Martin Bernheimer, a classical music critic noted for witty, withering writing that won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1982, died Oct. 29 at his home in Manhattan. He was 83.

“Historically,” Mr. Bernheimer wrote in the Financial Times in 2008, “the best critics have guarded standards, stimulated debate and, in the complex process, reinforced the importance of art in society. They have been tastemakers, taskmasters and possibly ticket-sellers. Some have even written well.”

Mr. Bernheimer certainly did. He described Luciano Pavarotti as “the over-hype tenor of the century.” Of Lorin Maazel, he wrote, “He knows how to capitalize on his limitations.” Mr. Bernheimer joined The Los Angeles Times after spells at The New York Post, The Musical Courier and Saturday Review. He twice won the prestigious ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for writing about music, in 1974 and 1978, and served on the faculties of the University of Southern California, the University of California/Los Angeles, and other nearby colleges. He appeared regularly on the Metropolitan Opera’s national radio broadcasts.

Sol Stein, a prolific novelist and playwright, publisher, and editor who helped fashion a collection of essays by James Baldwin, a former high school classmate, into a literary classic titled Notes of a Native Son, died Sept. 19 at his home in Tarrytown, NY. He was 92.

As editor in chief of Stein and Day, a publishing house established by Stein and his then-wife, he worked with Elia Kazan; also Jacques Barzun and Lionel Trilling, his former professors at Columbia; David Frost, Budd Schulberg and Dylan Thomas.

Mr. Stein’s lifelong association with Mr. Baldwin began when both were editors of The Magpie, the literary magazine at DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx. It was perhaps an unlikely bond: As Mr. Stein would say, he was white, Jewish and attracted to women while Mr. Baldwin was black, the stepson of a Pentecostal minister, and attracted to men.

He was the author of more than a dozen books, including how-to guides for novelists. In Stein on Writing (1995), he offered this advice to writers: “Be sure you don’t stop the story while describing. You are a storyteller, not an interior decorator. Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader — not the fact that it’s raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.”

[Editor’s note: Every year, a new crop of how-to-write books is published, and I have read or at least perused most of them. Not one is as clear and helpful as Stein on Writing. I recommend it to my classes of memoir writers every term. SB]

Diet Eman died on Sept. 3 at her home in Grand Rapids, MI. She was 99. Her death was confirmed by John Evans, as family spokesman, who directed the film The Reckoning (2007), which documents her experience as a member of the Dutch resistance during WWII.

When Nazi harassment of Dutch Jews escalated in 1942 to persecution and transport to the Westerbork camp in the northeast Netherlands, she and her resistance group stole food and gas ration cards, forged identity papers, and sheltered hundreds of fugitive Jews. She delivered supplies and moral support to one apartment in The Hague that in late 1942 housed 27 Jews in hiding. Pursued by the Nazis, she was captured in 1944 and imprisoned, but was released three months later, and she immediately rejoined the resistance.

In 1982, President Ronald Reagan hailed Ms. Eman in a letter for risking her safety “to adhere to a higher law of decency and morality.” In 1998, Yad Vashem granted her the title of Righteous Among the Nations, given to non-Jews for risking their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. In 2015, King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands, lauded Ms. Eman as “one of our national heroes.”

Edda Servi Machlin, who emigrated to the United States from Italy after WWII and wrote a definitive cookbook on Italian Jewish food, died August 16 at her home in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. She was 93.

Her book, The Classic Cuisine of the Italian Jews, did more than offer recipes; it recounted her memories of growing up in Pitigliano, a town in Tuscany that was known as little Jerusalem because it had a vibrant Jewish community and culture, one that had been there for centuries. She told of an underground communal oven that, when she was young, was used only for baking matzo at Passover.

In 1943, her parents and youngest brother were sent to a concentration camp in northern Italy, from which they were later liberated. She, two brothers and a sister fled into the hills of Tuscany and hid out with the partisans. She moved to New York in 1958, where she met Eugene Machlin and began her cookbook writing career.

Kenneth Bialkin, a philanthropist and a longtime leader of major Jewish organizations, died August 15. He was 89. The Anti-Defamation League’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, announced his death. Bialkin was the civil rights group’s national chairman in the early 1980s.

Bialkin, who was until recently active as a retired partner at the Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom legal firm, also was chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations in the mid-1980s, when it took a lead in brokering freedoms for Soviet Jews in the final years of the USSR. He was also chairman of the American Jewish Historical Society, president of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, and chairman of the America Israel Friendship League. He served for 30 years as vice chairman of the Jerusalem Foundation, a major philanthropic builder in the Israeli city.

Leslie H. Gelb, 82, a former American diplomat, journalist and commentator on worlds affairs, died August 31 at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan.

He was executive assistant to Senator Jacob K. Javits from 1966-1967; director of policy planning and arms control for international security affairs at the Defense Department from 1967-1969, where he won the Pentagon’s Distinguished Service Medal; and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution from 1969-1973. He worked as an editor, columnist and Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent for The New York Times. He was assistant secretary of state and director of the Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs during the Carter administration from 1977-1979, and was president of the Council on Foreign Relations, the prestigious New York-based think tank from 1993-2003.

Mr. Gelb was 30 years old when in 1967 he took day-to-day charge of the team that compiled the secret Pentagon Papers, commissioned by Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara and published by The New York Times in 1971, revealing a damning evolution of Washington’s intervention in Vietnam.

He taught and lectured at various colleges, wrote several books, and received an Emmy Award in 1984 as a producer of the ABC documentary “The Crisis Game.”

In addition to his awards and prizes, in 1993, he was named American Father of the Year.