Israeli songwriter, playwright, author and columnist Yehonatan Geffen, nephew of Moshe Dayan and father of pop star Aviv Geffen and filmmaker Shira Geffen, died April 19 in Israel. He was 76.

Geffen also wrote novels and penned hundreds of columns for Ma’ariv from 1972 to 2013, which made him a popular commentator. He was a member of the legendary group Lool (Chicken Coop), and performed with the top entertainers in the country.

Bernice Rose, an art historian and curator whose groundbreaking exhibitions put traditional drawing on an equal footing with painting and sculpture, died on April 16 at her home in Manhattan. She was 87.

As a drawing curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, she organized exhibitions showing that drawings were far more than preliminary works executed mainly on paper. In a catalogue that accompanied “Drawing Now: 1955-1975,” she wrote that drawing had become “a major and independent medium with distinctive expressive possibilities altogether its own.”

Bernice Rose left MoMA in 1993 to become director of special exhibitions at Pace Gallery in New York. In 2007, the Menil Collection in Houston appointed her the inaugural chief curator at its drawing institute. Although she retired from the Menil in 2014, she continued working as chief editor emerita of the “Jasper Johns Catalogue Raisonné of Drawings,” published in 2018, as well as an adviser to the Houston collector Louisa Stude Sarofim.

Walter Mirisch, a film producer who with his two brothers ran a pioneering independent production company that helped bring to the screen a raft of classic films, including the Oscar best-picture winners “West Side Story,” “The Apartment,” and “In the Heat of the Night,” died Feb. 24 in Los Angeles, at 101.

The Mirisch Company, which Mr. Mirisch founded in 1957, grew to be an industry powerhouse, greenlighting films by leading directors — including John Ford, John Huston and Billy Wilder — that were nominated for a total of 87 Academy Awards and won 28. Other hits included “The Magnificent Seven,” “The Great Escape,” “Fiddler on the Roof,” “Some Like it Hot,” and “The Pink Panther.”

Mr. Mirisch served four terms as president of the Motion Picture Academy, which honored him with the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award and the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, recognizing a career of distinguished work.

Amy Schwartz, prolific author and illustrator of books for children, died Feb. 26 at her home in Brooklyn. She was 68.

Her books included several on the theme of “100 things,” written in rhyme — 100 things That Make Me Happy, 100 Things I Love To Do With You, 100 Things I know how To Do. Among her most recent books was 13 Stories About Ayana, a follow-up to her 13 Stories About Harris from two years before. To fit 13 stories into a book for an age group with a notoriously short attention span required that some be decidedly spare. One story in the “Harris” book was just one sentence: “Harris was standing on his truck and he shouldn’t have been.” It was accompanied by two illustrations: Harris on his toy truck, and Harris in a heap beside it, crying, after it had tipped over.

“Amy was an acute observer of all the tiny details that together make up a child’s life,” said Mary Cash, vice president and editor-in-chief at Holiday House, one of her publishers.

Judith Heumann, an activist who helped secure legislation protecting the rights of disabled people, died March 4 in Washington, DC. She was 75.

Judith Heumann has been called “the mother of the disability rights movement” for her longtime advocacy on behalf of disabled people through protests and legal action, her website says. She lobbied for legislation that eventually led to the federal Americans With Disabilities Act, which was enacted in 1990, also the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, and the Rehabilitation Act.

She served as the assistant secretary of the U.S. Office of Special Education and Rehabilitation Services, beginning in 1993 in the Clinton administration, until 2001. She also was involved in passage of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which was ratified in May 2008.

She also helped found the Berkley Center for Independent Living, the Independent Living Movement, and the World Institute on Disability, and served on the boards of several related organizations.

Judith Heumann was the child of German-Jewish immigrants who fled Germany before the Holocaust with their son and their daughter, who had polio and had lost her ability to walk at age 2.

“She helped people accept who they were as disabled people and take pride in that identity,” said Maria Town, president and CEO of the American Association of People With Disabilities. “She helped so many people understand their own power as disabled people.”