Carrie Robbins, a meticulous and resourceful costume designer who worked on more than 30 Broadway shows from the 1960s to the 2000s, died on April 12, in Manhattan. She was 81. Critics hailed Ms. Robbins’ costumes over the years for transporting audiences to the Spain of Don Quixote, the underworld of early-18th-century London, and the ruined South during the Civil War. For “Grease,” she studied high school yearbooks from the 1950s. For a 1992 musical [...]

Howie Schwab, a sports nerd who parlayed his love of statistics into a long stint at ESPN that was most notable for his starring role as the ultimate trivia expert on the game show, “Stump the Schwab,” died on April 27 in Aventura, FL. He was 63. On “Stump the Schwab,” three challengers vied to outdo Mr. Schwab in answering questions posed by the host, Stuart Scott. Mr. Schwab almost always won. The show ran [...]

Lesley Hazleton, a British-born Jewish psychologist, journalist and author, whose curiosity about faith and religion led her to write biographies of Muhammad, Mary and Jezebel, died on April 29 at her home, a houseboat in Seattle. She was 78. She moved to Jerusalem in 1966, at age 20, and lived there through two wars and one peace treaty, working as a journalist for The Jerusalem Post and as a stringer for Time magazine. She left [...]

Jerome Rothenberg, a poet, translator and anthologist whose efforts to bring English-language readers into contact with creative traditions far outside the Western establishment — a field he called ethnopoetics — had an enormous impact on world literature, died on April 21 at his home in Encinitas, CA. He was 92. By ethnopoetics, Mr. Rothenberg meant poetry from indigenous and other non-Western cultures, including Jewish mysticism, American Indian, Dada, and a range of poetries from Europe, [...]

Sheppie Abramowitz, a political insider who became a powerful ally for refugees around the world, died on April 7 in Washington. She was 88. For more than five decades, Ms. Abramowitz was active in movements to solve refugee crises — in Vietnam, Thailand, Turkey and Kosovo. She used her deep knowledge of government officials, logistics and the struggles of those fleeing war and oppressive governments to secure real relief. Her husband, Morton I. Abramowitz, was [...]

Dr. Werner Spitz, a pathologist whose accounts of the traumatic last moments in some of the most sensational American deaths of the past 60 years figured in cases involving President John F. Kennedy, that carried a message of feminist empowerment, died on April 20 in Barrington, R.I. She was 81. In 1973, Ms. Specht was a copywriter at the McCann-Erickson agency in Manhattan. Preference was created to challenge Clairol’s Nice ‘n Easy. Her copy empowered [...]

Dr. Herbert Pardes, a psychiatrist and former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, who brought order to the merger of two major medical centers that became New York-Presbyterian Hospital Martin Luther King, Jr., O.J. Simpson, Jon Benet Ramsey, Mary Jo Kopechne and many others, died on April 14, in St. Clair Shores, MI, a suburb of Detroit. He was 97. Dr. Spitz’s career of more than 60 years traced to the early days [...]

Ilon Specht, who wrote a successful television commercial for L’Oréal’s Preference hair color product and ran it for 11 years, died on April 30 at his home in Manhattan. He was 89. Dr. Pardes aspired to make New York-Presbyterian a model for medical care, with focus on patients, efficient management, and rigid financial controls.

Disney legend Richard M. Sherman, half of the Academy Award-winning songwriting team of the Sherman Brothers (with his late brother Robert B. Sherman), died May 25, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Beverly Hills. He was 95. One of the most prolific composer-lyricists in the history of family entertainment, and a key member of Walt Disney’s inner circle of creative talents, Mr. Sherman garnered nine Academy Award nominations (winning two Oscars for his work on the [...]

Adele Faber, a former high school teacher who, with her Long Island neighbor Elaine Mazlish, wrote child-rearing blockbusters like How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk and Siblings Without Rivalry, which became bibles for generations of parents, died on April 24 in White Plains, NY. She was 96. The parenting guides have sold more than four million copies in North America alone, and have been published in 40 countries. [...]