Charles Koppelman, a longtime music executive who worked with Barbra Streisand, Dolly Parton, the Lovin’ Spoonful, Tracy Chapman, Wilson Phillips and Vanilla Ice, among many other artists, and later steered the companies of Martha Stewart and the fashion designer Steve Madden through periods of turbulence, died Nov. 25 at his home in Roslyn Harbor, NY. He was 82.

For decades, Mr. Koppelman was a player in the upper ranks of the music industry, acting variously as dealmaker and superstar matchmaker. Seldom pictured without a Cuban cigar and a jovial grin, he relished the excitement of striking big deals and the lifestyle that went along with being a top executive in music’s high-flying 1980s and ‘90s.

Michael Feingold, whose learned writing about the theater was a fixture of The Village Voice for decades, and who was also a dramaturge, a translator, and a Tony Award-nominated lyricist and adapter, died on Nov. 21 in Manhattan. He was 77.

Mr. Feingold had an encyclopedic knowledge of plays and musicals, which he drew upon as he sized up productions, beginning in the early 1970s and continuing until recently. He did not pull punches, even if his target was a venerable veteran.

He once dismissed Andrew Lloyd Webber, whose music is often said to be derivative, with this line: “Webber’s music isn’t so painful to hear, if you don’t mind its being so soiled from previous use.”

He translated numerous European works for the American stage, especially those of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. He was at one time literary manager for the Yale Repertory Theater, the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, and the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, MA, roles in which he would read scripts and often help shape ones that were accepted for production. He wrote for The Voice from 1971 to 2013. “He was, above all, a champion of theater that is bold and challenging,” The New York Times said.

Probably more than any other individual, Michael Pertschuk was responsible for the government’s placing warning labels on cigarettes, banning tobacco advertising from television and radio, requiring seatbelts in cars, and putting in place other consumer protections — all by helping to draft those measures into law as the chief counsel and staff director of the Senate Commerce Committee and later as the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission under President Jimmy Carter.

Michael Pertschuk died on Nov. 16 at his home in Santa Fe, NM. He was 89.

“I spent a good part of my life making life miserable for the tobacco companies,” Mr. Pertschuk once said, “and I’m not sorry about that.”

Freddie Roman, a stand-up comedian who told jokes to mostly Jewish audiences in the Catskills, then brought borscht-belt humor to Manhattan when he conceived and performed in the hit show “Catskills on Broadway,” died on Nov. 26 in Boynton Beach FL. He was 85.

Mr. Roman began his comedy career in the Catskills in the early 1960s, when that resort area in upstate New York was thriving. At one hotel after another, he told one-liners and stories that delighted audiences spending their weekends and summer vacations there.

He spread his Catskills-bred shtick around the country for five decades, working  often in Las Vegas, Atlantic City, and Florida as he followed his older audiences south.

Lord David Young, a British-Jewish member of the House of Lords who advised Conservative governments in the United Kingdom from Margaret Thatcher to David Cameron died Dec. 8. He was 90.

Margaret Thatcher, who appointed Young to his first political post as an advisor in charge of privatization, famously said of him, “Other people bring me problems. David brings me solutions.”

During his many years in politics, Young used his position to advance the needs of British Jewry and push for stronger British-Israeli relations. “Lord Young was always proud of his Jewish heritage,” said Lord Leigh of Hurley, a longtime senior treasurer of the British Conservative party.

Jay Goldberg, a former boxer, who became a comedian and a colorful lawyer who defended celebrity clients and a bevy of mobsters, died on Dec. 5 at his home in Bridgehampton. He was 89.

Mr. Goldberg relished his role as a gladiator, first as a 6-foot-2, 140-pound welterweight who retired when a knockout in the third round ended his 10-0 winning streak, then as a “killer” in the courtroom, who also occasionally filled in at the Copacabana nightclub in Manhattan (his aunt knew the owner), sharing Mark Twain’s faith that a laughing jury seldom convicts.

Once a mobster whom he represented and who had pleaded guilty was about to be sentenced by a federal judge. As Mr. Goldberg stood beside his client in a packed courtroom, the judge asked whether the defendant “should suffer economic loss for his criminal activity.”

Judge,  “I have taken care of that already, ” Mr. Goldberg said.

As a private defense lawyer, Mr. Goldberg attracted a long list of high-profile clients, including Miles Davis, Bono, Johnny Cash, the Hells Angels, Carl Icahn, Charles Rangel, Meyer Lansky, Sean Combs, Willie Nelson, The Rolling Stones, and Donald J. Trump. He was the author of five books, notably a memoir, The Courtroom Is My Theater. In a New York Times interview in 1997, Mr. Goldberg said, “It’s the only place where you get to emote and try to convince juries that black is white.”

Philip Pearlstein, an artist whose nudes reclaimed the naked human body for painting, and who found a persuasive modern idiom for the portrait genre, died on Dec.17 in Manhattan. He was 98.

In the early 1960s, Mr. Pearlstein turned from landscapes executed in a brushy Abs tract Expressionist style and began painting nude models from life. His icily lit nudes represented a shocking departure in American painting then dominated by color fields.

His early paintings, from what he later called his symbolist period, were brightly colored abstractions. On vacation trips, he became fascinated by rock formations and began seeking out what he thought of as ready-made Abstract Expressionist compositions in nature. In the late 1950s, he began drawing the figure, and remained faithful to the nude throughout his career.