Soma Golden Behr, a longtime senior editor at The New York Times, died on June 30 in Manhattan. She was 84.

In her work, she expressed a lifetime interest in issues involving inequality, poverty, race and class, which resulted in a number of series for the newspaper, each enlisting squads of reporters, photographers and editors for intensive, sometimes yearlong assignments, several earning Pulitzer Prizes for reporting.

She was the first woman to lead the newspaper’s national desk, and the third on its masthead. In 1977, she was named to the Times editorial board. At the time, she was only women exclusively writing editorials, often on women’s issues, gay rights, and inequality.

Jon Landau, an Oscar-winning producer who collaborated with the director James Cameron in making three of the highest-grossing films of all time, “Titanic” and the two “Avatar” movies, died on July 5 in Los Angeles. He was 63.

Mr. Landau and Mr. Cameron’s decades-long collaboration made box office history. The first film they made together, “Titanic,” became the first movie to gross more than $1 billion globally after its 1997 release. Its record for total earnings, $1.84 billion, was broken by their next film, the science-fiction epic “Avatar” (2009).

“Titanic” was nominated for 14 Oscars and won 11, including best picture.

Richard M. Goldstein, a trailblazer in planetary exploration who used ground-based radars to map planets with techniques that scientists now use to measure geographical changes on Earth, including melting glaciers, died on June 22 at his home in La Canada Flintridge, CA. He was 97.

In the early 1960s, while a graduate student in electrical engineering at the California Institute of Technology, he proposed as his thesis project to try to detect echoes from Venus, using the Goldstone Solar System Radar, which had been newly developed. If successful, scientists would learn the distance from Earth to Venus. On March 10, 1961, technicians pointed the new radar at Venus. Six and a half minutes later, signals from the planet returned. He bounced signals off Mercury, Mars and Saturn’s rings, all making it possible to do accurate spacecraft navigation within the solar system.

Later, he adapted his radar algorithms for use with aircraft and satellites, which have mapped melting glaciers, the movement of tectonic plates, and other changes to the Earth’s surface.

Ruth Westheimer, the diminutive guru of the American sexual revolution whose straightforward, matter-of-fact way of discussing the facts of life led to a career as a radio talk-show host, television personality, author and advice expert, died July 12 at her home in New York City. She escaped Nazi Germany in the 1930s and was one of the entertainment industry’s last survivors of the Holocaust.

The turning point for her career came in 1980. After giving a lecture to a group of New York broadcasters about the need for sex education programming, WNYN-FM offered her a 15-minute radio show called “Sexually Speaking.” Word spread quickly about the quirky, candid and informative radio host calling herself Dr. Ruth, who offered no-holds-barred advice on sex. By 1983, the program was an hour long and was drawing a quarter-million listeners weekly. The following year, it was syndicated across America. In 1983, “Sexually Speaking” made the leap to television.

As a 10-year-old, she was sent to Switzerland on a kindertransport. Later, she relocated to Palestine, also served in the Israeli army as a sniper. She arrived in New York in 1956. She never saw any of her family again. She learned that her parents were sent to the Lodz Ghetto and killed at Auschwitz.

Maxine F. Singer, a biochemist and federal health official who in the 1970s was instrumental in developing guidelines that protected the then-nascent field of biotechnology while calming fears that this new science would give way to the spread of deadly lab-produced microbes, died on July 9 at her home in Washington, DC. She was 93.

In a letter to the journal Science,  Dr. Singer pointed out the risks to laboratory workers and called on the National Academies of Science to develop federal guidelines to protect them.

David Liederman, whose confections redefined the chocolate chip cookie and whose chain, David’s Cookies, grew to more than 100 stores nationwide, died on July 4 in Mount Kisco, NY. He was 75.

The unique feature of Mr. Liederman’s innovative version of the chocolate chip cookie was that it was not made with standard Toll House chocolate chips, but was studded with irregular pieces of dark

Swiss Lindt chocolate. He called his cookies chocolate chunk.

He opened his first cookie store, David’s Cookie Kitchen, on Second Avenue and 53rd Street in Manhattan in 1979. A chain of more than 100 David’s Cookies stores opened nationwide and in Japan. He sold David’s Cookies to Fairfield Foods in New Jersey in 1995 and retired from the company. He valued his cookie business at about $35 million in mid-1980s (about $102 million in today’s currency).

He also fronted several restaurants, including Manhattan Market, Chez Louis, Broadway Grill, Television City, and Restaurant Luna in Mount Kisco.

Dorothy Lichtenstein, a prominent arts patron and widow of the acclaimed Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, died on July 4 at her home in Southampton, NY. She was 84.

Described as an elegant, engaging woman and a gracious philanthropist, instead of seeking to sell the work left in her husband’s estate, she gave most of it away. Her donations consisted of paintings and sculptures, piles of sketchbooks, file drawers bulging with correspondence, and even the building in Lower Manhattan in which Mr. Lichtenstein’s last studio was located.

Through the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, of which she was co-founder and president, the family donated 1,000 works to museums in the United States and abroad. The main beneficiary was the Whitney Museum of American Art, which in 2018 received a gift of some 400 works from Mr. Lichtenstein’s personal study collection — a mix of classic Pop paintings and sculptures and lesser-known material, like his early sketches of Native Americans and photographs he took of New York City building facades.

When she gave the studio building to the Whitney, “with characteristic self-effacement, she declined the Whitney’s offer to rename it in her honor,” The New York Times reported.

[The Shofar editor was particularly moved by tributes in her memory, yet not surprised. Although not close friends, I and Dolly Herzka, as she was known then, were college classmates and acquaintances, who many times talked together about college life and what we hoped would be fulfilling careers. Her beauty and grace were clearly evident even then. SMB]