Menachem Daum, a filmmaker who co-produced a groundbreaking 1997 documentary that illuminated the cloistered world of America’s Hasidim, died on Jan. 7 in Borough Park, Brooklyn. He was 77.

What made the documentary, “A Life Apart: Hasidism in America,” so striking was Mr. Daum’s ability to get people who scorn movies and television to sit on camera for revealing interviews, allowing him to chronicle their mores and rituals. The resulting film offered a complex portrait of a religious group usually depicted as somber and impenetrable; here it offered scenes of Hasidim joyfully dancing.

Leon Wildes, a New York immigration lawyer who successfully fought the United States government’s attempt to deport John Lennon, died on Jan. 8 in Manhattan. He was 90.

From early 1972 to fall 1975, Mr. Wildes battled the Nixon administration and immigration officials for targeting Mr. Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, marshaling a series of legal arguments revealing that Mr. Lennon, an antiwar activist and a vocal critic of President Richard M. Nixon had been singled out by the White House because he had an influence over young voters.

Mr. Wildes’ son, Michael, said in a phone interview with The New York Times that his father “…drew value from helping others achieve their American dream, as he had done — the golden grail of a green card, or citizenship.”

Norma Barzman, a screenwriter who moved to Europe in the late 1940s rather than be subject to the congressional investigations and professional ostracism that overtook her industry for a decade, died on Dec. 17 r her home in Beverly Hills, CA. She was 103 and widely considered to be one of the last surviving victims of the Hollywood blacklist.

Mrs. Barzman and her husband and fellow screenwriter, Ben Barzman, were among the hundreds of film industry figures — including screenwriters, actors, directors, stagehands and technicians — who found themselves iced out of Hollywood after WWII because of their unwillingness to discuss their affiliation and those they knew who were affiliated with the Communist Party, an association common among the Hollywood left. However, attitudes changed, and those sympathetic to the cause were caught up in the government crackdown.

After returning to Los Angeles, Mrs. Barzman wrote a column on aging for The Los Angeles Herald Examiner, and also a memoir, The Red and the Blacklist: The Intimate Memoir of a Hollywood Expatriate.

Zvi Zamir, who as the director of Israel’s Mossad spy agency, led a campaign to crush Palestinian terrorism after 11 Israelis were killed at the 1972 Munich Summer Olympics. He also relayed a warning to his government that Egypt and Syria were about to start the Yom Kippur War. Mr. Zamir died on Jan. 2. He was 98.

“Zamir led a determined and initiative-taking approach in the State of Israel’s fight against Palestinian terrorism, which was strengthening at the time,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in a statement.

On Oct. 7, 2023, 50 years after the Yom Kippur War began, Hamas and other militant groups based in Gaza crossed the border with Israel and killed an estimated 1,200 Israelis and took hundreds of hostages. Israel has retaliated by vowing to destroy Hamas, The New York Times reported.

At Mr. Zamir’s funeral, David Barnea, the current director of the Mossad, said that  “Zvicka’s spirit will accompany us in this mission.”

Claire M. Fagin, an educator and advocate for change in the profession of nursing, died Jan. 16 at her home in Manhattan. She was 97.

Dr. Fagin was named dean of the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing. During her tenure, she tripled the enrollment, established a doctoral program in nursing, and built Penn into a widely acknowledged world leader in nursing research and education. In 2006, Penn renamed its Nursing Education Building the Claire M. Fagin Nursing Sciences Building

Dr. Fagin was later the founding director of the John A. Hartford Foundation’s national program on geriatric nursing. She was also chair of the advisory board that turned a $100 million grant into the Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing at the University of California, Davis, which focuses on master’s and doctoral programs in nursing.

In spite of her advanced degrees, her prominent academic positions and honorary degrees and other awards, Dr. Fagin always made a point of identifying herself as a nurse. Her mother would say that her daughter was not, as she put it “a real nurse.” Dr. Fagin would say, “Mama, I’m an R.N. That’s what it means — Real Nurse.”

Tanya Berezin, artistic director of the Circle Repertory Theater, died Nov. 29 in San Francisco, at 82.

She began her theater career as a stage actress, gaining glowing reviews  for her Off Broadway performances over the years, and she won an Obie Award for her role in Lanford Wilson’s play, “The Mound Builders” in 1975. In 1986, she turned her attention to behind-the-scenes activity, and joined the repertory theater she had helped to found in 1969.

Her goal was to bring more imaginative work to the theater company, and during her tenure as artistic director, she offered plays about AIDS, capitalism and complex family relationships.

She also acted in television dramas, like “St. Elsewhere” and “The Equalizer,” and also in films, including “Awakenings,” with Robert De Niro and Robin Williams.

Robert Rosenthal, a psychologist renowned as an expert in non-verbal communication, and in what he called “self-fulfilling prophecies” in which subtle and often unconscious gestures can influence behavior, died on Jan. 5 in Riverside, CA. He was 90.

Widely considered one of the leading social psychologists of the 20th century, Dr. Rosenthal, who spent much of his career at Harvard, was best known for his work on what he called the Pygmalion effect, concluding that performance is enhanced when given positive reinforcement.

In addition to his work on interpersonal expectations, Dr. Rosenthal was a pioneer in meta-analysis, in which he developed a framework for combining multiple studies of the same phenomenon to reach better results.