Arno J. Mayer, a historian whose unorthodox reading of the first half of the 20th century challenged conventional understanding of WWI, WWII and the Holocaust, died on Dec. 17 at a senior care facility in Princeton, NJ. He was 97.

Dr. Mayer was the son of Luxembourg Jews who fled to America with his family just ahead of the Nazi invasion in 1940. His career in academia and writings was devoted largely to trying to make sense of the cataclysm the world had experienced. His early scholarship focused on the origins of WWI, while his later writing reached forward to the Holocaust and the founding of Israel.

A common idea threaded through his long career, which included seven books and teaching positions at Brandeis, Harvard and Princeton: that society must be conceived as a whole, and that history is the result of tensions among its constituent parts, like class and social structures.  He argued that WWI, WWII, and the Holocaust were the result of modern capitalism colliding with an entrenched European elite. While several prominent historians supported Dr. Mayer’s thesis, many others denounced it.

Edward Jay Epstein, an author whose deeply researched books challenged conventional wisdom about controversies ranging from whether John F. Kennedy was killed by a lone assassin to whether the whistle-blower Edward Snowden was really a Russian spy, died Jan. 9 in Manhattan. He was 88.

A professional skeptic, Mr. Epstein wrote more than two dozen nonfiction books, many involving allegations of government conspiracies and corporate dereliction.

He earned his doctorate in 1972 from the Harvard-M.I.T. Joint Center for Urban Studies, taught political science at Harvard, the University of California/Los Angeles, and M.I.T., and he wrote for The New Yorker. But he returned to New York in order to become a full time author rather than pursue an academic career. “I wanted to be in New York, ever since I met Clay Felker,” the editor of New York Magazine, he said in an interview last year with the online magazine Air Mail. “He knew the world.”

Herman Raucher, who turned his memories of a summer as a teenager in a Massachusetts beach town, including one of a sexual encounter with a young war widow, into the screenplay for the nostalgic 1971 film “Summer of ’42,” died on Dec. 28 in Stamford, CT. He was 95.

“Summer” won an Oscar for Michel Legrand’s original score, and received four other nominations, including one for Mr. Raucher’s screenplay. It was the fifth-highest-grossing film of 1971, taking in $321 million (or about $245 million in today’s currency) at the box office.

After the filming of “Summer,” was completed, it was in post-production for a year. During that time, Mr. Raucher wrote a novel based on his screenplay, and that became a best seller. When the movie was released, the ad line was “Based on the National best seller,” which Mr. Raucher said “…was absurd because the book was written after the movie.”

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.”