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.

Daniel Abraham, an entrepreneur who turned a tiny family business into a giant that dominated the weight-loss industry with popular brands like Slim-Fast and Dexatrim, died on June 29 in Manhattan. He was 100.

Mr. Abraham built his fortune on a pharmaceutical company that his father, a dentist, bought for $5,000 in 1947 after spotting it in an advertisement in the trade publication Drug Store News. He expanded the company into an empire that included Slim-Fast.

Mr. Abraham, whose family lived in Israel for much of the 1970s, was also active politically. In pursuit of Middle East peace, he cultivated relationships with top Israeli, American and Arab leaders, including Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, a friend for more than three decades.

Forbes estimated Mr. Abraham’s wealth this year at $2.4 billion.

In a long career as a psychoanalyst, Anna Ornstein, who was deported to Auschwitz when she was 17 and experienced unspeakable horror in her youth, embraced a school of psychotherapy that stresses empathy — a belief that all people, even those who seem the most vile, contain a spark of humanity. Dr. Ornstein died on July 2 at her home in Brookline, MA. She was 98.

She and her husband, also a Holocaust survivor, emigrated to the United States in 1950. She taught child psychiatry at the University of Cincinnati, at Harvard Medical School, and at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis. She also spoke about the Holocaust to young people and community groups.