Shlomo Avineri, an Israeli political scientist, historian and former government official whose pessimism about resolving the conflict with Palestinians did not stop him from advocating measures to ease it, died on Nov. 30 in Jerusalem. He was 90. In his writings, Mr. Avineri was consistently skeptical about Israel’s prospects for achieving peace with its enemies. He was convinced of Palestinian and Arab hatred for Israel and Zionism, whose 19th-century roots he chronicled in 1981 in [...]

George A. Cohon, a Chicago-born entrepreneur who, by introducing the Big Mac — or the Bolshoi Mac — to Moscow in 1990, died on Nov. 24 at his home in Toronto. He was 86. A Fuller Brush salesman in college with a flair for merchandising, Mr. Cohon abandoned his law practice when Ray Kroc, the McDonald’s founder, offered him the chain’s franchise for eastern Canada. Mr. Cohon borrowed $70,000 to buy the rights and opened [...]

Mort Engelberg, a movie producer behind such hits as “Smokey and the Bandit” and “The Big Easy” who drew on his Hollywood expertise to stage manage appearances for politicians, notably a bus tour for Bill Clinton and Al Gore following the 1992 Democratic convention, died Dec. 9 in Los Angeles. He was 86. He drew on the tropes of road movies to invent the modern presidential bus tour for Clinton and Gore through Pennsylvania, Indiana, [...]

Merle Goldman, an historian at Boston University, widely considered one of the world’s leading analysts of Chinese politics, died Nov. 16 at her home in Cambridge, MA. She was 92. Dr. Goldman’s specialty was the politics of dissent in modern China, a topic that gave her a unique perspective on the country’s seismic changes under Communism. She wrote books, book reviews and opinion articles that were required reading for government and opinion leaders. She [...]

Neil Drossman, who brought wit to print advertisements and television commercials, died on Nov. 25 in the Bronx. He was 83. From the late 1960s until this year, Mr. Drossman was a copywriter at several agencies. One of the most enduring lines Mr. Drossman wrote was for Meow Mix: “Tastes so good, cats ask for it by name. For Stick Ups, small deodorizing disks made by Air Wick that could be glued anywhere in the [...]

Guy Stern, who fled rising antisemitism in Nazi Germany at 15 for a new life in the United States but returned to Europe during WWII as a member of a military intelligence program that trained him to interrogate prisoners of war, died on Dec. 7 in West Bloomfield, MI. He was 101. Mr. Stern was one of the so-called Ritchie Boys, a group named for a secret Army camp in Maryland that served as a [...]

Dan Greenburg, the prolific humorist, best-selling author, essayist, playwright and screenwriter, whose satirical prose examined Jewish angst, died on Dec. 18 in the Bronx. He was 87. Mr. Greenburg achieved national fame in 1964 with the publication of his How To Be A Jewish Mother: A Very Lovely Training Manual, a tongue-firmly-in-cheek assessment of the unique and often baffling qualities of a stereotypical Jewish mother. Though his own mother didn’t think it was particularly funny, [...]

Robert M. Solow, who won a Nobel in economic science in 1987 for his theory that advances in technology, rather than increases in capital and labor, have been the primary drivers of economic growth in the United Stated, died on Dec. 21 at his home in Lexington, MA. He was 99. Professor Solow taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he and a fellow Nobel laureate, Paul A. Samuelson, forged the M.I.T. style of [...]

Irwin Cohen, an inventive developer who transformed a derelict factory, where the first Oreo cookie was produced in 1912, into Chelsea Market, an exuberant 21st-century food bazaar that helped revitalize its New York City neighborhood, died on Dec. 18 in Manhattan. He was 90. In creating the market, Mr. Cohen reconfigured the former National Biscuit Company plant — a complex of 17 brick buildings dating to the 1890s, filling a block between Ninth and 10th [...]