Marc Jaffe was at a New Year’s Eve party in Hollywood in 1967 when a screenwriter named William Peter Blatty began chatting him up. Mr. Blatty said he had tried and failed to sell an idea for a novel — about a young girl possessed by a demon and the tortured priest who tries to save her. But Mr. Jaffe, editorial director of Bantam Books, the paperback publishing house in New York City, thought the [...]

Naomi Feil was only 8 years old when she moved into what was then known as a home for the aged, where her parents worked. Living there until she left for college, she learned firsthand how to comfort and communicate with older adults. When she died on Dec. 24 at her home in Jasper, OR, at the age of 91, she had devoted her entire career to finding ways to comfort disoriented older people and [...]

Charles Fried, a conservative legal scholar who as President Ronald Reagan’s solicitor general argued against abortion rights and affirmative action before the Supreme Court — but who later rejected the conservative legal movement’s rightward march, calling the current high court “reactionary” — died on Jan. 23 at his home in Cambridge, MA. He was 88. In 2021, as the high court’s Republican-appointed supermajority looked likely to reverse Roe, Mr. Fried wrote in an opinion column [...]

Vera Klement, a Holocaust survivor who was known for paintings that combined elements of Abstract Expressionism and figurative art, died on Oct. 20 in Evanston, IL. She was 93. “Abstract Expressionism suited me, I suppose, as far as a worldview: the notion of being at risk, on the edge, existential,” she told The Chicago Tribune. “And I think that has remained with me. It was the basis of my way of looking at art [...]

Alvin Moscow, who wrote a best-selling account of the sinking of the ocean liner Andrea Doria in 1956, then collaborated on the memoirs of several public figures, including Richard M. Nixon soon after he lost the 1960 presidential election to John F. Kennedy, died on Feb. 6 in North Las Vegas. He was 98. In all, 56 people died in the collision of the two ships. In Collision Course: The Andrea Doria and the Stockholm, [...]

Berish Strauch, a plastic surgeon whose pioneering procedures to reattach or replace vital body parts included one of the first toe-to-thumb transplants, died on Dec. 24 in Greenwich, CT. He was 90. As the longtime chief of reconstructive surgery at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, Dr. Strauch devised many of the surgical procedures and technologies that are now considered commonplace. After a New York City firefighter lost his thumb in 1976, Dr. Strauch tried [...]

Howard Golden, who as Brooklyn borough president for a quarter-century pressed to strengthen the borough economically, and defended it against slights real or perceived in the years before it experienced a gentrifying revival, died on Jan. 24 at his home in the Kensington section of Brooklyn. He was 98. Mr. Golden’s career in politics developed as he moved up in Brooklyn’s Democratic party. He was a city councilman from Borough Park for seven years before [...]

Arno A. Penzias, whose astronomical probes confirmed what became known as the Big Bang theory, died on Jan. 22 in San Francisco. He was 90. Dr. Penzias shared the 1978 Novel Prize in physics with Robert Woodrow Wilson for their discovery in 1964 of cosmic microwave background radiation, remnants of an explosion that gave birth to the universe some 14 billion years ago, now the accepted explanation for the origin of the universe. Dr. Penzias [...]

Lawrence L. Langer, a literary scholar who found the Holocaust an event so vast and evil that it defies moral framing, died on Jan. 29 at his home in Wellesley, MA. He was 94. Across some 15 books and monographs, Dr. Langer insisted on an interpretation of the Holocaust as a moral black hole. Reason, Humanism and Enlightenment values had no function in the concentration camps, he said. At Simmons College, he created what is [...]