Richard Barancik, the last surviving member of the Allied unit known as the Monuments Men and Women, which during and after WWII preserved a vast amount of European artwork and cultural treasures that had been looted and hidden by Nazi Germany, died on July 14 in Chicago. He was 98.

The Monuments Men and Women were composed of about 350 people — among them museum directors, curators, scholars, historians and artists — whose missions included steering Allied bombers away from cultural targets in Europe, overseeing repairs when damages occurred, and tracking down millions of objects plundered by Nazis and returning them to their institutions and countries of origin.

He and others received the Congressional Gold Medal from U.S. House Speaker John Boehner on Oct. 22, 2015 in Washington for “heroic roles in the preservation, protection, restitution of monuments, works of art and artifacts of cultural importance.”

Louise Levy, along with hundreds of others ages 95 and older, was part of a study by the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein School of Medicine to understand how their genetic makeup led to their good physical and cognitive health during extremely long lives. She died on July 17 in Greenwich, CT. She was 112.

She had been the oldest known living person in New York State, according to LongeviQuest, which maintains a database of super-centenarians, people who have lived into a 12th decade. She did not have heart disease, diabetes or Alzheimer’s disease, but was treated for breast cancer and smoked cigarettes for decades, until 1965. Even as her hearing, eyesight and mobility diminished in recent years, she stayed active with tai chi and stretching classes, playing bridge, and knitting sweaters for hospitalized babies. She began losing her short-term memory only in the last six months.

James B. Zagel, who as a federal judge sentenced former Illinois Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich to 14 years in prison for corruption and who earlier helped prosecute Richard Speck for the grisly killings of eight Chicago student nurses, died on July 15 at his home in Chicago. He was 82.

The case against Rod Blagojevich centered on allegations that he had tried to sell the U.S. Senate seat from Illinois that had been vacated by Barack Obama upon Mr. Obama’s election to president in 2008. Mr. Blagojevich was released from prison in 2020 after President Donald J. Trump commuted his sentence.

Stephen M. Silverman, a long-time entertainment reporter and author who wrote a critically admired biography of British director David Lean and also a forthcoming book about the Broadway titan Stephen Sondheim, died on July 6 in Manhattan. He was 71.

As a journalist, he wrote about Broadway and Hollywood for The New York Post, People Magazine and its website, People Daily, and was its news editor for 20 years.

Some of Mr. Silverman’s books were detours from his entertainment specialty. In 2015, he and Raphael D. Silver, a film producer, published The Catskills: Its History and How It Changed America. Mr. Silverman also wrote The Amusement Park: 900 Years of Thrills and Spills, and the Dreamers and Schemers Who Built Them (2019). He described the appeal of a quintessential amusement park ride: “When you’re at the top of the roller coaster, you’re not thinking of paying the mortgage.”

Bo Goldman, a Hollywood screenwriter who took home Oscars for his work on “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (1975) and “Melvin and Howard” (1980), died on July 25 in Helendale, CA. He was 90.

Film director Martin Brest, for whom Mr. Goldman worked on two films, “Scent of a Woman” (1992) and “Meet Joe Black” (1998), recalled that Mr. Goldman was known as “the screenwriter’s screenwriter,” but that he called him “the man with the X-ray ears, because he had a pitch-perfect recall of the nuances of a comment that someone made to someone 50 years prior.” He could reproduce the tone of the comment, Mr. Brest said, “because the tone told the whole story.”

Mr. Brest said Mr. Goldman was able to create memorable characters through small details. “His remembrance of nuances, things that people don’t know they’re revealing but that reveal volumes — that was his art form,” he said.

Paul Reubens, the comic actor whose bow-tied, childlike alter-ego Pee-wee Herman became an unlikely movie and television sensation in the 1980s, died on July 2 in Los Angeles. He was 70.

Mr. Reubens had scores of acting credits in a career that began in the 1960s, but Pee-wee, a character he created in the late 1970s as a l0-minute bit when he was a member of the Los Angeles comedy troupe the Groundlings, overshadowed all else, morphing into a bizarre and savvy cultural phenomenon.

In a recent interview with The New York Times, he reflected on the adjustments that were made to keep the character fresh, and on how the creative landscape had changed since Pee-wee first appeared some 40 y ears ago. “Today, it seems to me, it’s a lot more difficult to stand out,” he said.

Dorothy Tapper Goldman, a philanthropist and major collector of American historical documents who in 2021 sold her original printed copy of the U.S. Constitution, which her husband had bought in 1988 for $165,000, for a record-setting $43.2 million, died on July 23 at her home in Manhattan. She was 78.

She used the proceeds from the sale to establish the Dorothy Tapper Goldman Foundation, which has made substantial contributions to the New York Historical Society, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, where she advocated for the inclusion of Native American art.

She also supported the Grolier Society of the City of New York, the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, and the Tongabezi Trust School in Zambia.