Jack Goldstein, a preservationist who in the 1980s reacted to the razing of several venerable Broadway theaters under a Times Square redevelopment plan by helping to organize a successful campaign to give landmark status to more than two dozen other theaters, died on June 16 in Cold Spring, NY. He was 74.

Part of the process was examining theaters’ interiors and exteriors to determine which should be designated landmarks, and then persuading the landmarks commission of their worthiness. He collaborated on a report with architect Hugh Hardy that stressed the full geometry of the theaters — their shape, layout and acoustical properties — rather than just their decorative detail. In 1987, the commission designated 28 theaters as landmarks.

Mary Ann Hoberman, whose dozens of rhyme-filled books for children sought to encourage them to read, to read aloud, and to commit poems to memory, died on July 7 at home in Greenwich, CT. She was 92.

In a 2008 interview with the Poetry Foundation, she said that moments from her childhood were reflected in her books. “I started writing when I had children of my own,” she said, “but I wasn’t really observing them so much as remembering what it was to be a child myself.”

Lawrence Turman, who as a novice movie producer in 1963 read about a novel by a largely unknown writer named Charles Webb, took a $1,000 option on it, and set in motion the making of the landmark film “The Graduate,” died July 1 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 96.

Mr. Turman had producing or executive producing credits on more than 40 feature films and television movies, but it was “The Graduate” that made his career, The New York Times said.

Once he owned the rights, it took years to get the film made. He submitted the idea to all the studios, and none liked it, he said. Finally Joseph E. Levine of Embassy Pictures, who at the time was known as “king of the schlockmeisters,” took it on. “The Graduate” turned out to be the top-grossing film of 1967. “We had lines around the block,” Mr. Turman wrote in his book, So You Want To Be A Producer. “And in those lines were some studio executives who had originally turned the picture down.”

Peter Nero, the concert pianist, born Bernard Nierow, who soared to popularity in the 1960s with a swinging hybrid of classics and jazz and kept the beat for nearly six decades with albums, club and television dates, and segues into conducting pops orchestras, died on July 6 in Eustis, FL. He was 89.

Mr. Nero appeared with Frank Sinatra, Mel Tormé, Andy Williams, Johnny Mathis and other headliners; released 72 albums; conducted the Philly Pops for 34 years, and delivered a mix of jazz and classics to generations of fans. In 1979, Mr. Nero was named musical director and player-conductor of the Philly Pops. Audiences marveled at his ability, standing up to play the piano with one hand while conducting the orchestra with the other. He also conducted orchestras in Tulsa, Washington, South Florida, St.; Louis and other cities, often performing 100 concerts a year, The New York Times said.

Henry Kamm, a Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for The New York Times who covered Cold War diplomacy in Europe and the Soviet Union, famine in Africa, and wars and genocide in Southeast Asia, died on July 9 in Paris. He was 98.

From the continent he had fled at 15 to escape Nazi persecution during WWII, to the killing fields of what was then known as Indochina, Mr. Kamm was “the consummate star of The Times’s foreign staff: a fast, accurate, stylish writer, fluent in five languages, with global contacts and reportorial instincts that found human dramas and historical perspectives in the day’s news,” The Times said.

In 2018, he applied for and received German citizenship — a reconciliation, of sorts, with the nation he had fled as a teenager. The archive of his papers, including some 7,000 Times articles, is held by the New York Public Library.

Evelyn M. Witkin, whose discovery of the process by which DNA repairs itself opened the door to significant advances in the treatment of cancer and genetic defects, died on July 8 in Plainsboro Township, NJ. She was 102.

In a career that began in the late 1940’s, early in the field of genetic research, Dr. Witkin explored the ways in which radiation both damaged DNA and generated a repair mechanism, what she came to call the SOS response. Her insight into the SOS response shed new light on how solar radiation and chemicals in the environment affect humans’ genetic makeup.

In 1983, she became the director of the Waksman Institute of Microbiology at Rutgers University, where she stayed util retiring. In 2021, on her 100^th birthday, the Waksman Institute renamed one of its premier research laboratories for her.

Marvin Wulf, a constitutional lawyer who reshaped the American Civil Liberties Union into a more aggressive litigator, argued 10 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, and supported the future Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in bringing a landmark sex discrimination case, died on July 8 at his home in Manhattan. He was 95.

As the legal director of the ACLU from 1962 to 1977, Mr. Wulf turned the organization from one that mostly filed friend-of-the-court briefs in others’ cases into one that directly filed suit on behalf of people who said their civil liberties had been violated.

Mr. Wulf hired the future U.S. Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to co-direct the ACLU’s newly created Women’s Rights Project, which focused on sex-discrimination cases. Ms. Ginsburg won five of the six sex-discrimination cases she argued before the court during her time there.