Barney Frank, the brassy, lightning-quick-witted former Massachusetts senator, who for decades was the most prominent gay politician in the country and who was an author of the most significant overhaul of the nation’s financial regulations since the Great Depression, died on May 19 at his home in Ogunquit, Maine. He was 86.

Mr. Frank, a liberal Democrat, represented a diverse suburban Boston district for 32 years, starting in 1981. A Harvard-trained lawyer, Mr. Frank “bristled with intellectual firepower, acidic turns of phrase, and a zest for verbal combat,” The New York Times said.

His most significant legislative achievement was in the realm of financial regulation. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which he sponsored with Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, tightened the rules on the financial industry as part of the government’s response to the housing crisis of 2007 and the global financial meltdown the next year. Signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2010, the measure sought to prevent the nation’s biggest banks from engaging in behavior with risks to consumers.

Mr. Frank’s book, The Hard Path to Unity, completed shortly before he entered hospice care, opined that the political left had sometimes gone too far in pushing divisive causes. “Slow down,” he advised, “and find common ground.” He told interviewers that he was pleased that the book’s message was having some resonance. “Frankly,” he told The Times, “if I weren’t dying, people wouldn’t be paying as much attention.”

Nicole Hollander, a biting cartoon artist, whose comic strip “Sylvia,” about a big-haired, cigarette-smoking, cat-loving, hyper-opinionated feminist, made her a singular voice on the funny pages for more than 30 years, died on April 23 in Chicago. She was 86.

Ms. Hollander made Sylvia a tart-tongued, witty, loquacious single mother who held court — sometimes from her bathtub — on sex and relationships, politics, health care reform, the environment, and other hot-button issues. The strip was syndicated in about 80 newspapers.

Eugene Braunwald, a groundbreaking cardiologist, whose research helped transform heart disease from near-certain killer into a condition often manageable with medications procedures and careful monitoring, died on April 21 in Newton, MA. He was 96.

Regarded as one of the most influential cardiologists of the 20th and early 21st centuries, Dr. Braunwald’s research reshaped how doctors understood heart attacks, heart failure, and coronary artery disease, and helped lead to therapies that saved millions of lives — medications that lowered the heart’s workload and reduced blood pressure, and treatments that reopened blocked arteries.

Dr. Braunwald remained deeply involved in research well into the 21st century, publishing papers mentoring younger physicians, and contributing to clinical trials. In 2014, he was a leader of a study that found an alternative cholesterol-lowering drug could protect people from heart attacks and strokes. The study validated previous findings that lowering cholesterol prevents heart disease — settling the issue once and for all, Dr. Braunwald insisted. “People,” he said, “can stop yapping.”

Abraham H. Foxman, a hidden child of the Holocaust who became the chief combatant against antisemitism in the United States as national director of the Anti-Defamation League for almost three decades, died on May 10 in Manhattan. He was 86.

Mr. Foxman was born near Vilnius. When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 and seized Vilnius, eventually slaughtering 100,000 Jews, the family turned over Avraham to a nanny, Bronkislawa Kurpi. His mother posed as a Christian and Avraham’s aunt. His father, after periods confined to Nazi labor camps, hid out in forests.

For four years the nanny raised Avraham as her son, had him baptized as a catholic and gave him the name Henryk Stanislaw Kurpi. Whenever he passed a church, he would make the sign of the cross, and when he met a priest on the street, he would stop to kiss his hand, the Times said.

The family survived the war, reclaimed 5-year-old Avraham, and returned Avraham to Jewish observance. The family immigrated to the United States in 1950, and Mr. Foxman attended the Yeshiva of Flatbush and stayed through the end of high school. He earned a B.A. in political science from the City College of New York and a law degree from New York University.

Some of my most satisfying moments as director of the ADL were in “witnessing people who did bad things and said vile things turn around and become better people,” he said.

So identified was Mr. Foxman with the battle against antisemitism that in 2016, when campuses of the City University of New York grappled with incidents that many Jews saw as bigoted, Eric Alterman, a professor of English at Brooklyn College, said in an opinion article, “When it comes to antisemitism, if Abe Foxman is not worried, I’m not worried.”

Edith Eva Eger, a clinical psychologist and best-selling author whose traumatic experiences as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps — including being forced to dance for Josef Mengele, the notorious physician known as the “Angel of Death” — enabled her to identify with and treat emotionally troubled patients, died on April 27 at her home in San Diego. She was 98.

Her emotional recovery took time: For two decades after the war, she did not discuss the privations she had endured or the atrocities she had witnessed. She learned that she had to forgive herself for surviving, which she barely had. When American soldiers liberated Gunskirchen, a sub-camp of Mauthausen in Austria, in May 1945, she lay nearly motionless in a heap of corpses, weighing barely 70 pounds and suffering from pneumonia, typhoid fever, and pleurisy.

“I release them,” she told the U.S.C. Shoah Foundation in the 1990s, referring to her Nazi captors, adding: “It’s not me forgiving them for what they did to me. I think it’s mostly liberating myself, to invest my energy in the future.”

Seymour Bernstein, an acclaimed concert pianist, who later turned to teaching, his true calling, he said, died on April 30 in Damariscotta, Maine. He was 99.

In spite of rave reviews of his public performances, Mr. Bernstein was never comfortable in the limelight. “I hated the commercial aspect,” he said. “I hated the nerves.”

In the early 1950s, during the Korean War, Mr. Bernstein was drafted into the Army. Sent to Korea in the same unit as the violinist Kenneth Gordon, who later joined the New York Philharmonic, Mr. Bernstein asked their lieutenant if they could perform for the unit. They were informed that soldiers don’t like classical music, Mr. Bernstein later told the Korean War Legacy Foundation. Undeterred, he borrowed a Yamaha piano from a local music school. He and Mr. Gordon gave several concerts a day for American and international troops, and the soldiers were often in tears by the end, he said. On one occasion, shells flew overhead while he was performing a Chopin polonaise.

Mr. Bernstein continued offering private lessons and master classes, and playing the piano into his 90s. “For me, life is beginning at 90,” he said. “I’m learning to play the piano properly.”

Lionel A. Rosenblatt, a U.S. Foreign Service officer, who helped roughly 200 South Vietnamese citizens evacuate Saigon days before it fell in 1975 with a daring, unauthorized mission that prefaced a career advocating for refugees in Southeast Asia and other global hot spots, died on April 11 at his home in Washington. He was 82.

Concerned about the fate of the Vietnamese who had worked with the United States during the war, tens of thousands of whom could be vulnerable to retribution by the Communist North Vietnamese government, Mr. Rosenblatt said, “Our lives depended on their ability to help us. To up and leave them was unthinkable.”

They phoned their network of former colleagues. They scheduled meet-ups on street corners, a restaurant, a cathedral, offering passage out of Vietnam, warning that it was a risky and dangerous mission. They shepherded their Vietnamese friends to military planes leaving for Guam and the Philippines and eventual travel to the United States. On April 30, Mr. Rosenblatt and his colleague, Larry Craig Johnstone, left the country in the last American helicopter to make a rooftop departure out of the country.