“Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!” the goofy animated mystery series featuring a ragtag quartet of teenage sleuths and a cowardly Great Dane with a gruff bark, who leads the gang in and out of trouble, was a hit from its first episode in 1969.

It would become a Saturday morning staple. And it would grow into one of the most lucrative franchises in the history of animation, making the reputations of its creators, Ken Spears and Joe Ruby.

Mr. Ruby, a long-time writer and producer of animated television shows, died on August 26 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 87.

A half century after that first episode, “Scooby-Doo” is still being broadcast, and it is considered the most spun-off series in the history of television, having spawned other series as well as feature films, video games, comic books and other merchandise, Newish News Service reported. In 2004, the show beat “The Simpsons” to set a Guinness record for “most prolific cartoon” at 350 episodes.

Carole Ruby, Joe Ruby’s wife, recalled that when she and Mr. Ruby had been married for a year, Mr. Ruby’s father gave them $50 as an anniversary present. He gave them cash, he said, because he was certain his son was never going to make it as an artist.

They were both outsiders in the starched white world of elite 1950s tennis, superb players but excluded from tournaments and clubs and shunned on the circuit because of their heritage. Angela Buxton, a white, Jewish English woman, was a granddaughter of Russian Jews who had fled the pogroms in the early 1900s; Althea Gibson, a Black American, was born in a sharecropper’s shack in South Carolina and grew up in Harlem.

Eventually, they found each other and forged a powerful doubles partnership. In 1956, they won the French Championship and Wimbledon, the jewel in the crown of a sport that had hardly welcomed them.

But for all Ms. Buxton’s prowess on the court — she was ranked in the women’s top 10 in the mid-1950s — she is best remembered for the long-lasting support and encouragement she gave Ms. Gibson, the first great Black player in women’s tennis, the first Black to win Wimbledon and, for a time, the No. 1 ranked female player in the world.

Ms. Buxton died at 85 on August 14 at her home in Fort Lauderdale.

Professor Moses Rischin, emeritus professor at San Francisco State University and a pioneering scholar in the field of American Jewish history, died on August 21.

Born in Brooklyn, the son of two Russian immigrant parents who loved Hebrew, young Moses was sent to study in the then recently-opened Yeshiva of Flatbush, providing him with a foundation in Hebrew and Judaica that later served him well. In 1947, he entered the graduate program at Harvard, where he encountered pioneering historian Oscar Handlin. Rischin was one of Handlin’s most influential disciples, following him into the field of American Jewish history.

Rischin worked on the first analytic bibliography of American Jewish history, sponsored by the American Jewish Committee and published as a pamphlet by Harvard University Press under the title An Inventory of American Jewish History. The volume defined the contours of the emerging field and alerted students to the breadth and depth of its literature, with insights that helped shape future scholarly directions.

Rischin received his doctorate from Harvard, with the publication of The Promised City: New York’s Jews 1870-1914. It defined the highest standards of scholarship in the field, and it remained in print for decades.

Arnold Meyer Spielberg died August 25 at age 103. The father of celebrated film director Steven Spielberg, the senior Spielberg was an electrical engineer of uncommon invention and productivity. Having developed research that would make the personal computer possible, the elder Spielberg’s contributions to modern life worldwide are almost impossible to avoid.

He helped design and build the first business computer, patented the first electronic library system, and designed the first electronic cash register. Before that, as a communications chief in the Army Signal Corps in 1942, he joined the Burma Bridge Busters, a B-25 bomber squadron based outside present-day Kolkata that targeted Japanese railroad lines, shipping and communications in Burma.

When Steven Spielberg founded the USC Shoah Foundation — The Institute for Visual History and Education, he recruited his father to lead the development team of the digital Shoah Institute archives, organizing more than 100,000 hours of visual history in 52,000 video testimonies in 32 languages of Holocaust survivors and other witnesses from 56 countries.

Gerald Shur, a lawyer who created the federal witness protection program, died August 25 at his home in Warminster, Pa. He was 86.

In 1961, Mr. Shur became an early recruit in the crusade by Robert F. Kennedy, then the attorney general, to break the grip of organized crime in the United States. Joining the Justice Department that year as a lawyer assigned to New York, he was tasked with investigating the mob.

“In the course of that,” he told The Associated Press in 2007, “I began to hear people say, ‘I can’t testify; I’ll be murdered before or after I testify.’”

During Mr. Shur’s 34 years at the Justice Department, 6,416 witnesses and thousands of their dependents, including wives, children and mistresses were given new identities and relocated, according to Pete Earley, who with Mr. Shur wrote the 2002 book WITSEC: Inside the Federal Witness Protection Program.

Chayele Porus Palevsky, a longtime stalwart of New York’s Yiddish cultural scene, who worked tirelessly to preserve the memory of Jewish Vilna, died Sept. 20, the second day of Rosh Hashanah. Palevsky, one of the last surviving Jews to have fought among the partisans of Vilna, died at the River Garden Hebrew Home in Jacksonville, FL, surrounded by her family.

Chayele and her family were imprisoned in the Svintsyan ghetto, where she joined a partisan group and helped steal guns from the Germans. After the ghetto’s liquidation, she continued fighting in the surrounding forests in a partisan group that called itself “nekome” (revenge). She served as a nurse and an ad hoc psychotherapist for her fellow fighters.

After the war, she married fellow partisan Simon Palevsky. They were active in a variety of Yiddish cultural organizations.

Arthur Ashkin, a physicist who was awarded a 2018 Nobel Prize for figuring out how to harness the power of light to trip microscopic objects for closer study, calling his invention optical tweezers, died Sept. 21, at his home in Rumson, NJ. He was 98.

The Nobel Committee wrote, Dr. Ashkin “has invented optical tweezers that grab particles, atoms, molecules, and living cells with their laser beam fingers.” Trapping biological material proved to have groundbreaking practical applications in research and in understanding the behavior of the basic building blocks of life, like DNA and other biological systems. Today, optical tweezers are widely manufactured and sold to researchers.