Jacob Rothschild, a wealthy financier, patron of the arts, philanthropist with close ties to Israel and, who broke with his family’s fabled banking dynasty at a time of change in the world of high finance, has died. He was 87. At the time of his death, he was chairman of the Rothschild Foundation, a British charity.

In addition to his career as a high-powered financier, Mr. Rothschild played a role in Israel. He oversaw his family’s long-running philanthropic activities there as head of the Yad Hanadiv foundation, which sponsored the construction of Israel’s Parliament, Supreme Court and National Library. Waddesdon Manor, a chateau built by Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild, managed by Britain’s nonprofit National Trust, is now home to the Rothschild’s collection of an estimated 15,000 works of art and objects, and for Jacob Rothschild’s collection of Rothschild wines, mainly from the Bordeaux region of France.

Richard Lewis, the stand-up comedian who parlayed a dark sense of humor into an acting career that included movies and TV, died on Feb. 27 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 76.

Neurotic and self-deprecating, typically dressed all in black, Mr. Lewis paced the stages of comedy clubs, hanging his head, pulling at his shock of black hair, riffing on his struggles in life and love. He called himself “The Prince of Pain.”

Beginning in 1999, he had a regular role on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” as a good friend and golf buddy of Larry David, the show’s star and creator. He played a semi-fictionalized version of himself, a dour personality who made Mr. David’s otherwise prickly self seem like Christopher Robin.

“I owe my career to my mother,” Mr. Lewis told the Washington Post in 2020. A woman with issues, he said, “I should have given her my agent’s commission.”

Jason Zinoman, in an appraisal in The New York Times, wrote of the friendship between Lewis and David, “These cantankerous Brooklyn Jews made harangues seem like hugs.”

Bruce Newman, a New York antiques dealer and proprietor of his family’s business, Newel Galleries, originally founded as a prop house for theater and film productions, died on Feb. 9 at his home in Beverly Hills, CA. He was 94.

During his reign over the business, the building teemed with two centuries’ worth of treasures, most costing upward of five figures — carousel horses, Ruhlmann desks; benches from the Paris Metro; French Victorian dining chairs swirled in bronze trim, also Victorian wicker, French salon furniture, Art Deco, Art Nouveau, Gothic revival, Biedermeier, Directoire, English Arts & Crafts, Renaissance and Medieval pieces, also the weird and the whimsical. Reportedly, Mr. Newman loved “the hunt.”

His customers? From Queen Elizabeth II and Jackie Kennedy to Barbara Streisand and Claus Von Bulow who, between trials for the attempted murder of his wife, Sunny Von Bulow, sold Mr. Newman two 18th-century Venetian lacquered commodes from the couple’s Newport estate.

Iris Apfel, a New York society matron and interior designer who invaded the fashion world with a brash bohemian style that mixed hippie vintage and haute Couture, died on March 1 at her home in Palm Beach, FL. She was 102.

Calling herself a “geriatric starlet,” Ms. Apfel in her 80s and 90s set trends with irreverent ensembles: a boxy, multicolored Bill Blass jacket with tinted Hopi dancing skirt and hairy goatskin boots; a fluffy evening coat of red and green rooster feathers with suede pants slashed to the knees; a rose angora sweater set and a 19th-century Chinese brocade panel skirt.

“When you don’t dress like everybody else, you don’t have to think like everybody else,” Ms. Apfel told Ruth La Ferla of The New York Times in 2011.

For decades starting in the 1950s, Ms. Apfel designed interiors for private clients like Greta Garbo and Estée Lauder. In 1992, she and her husband sold their company, and she became a soaring free spirit known in society and to the fashion cognoscenti for ignoring the dictates of the runway in favor of her own artfully clashing styles.

Ellen Bernstein, a river guide turned rabbi who blazed a spiritual trail in the environmental movement by connecting nature to the Hebrew Bible, died on Feb. 27 in Philadelphia. She was 70.

In 1988, Rabbi Bernstein founded Shomrei Adamah, Keepers of the Earth, which she described as the first national Jewish environmental organization. “The Creation story, Jewish law, the cycle of holidays, prayers, mitzvot, and neighborly relations all reflect a reverence for land and a viable practice of Stewardship,” she wrote in Ecology & The Jewish Spirit: Where Nature & the Sacred Meet.

            Her work gave a new dimension to the words “holy land” and to the synergy between heaven and earth,” The New York Times said.

Steve Lawrence, the nightclub, television and recording star who, with his wife Eydie Gorme, kept pop standards in vogue on musical walks down memory lane for a half-century, died on March 8 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 88.

Besides playing concerts and tours with his wife, Mr. Lawrence starred in Broadway musicals, acted on television and in movies, produced TV specials, recorded scores of albums with Ms. Gorme, and more than 60 singles.

In 2004, at the Westbury Music Fair on Long Island, where they had played many times, they performed at a theater in the round. “Forty years we’ve been schlepping all over the world, only to be working in a merry-go-round in Westbury,” Mr. Lawrence joked to a New York Times reporter that year.

Howard H. Hiatt, a physician, scientist and academic who reshaped the field of public health, steering it away from the narrow study of infectious diseases toward big-picture issues of fiscal and societal accountability in medicine, died on March 2 at his home in Cambridge, MA. He was 98.

Harvard Public Health, a magazine published by the Harvard School of Public Health, where Dr. Hiatt was dean for 12 years, wrote in 2013 that Dr. Hiatt “made public health the conscience of medicine.”

A Harvard-trained physician who held leadership posts at some of the country’s most prestigious hospitals, Dr. Hiatt was an outspoke critic of the inequities in American health care. He accused American medicine of having a bias toward expensive, high-tech treatments while excluding millions of people from basic care.