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an admired painter who exchanged the severe abstraction that made her name for a heady mix of dream imagery and deep historical references, died on Jan. 21 at her home in Amsterdam.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

Mort Künstler, whose meticulously researched and dramatically composed paintings of American historical events, especially of the Civil War, made him one of the country’s most prominent historical artists, died on Feb. 2 in Rockville Center, NY. He was 97.

Mr. Künstler developed a sense of dramatic realism early in the 1950s as an illustrator for pulp novels and men’s adventure magazines. He refined his mainstream commercial appeal working for top ad agencies and magazines like National Geographic, where he learned the importance of conducting extensive historical research before ever dipping a brush in paint.

Mr. Künstler’s paintings have joined the permanent collections of dozens of museums, and he had scores of solo shows in galleries and museums across the country.

Harold Holzer, a Civil War expert and author, described Mr. Künstler in an interview as “both a scholar of the paintbrush, and a painter of scholarship…a master storyteller with an eye for color and character, drama and detail.”

Anson Rabinbach, one of the world’s leading experts of the Nazi era, died on Feb. 2 in Rome, where he was giving a lecture. He was 79.

Professor Rabinbach was among several young scholars in the early 1970s who attempted to bridge the gap between social history and intellectual history, especially in the realm of 20th-century Europe. Frustrated by a lack of places in which to express his views, in 1973, professor Rabinbach and three other academics — David Bathrick, Andreas Huyssen and Jack Zipes — founded the journal New German Critique, which became a leading outlet for scholars of 20th-century German culture.

Although he taught at Princeton, held top fellowship, and lectured around the world, Professor Rabinbach always considered New German Critique his intellectual home, a place where he could express his opinions about the left and the right.