Janet Malcolm, a longtime writer for The New Yorker, who was known for her piercing judgments, her novel-like nonfiction and a provocative moral certainty that cast a cold eye on journalism and its practitioners, died June 16 in a hospital in Manhattan. She was 86.

Over a 55-year career, Ms. Malcolm produced deeply reported, exquisitely crafted articles, essays and books, most devoted to her interests in literature, biography, photography, psychoanalysis and true crime. Her writing was precise and analytical; her gaze missed nothing, The New York Times said.

Harvey Schlossberg, a former New York City traffic cop with a doctorate in psychology who choreographed what became a model law enforcement strategy for safely ending standoffs with hostage takers, died May 21 in Brooklyn. He was 85.

In a pioneering training film he made for the New York Police Department in 1973, Mr. Schlossberg said that in a hostage situation, police officers “all believed ‘If you give me the right gun with the right bullet, I can put everybody out.’” Instead, he counseled patience and “crisis intervention therapy.” Delaying tactics, he said, allowed more time for the criminals to make mistakes and, just as crucially, to develop a rapport with their victims, leaving the hostage takers less likely to harm them.

Robert A. Katzmann, who as chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York helped guarantee legal representation to immigrants, championed civic education and demystified judicial proceedings for the public, died June 9 in a Manhattan hospital. He was 68.

As the son and grandson of Jewish refugees who had fled Germany and Russia, Judge Katzmann was instrumental in the establishment of the New York Immigrant Family Unity Project, the first government-funded program of legal assistance for noncitizens being held by the authorities under a federal law.

Widely credited as the first federal judge to hold a doctoral degree in government, he believed that while justice ought to be blind, the process of meting it out should be transparent.

To that end, in 2014, he and U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero started the Committee on Civic Education, which culminated in Justice for All: Courts and the Community, an educational initiative to make the judicial system more accessible. During the pandemic, audio of courtroom sessions was live-streamed for the first time.

“What I really wanted to do was bring our courts and our communities closer together,” Judge Katzmann told The New York Law Journal last year. “If I had to say what is my signature initiative, if one can ever talk that way, it would be that.”

Saul B. Cohen, who helped restore higher academic standards at the City University of New York as president of Queens College and as a member of the state Board of Regents and who revitalized his own field of political geography, died June 9 at his home in Larchmont, NY. He was 95.

Before Queens College, Dr. Cohen was a professor and dean of the Graduate School of Geography at Clark University in Worcester, MA, where he earned a reputation for upgrading the school’s academic standards and increasing minority enrollment. Previously he taught at Boston University. He wrote or edited 16 books.

After leaving Queens College in 1985, he served as director of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, an international relief organization.

Six Americans were among 45 ultra-Orthodox Jews who died in a crush of Lag B’Omer observers at Mount Meron in northern Israel, by the tomb of an ancient Jewish mystic, Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai. Every year, tens of thousands throng to the area to celebrate the rabbi and to light bonfires as part of the celebrations. It is unclear what caused the stampede.

Among the dead are Donny Morris, 19, from New Jersey; Eliezer Zvi Yuzef, 26, and Menachem Knoblowitz, 22, both of New York. Yousef Amran Tauber and Yousef Kahn were also killed, ages and home states not released.

Fred Jordan, the publishing partner of Barney Rosset, whose groundbreaking Grove Press and Evergreen Review fended off government censors to introduce avant-garde authors who inspired the counterculture of the 1960s, died April 19 in Brooklyn. He was 95.

“The lifting of the ban on language had far-reaching significance, not just for writers and readers,” Mr. Jordan would tell students at New York University in a lecture he occasionally delivered. “Much of what later came to be known as the counterculture received its impetus from a new spirit of liberalism and freedom, which arose out of the new openness and the removal of old restraints.”

Mr. Jordan was a Holocaust survivor. He was to have been bar mitzvahed in his home town of Vienna on Nov. 9, 1938, but the ceremony was pre-empted by Kristallnacht. Fred escaped Vienna as part of the Kindertransport. His father was arrested but later smuggled out of Austria. He survived the war in the basement of a Belgian church. His mother was interned in the Lodz ghetto in German-occupied Poland in 1940, then transported to the Chelmno extermination camp.