Lester M. Crystal, who after 20 years at NBC News, including two as its president, moved to “The MacNeil/Lehrer Report” on PBS and immediately set about transforming it from a half-hour program into “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour,” a broadcast widely acclaimed for its breath and depth, died on June 24 in Manhattan. He was 85.

Mr. Crystal, a long-time resident of Scarsdale, NY, served as executive producer of “NewsHour” for 22 years, helping to establish the program as a distinctive voice in broadcast journalism. “NewsHour” took an in-depth approach to the news that the half-hour news programs of commercial television could not.

World leaders, presidential candidates, and other newsmakers were interviewed at length as the broadcast examined issues in segments that had more in common with a newsmagazine than with other TV news programs, thereby “gaining influence in the corridors of power,” The New York Times said.

“Les’s voice was the one you wanted to break into your ear during a news-making interview or on an election night, providing a crucial fact or giving you the breaking news you needed to get on the air right away,” said Judy Woodruff, who co-anchored the program with Robin MacNeil when Jim Lehrer suffered a heart attack. He was “authoritative, calm and brief,” she said, and a stickler for facts. “You were OK if Les said it.”

[Editor’s note: Lester Crystal and his wife, Toby, were our friends for many years. My best memory of Les is that he could tell a good joke as well as he could distill the news. Rest in peace, my friend. SMB]

Shirley A. Siegel, who as a top law school graduate overcame rejections by 40 male-dominated law firms before forging a career as a leading civil rights lawyer, arguing cases before the Supreme Court and becoming New York State’s first female solicitor general, died June 29 at her home in Manhattan. She was 101.

Ms. Siegel was no stranger to discrimination herself — as a woman and as a Jewish woman. She had entered Yale Law School in 1939 as the only woman in her class. “I came to my first class, and nobody would sit next to me,” she said. Graduating fourth in her class, her application for employment was rejected by 40 firms. She was finally hired by Proskauer, Rose & Paskus, a largely Jewish firm, becoming its first female lawyer.

In her New York City Bar Association biography, Ms. Seigel explained how she had achieved her childhood goal of becoming a lawyer. “You get to realize in so many different settings the importance of understanding the facts, getting skeptical if what you’re being told doesn’t hang together,” she said. “It just applies to everything. And, of course, hard work. Everything is hard work.”

Ida Haendel, the Polish-born prodigy who became one of the foremost violinists of her generation, died July 1 in Pembroke Park, FL. Her age was unclear, either 91 or 96.

Until the 1980s, Ms. Haendel was virtually the only woman among the top tier of concert violinists. Well into her 80s, she continued to play at any opportunity.

The cellist. Steven Isserlis, who played Beethoven’s Triple Concerto with Ms. Haendel and the pianist Martha Argerich, said Ms. Haendel’s musicmaking had always conveyed passion. “It was strong, vibrant, focused and came from right deep inside her,” he said.

Mr. Isserlis recalled an impromptu performance that Ms. Haendel gave around 1 a.m. in a late-night diner in Westchester County that he described as filled with bikers. The conversation had turned to Schumann’s Violin Sonata in D minor, and Mr. Isserlis offered that he didn’t know the piece well. “Do you want to know how it goes?” she asked.

“Before I could stop her she took out her violin and played Schumann, with all the bikers watching,” Mr. Isserlis said. “When she was done, everyone erupted in applause.”

In 2006, Ms. Haendel traveled to Auschwitz, where she played the Prayer from the “Dettingen Te Deum” by Handel for a delegation that included Pope Benedict XVI. Her recorded performance of the simple melody is “impassioned, her tone anguished yet irrepressibly vibrant,” the New York Times said.

Else Blangsted, who fled Nazi Germany as a teenager, believing that she had given birth to a stillborn child, then built a career as a leading music editor on Hollywood films, died May 1 in Los Angeles. She was 90.

For more than 30 years, Ms. Blangsted played a major part in shaping how movie music was heard in features like “The Color Purple,” “Tootsie,” and “On Golden Pond.”

She concealed a teenage pregnancy when her family sent her to a Jewish boarding school in Switzerland to escape the Holocaust. The pregnancy was discovered when she went into labor. Under sedation during the delivery, she was told afterward that the child had died. Fifty years later, she discovered that her daughter had survived and was adopted by German-speaking Jews. When they finally met, “it was the end of drama, the end of shame, the end of accusations, the end of migraines,” Ms. Blangsted said.

Susan Rothenberg, who helped to usher figure drawing back into art in the 1970s, died May 25 at her home in Galistero, NM. She was 75.

Ms. Rothenberg took art lessons as a child but harbored no serious hopes of becoming a professional. Later, she came up with the idea of penetrating deep into the Nova Scotia woods to teach English in some rural town. But then, on a whim, she changed trains in Montreal for New York City, easily tapping into the SoHo art crowd.

In a 1984 Times Magazine interview, Ms. Rothenberg said she considered herself a groundbreaking artist partly in the sense that she’d had the confidence to paint for herself. “I almost feel I can take the most banal subject matter and make a good painting out of it,” she said.

Herb Stempel, who admitted that the quiz show on which he was a contestant was fixed, died April 7. He was 93.

According to The New York Times account, on Dec. 5, 1956, Mr. Stempel, a City College student from Queens, was in his eighth week on “Twenty-One,” an NBC quiz show, where he posed as a nerdy know-it-all. He had won $49,500. But his new rival was Charles Van Doren, a golden-boy Columbia University instructor, and the uninspiring Mr. Stempel was scripted to take a dive.

While Mr. Van Doren went on to become the most celebrated (and, later, vilified ) contestant of the quiz-show era, Mr. Stempel might have become a forgotten man. Instead, he helped blow the cover off one of the major scandals of the age, telling the news media, prosecutors and congressional investigators that it was all a hoax.

At a 1959 congressional hearing where an episode of “Twenty-One” featuring Mr. Stempel was viewed, he said he had not returned the money he took from the show because he felt he had earned it. “Actually,” he said, “may I say that I was not a quiz contestant in this program, in my opinion. I was an actor.”