Frederick Wiseman, a director whose rigorously objective explorations of social and cultural institutions constitute one of the more revered bodies of work in American documentary filmmaking, died on Feb. 16 at his home in Cambridge, MA. He was 96.

Mr. Wiseman, who received an honorary Academy Award in 2016, was among the most influential directors of nonfiction cinema.

Mr. Wiseman’s last films were among his best received. The novelist Jay Neugeboren, writing in The New York Review of Books, called “In Jackson Heights” (2015), a panoramic portrait of a  diverse neighborhood, in Queens, “richly textured and sumptuously beautiful.” Reviewing “Ex Libris: The New York Public Library” (2017), Manohla Dargis of The New York Times called it “one of the greatest movies of Mr. Wiseman’s extraordinary career and one of his most thrilling.”

Michael Silverblatt, a ravenous reader and cerebral interviewer whose long-running public radio program, “Bookworm,” provoked authors to see their work in fresh ways and to articulate what drove them to write in the first place, died on Feb. 14 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 73.

Mr. Silverblatt, whose nationally syndicated show aired from 1989 to 2022, once described himself as “a person of ferocious compassion instead of ferocious intellect.” He stunned his guests not only by having thoroughly digested their latest books, but also by having devoured most of their entire output. “He was the reader most writers dream about,” said Joyce Carol Oates.

“There are all sorts of other things that you can get on radio and television,” he told Oprah.com in 2009, “but I wanted listeners of ‘Bookworm’ to hear words, ideas, but partricularly emotions that don’t get discussed in public, if at all elsewhere. That is to say, for one reason or another, the show is a crusade that’s much larger than the subject of books.”

Dick Zimmer, a three-term Republican congressman from New Jersey, who sponsored the landmark legislation known as Megan’s Law, requiring states to disclose where convicted sex offenders are living, died on Dec. 30, 2025, at a nursing care facility in Flemington, NJ. He was 81.

First elected to the House of Representatives in 1990, Mr. Zimmer sponsored Megan’s Law after the 1994 rape and murder of 7-year-old Megan Kanka in Hamilton Township, NJ. Her family had been unaware that her killer, a twice-convicted sex offender, had recently moved in across the street.

The bill was based on similar legislation adopted in New Jersey and in other states. It was passed unanimously by the House and Senate and signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1996.

Gary Graffman, a former child prodigy whose successful international career as a concert pianist was cut short when a rare neurological disorder cost him the use of his right hand in his 50s, setting him on a new and distinguished path as a teacher and administrator, died on Dec. 27 at his home in New York. He was 97.

His performing career lasted until the early 1980s, when he began to suffer from focal dystonia. He never regained use of his right hand, and instead focused on teaching and performing repertory for the left hand.

In his memoir, Mr. Graffman wrote vividly about the pitfalls of live performance. Describing a concert of Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3 with the conductor George Szell, which almost derailed after a section of the orchestra counted wrong. Mr. Graffman wrote, “I felt like someone who had been tied to the railroad tracks as a train whistle is heard in the distance. But,” he added, “Szell made some magic passes in the air and led the orchestra safely across the Red Sea.”

Eva Schloss, an Auschwitz survivor who dedicated her life to speaking out against prejudice and to preserving the legacy of her stepsister Anne Frank, died on Jan. 10 in London. She was 96.

“We hope her legacy will continue to inspire through the books, films and resources she leaves behind,” Ms. Schloss’s family said in a statement published by the Anne Frank Trust UK, an organization she co-founded to challenge intolerance and educate young people about the Holocaust. After WWII, her mother married Anne Frank’s father, Otto, the sole survivor of the Frank family.

For more than 40 years, Ms. Schloss remained silent about the horrors she endured at Auschwitz, to which she had been deported as a teenager. When her grandchildren once asked about the tattoo on her arm that she had been branded with at Auschwitz, a-5272, she told them it was her telephone number.

It was not until 1986, when she was invited to speak at the opening of a traveling Anne Frank exhibition in London, that she began to tell her story publicly. From that point on, and into her 90s, she traveled widely to speak about the dangers of injustice.

Josef Veselsky, a Holocaust survivor and table tennis champion who spent more than a year as Ireland’s oldest man, died on Jan. 10 at 107.

Born Joseph Weiss to a Jewish family, he was 20 when Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia. He changed his name after his mother, Bertha, urged him to change his name to “something more Slovak,” according to the Irish Times.

He joined the resistance and survived the war in the Carpathian Mountains, according to Holocaust Education Ireland. His older brother and parents were killed in Auschwitz.

Following the war, Veselsky served as the captain of the Czechoslovak national table tennis team and was later awarded the Order of the Slovak National Uprising for his actions during the war. He also served as the captain of the Irish national table tennis team for 20 years, and became life president of the Irish Table Tennis Association.

In October 2024, following the death of Marti McEvilly at the age of 108, Veselsky became the oldest man in Ireland.

Rhoda Levine, one of the rare female opera directors to work steadily starting in the 1970s, at a time when the field was dominated by men, and who was acclaimed for clear, straightforward interpretations of the classics as well as stirring world premieres, died on Jan. 6 at her home in Manhattan. She was 93.

She brought true theatrical acting into opera, insisting on directing singers as actors, demanding a kind of realism in an often stylized art form. At New York City Opera, Netherlands Opera and other companies, she directed works stretching from Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” to Alban Berg’s “Lulu,” in addition to contemporary works like Mark Adamo’s “Little Women.”

Her preoccupation was to reach her audience directly, to “provide an audience with a very human experience that really connected with their own lives,” she told the music journalist Bruce Duffle in 1998. “Clarity is all,” she added. “Whether the audience likes it or not, whatever your intention is, you must deliver that intention to them. That’s your job as an actor, an actress or as a musician. You hope you’re clear.”