Frances Sternhagen, the Tony Award-winning actress who played leading roles in stage productions of “Driving Miss Daisy” and “On Golden Pond” as formidable older women when she was so young that she had to wear aging makeup, died on Dec. 4 in New Rochelle, NY. She was 93.

Miss Sternhagen won Tonys as featured actress in a play for her performances in two widely diverse productions. In a 1995 Broadway revival of “The Heiress,” based on Henry James’s novel Washington Square, she was Cherry Jones’s well-meaning, matchmaking Aunt Lavinia. In “The Good Doctor,” Neil Simon’s 1973 take on Chekhov, she played multiple roles in comedy sketches.

On television, she played the controlling working-class mother of the oddball postal carrier Cliff Clavin on “Cheers,” and was Dr. John Carter’s aristocratic Chicago grandmother on “ER,” among other maternal figures in memorable hit series. She continued working into her 80s, playing her final film role in “And So It Goes” (2014), a comic drama in which she played a wise, snarky and chain-smoking real estate agent.

Suzanne Shepherd, an influential New York acting teacher who found success in midlife as a character actress, including memorable turns as the mothers of Edie Falco’s character on “The Sopranos” and Lorraine Bracco’s character in “Goodfellas,” died on Nov. 17 at her home in Manhattan. She was 89.

After establishing herself as a stage actress and director, Ms. Shepherd became well known as an acting instructor — her students included Gregory Hines, Bebe Neuwirth and Christopher Meloni — before she began acting in film and on television when she was in her mido-50s.

In her final film, “The Performance,” Ms. Shepherd played the mother of Jeremy Piven’s character, a Jewish American tap dancer whose troupe is scouted to perform for Adolf Hitler in the 1930s. Recently, her friend Carl Capotorio said that Ms. Shepherd had told him, “There are plenty more mothers to play. I want to play them all.”

Dr. Abraham B. Bergman, a pediatrician who was instrumental in passing a federal law to combat sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), died on Nov. 10 in Seattle. He was 91.

In the 1960s and early ‘70s, Dr. Bergman was president of the National Foundation for Sudden Infant Death, a grass-roots group that supported parents who had lost children to what was once commonly called crib death. Although SIDS, as the syndrome became known, was the leading killer of infants less than a year old, its cause was unknown. Parents often blamed themselves, marriages broke up and, in some cases, the authorities investigated for child abuse.

Dr. Bergman’s group sought to destigmatize SIDS, support grieving parents, and raise money for research. Its efforts led to the Sudden Infant Death Syndrome Act of 1974, which appropriated millions of dollars for research.

In another groundbreaking piece of legislation, Dr. Bergman testified before a Senate subcommittee about flammable sleepwear. “You senators are in a position to save far more lives than physicians,” he said. In response, Congress toughened and broadened the Flammable Fabrics Act to require more flame-resistant clothing.

During those long car and airplane trips to visit family, spare a thought for Irving Liberman, a scientist who helped make GPS a reliable, precise resource. He died on Nov. 6 at his home in the Squirrel Hill section of Pittsburgh. He was 86.

A lifelong tinkerer, Mr. Liberman was always fascinated by how things worked. At a young age, he would take things apart and put them back together, sometimes with parts left over, yet they still worked. Before he would use any gadget, he had to know how it worked.

The owner of eight patents and author of more than 50 publications, Mr. Liberman, who had earned master’s and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering, was recruited by Westinghouse Research & Development. In 1995, he was the project manager for a cohort that developed the miniature atomic clock, which was accurate within a millionth of a second per day and would come to be used for many disciplines, especially GPS technology, and also smart bombs, cellular communication systems and even the ankle bracelets worn by prisoners.

Andrea Fay Friedman, an actress with Down syndrome, who starred in the television series “Life Goes On” died on Dec. 3 at her home in Santa Monica, CA. She was 53.

Ms. Friedman was known for her portrayals of people with developmental disabilities. She called her Down syndrome her “up syndrome,” her father, Hal Friedman, said in a phone interview.

Her breakthrough in acting came in 1992 on the TV drama “Life Goes On” about a character with Down syndrome. Ms. Friedman played the main character’s girlfriend and later wife, for two seasons. She also appeared in other TV shows, including “Baywatch,” “ER,” and “Law and Order: SVU.”

Rabbi David Ellenson, a scholar who wrestled with the interplay of tradition and modernity in Judaism,, and who shaped a generation of Reform rabbis as a teacher and later as the president of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, died on Dec. 7 at his home in Manhattan. He was 76.

He taught for more than 40 years at the Reform seminary, which trains rabbis, cantors and Jewish educators on four campuses: in New York, Cincinnati, Los Angeles and Jerusalem. He forged important academic and intellectual alliances across the Orthodox, Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist branches of Judaism. The question that animated his life was: How does the Jewish religious tradition adapt, transform and resist the powerful forces of modernity?

Rabbi Ellenson wrote seven books and more than 300 articles and reviews. His book, After Emancipation: Jewish Religious Responses to Modernity (2005) won the 2006 National Jewish Book Award as the outstanding book on Jewish thought.

Shlomo Avineri, an Israeli political scientist, historian and former government official whose pessimism about resolving the conflict with Palestinians did not stop him from advocating measures to ease it, died on Nov. 30 in Jerusalem. He was 90.

In his writings, Mr. Avineri was consistently skeptical about Israel’s prospects for achieving peace with its enemies. He was convinced of Palestinian and Arab hatred for Israel and Zionism, whose 19th-century roots he chronicled in 1981 in his book, The Making of Modern Zionism. The Hamas attack in Israel on Oct. 7 buttressed this view. Immediately afterward, speaking to The New York Times, he noted what he said was Hamas’s view that in Israel “every civilian is a soldier.”

Mr. Avineri had a distinguished academic career behind him when he entered Israel’s foreign ministry in 1975 as director general in the government of Yitzhak Rabin. “What I have in mind specifically,” he wrote at that time, “is a discussion with the Palestinians now under Israeli rule concerning the possibility of establishing a Palestinian Arab state on the West Bank and in Gaza.”