Jerry Stiller became a comedy star twice — in the 1960s in partnership with his wife, Anne Meara, and in the 1990s with a memorable recurring role on “Seinfeld” as Frank Costanza, the short-tempered father of Jason Alexander’s George. He died May 11 at his home on the Upper West side of Manhattan. He was 92.

Early in his career, he appeared on Broadway, but was best known as a comedian. The team of Stiller and Meara was for many years a familiar presence in nightclubs, on television variety and talk shows, and in radio and television commercials. Following his appearances in about 30 of the “Seinfeld” episodes, he played Arthur Spooner for a nine-season run of “The King of Queens.”

“I’ve never thought of stopping,” Mr. Stiller told The Daily News of New York in 2012. “The only time you ever stop working is when they don’t call you.”

Avraham Rabby spoke four languages, studied at Oxford, and went to the University of Chicago on a Fulbright scholarship. Born in Israel, he became an American citizen in 1980. He was intelligent, outgoing, optimistic and capable. He appeared, in other words, like an ideal candidate to be a Foreign Service officer for the State Department when he applied in 1985. Except — he was blind, a condition that ruled him out from employment in the Foreign Service.

He waged a years-long campaign to overturn the policy. In 1989, he succeeded, becoming the first blind person to be hired by the diplomatic corps, paving the way for other blind officers.

Mr. Rabby died April 17 at Tel HaShomer Hospital in Ramat Gan, Israel, near Tel Aviv. He was 77.

“A blind person sees the world differently from a sighted person,” Mr. Rabby told The New York Times in a 2007 profile. “Our impressions are no less valid.”

As a popular talk radio host, Barry Farber sustained a six-decade career in broadcasting. He died on May 6, one day after his May 5 program, an on-air 90th birthday tribute.

Mr. Farber’s first talk show, “Barry Farber’s Open Mike,” aired on WINS in New York when he was 30 years old. He was later heard on WMCA and WOR in New York, and on the ABC Radio Network in various time slots over the years. At one point his program occupied 25% of the weekly airtime of WOR. He interviewed celebrities, political figures, and people with unusual and/or controversial interests. Since 2008, he had been broadcasting on Talk Radio Network and on CRN Digital Talk Radio from his Upper West Side apartment. He was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 2014.

Zev Buffman, a prominent Broadway producer, who brought Elizabeth Taylor to the stage in a revival of  Lillian Hellman’s “The Little Foxes,” died March 31 at a Seattle hospital. He was 89.

Mr. Buffman’s fascination with show business began in Tel Aviv where, as a youngster, he watched movies from the theaters’ projection booths. Fluent in German, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic and Yiddish, he learned English by listening to Hollywood stars.

After serving as a commando in Israel’s Defense Forces during its War of Independence in 1948, he moved to Los Angeles in 1951, fixated on a Hollywood career. Cast only in minor roles, he turned to producing, and produced or co-produced dozens of shows on Broadway.

According to his wife, Vilma Buffman, Mr. Buffman’s proudest achievement was producing a revival of “Oklahoma!” He said it was like Israel, she told the New York Times. “They came to a new area, developed it, and it became a state.”

David Toren, a Holocaust survivor and patent lawyer who waged a single-minded quest to recover art looted from his family by the Nazis, died on April 19 at his home in Manhattan. He was 94. The cause was the coronavirus.

Mr. Toren had a career as a successful patent lawyer but became a hunter of stolen art when a painting that once belonged to a relative, “Two Riders on as Beach” (1901), by the German painter Max Liebermann, surfaced in a secret hoard held by Cornelius Gurlitt. Well into his 80’s, the quest for his family’s stolen art became his preoccupation.

“We will continue to search for and hopefully locate additional works of art looted by the Nazis,” David Toren’s son Peter said. “My father would have expected no less.”

Madeline Kripke, who kept one of the world’s largest private collection of dictionaries, much of it crammed into her Greenwich Village apartment died April 25 in Manhattan. She was 76. The cause was the coronavirus and complications of pneumonia.

Ms. Kripke, her father a rabbi and her mother a writer of children’s religious books, told Daniel Krieger for a profile about her on the website Narratively, that the Webster’s Collegiate she received from her parents when she was in the 5th grade “unlocked the world for me because I could read at any vocabulary level I wanted.” Beginning with the Webster’s Collegiate, she accumulated an estimated 20,000 volumes as diverse as a Latin dictionary printed in 1502 and the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s 1980 guide to pickpocket slang.

As a young collector, she once coveted a 1694 edition of The Ladies Dictionary, which she had found in a London shop at a time when she had only enough money for a planned train trip to France to meet a friend in Nice. She bought the book and hitchhiked to Nice instead.