Leftist terrorist murdered two Israel Embassy staffers in Washington, D.C. The attack occurred on May 21, outside the Young Diplomats Reception for young Jewish professionals at the Capital Jewish Museum, hosted by the American Jewish Committee. The two staffers, Yaron Lischinsky, 30, a German-Israeli dual citizen, who had immigrated to Israel at the age of 16 and served in the Israel Defense Forces, and Sarah Milgrim, 26, were shot at close range by a gunman who opened fire and killed them.

Arrested was Elias Rodriguez, 31, who pretended to be a bystander after the shooting. When police arrived, the man turned himself in and told the officers, “I did this, I did this for Palestine.”

Don Mischer, an award-winning producer and director who brought meticulous preparation to live television extravaganzas like award shows, Olympic opening ceremonies, Super Bowl halftime performances, and the 2004 Democratic National Convention, died April 11 in Los Angeles. He was 85.

Mr. Mischer was the executive producer of NBC’s broadcast of the opening ceremony at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City; the Primetime Emmy Awards numerous times between 1993 and 2019; and the Tony Awards from 1987 to 1989. He also directed the Academy Awards ceremonies in 2011 and 2012, and several Super Bowl halftime shows.

He won 15 Emmy Awards and 10 Directors Guild of America Awards as well as the guild’s Life Achievement Award in 2019.

Aliza Magen, who spent more than 40 years working for the Mossad, Israel’s national intelligence agency, eventually serving as deputy under three of its directors, making her the highest-ranking woman in the organization’s history, died on April 14 in Jerusalem. She was 87. She participated in some of the Mossad’s biggest operations, although many of the details of her work remain classified.

It was often hard for a woman to rise in the ranks of the Mossad, she said. Top leadership roles require experience working undercover in foreign countries, assignments that are difficult for women to manage while raising a family. At the same time, she pointed out that women agents often have an easier time working undercover because people are less likely to be suspicious of them.

Walter Frankenstein, who with his family hid from the Nazis for more than two years by taking refuge in abandoned buildings, cars, forests, craters, brothels, and wherever they could survive, died on April 21 in Stockholm, where he had lived since 1956. He was 100.

To support his family, he worked as a mason, which brought him into contact with Adolf Eichmann, a pivotal architect of the Final Solution, who threatened him as he did plastering work in Eichmann’s o residence. “One speck and you’re in Auschwitz tomorrow,” he recalled Eichmann saying.

In later life, the Frankensteins regularly visited Germany, where Mr. Frankenstein spoke at schools and museums. Klaus Hillenbrand, Mr. Frankenstein’s biographer, said that “keeping the memory of the Shoah was a mission for him.”

Herbert J. Gans, an eminent sociologist who studied urban and suburban life in America, died on April 21 at his home in Manhattan. He was 97.

A refugee from Nazi Germany, he became one of the nation’s most influential social critics. He taught at Columbia and other leading universities for 54 years, wrote a dozen books and hundreds of articles that shaped the thinking of government and corporate policymakers, colleagues in sociology, and a wide public audience.

Leonard Zeskind, who tracked right-wing hate groups and who foresaw that anti-immigrant ideologies would move to the mainstream of American politics, died on April 15 at his home in Kansas City, at 75.

Mr. Zeskind spent decades studying white nationalism, documenting how its leading voices had shifted their vitriol from Black Americans to nonwhite immigrants. His 2009 book, Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement From the Margins to the Mainstream, resulted from years of following contemporary Klansmen, neo-Nazis, militia members, and other right-wing groups. His investigations earned him a MacArthur “genius grant” in 1998.

At a 2018 town hall meeting in Washington, Mr. Zeskind called on Democrats in Congress to oppose a bill sponsored by Rep. Steve King of Iowa to end birthright citizenship — that anyone born in the United States is a citizen — a focus of anti-immigrant groups warning of threats to the “white race.”           Recently, his book was one of 381 removed from the U.S. Naval Academy library in a purge of titles about racism and diversity, The New York Times reported.

Andrew Gross, a member of a prominent New York apparel family who abandoned a career in the so-called rag trade to write nearly 20 crime and political thrillers, including five with James Patterson that hit No. 1 on The New York Times best-sellers list, died April 9 at his home in Purchase, NY. He was 72.

Mr. Gross was a grandson of Fred P. Pomerantz, the founder of Leslie Fay Inc., whose dresses and sportswear were being sold in more than 13,000 stores around the country when Mr. Pomerantz died in 1986. For a time, Mr. Gross served as senior corporate vice president of the company, until he announced to his wife and three children that he wanted to write a novel. Although the finished novel was never sold, the work came to the attention of Mr. Paterson.

In 2018, Mr. Gross published what he considered his most personal work, Button Man, loosely autobiographical, about a man from a poor Jewish family on the Lower East Side of Manhattan who fight his way up the corporate ladder and into conflict with mobsters. “It is a tribute to my grandfather,” Mr. Gross told Publishers Weekly, referring to Mr. Pomerantz. “He was as tough as any gangster, single-minded and driven. He set a high bar for himself, and he succeeded.”