. With his longtime musical partner, the pianist Gilbert Kalish, Mr. Krosnick also had an active solo career, giving recitals in the [...]

Robert B. Shapiro, as former law professor turned corporate executive who performed a marketing miracle by branding aspartame as the sugar substitute NutraSweet, and making it a household name that consumers demanded in thousands of products, died on May 2 at his home in Chicago. He was 86. Aspartame was invented by chemists at the pharmaceutical company G.D. Searle. In 1985, Searle sold $700 million worth of aspartame, identified as NutraSweet, to dieters and others [...]

Jack Katz, a comic-book artist and writer, whose 768-page magnum opus, “The First Kingdom,” published in installments over a dozen years starting in 1974, was widely credited with helping give birth to the long-form graphic novel, died on April 24 in Walnut Creek, CA. He was 97. The revered comics pioneer Will Eisner once called “The First Kingdom” “...one of the most awesome undertakings in modern comic book history.” Jerry Siegel, who created Superman [...]

Margot Friedländer, a Holocaust survivor who, after decades in New York City, returned in 2010 to Berlin, where she found new purpose as a champion of Holocaust remembrance, died on May 9 in Berlin. She was 103. Mrs. Friedländer and her husband arrived in New York in 1946, vowing never to return to the country that had murdered their families. But after her husband’s death, Mrs. Friedländer decided to go back to see what was [...]

Charles Louis Strouse, an American composer and lyricist best known for writing the music to the Broadway musicals Bye Bye Birdie for which he won his first Tony Award for Best Musical,  Applause, which gave him his second Tony Award,  and Annie, his third,  died on May 15 in Manhattan, at 96. Annie, which included the song, “Tomorrow,” which quickly became a song hit and, in addition to his third Tony Award, garnered him two [...]