Shecky Greene, a high-energy stand-up comedian who for many years was one of the big stars in Las Vegas, died on Dec. 31 at his home in Las Vegas. He was 97. Mr. Green was a frequent guest of Ed Sullivan, Johnny Carson and other television hosts, and had acting roles ink movies and on television. In Las Vegas, though, he was “an institution,” The New York Times said. He told stories, he made faces, [...]

Sidney M. Wolfe, a physician and consumer advocate who for more than 40 years hounded the pharmaceutical sector and the Food and Drug Administration over a variety of issues, died on Jan. 1 at his home in Washington, DC. He was 86. Dr. Wolfe’s complaints included high prices, dangerous side effects, and overlooked health hazards. His work brought a new level of transparency and accountability to medical care. Along with the consumer advocate Ralph Nader, [...]

Gerry Holzman, a master woodcarver, who conceived and toiled for 20 years to build a merry-go-round that celebrated New York State with riding animals like a beaver, a cow and a pig as well as portrait panels of citizens like Susan B. Anthony, Grandma Moses and Theodore Roosevelt, died on Dec. 8 at his home in Brunswick, Maine. He was 90. The carousel, which is 36 feet wide and 23 feet high, was built with [...]

 Joseph Lelyveld, a former executive editor and foreign correspondent for The New York Times, who won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction for his book, Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White, died on Jan. 5 at his home in Manhattan. He was 86. Mr. Lelyveld was one of the most respected journalists in America for nearly four decades, a globe-trotting adventurer, who reported from Washington, Congo, India, Hong Kong, Johannesburg and London, winning [...]

Martha Diamond, who captured the changing face of New York’s buildings, streets and vistas with simple expanses of color, died on Dec. 30. She was 79. She began drawing as a child, and often accompanied her father, a physician, to hospital rounds near the Central Park Conservatory Garden. She remained awe-struck many decades later by the looming Manhattan skyline that appeared as they drove across the Queensboro Bridge. Among her successes, she appeared in the [...]

Arno J. Mayer, a historian whose unorthodox reading of the first half of the 20th century challenged conventional understanding of WWI, WWII and the Holocaust, died on Dec. 17 at a senior care facility in Princeton, NJ. He was 97. Dr. Mayer was the son of Luxembourg Jews who fled to America with his family just ahead of the Nazi invasion in 1940. His career in academia and writings was devoted largely to trying to [...]

Edward Jay Epstein, an author whose deeply researched books challenged conventional wisdom about controversies ranging from whether John F. Kennedy was killed by a lone assassin to whether the whistle-blower Edward Snowden was really a Russian spy, died Jan. 9 in Manhattan. He was 88. A professional skeptic, Mr. Epstein wrote more than two dozen nonfiction books, many involving allegations of government conspiracies and corporate dereliction. He earned his doctorate in 1972 from the Harvard-M.I.T. [...]

Herman Raucher, who turned his memories of a summer as a teenager in a Massachusetts beach town, including one of a sexual encounter with a young war widow, into the screenplay for the nostalgic 1971 film “Summer of ’42,” died on Dec. 28 in Stamford, CT. He was 95. “Summer” won an Oscar for Michel Legrand’s original score, and received four other nominations, including one for Mr. Raucher’s screenplay. It was the fifth-highest-grossing film of [...]

Menachem Daum, a filmmaker who co-produced a groundbreaking 1997 documentary that illuminated the cloistered world of America’s Hasidim, died on Jan. 7 in Borough Park, Brooklyn. He was 77. What made the documentary, “A Life Apart: Hasidism in America,” so striking was Mr. Daum’s ability to get people who scorn movies and television to sit on camera for revealing interviews, allowing him to chronicle their mores and rituals. The resulting film offered a complex portrait [...]

Leon Wildes, a New York immigration lawyer who successfully fought the United States government’s attempt to deport John Lennon, died on Jan. 8 in Manhattan. He was 90. From early 1972 to fall 1975, Mr. Wildes battled the Nixon administration and immigration officials for targeting Mr. Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, marshaling a series of legal arguments revealing that Mr. Lennon, an antiwar activist and a vocal critic of President Richard M. Nixon had [...]