Herbert Gold, a novelist, who wrote of the complexities of love and marriage, died on Nov. 19 at his home in San Francisco. He was 99.

Mr. Gold’s writing brought a sense of humor to his tales of ordinary men and women trying to gain a foothold in the slippery terrain of romance or, like him, struggling to connect the world of their Jewish immigrant parents with the realities of American life.

His most admired novels addressed a different theme: Jewish identity in the United States. He explored this subject in two works that blended memoir and fiction, and in a novel-memoir that tilted more strongly toward autobiography.

Marvin Newman, a renowned photographer who brought an artistic eye to capturing shadows on a Chicago main street; people in front of shuttered storefronts on Coney Island; and athletes in competition, including Bill Mazeroski of the Pittsburgh Pirates smashing the 1960 World Series-winning home run, died on Sept. 13 at his home in Jersey City, NJ. He was 95.

One of Mr. Newman’s most famous pictures is one he took for Sports Illustrated in the Texas Christian University locker room before the 1957 Cotton Bowl against Syracuse University. There is no action, barely a hint of movement, just players and staff members sitting on chairs or the floor, anticipating the start of the game.

In an appraisal of the photograph in Sports Illustrated in 1999, Gary Smith wrote that it represented what sports are most about — “the moments before, the times when a person takes a flashlight to his soul and inspects himself for will and courage and spirit.”

Mr. Newman said he knew the picture was special. “When photography works well, you can go inside the psyche of the people in the picture,” he said. “You can see beyond the moment.”

Dianne Feinstein, the long-serving Jewish senator from California who rose to national prominence when she appeared before cameras with her hands stained with the blood of a murdered colleague, died Sept. 28. She was 90 and in failing health. Feinstein served in the Senate for more than three decades as its longest-serving woman.

Feinstein became a national figure in 1978 when she was the president of the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco and found the body of fellow supervisor Harvey Milk. Milk, who was Jewish and the first openly gay elected official in the city’s history, was assassinated by a former colleague, Dan White. White also killed San Francisco Mayor George Moscone.

Feinstein announced the murders while her hands were still stained with Milk’s blood. She soon stepped in to replace Moscone, serving two terms as major. The trauma of the double murder propelled her to become an outspoken advocate for gun control, a cause she took with her into the Senate, when she won a special election in 1992 to replace Sen. Pete Wilson, a Republican.

Feinstein was the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee from 2009 to 2017, and later served as the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, stepping down when her health began to fail. Early in 2023, she announced she would not run again for election in 2024.

Victor R. Fuchs, the so-called dean of American health care economists, died on Sept. 16 at his home on the campus of Stanford University in Palo Alto, CA. He was 99.

Dr. Fuchs was best known for a slim book published in 1975 with the attention-grabbing title, Who Shall Live? Health Economics and Social Choice. He was among the first to articulate why the United States was in the midst of rapidly rising health care costs, while costs in other countries stayed manageable. The book has become required reading among physicians, health economists, and anyone interested in the issue of American health care, and it has never been out of print.

Dr. Fuchs showed that the real problem facing the country was not health care coverage but health care costs; America, he wrote, was spending more and more without achieving better health outcomes.

He wrote more than 200 research papers and 16 more books. He retired in 1995 but continued to write. He finished his latest not long before his death. It is scheduled for publication next month.

Stephen Rubin, a publisher who helped make John Grisham and Dan Brown famous writers, and who published Michael Wolff’s 2018 chronicle of the Trump White House, Fire and Fury, died on Oct. 13 in Manhattan. He was 81.

“Trying to publish big-ticket best sellers is the riskiest game you can play,” Mr. Rubin wrote in his memoir, Words and Music: Confessions of an Optimist. “But it has been my modus operandi.” Among his successes are John Grisham’s first novel, A Time To Kill; Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code, Killing Lincoln by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard; Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time; and Lauren Weisberger’s The Devil Wears Prada.

In his memoir, he said, “In an era when social media and cable television dominate the conversation, it is thrilling that one lone book could cut through all the static and have a profound effect on an entire nation.”

Evelyn Fox Keller, a theoretical physicist, a mathematical biologist and, beginning in the late 1970s, a feminist theorist who explored the way gender pervades and distorts scientific inquiry, died on Sept. 22 at an assisted living home in Cambridge, MA. She was 87,

Like many women in the sciences, she had faced years of disparagement and discrimination, and one of her first efforts was to quantify the effect such a hostile environment had on women — how it held them back, and how it drove many to leave science completely.

She pressed her argument in books, essays and speeches, often to packed auditoriums.

Florence Fisher, an adoptee who spend decades searching for her birth parents and then spent another half century fighting to open adoption records for millions of others, died on Oct. 1 in Brooklyn. She was 95.

Although she ultimately found her birth parents, the difficulties she dealt with — sealed records, silent families — made her think about what millions of other adoptees had faced.

“The impact that Florence had on the adoptee-rights movement cannot be overestimated,” said Lorraine Dusky, another advocate. “Florence came along at the right moment. With diligence, she achieved success state by state.”