Lesley Hazleton, a British-born Jewish psychologist, journalist and author, whose curiosity about faith and religion led her to write biographies of Muhammad, Mary and Jezebel, died on April 29 at her home, a houseboat in Seattle. She was 78.

She moved to Jerusalem in 1966, at age 20, and lived there through two wars and one peace treaty, working as a journalist for The Jerusalem Post and as a stringer for Time magazine. She left Israel for New York in 1979, wrote the column “Hers” for The New York Times, and embarked on a career as a car columnist for Lear’s magazine and later for The Detroit Free Press. She also had a pilot’s license, and wrote a blog, “Accidental Theologist,” about faith and religion.

Life is a journey, she believed. “It’s not how long I live that matters,” should would say. “It’s how I live. And I intend to do it well, to the end.” And she did.

Jerome Rothenberg, a poet, translator and anthologist whose efforts to bring English-language readers into contact with creative traditions far outside the Western establishment — a field he called ethnopoetics — had an enormous impact on world literature, died on April 21 at his home in Encinitas, CA. He was 92.

By ethnopoetics, Mr. Rothenberg meant poetry from indigenous and other non-Western cultures, including Jewish mysticism, American Indian, Dada, and a range of poetries from Europe, Asia, Africa and Oceania, introducing readers to ancient Egyptian coronation events, Comanche peyote songs, and Gabonese death rites.

He taught at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and SUNY Binghamton, but spent most of his career at the University of California, San Diego. He published several books of his own poems, translated others, and presented staged readings. At his death, two titles had been accepted for publication, one of them “In the Shadow of a Mad King,” a recording of Mr. Rothenberg’s poems about Donald Trump.

Sheppie Abramowitz, a political insider who became a powerful ally for refugees around the world, died on April 7 in Washington. She was 88.

For more than five decades, Ms. Abramowitz was active in movements to solve refugee crises — in Vietnam, Thailand, Turkey and Kosovo. She used her deep knowledge of government officials, logistics and the struggles of those fleeing war and oppressive governments to secure real relief. Her husband, Morton I. Abramowitz, was a U.S. ambassador, and she became his humanitarian adjunct, bringing her knowledge to bear when they returned to Washington from abroad.

Ms. Abramowitz established a Washington office for the International Rescue Committee, and became its vice president. She retired from the IRC in 2009.

She is survived by her husband, children, grandchildren and brother, Philip Glass, the composer

Dr. Werner Spitz, a pathologist whose accounts of the traumatic last moments in some of the most sensational American deaths of the past 60 years figured in cases involving President John F. Kennedy, that carried a message of feminist empowerment, died on April 20 in Barrington, R.I. She was 81.

In 1973, Ms. Specht was a copywriter at the McCann-Erickson agency in Manhattan. Preference was created to challenge Clairol’s Nice ‘n Easy. Her copy empowered women, and the tag line has endured all the years since: Because I’m worth it.”

Dr. Herbert Pardes, a psychiatrist and former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, who brought order to the merger of two major medical centers that became New York-Presbyterian Hospital Martin Luther King, Jr., O.J. Simpson, Jon Benet Ramsey, Mary Jo Kopechne and many others, died on April 14, in St. Clair Shores, MI, a suburb of Detroit. He was 97.

Dr. Spitz’s career of more than 60 years traced to the early days of modern forensic pathology, and his textbook on the topic remains a gold standard in the field.

Ilon Specht, who wrote a successful television commercial for L’Oréal’s Preference hair color product

and ran it for 11 years, died on April 30 at his home in Manhattan. He was 89.

Dr. Pardes aspired to make New York-Presbyterian a model for medical care, with focus on patients, efficient management, and rigid financial controls.

Disney legend Richard M. Sherman, half of the Academy Award-winning songwriting team of the Sherman Brothers (with his late brother Robert B. Sherman), died May 25, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Beverly Hills. He was 95.

One of the most prolific composer-lyricists in the history of family entertainment, and a key member of Walt Disney’s inner circle of creative talents, Mr. Sherman garnered nine Academy Award nominations (winning two Oscars for his work on the 1964 classic “Mary Poppins”), won three Grammy Awards, and received 24 gold and platinum albums over the course of his 65-year career.