Leonard A. Cole, a dentist who became an expert on biological weapons and who chronicled in troubling detail a secret U.S. Army program that turned millions of Americans into unwitting germ-warfare guinea pigs in the 1950s and ’60s, died on Sept. 18 in Ridgewood, NJ. He was 89.

Dr. Cole’s dental practice was firmly established when he began a second career s a political scientist, looking into the clandestine military tests. The program, which ran from 1949 until President Richard M. Nixon halted it in 1969, involved releasing ostensibly harmless bacterial and chemical agents in the New York City subway, over the skies of San Francisco, and in dozens of other places to test the country’s vulnerability to biological and chemical attacks. His book, Clouds of Secrecy: The Army’s Germ Warfare Tests Over Populated Areas,” published in 1988, offers an in-depth examination of the Army program.

Dr. Cole retired from dentistry in 2000 but continued to write books. To balance his various endeavors, Dr. Cole said in an interview with the online publication Authority Magazine last year that he gave his “undivided attention” to whatever he was doing at the moment. He said that a friend had once told him he was the best dentist among political scientists, and the best political scientist among dentists.

Judah Samet, who survived the Holocaust and decades later avoided the deadliest antisemitic attack in United States history by mere minutes, died Sept. 27, in Oakland, CA. He was 84.

Mr. Samet survived the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp as a child during WWII, and was in the parking lot of the Tree of Life synagogue in 2018 when a gunman entered the building and killed 11 people.

He had, indeed, lived a remarkable life, his nephew Larry Barasch, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “He grew up in Hungary, survived the Holocaust, became orphaned upon leaving the camps, moved to Israel and found his mother. He joined the Israeli Defense Forces as a paratrooper and radio man, fought side-by-side with General Moshe Dayan for Israeli independence. He immigrated to Canada, married Barbara Schiffman and became a well-known jeweler in Pittsburgh, working for my grandfather, Irving Schiffman.”

He was a long-time member of the Tree of Life congregation and was an active participant in services for some 40 years. On Oct.27, 2018, he arrived late to the Shabbat service at Tree of Life, and was still in the parking lot when the gunman entered the synagogue.

Mr. Samet did not speak about his experience during the Holocaust for nearly 60 years. But over the past two decades, he spoke to tens of thousands of students about his experiences. He told people it was important to him, as a survivor, to give direct testimony because soon there would be no one to tell the story of the Holocaust.

Laurence H. Silberman, a conservative federal appeals court judge and advocate of judicial restraint whose opinions on gun rights, press freedom, the Affordable Care Act, and other crucial issues resonated widely and sometimes presaged Supreme Court decisions, died on Oct. 4 at his home in Washington, DC. He was 86.

Judge Silberman was unanimously confirmed by the Senate for six federal posts; was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, by President George W. Bush in 2008; and three times was shortlisted by Republican presidents for the Supreme Court.

Theo Richmond, a British documentary filmmaker who depended on words rather than images to create what he called “the most worthwhile thing I’ve ever done” — an acclaimed book, Konin: A Quest, that captured the quotidian life and precipitous death of the Jewish population of his parents’ hometown in Poland after the Nazi invasion — died on August 25 in London. He was 93.

Over the course of seven years, Mr. Richmond conducted some 400 interviews in Poland, Israel, Florida, Nebraska, Texas, Montreal and Brooklyn, racing against time to collect memories from former residents of Konin, a village 140 miles west of Warsaw, near the German border.

In 1939, about 3,000 of its 13,000 residents were Jewish. By 1940, according to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, “the town was Judenrein,” or “cleansed” of Jews.

“This book is about my return journey to a place I had never been to,” Mr. Richmond wrote, “a place of which I knew nothing except that it was a part of my past and in a curiously powerful way a part of my present.”

Grace Glueck, a journalist who broke new ground by making the art world a distinct beat at The New York Times, and who then helped bring an important sex-discrimination lawsuit against the paper, her employer of more than 60 years, died on Oct. 8 at her home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She was 96.

In more than 3,000 articles for The Times, Ms. Glueck approached art as a reporter more than as a critic, effectively inventing the art beat at the newspaper and inspiring other newsrooms across the country to make it a journalistic standard, The Times said.

Her news articles, interviews and profiles, filled with revelatory fact and often laced with wit, became a staple of the paper’s coverage of the visual arts in New York during the 1960s and 1970s, simultaneously during the rise of the feminist movement. She helped initiate a 1974 lawsuit that accused the paper of underpayment and under-promotion of women, based on her experience when she began there as a recent English-major graduate. Her tasks were clerical, and only because Lester Markel, the paper’s Sunday editor, took notice of her work was she able to train as a reporter. The lawsuit was settled in 1978 with The Times agreeing to consider more women for top management.

Robert Kalfin, the driving force behind the Chelsea Theater Center, which for two decades beginning in 1965 presented adventurous plays not always to the liking of general theatergoing audiences, died on Sept. 20 at a hospice center in Quogue, NY. He was 89.

Mr. Kalfin thought the commercial theaters of the day were limited and unimaginative, and he strove to broaden the theatrical landscape. His mission statement: “We will do whatever nobody else is doing, and what we think people ought to see.”

After the Chelsea closed, Mr. Kalfin continued to direct in New York and in regional houses. He was still working until recently. One of his post-Chelsea projects in New York was directing a Yiddish version of “Yentl,” produced by the Folksbiene Yiddish Theater in 2002.

Leonard Kriegel, an American memoirist and essayist whose work blazed with rage at the loss of the use of his legs to polio, died on Sept. 25 in Manhattan. He was 89.

An academic and literary critic who taught for many years at the City College of New York, Mr. Kriegel was known for scholarly and popular writings that examined large historical phenomena (the struggles of the labor movement, the social construction of masculinity, the treatment of disabled people) at the level of the individual life — often his own.

Throughout his life, Mr. Kriegel’s rage provided ballast against despair. Even the onset of his illness, he recalled in an essay in “Flying Solo,” was not entirely devoid of hope. As he recounted it, his father, on learning that Leonard had contracted polio, raced upstate from his delicatessen job without stopping to change his clothes.

“He sat alongside my bed in the small hospital in Cold Spring, imploring me to live and feeding me vanilla ice cream,” Mr. Kriegel wrote. “What remains as vivid in memory today as it was more than 50 years ago is the odor that clung to my father’s hand as he fed me that ice cream. I could smell the dry-sweat prospect of my death on that hand. Yet beyond that was the smell of pickle brine and smoked salmon and chopped herring that mixed with the rich creamy taste of the vanilla ice cream. For whatever incomprehensible reason, the mixing of smells was a father’s promise to a son that he would live.”