Amnon Weinstein, an Israeli luthier who restored violins belonging to Jews during the Holocaust so musicians around the world could play them as tributes to those silenced in Nazi death camps, died on March 4 in Tel Aviv. He was 84. Mr. Weinstein was the founder of Violins of Hope, an organization that provides violins he restored to orchestras for concerts and educational programs commemorating the Holocaust. The instruments have been played in dozens of [...]

Marjorie Perloff, whose incisive readings of avant-garde artists like Ezra Pound, John Cage and John Ashbery made her one of the world’s leading scholars of contemporary poetry, died on March 24 at her home in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles. She was 92. Professor Perloff, who spend the latter part of her career at Stanford University, made her name as a forceful advocate for experimental poetry, reaching back to early 20th-century writers like [...]

Famed American artist and sculptor Richard Serra, known for turning curving walls of rusting steel and other malleable materials into large-scale outdoor artworks installed across the world, died on March 26 at his home on Long Island. He was 85. Known by his colleagues as the “poet of iron,” Serra became world-renowned for his structures of arcs, spirals and ellipses. His works have been installed in landscapes and included in the collections of museums, from [...]

Dr. David Egilman, a physician and expert witness who, over a 35-year span, gave testimony in some 600 trials involving corporate malfeasance, resulting in billions of dollars in awards for victims and their survivors, died on April 2, at his home in Foxborough, MA. He was 71. A dogged researcher, he dug up incriminating evidence showing that, in many cases, drug companies knew the risks involved with putting a new medication on the market, but [...]

Norman Miller, who arrived in Britain via the Kindertransport when he was 7 years old, died Feb. 24 in a hospital in Manhattan. He was 99. In 1944, when he was 20 , he joined the British Army, hoping to find out what had happened to his family in Germany. Not until after the war did he learn in a letter from a friend who had survived the Jungfernhof concentration camp that his parents, sister [...]

Michael Singer, a sculptor whose work blurred the lines separating art, landscaping, architecture and urban planning, died on March 14 at his home in Delray Beach FL. He was 78. Mr. Singer was often characterized as a landscape architect with public commissions at sites around the country. But in fact, he was an artist who saw his medium and his ambition in expansive yet humble terms, with work that attempted to remediate humanity’s disruption of [...]

Sami Michael, an Iraqi-born Israeli writer whose novels illuminate the world of Jews from Arabic countries and their prejudices and discrimination that they, as well as Israeli Arabs, have experienced, died on April 1 in Haifa, where he lived. He was 97. A native Arabic speaker, Mr. Michael had to master Hebrew to publish his first novel in 1974. Mr. Michael went on to write a dozen novels, three books of nonfiction, three plays and [...]

Maurice El Medioni, an Algerian-born pianist who fused Jewish and Arab musical traditions into a singular style he called “Pianoriental,” died on March 25 in Israel. He was 95. Mr. Medioni was among last representatives of a once-vibrant Jewish-Arab musical culture that flourished in North Africa before and after WWII. The Medioni style remained buried and nearly forgotten for decades during the war. Then, in 1996 at the age of 68, he released a breakthrough [...]

Ellen Ash Peters, a legal trailblazer who was the first woman on the faculty of Yale Law School, the first female chief justice of the Connecticut Supreme Court, and who wrote a landmark civil rights decision in 1996 desegregating public schools in Hartford, died on April 17 at home in West Hartford. She was 94. In her 18 years on the Connecticut court, Justice Peters wrote more than 600 opinions. In 1994, at a dinner [...]

Phyllis Pressman, the matriarch of the family that founded Barneys New York, the luxury menswear store and the creator of Chelsea Passage, the store’s home goods bazaar, died on April 16 in Palm Beach, FL. She was 95. Chelsea Passage was created by “finishing” the alley on the 17th Street side of the store. In it, Mrs. Pressman filled it with a mixture of Art Deco ceramics and unique, decorative items. Barneys and Chelsea Passage [...]