Michael Singer, a sculptor whose work blurred the lines separating art, landscaping, architecture and urban planning, died on March 14 at his home in Delray Beach FL. He was 78.

Mr. Singer was often characterized as a landscape architect with public commissions at sites around the country. But in fact, he was an artist who saw his medium and his ambition in expansive yet humble terms, with work that attempted to remediate humanity’s disruption of the natural world.

He spent 15 years in the forests of Vermont, “trying to figure out the human connection to the natural environment,” he told The New York Times in 2004. “How do we express it? How do we act in a way that isn’t controlling, destructive?” That connection was a concern for his entire career, even as he moved toward projects with multimillion-dollar budgets and five-year time frames. Such projects, he believed, demanded the insight of artists with, perhaps, unthought-of possibilities.

Sami Michael, an Iraqi-born Israeli writer whose novels illuminate the world of Jews from Arabic countries and their prejudices and discrimination that they, as well as Israeli Arabs, have experienced, died on April 1 in Haifa, where he lived. He was 97.

A native Arabic speaker, Mr. Michael had to master Hebrew to publish his first novel in 1974. Mr. Michael went on to write a dozen novels, three books of nonfiction, three plays and a children’s book, winning many awards and honorary doctorates. In a statement of condolence, referencing other Israeli world-class writers, President Isaac Herzog of Israel extolled Mr. Michael as a “giant among giants.”

Maurice El Medioni, an Algerian-born pianist who fused Jewish and Arab musical traditions into a singular style he called “Pianoriental,” died on March 25 in Israel. He was 95.

Mr. Medioni was among last representatives of a once-vibrant Jewish-Arab musical culture that flourished in North Africa before and after WWII. The Medioni style remained buried and nearly forgotten for decades during the war. Then, in 1996 at the age of 68, he released a breakthrough album, “Café Oran.” It led to a belated second life as a star of so-called world music and a mentor to a new generation of Israeli musicians eager to recover the musical heritage of their Sephardic heritage.

Ellen Ash Peters, a legal trailblazer who was the first woman on the faculty of Yale Law School, the first female chief justice of the Connecticut Supreme Court, and who wrote a landmark civil rights decision in 1996 desegregating public schools in Hartford, died on April 17 at home in West Hartford. She was 94.

In her 18 years on the Connecticut court, Justice Peters wrote more than 600 opinions. In 1994, at a dinner to honor Justice Peters, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said that Justice Peters “gave generations of women law students a reason to believe they, too, could aspire and achieve.”

Phyllis Pressman, the matriarch of the family that founded Barneys New York, the luxury menswear store and the creator of Chelsea Passage, the store’s home goods bazaar, died on April 16 in Palm Beach, FL. She was 95.

Chelsea Passage was created by “finishing” the alley on the 17^th Street side of the store. In it, Mrs. Pressman filled it with a mixture of Art Deco ceramics and unique, decorative items. Barneys and Chelsea Passage were destinations for those with discriminating taste and style until bankruptcy in 2019.

Jacob Rothschild, a wealthy financier, patron of the arts, philanthropist with close ties to Israel and, who broke with his family’s fabled banking dynasty at a time of change in the world of high finance, has died. He was 87. At the time of his death, he was chairman of the Rothschild Foundation, a British charity.

In addition to his career as a high-powered financier, Mr. Rothschild played a role in Israel. He oversaw his family’s long-running philanthropic activities there as head of the Yad Hanadiv foundation, which sponsored the construction of Israel’s Parliament, Supreme Court and National Library. Waddesdon Manor, a chateau built by Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild, managed by Britain’s nonprofit National Trust, is now home to the Rothschild’s collection of an estimated 15,000 works of art and objects, and for Jacob Rothschild’s collection of Rothschild wines, mainly from the Bordeaux region of France.

Richard Lewis, the stand-up comedian who parlayed a dark sense of humor into an acting career that included movies and TV, died on Feb. 27 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 76.

Neurotic and self-deprecating, typically dressed all in black, Mr. Lewis paced the stages of comedy clubs, hanging his head, pulling at his shock of black hair, riffing on his struggles in life and love. He called himself “The Prince of Pain.”

Beginning in 1999, he had a regular role on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” as a good friend and golf buddy of Larry David, the show’s star and creator. He played a semi-fictionalized version of himself, a dour personality who made Mr. David’s otherwise prickly self seem like Christopher Robin.

“I owe my career to my mother,” Mr. Lewis told the Washington Post in 2020. A woman with issues, he said, “I should have given her my agent’s commission.”

Jason Zinoman, in an appraisal in The New York Times, wrote of the friendship between Lewis and David, “These cantankerous Brooklyn Jews made harangues seem like hugs.”