Dan Ben-Amos, a folklorist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was chair of the Department of Folklore and Folklife, died March 26. He was 88.

An interest in folklore while studying at Hebrew University of Jerusalem determined his life’s work. He began by conducting folklore research in Nigeria on the oral tradition of the Edo people in Benin City and its rural surroundings. His scholarly interests included Jewish folklore, African folklore, humor, the history of folklore, and structural analysis.

He served on the executive board of the American Folklore society, was editor of the Journal of American Folklore and general editor of the Indiana Press series on folklore and, since 1966, has been editor of the Raphael Patai Series in Jewish Folklore and Anthropology for the Wayne State University Press. In 2006, he won a National Jewish Book Award for Sephardic Culture, and was a finalist in the Scholarship category.

Seymour Stein, whose Sire Records launched Madonna’s career and signed early punk rock and new wave icons as The Ramones and Talking Heads, died April 2. He was 80.

Although Mr. Stein’s imprint, founded in 1966, enjoyed major distribution, he also took risks on unproven, underground talent that paid off on the charts, Variety said. Lou Reed, the Pretenders, Ice-T and many others released some of their best music on Sire. Gary Kurfirst, late manager of Talking Heads, said at Stein’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, “Seymour’s taste in music is always a couple of years ahead of everyone else’s.”

Madonna was the commercial turbine that drove Sire through the 1980s. Six of her albums attained multi-platinum status, and two received awards for sales of more than $10 million.

In addition to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2005, he was honored by the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2016 and received a Billboard tribute in 2012.

Mimi Sheraton, the food writer and restaurant critic who chronicled culinary scenes in New York and around the world that captured the nuances of haute cuisine, died on April 6 in Manhattan. She was 97.

In a six-decade career, Ms. Sheraton was The New York Times’s food and restaurant critic; worked for Vanity Fair, Time, New York, Condé Nast Traveler and other magazines; and wrote 16 books, including restaurant guides, cookbooks, and a memoir. She calculated in 2013 that she had eaten 21,170 restaurant meals professionally in 49 countries.

In her Greenwich Village townhouse, Ms. Sheraton had 2,000 cookbooks and a spacious kitchen overlooking a backyard where she grew herbs. And she read other restaurant critics, with whom she often disagreed.

“Well, whether they’re right or not, which means they agree with me,” she told The Times in 2004, “food writers in general devote too much space to chefs’ philosophies. They’re not Picasso, after all — this is supper. So I don’t want to hear about a chef’s intentions. Call me when it’s good.”

Harry Lorayne, who enjoyed an international career as a memory expert, dazzling audiences with feats of memory from telephone books and magazines, died April 7 in Newburyport, MA. He was 96.

In a demonstration of his ability on July 23, 1959, he went into the audience of the Garry Moore Show and asked the names of hundreds of people. Then, when called on stage, he recited the names of all the people and where they were seated. He claimed that, over the years, he had met and recalled the names of more than 20 million people. He also memorized strings of numbers and foreign language vocabularies.

According to The New York Times, his most important act of recall was one that audiences never saw: Before every performance, he would discreetly check to be sure his trousers were zipped.

Benjamin B. Ferencz, the last surviving prosecutor of the Nuremberg trials, who convicted Nazi war criminals of organizing the murder of a million people, and German industrialists of using slave labor to build Hitler’s war machine, died on April 7 in Boynton Beach, FL. He was 103.

Thirteen trials were held in Nuremberg. Mr. Ferencz was assigned to prosecute the Einsatzgruppen case, which for its staggering volume of victims has been called the biggest murder trial in history. It was the case against 22 Nazis, including six generals, who organized, directed and often joined roaming SS extermination squads, aided by police and other authorities, who rounded up and slaughtered a million specifically targeted people or groups in Nazi-occupied lands: political and cultural leaders, members of the nobility, clergy, teachers, Jews, Gypsies and others. Most were shot, others gassed in mobile vans. Fourteen were sentenced to death and two to life in prison.

Later, he taught at Pace University, wrote several books, and was the subject of a 2019 documentary. He gave $1 million to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, The New York Times said.

Al Jaffe, a cartoonist who created the fold-in, one of Mad magazine’s most recognizable features, died April 10 in Manhattan. He was 102.

In 1964, Mr. Jaffee created the “Mad Fold-In,” an illustration-with-text feature on the inside of the magazine’s back cover that seemed at first glance to deliver a straightforward message. When the page was folded in thirds, however, both illustration and text were transformed into something entirely different and unexpected, often with a liberal-leaning or authority-defying message.

For instance, the fold-in from the November 2001 issue asked, “ What mind-altering experience is leaving more and more people out of touch with reality?” The unfolded illustration showed a crowd of people popping and snorting various substances. But when folded, the image transformed into the Fox News anchor desk.

For his creative work, Al Jaffee won cartooning’s top honor, the Reuben Award, putting him in the company of Charles M. Schulz, Mort Walker, Gary Larson, Matt Groening and other luminaries of the trade. In 2020, Mad celebrated Mr. Jaffee with a “Special All Jaffee Issue” to mark his retirement. Mr. Jaffee created a fold-in for the occasion: It starts with an image of Alfred E. Neuman, Mad’s mascot, amid assorted stores that have all posted going-out-of-business signs, under the headline “Economy Collapsing! Unemployed Starving!” But when it was folded in, a new message appeared: “No More New Jaffee Fold-Ins.” Mr. Jaffee’s blissful image is seen hovering above the cityscape.

Michael Lerner, a veteran character actor whose dozens of film and television credits include small but memorable roles in “Barton Fink” and “Elf,” died on April 8 at a hospital in Burbank, CA. He was 81.

Mr. Lerner was a busy working actor, who started out with roles in theater productions and episodic television before embarking on a five-decade film career. His role as Jack Lipnick, a volatile movie studio mogul, in Joel and Ethan Coen’s darkly comic “Barton Fink” (1991) earned him an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor in 1992.

On TV, he appeared as Pierre Salinger in “The Missiles of October” about the Cuban missile crisis. Other television credits include “M*A*S*H,” “The Brady Bunch, “Hill Street Blues,” “Clueless,” “Ruby and Oswald,” and “X-Men.”

“I would love people to know that I am a chameleon,” Mr. Lerner told The New York Times in 1991. “That I can play anything.”