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.”

Norman Lamm, the longtime leader of Yeshiva University who encouraged the Orthodox Jewish institution to engage with the secular world and, in doing so, The New York Times said, rescued the school from the brink of bankruptcy, died May 31 at his daughter’s home in Englewood, NJ. He was 92.

After he was elected president in 1976, Rabbi Lamm championed the concept of Torah U’madda — leading a life that blends rigorous adherence to Jewish law with pursuit of worldly knowledge and immersion in the wider society. The idea was controversial because Hasidic and other ultra-Orthodox rabbis argued that exposure to decadent influences would erode traditional Jewish life. But Rabbi Lamm, as a clergyman, philosopher, teacher and administrator, made a forceful case for his synthesis of the spiritual and temporal during his 37 years as the university’s president or chancellor.

Cyril Wick, a race car driver who “dressed British, thought Yiddish” died April 10 in London. The cause was Covid-19. He was 90.

Born in London to Jewish immigrants from Poland and Lithuania, he was educated at the prestigious Harrow School, where he faced anti-Semitic taunts during sporting matches. Later, an avid sailor, he would light Shabbat candles aboard his boat at the posh Lymington Harbour.         “He was like James Bond,” his stepdaughter Barbara Balaban said. “He raced cars and wore cool suits and did cool things and was passionately Jewish,” supporting numerous Jewish institutions, including nonprofits for the blind and disabled and a number of Orthodox groups. “His approach was very much ‘dress British, think Yiddish,’ she said. “He spoke like an old Harrovian, also sang songs in Yiddish and dirty Russian.”

Cyril Wick founded the engineering firm Diffusion Alloys, where he developed a number of techniques for coating metals in chrome and titanium.

Bruce Jay Friedman, whose early novels, short stories and plays were pioneering examples of modern American black humor, died June 3 at his home in Brooklyn. He was 90.

Mr. Friedman, who also wrote the screenplays for the hit film comedies Stir Crazy and Splash, was an unusual case in American letters: an essentially comic writer whose work skipped back and forth between literature and pop culture.

His first two novels, Stern (1962) and the best-selling A Mother’s Kisses (1964) — tales of New York Jews exploring an America outside the five boroughs — and his first play, the 1967 Off-Broadways hit Scuba Duba, made him widely celebrated. The New York Times Magazine in 1968 declared Mr. Friedman “The Hottest Writer of the Year.” He continued writing through the ‘70s and ‘80s, many of his stories made into films, including The Heartbreak Kid, a provocative story about a young man who ditches his new wife on their honeymoon and takes up with another woman. His 2011 memoir is titled Lucky Bruce.

Talking to a Key West, Florida, audience in 2005, Mr. Friedman said, “People ask me where do stories come from. Well, they come from a lot of places. Very often, it’s your life, and then you extrapolate from a personal experience. You have a fragment of an experience, and you ask yourself, ‘What if?’”

Betty Goudsmit-Oudkerk, a Dutch-Jewish woman who saved hundreds of Jewish children during the Holocaust, died June 14 in Amsterdam. She was 96.

Goudsmit-Oudkerk was the last living member of the small team of rescuers who smuggled Jewish children to safety over several months from a Protestant seminary in Amsterdam. The seminary bordered an internment facility that the Nazis had set up for Jewish children opposite the Hollandsche Schouwburg concentration facility where their parents were kept. At 17, Goudsmit-Oudkerk was allowed to care for the jailed children. With help from the director of the Hollandsche Schouwburg, Walter Süskind, she helped transfer hundreds of children to Johan van Hulst, who ran the seminary. Hulst’s team spirited the children away.

In 2022, a $27 million Holocaust museum is scheduled to open in the building that housed the seminary.

Frances Goldin, a lifelong firebrand who never stopped fighting to safeguard her beloved Lower East Side from upscale developers, died May 16 in Manhattan, in the same rent-controlled apartment on East 11th Street where she lived for 40 years. She was 95.

She was an advocate for affordable housing and a staunch defender of the poor. She was a civic leader in a vintage neighborhood, and in a second career, a literary agent who represented progressive authors, including Susan Brownmiller, Martin Duberman, and Robert Meeropol, among others.

When she was nearing 90, Ms. Goldin said she’d had three goals: to preserve and improve Lower East Side housing, which she did; to free Mumia AbuJamal, who is still serving a life sentence for murder; and to publish Imagine Living in a Socialist USA, which she edited with Debby Smith and Michael Smith and which was published in 2014.