British playwright Tom Stoppard, a towering figure in theater and film, died on Nov. 29, 2025, at his home in Dorset, England. He was 88.

Born Tomas Straussler on July 3, 1937, in Zlin, then part of Czechoslovakia, into a Jewish family, he and his family fled Nazi persecution — first to Singapore, then to India, before finally settling in Britain in 1946. He attended school in Yorkshire, and at age 17 began working as a journalist, later becoming a theater and film critic. He got his start with several minor stage plays, and achieved a breakthrough with the 1966 premiere of “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” an absurdist reinterpretation of two minor figures from Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.” The play was first staged at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe before transferring to London’s West End, and then to Broadway, where it earned him his first Tony Award.

Over the next six decades, Stoppard wrote a string of celebrated works. He was honored with five Tony Awards for Best Play. In recognition of his contributions to literature and theater, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1997.

He was in his 50s before he discovered the truth about his Jewish origins, and into his 80s by the time the knowledge metabolized into “Leopoldstadt,” which followed a once-prosperous Viennese family from 1899 to 1955.

Mel Leipzig, an acclaimed figurative painter whose passion for detail transformed depictions of fellow New Jerseyans in mundane settings into mesmerizing enigmas, died on Nov. 1 in Princeton, NJ. He was 90.

The New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote in 1979 that Mr. Leipzig’s “sense of mysterious emotional tensions in strongly characterized ordinary people makes him, perhaps, the Chekhov of Trenton, referring to the Russian dramatist who revealed the melancholy interior lives of his subjects.

“Painting has saved my life,” he said in the Painting Perception interview in 2018. “There’s so much in this life that you cannot control. I lost my wife — it was very hard for me, but because I paint, I could get through it. Painting is unbelievable in how it can help.

“Creativity is very life-giving. Van Gogh would have shot himself a lot earlier had he not been an artist.”

Frank Gehry, one of the most influential and acclaimed American architects, died on Dec. 5 at his home in Santa Monica, CA. He was 96, and still working on an 82,000-square-foot flagship store for Louis Vuitton on Rodeo Drive, and finalizing a 1,000-seat concert hall for the Colburn School of Music in downtown Los Angeles.

Gehry is best known for his work building the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, which opened in 1997; the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, which he completed in 2003; and the Foundation Louis Vuitton, which opened in 2014. He won the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1989, and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016 by President Barack Obama.

While working on the Walt Disney Concert Hall, Gehry was also completing his project in Bilbao, with its titanium panels and flowing movement imbued in the structure that became characteristic of Gehry’s work. The design for both buildings pioneered new ways of using technology in architecture to build more fluid shapes.

His later buildings included a 76-story residential tower at 8 Spruce Street in Lower Manhattan in 2011, the Pierre Boulez Hall in Berlin in 2017, a memorial to President Dwight D. Eisenhower in Washington in 20020, and the Luma Foundation building in Arles, France in 2021.

Rabbi Eliezer Diamond, who taught at the Jewish Theological Seminary for more than three decades and left an indelible mark on generations of rabbis and Jewish scholars, died on Dec. 11. He was 73.

Beyond the numerous eulogies that have been written for him, the rabbi’s reflections on life and faith endure. “What draws me back to Hashem, if not to my life as a whole, is Psalm 23: ‘Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I fear no evil for you are with me,’” he wrote in his last Facebook post. “Wherever I am, God is there, too.”

Cora Weiss, active for more than half a century in support of gender equality, international peace, the anti-Vietnam War movement, civil rights and nuclear disarmament, and who helped organize some of the important mass demonstrations of the 1960s, died on Dec. 8 in Manhattan. She was 91.

In 196`1, when she was raising her children in the Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx, she heard about Women Strike for Peace, a new group organizing demonstrations against nuclear weapons testing. She joined.

“In my experience with Women Strike for Peace, we got things done,” she said. Within a few years, Ms. Weiss had become co-chairwoman of the New Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam and had helped organize one of the largest antiwar protests in the United States.

A lifelong supporter of the United Nations, Ms. Weiss was particularly proud of her work in helping to draft United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, which affirmed the importance of the role of women in the peace process and protecting their security, unanimously adopted in 2000.

Later in life, as president of the Hague Appeal for Peace, she became involved in global peace education. “I’ve decided that it’s the only sustainable thing,” Ms. Weiss said. “You can march, you can protest, you can make phone calls, you can write letters. But education is the closest thing, I think, to a sustainable form of social change.”

Rob Reiner, who rose from an early career as a sitcom star to direct a run of film classics that included “When Harry Met Sally…” and “The Princess Bride,” died at age 78 along with his wife, Michele Singer. 70, the daughter of Holocaust survivors. Los Angeles authorities say the two were found dead in their home on Dec. 13 in what they are investigating as a homicide.

Describing his Jewish childhood to The Forward, Rob Reiner recalled his Yiddish-speaking grandmother and his own Yiddish instruction. He described the experience as “home shuling.”

Beginning in the 2000s, Reiner’s work and public life were largely concerned with activism and civics. He cofounded the marriage equality group American Foundation for Equal Rights, and made several documentaries, one about Christian nationalism. The Reiners formed a partnership at home, on movie and television sets, and in their activism.

“As a Jew, you see what nationalism can do. You see the results of it,” he said, referring to a trip he and his wife had made to Auschwitz, where her mother was an inmate and the rest of the family was murdered. “And so for us who are Jewish by birth, we know what the dangers are, and hopefully this film can at least be a little bit of a teaching tool to everybody.”

Robert J. Samuelson, an economics columnist for Newsweek and The Washington Post who explored, in reader-friendly vernacular the perils of inflation, the fiscal consequences of entitlement spending, and the slow-motion crisis of the bulging national debt, died on Dec. 13 in Bethesda, MD. He was 79.

Upon retiring in 2020, Mr. Samuelson wrote a final column assessing his career: “So far as I can tell,” he wrote, “nothing that I have written has ever had the slightest effect on what actually happened. I’m resigned to this. No one elected me to anything. In our system, the people rule, not the pundits; and that’s how it should be.”