Zelig Eshhar, an immunologist whose breakthrough research in the 1980s created a critical pathway to developing immunotherapies that attack particular cancers, died on July 3 at Tel Yitzhak, a kibbutz in central Israel. He was 84.

Dr. Eshhar’s exploration of the human immune system began in the 1960s, during his Ph.D. studies at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, near Tel Aviv. There, he focused on the T-cell, a type of white blood cell with the natural ability to fight germs and disease. Dr. Eshhar’s CAR-T leap is the fundamental science behind immunotherapies that since 2017 have been approved by the F.D.A. to treat blood cancers like acute lymphoblastic leukemia, non-Hodgkin lymphoma and multiple myeloma. Small clinical trials of CAR-T therapies for ovarian and colorectal cancers have also shown promise, according to the National Cancer Institute.

Wallis Annenberg, who in more than 20 years in leadership positions at her family’s Annenberg Foundation oversaw more than $3 billion in grants and donations to projects that include the arts, wildlife, and older adults, died on August 11 at her home in Los Angeles. She was 86.

Philanthropic projects have included the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; PetSpace, an animal adoption hospital and humane education center; GenSpace, an innovative community center for older adults; and the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, a structure that, when completed, will span 10 lanes of the 101 Freeway in Agoura Hills, CA, to allow the safe movement of mountain lions and other wildlife from the Santa Monica Mountains.

When Ms. Annenberg was asked by The Beverly Hills Courier in 2019 what makes a project resonate enough for her to support it, she said, “I have to give from my heart, first and foremost. Which is why I’ve been focused on issues like women’s empowerment, engaging people in the visual and performing arts, strengthening the human-animal bond. Things that really matter to me.”

Across more than 40 years as a popular New York talk-show host on WNYC and WBAI, Leonard Lopate interviewed writers, artists, actors, directors, politicians, scientists, journalists, musicians, athletes, designers, and explorers, including 42 Nobel Prize winners, one U.S. President (Jimmy Carter), and two future presidents (Barack Obama and Joseph R. Biden Jr.) Mr. Lopate died on August 5 at his home in Brooklyn. He was 84.

In 2010, he told The Brooklyn Rail, an arts and culture journal, “If I’m talking to a novelist, I’m not going to ask him why Mary killed John on page 84. I’m going to ask instead how he or she came up with the idea for the book.

“Same thing applies to a painter, a sculptor, a conceptual artist. It’s all about how they approach their work and how they come up with what they’ve achieved. Audiences are interested in hearing how they came to be what they are, and why they have succeeded and someone else has not.”

Daniel Warren Hoffman, an American-Israeli klezmer violinist, composer, and documentary film producer, died on July 18, 2025, in Tel Aviv, Israel.

Mr. Hoffman founded the klezmer-jazz fusion ensemble, the Klez-X and co-founded Davka and Trio Carpion. He also produced the documentary film “Otherwise It’s Just Firewood,” the pilot film for a television series that explores the role of the Italianate violin in disparate cultures worldwide. The film was aired widely on American PBS stations in 2018.

He studied and performed Arabic, Turkish, Greek and Balkan music. As a composer, he received composition grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Meet the Composer, and numerous American theaters, including Theater J, the San Diego Repertory Theatre, and Traveling Jewish Theater.

[Click the link and enjoy Mr. Hoffman’s amazing klezmer violin] https://youtu.be/BVtIl3dqDbM

Morton Meyerson, an understated Texas businessman who helped H. Ross Perot build Electronic Data Systems into a world-leading data processing company, and who later advised Mr. Perot during his 1992 presidential campaign, died on August 4 at his home in Dallas. He was 87.

Mr. Meyerson was the quiet, stubborn, moneymaking computer programmer in the backroom who helped make his boss a billionaire. Mr. Perot had started E.D.S. in 1962 with a $1,000 check. In 1984, when General Motors bought the company, it had $1 billion in revenue. When Mr. Meyerson finally left E.D.S., it was the largest computer services company in the world.

Nathan Silver, an architect whose 1967 book, Lost New York, offered a history lesson about the many buildings that were demolished before the city passed a landmarks preservation law that might have saved them, died on May 19 in London. He was 99.

Mr. Silver’s book was a photographic guide to what had vanished over many decades. “While cities must adapt if they are to remain responsive to the needs and wishes of their inhabitants, they need not change in a heedless and suicidal fashion.”

Rosalind Fox Solomon, a photographer whose black-and-white portraits shot in the American South, Israel and diverse spots around the globe earned her the admiration of critics and a place in the world’s most prestigious museums, died on June 23 in Manhattan. She was 95.

Ms. Fox Solomon came to realize that “something is different about me when I’m taking pictures,” she said. “I connect with something in myself that’s different than when I’m in social contact…I always have tried as much as possible to connect my inner feelings to my pictures.”

Ms. Fox Solomon was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1979. Her work is in the collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington.