Nita M. Lowey, who represented the 20th congressional district and, later, the 17th congressional district in Westchester County for a total of 32 years, died on March 15 at her home in Harrison, NY. She was 87.

Ms. Lowey, an ardent supporter of liberal causes, served on the House Appropriations Committee for nearly all her time in Washington, rising to be the first woman to lead it.

Rep. Henry J. Hyde, an Illinois House Republican who tangled with Ms. Lowey, cautioned colleagues not to be misled by her kindly demeanor. “She can make you smile while you’re bleeding,” Mr. Hyde said. “We call that the perfumed ice pick.”

Her areas of focus included women’s rights to abortion and health services, greater federal funding for homeless programs, low-cost housing, child care and early education programs.

In her reelection races, Ms. Lowey never had a Democratic opponent, and she won the general elections by substantial or overwhelming margins. She had no opponent at all in 2016.

[A personal note: Ms. Lowey represented Westchester County’s 20th congressional district while this editor was then an editor for S.I. Communications, a group of community newspapers covering The North Bronx to Bedford/Lewisboro. I frequently spoke with Ms. Lowey about her latest cause, which was always, “…the most important issue of the day, Sara.”  Frequently, it was.]   SMB

Max Frankel who fled Nazi Germany as a boy and rose to pinnacles of American journalism as a Pulitzer Prize-wining correspondent for The New York Times and later as its executive editor, died on March 23 at his home in Manhattan. He was 94.

He found his calling in journalism, and it led to global news assignments and the major events of his era — the Cuban missile crisis, the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union — and into the Moscow of Nikita Khrushchev, the Havana of Fidel Castro the Peking of Mao Zedong, and the Washington of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon.

Accompanying Nixon to China in 1972 on a historic mission to establish contacts after decades of estrangement, Mr. Frankel chronicled the president’s meetings with Mao and China’s premier, Chou En-lai, analyzed the news and, in Reporter’s Notebook pieces, took readers into the homes, factories and lives of a people who had been isolated since the 1949 Communist revolution. He wrote 35,000 words and 24 articles in eight days in Shanghai, Peking and Hangchow, and won the 1973 Pulitzer for international reporting.

Mr. Frankel’s achievements and innovations at The Times are detailed in an impressive and well-earned two-page spread in the March 24 issue of the paper. Space here does not allow a complete retelling. This publication encourages readers to seek out the obituary and read his inspiring story.

[As a one-time reporter and editor for a group of community newspapers, whose major assignment area covered not the world, but a mere one square mile in Westchester County, I was drawn to the truth of a statement made by Mr. Frankel to his staff, and proven by this writer’s own experience: “We address a family of readers whose trust and devotion we must earn anew each morning.” SMB]

Jeffrey Bruce Klein, one of four journalists who in 1976 founded the magazine Mother Jones, rooted it in the crusading left-wing politics of the 1960s. He returned in 1992 as editor in chief to rebrand it for younger more digital readers. He died on March 13 at his home in Menlo Park, CA at age 77.

The founders called it Mother Jones in honor of the fiery labor leader Mary Harris Jones. Mr. Klein left Mother Jones in 1998, taught journalism at Stanford and worked as a producer for “PBS NewsHour” with Jim Lehrer. His “NewsHour program on the Chinese economy won a Gerald Loeb Award in 2006.

The Shofar joins the Congregation in mourning the death of Lucille Bogen, mother of shul member Nancy Bogen Torchio, on Saturday, Feb. 8. Our most sincere condolences to Nancy, her husband Dan, and the family.

Jo Baer, an admired painter who exchanged the severe abstraction that made her name for a heady mix of dream imagery and deep historical references, died on Jan. 21 at her home in Amsterdam. She was 95.

   Beginning in 1960, when she moved to New York, Ms. Baer became one of the handful of artists developing Minimalism. In the early 1970s, she moved her work to sculpture and paintings in brightly colored designs.

“People want you to keep doing what you’ve already done because it makes money,” she said in a 2003 interview. “Once you’ve got a trademark, you’re recognizable, and they want you to stay that way.”

In her later years, she studied Greek, collected orchids, and spent the better part of a year as the chatelaine of a sprawling Norman castle in County Louth, Ireland. There, she found the austerity of her early Minimalism, unsatisfying. “I wanted more subject matter and more meaning,” she said in a 1987 interview. “There was an awful lot going on in the world, and I didn’t just want to sit there and draw straight lines.”

Tony Roberts, the Hollywood and stage actor best known as the hero’s best friend in Woody Allen movies like “Annie Hall,” and who distinguished himself on the New York stage with two Tony Award nominations, died on Feb. 7 at his home in Manhattan. He was 85.

Other acting credits are “Hannah and Her Sisters,” “Play It Again, Sam,” “Don’t Drink the Water,” “How Now, Dow Jones,” “Serpico,” “The Sisters Rosensweig,” “Barefoot in the Park,” “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three,” and other appearances on screen and stage. His final screen role was as Max Kellerman, a wistful Catskills resort owner, in a 2017 television movie version of “Dirty Dancing.”

In an NBC interview recounted in his 2015 memoir, Do you know me?, a critic, impressed by — or concerned about — the number of television, movie and theater projects Mr. Roberts had going on, asked him if he ever took a vacation.

“No,” Mr. Roberts said. “I crack under leisure.”

Marion Wiesel, who translated many books written by her husband, Elie Wiesel, including the final edition of his magnum opus, Night, and who encouraged him to pursue a wide-ranging public career, helping him become one of the most renowned interpreters of the Holocaust, died on Feb. 2 at her home in Greenwich, CT. She was 94.

Marion Wiesel shared her husband’s cosmopolitan knowledge of European culture and fluency in several languages. She quickly began translating his writings from French to English, ultimately working on 14 of his books.

Perhaps no single moment of Mr. Wiesel’s political career is so vividly recalled as his plea to Ronald Reagan, issued in the White House alongside the president and in front of TV cameras, not to visit the Bitburg military cemetery, where members of the SS are buried in what was then West Germany. “That place, Mr. President, is not your place,” Mr. Wiesel said. “Your place is with victims of the SS.”

“Those remarks had an editor: Mrs. Wiesel,” Alex Traub wrote in The New York Times. “There would not have been a Bitburg speech without Marion’s conviction,” the couple’s editor and friend Ileene Smith said. She called Mrs. Wiesel her husband’s “most trusted advisor.”     Elie Wiesel Foundation photo