Ida Schmertz, an influential behind-the-scenes feminist and corporate executive, who was a founding director of the first academic research center devoted to American women and politics, and who helped women advance in workplaces as varied as the dockyard and the corporate suite, died on July 28 in Manhattan. She was 91.

Ida Frederika was born to upper-middle-class Jewish parents in Amsterdam. The family fled Europe at the beginning of WWII, moving to the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) in 1939, and then to the United States. They settled near Philadelphia.

In 1994, President Bill Clinton appointed her as the founding chair of the Romanian-American Enterprise Fund to assist the former Communist nation in adopting a market economy.

Of particular interest to New Yorkers, Mrs. Schmertz testified and wrote in support of legislation in New York State that would allow terminally ill patients to end their lives with a lethal prescription. New York governor Kathy Hochul signed the Medical Aid in Dying Act into law in February 2026, effective August 5.

Bill Goichberg, the foremost chess impresario in the United States, whose ideas about organizing tournaments reshaped and expanded competitive chess over his six-decade career, died on Aug. 2. He was 83.

According to the Continental Chess Association, which Mr. Goichberg founded in the 1960s the association has held more than 2,300 tournaments and awarded more than $24 million in prize money.

In 1966, Mr. Goichberg organized the first scholastic tournament of high school competitors, followed by elementary and junior high school tournaments in later years. In 1991, he started a tournament to crown champions from K-12. That tournament routinely attracts between 1,500 and 2,000 competitors.

He played his first tournament in 1961 and was a master by 1964. Although he continued to play, he became increasingly interested in organizing tournaments.

Victor Niederhoffer, a polymath who pioneered the use of computers to predict short-term movements in stocks and commodities — a volatile, high-stakes trading techniq1ue that made him and his clients a fortune, which he subsequently lost, regained, then lost again, died on Aug. 4 at his home in Weston, CT, a 20,000-square-foot Tudor-style mansion.  He was 82.

Determined to find patterns in stock movements, he recorded prices in large ledgers and entered them into a computer program that he had written to track patterns. In 1979, Mr. Niederhoffer began trading for himself with $50,000. Eighteen months later, after turning that sum into $20 million, he started his own hedge fund, leaning heavily on his computer program. He made millions, lost millions, and always regained his fortune. In an essay for Vogue, his daughter, Galt Niederhoffer, wrote: “He is still awake late into the night, alert for the morning bells of the European and Asian markets, studying every permutation, setting up for every angle.”

Jill Smokler, a mother of three who started the blog “Scary Mommy” as a diversion from bedtime battles and toddler tantrums, and built it into a juggernaut that drew millions of readers to its pages, died on June 29 at her home in Pikesville, MD. She was 48.

Ms. Smokler “built her life’s work on a single, radical idea,” her brother Matt Epstein said in a statement. “That you could love your children more than anything in the world and still say, out loud, that the job is grindingly difficult.” In addition to her blog, which she started in 2008, she wrote three books.

When she started, her co-stars included her husband, Jeff Smokler, who traveled three days a week for business, three kids under 4, and Penelope, the family’s golden retriever.

“Motherhood,” Mrs. Smokler told Time Magazine, “was loud, chaotic, messy, and nothing like the magazine photos I stared at or the families I saw on TV.”

Mark Singer, a staff writer at The New Yorker from the age of 23 who extended the magazine’s franchise of rich reporting and witty prose about offbeat, complicated and quintessentially American characters, died on June 26 in Manhattan. He was 75.

Mr. Singer wrote urbane “Talk of the Town” pieces for the front of the magazine, reflected on serious national matters, and did a hitch traveling the country as the correspondent for the “U.S. Journal” column. But he was best known as a profiler. His subjects included the magician Ricky Jay, a set of four doorman brothers in New York, and a braggadocious real estate developer named Donald Trump, years before he ran for office.

Judah Gribetz, who as a top aide to Gov. Hugh L. Carey played a key role in helping New York City avoid financial collapse in the 1970s, and who decades later devised a complex plan for distributing $1.25 billion in restitution to half a million Holocaust survivors in a class-action suit against Swiss banks, died on June 26 at his home in the Rockaway Park neighborhood of Queens. He was 97.

The hundreds of thousands of claimants included people whose money, deposited in the banks to safeguard it from the Nazis, was not returned after WWII — enslaved laborers for German companies that had put their revenues in the banks, people whose Nazi-looted property was disposed of through Swiss institutions, members of the Romani community, disabled and gay people, and Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Mr. Gribetz has been given a “Solomonic role,” The Forward said, in having “to adjudicate between the competing needs of different groups of aging Holocaust survivors, from Florida to Ukraine. By 2020, when the last distributions were made, nearly $1.288 billion — an amount larger than the original settlement because of accumulated interest — had been distributed or allocated to more than 458,400 claimants.

Louise Lasser, the deadpan comedic actress who began her screen career in Woody Allen movies and became a star as the title character of “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” died on July 6 at her home in Manhattan. She was 87.

Articles about the series proliferated, and Ms. Lasser appeared on the covers of major magazines. She also did commercials for NyQuil and Excedrin, and was the first actress to win a Clio Award. She continued appearing in films and did guest appearances on various sitcoms. New York Times critic John J. O’Connor wrote that Ms. Lasser “had an uncanny ability to touch as well as tickle.”