Bert Fields, the dean of Hollywood lawyers whose services were called on by superstars and studios alike, died on August 7 at his home in Malibu. He was 93.

Over the decades, stars and studio heads who turned to Mr. Fields included Madonna, Tom Cruise, Warren Beatty, the Beatles, Michael Jackson, Dustin Hoffman, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Michael Ovitz, and Jeffrey Katzenberg.

Early in his career, Mr. Fields did some acting, appearing as a prosecutor in an episode of the TV police drama “Dragnet”; Jack Webb, the show’s creator and star, was a client. Soon he acquired other clients — Edward G. Robinson, Peter Falk, and Elaine May. In 1982, Mr. Fields merged his firm with another to become the entertainment powerhouse Greenberg Glusker Fields Claman & Machtinger. He also wrote three books about Shakespeare and two mystery novels under the pseudonym D. Kincaid.

Mary Ellin Barrett, one of songwriter Irving Berlin’s three daughters and the author of a biography of her famous father, Irving Berlin: A Daughter’s Memoir, died July 16 in Manhattan. She was 95.

He often seemed a “shaky, uncertain man,” Ms. Barrett wrote of her father, yet out came hit after hit. In his lifetime, he wrote about 1,500 songs. A Russian immigrant, he wrote “God Bless America,” which has been thought of as an unofficial second national anthem; a Jewish man, he wrote “White Christmas,” one of the most beloved holiday songs.

In her lifetime, Ms. Barrett worked for Time magazine, also Glamour, Vogue and Cosmopolitan. In addition to the book about her father, she wrote three novels.

Melissa Bank, whose first book, The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing, became a global publishing phenomenon in 1999, died on August 9 at her home in East Hampton. She was 61.

The book is a collection of seven stories about a girl named Jane Rosenal, from age 14 until her mid-30s, during which time she navigates sex, death, money and friends. Jane is sharp, independent and bitingly funny — not unlike Ms. Bank herself, it has been said. The Guide made the New York Times’s best-seller list, was translated into dozens of languages, and sold more than 1.5 million copies. Two of the stories from the book were adapted into the 2007 film, “Suburban Girl,” starring Sarah Michelle Gellar and Alec Baldwin.

Ms. Bank taught at the Southampton Writers Conference, and later in the MFA program at the Southampton campus of Stony Brook University.

Dr. Leon E. Rosenberg, a pioneer in the field of medical genetics, died on July 22 at his home in Lawrenceville, NJ. He was 89.

Dr. Rosenberg joined the faculty of the Yale School of Medicine in 1965. While at Yale, he led

research into inherited metabolic disorders, filling his lectures with stories of children who had presented inexplicable disorders. He repeatedly showed their causes to be their bodies’ inability to metabolize various acids, conditions that often could be easily treated. His research brought him public prominence, both as a researcher and as an advocate for equity in medicine,

As the dean of the Yale School of Medicine from 1984 to 1991, he paved the way for people of color and women to rise to senior faculty positions.

Elana Dykewomon, a writer and activist  who spent decades exploring her identity as a gay woman and a Jew, died August 7 at her home in Oakland, CA. She was 72.

Ms. Dykewomon chose her pen name (jettisoning the “man” in her new name) and wrote three novels and five collections of poetry and short stories, gaining ardent attention from the gay community. She was in hospice at her home, with friends, preparing to watch a live-streamed performance of her first play, “How to Let Your Lover Die,” when she died, 20 minutes before the performance began. The play is a rumination on love and loss that she wrote following the death in 2016 of her wife and partner of many decades. “Mourning is the most difficult form of celebration,” Ms. Dykewomon wrote. “But I am filled with the beauty of what I need to mourn.”

Prof. Howard Rosenthal, a political scientist whose pioneering research confirmed quantitatively that Congress is more politically polarized than at any point since Reconstruction, died on July 28 at his home in San Francisco. He was 83.

“Professor Rosenthal was a trailblazing figure in political science, who collaborated with economists and drew on game theory and other formal methods to help define the modern subfield of political economy,” said Prof. Alan Patten, chairman of the politics department at Princeton, where Professor Rosenthal taught between stints at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and New York University. “He was especially known for work measuring and analyzing political polarization, a phenomenon that is of more relevance than ever in contemporary American politics.”

Professor Rosenthal was awarded the Duncan Black Prize from the Public Choice Society in 1980, the C.Q. Press Award from the American Political Science Association in 1985, and the William H. Riker Prize for Political Science from the University of Rochester in 2010.

The Shofar and the Shofar’s editor join the City of Highland Park, Ill., in mourning those killed in a mass shooting at a July 4 parade. Among them were Steve Strauss, 88, Jacki Lovi Sundheim, 63, and Katherine Goldstein, 64. Before relocating to New York, my husband and I and our children lived in that picturesque city, within walking distance of Ravinia Park, the summer home of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. On nice afternoons, with Jenny in a stroller and Mimi on a tricycle, we would meander through the park and listen to Seiji Ozawa rehearse the orchestra. To learn that such a thing could happen there was shattering. SMB