Richard L. Rubenstein, the leading Jewish voice in the theological groundswell of the 1960s known as the “Death of God” movement, who argued that the idea of an omnipotent, benevolent deity who safeguards Jews as the chosen people, died on May 16 in Bridgeport, CT. He was 97.

Dr. Rubenstein was a Conservative campus rabbi and academic, who had studied at Harvard Divinity School as well as at Reform and Conservative Jewish seminaries. In 1966, in the seminal book, After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism, he challenged the notion of a cosmos-controlling God, principally by raising the specter of the six million Jews, one million of them children, killed by the Germans and their collaborators.

“How can Jews believe in an omnipotent, beneficent God after Auschwitz?” he wrote. “Traditional Jewish theology maintains that God is the ultimate, omnipotent actor in the historical drama. I fail to see how this position can be maintained without regarding Hitler and the SS as instruments of God’s will.”

While he contended that the God of traditional beliefs did not exist, Dr. Rubenstein never renounced a belief in a God and attended synagogue every Sabbath, his daughter said.

Dr. Aaron Stern, a psychiatrist who as head of Hollywood’s movie rating board in the early 1970s established himself as a kind of filmgoers’ sentry against carnal imagery and violence, died April 13 in Manhattan. He was 96.

From 1971 to 1974, Dr. Stern directed the Classification and Rating Administration of the Motion Picture Association of America. The rating board graded films by letter to let moviegoers know in advance how much violence, sexuality and foul language to expect on the screen. The board’s decision that a film merited a rating of R, or restricted, might lure more adults, but would immediately eliminate the pool of unchaperoned moviegoers under 17; an X rating would bar anyone under 17.

“You can only rate the explicit elements on the screen — never the morality or the thought issues behind it,” Dr. Stern said in 1972. “That is the province of religion, leaders, critics and each individual.”

Jack B. Weinstein, a legal scholar and famously independent federal judge in Brooklyn who led the legal system into an era of mass tort litigation, changing the way huge classes of people claim injuries from toxins, pollutants and faulty products could get redress in the courts, died on June 15 at his home in Great Neck, NY. He was 99.

Judge Weinstein was on the bench for 53 years and spend nearly a decade as the chief judge of the Eastern District of New York. Throughout his tenure, until he announced his retirement last year at the age of 98, he kept protesting the strictures of the criminal justice system.

Judge Weinstein’s view of his profession was complicated. “One of the great resources of our nation is the legal profession,” he said at a symposium in his honor in 2001, 53 years after he joined the bar. “It is entrepreneurial. It is selfish. It is sometimes stupid. It has all kinds of conflicts of interest. And yet it is independent, fighting for individuals against institutions.”

Roman Kent, who as an orphaned teenager endured the horrors of Auschwitz and other hellish camps, and later channeled his sorrow and rage into helping to lead an American movement to memorialize the Holocaust and provide reparations for aging Jewish survivors, died May 21 at his home in Manhattan. He was 92.

While many Holocaust survivors have chosen to stay quiet about their experiences or share them only with close friends and other survivors, Mr. Kent believed that the world needed to be reminded of the six million Jews who perished at the hands of the Germans and their collaborators, and that Germany needed to repay the remnants of European Jewry for what they suffered and whom they lost. He and a handful of others did the painstaking work of galvanizing and organizing survivors into a movement.

Mr. Kent was chairman of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants. In 1988, he joined the board of the Conference of Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which has negotiated most of the $80 billion that Germany has paid in assistance to survivors and for educational and memorial programs. At various times, Mr. Kent was president of the International Auschwitz Committee, also the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, which provides aid to non-Jews who hid Jews or helped them escape.

Mr. Kent was a vigorous supporter of Holocaust education. In a speech he gave in 2015, on the 71st anniversary of the Lodz ghetto’s liquidation, he explained why. It was the obligation of adults, he said, to get children to understand “what happens when hatred and prejudice are allowed to flourish.”

Stuart Silver, an inventive design director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the 1960s and ‘70s, who introduced style and spirit into museum exhibitions, died May 6 in Manhattan. He was 84.

Mr. Silver’s self-described “theatrical techniques” and the philosophy they suggested — “that a museum was a place of pleasure, that a spectacle could also be enrichment,” as he put it — were characteristic of a whole era at the Met.

The driving force and chief evangelist behind the new approach was Thomas Hoving, who in 1967 became the seventh director of the museum in its history. “I brought the ‘blockbuster’ exhibition to the Met,” Mr. Hoving wrote in Making the Mummies Dance, his 1993 book about running the museum, “but designer Stuart Silver brought them to life.”

Memorable exhibitions included “In the Presence of Kings,” “Tutankamun,” “The Great Age of Fresco,” which drew more than 180,000 visitors in its first month, “The Year 1200,” which featured about 300 objects lent by 16 countries.

Later, he joined the Knoll furniture designer firm, and also formed his own design firm, serving, among other museums and fairs, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in California

[On a personal note, some years ago, The Shofar editor interviewed Stuart Silver for a profile in The Scarsdale Inquirer, at which time he talked about his idea to make museum design “less stuffy,” he said, and to involve museum goers in a discovery experience. Exhibition is more than factual accuracy, he said.]

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.