Dan Einstein, a Grammy-winning independent record producer who championed the careers of John Prine and Steve Goodman, died Jan. 15 in Nashville. He was 61.

He made his mark in the record business in the 1980s and ‘90s with two labels: Oh Boy Records and Red Pajamas Records, both Grammy winners. The labels were not the only independents, but the marketing was unique, relying on mail-order sales, grass-roots publicity, and innovative consumer engagement.

In a second-career move, most people in Nashville knew Mr. Einstein as the proprietor, with his wife, of Sweet 16th, the award-winning bakery they opened in 2004. Referring to themselves as “your East Nashville sugar dealer,” the Einstein’s earned accolades for their baked goods as well as their generosity to hungry neighbors and to those who had lost homes when tornadoes ravaged Nashville in 2020.

Laurel Cutler, a female advertising executive in the testosterone-driven “Mad Men” era of 1960s New York, died Nov. 28 at her home in Manhattan. She was 94.

During her five-decade career on Madison Avenue, Ms. Cutler was the only women on Fortune magazine’s list of 11 “seminal thinkers” of the 1980s. Ladies’ Home Journal called her one of the 50 most powerful women in America in 1990, noting that she could get her phone calls returned. The Advertising Federation of America named her “Woman of the Year” in 1985 and “Man of the Year” 10 years later. She was inducted into the Advertising Hall of Fame in 2011.

Laurel Cutler’s brother, Lloyd Cutler, became a highly successful lawyer in Washington and counselor to Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. In her memoir, she recalled a reception in Washington where she was introduced to Katharine Graham, publisher of The Washington Post, as “Lloyd’s sister.” At that, Edward N. Ney, chairman of Young & Rubicam, stepped in to tell Mrs. Graham, “In our world, he’s Laurel’s brother.”

Steve Schapiro, a photojournalist and social documentarian who bore witness to some of the most significant political and cultural moments and movements in modern American history, starting in the 1960swith the struggle for racial equality across the Jim Crow South, died on Jan. 15 at his home in Chicago. He was 87.

Over a six-decade career, Mr. Schapiro trained his camera’s eye on an astonishing array of people across the American landscape as he sought to capture the emotional heart of his subjects, whether they were narcotics users in Harlem, migrant workers in Arkansas, or movie luminaries in Hollywood.

Mr. Schapiro’s photographs have been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and elsewhere. They have also been collected in books about Hollywood movie sets, including those for “The Godfather,” “Taxi Driver,” and “The Way We Were.”

“I think we are on the way to a day when cameras as we have known them will be obsolete,” he told The Chicago Tribune in 2016. “We will be using just cellphones to take photos.” But he added, “I will ever believe it is the photographer who counts, not the camera.”

Israel S. Dresner, a New Jersey rabbi who ventured into the Deep South in the 1960s to champion civil rights, befriended the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and was jailed multiple times for demonstrating against racial segregation, died on Jan. 13 in Wayne, NJ. He was 92.

By the time Rabbi Dresner joined the civil rights movement, he was already a veteran of political protests, having been arrested at 18 in 1947 outside the British Empire Building at Rockefeller Center in Manhattan in a protest against Britain’s refusal to let the Exodus, a ship loaded with Holocaust survivors, land in British-controlled Palestine, an incident that inspired the novel of the same name by Leon Uris in 1958 and a subsequent film.

Rabbi Dresner was in his mid-20s when, in 1954, he enrolled at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, the Reform rabbinical seminary in Manhattan. He was ordained in 1961.

Rabbi Dresner was an early supporter of Soviet Jewry, opposed the war in Vietnam, and supported the rights of the poor, women, immigrants, religious and ethnic minorities, disabled people, and gay men and lesbians.

Last month, in an interviews with WCBS-TV in New York, Rabbi Dresner said, “I want to be remembered as somebody who not only tried to keep the Jewish faith but also invoked the Jewish doctrine from the Talmud, which is called ‘tikkun olam’ — repairing the world — and I hope that I made a little bit of a contribution to making the world a little better place.”

Alan A. Stone, who used his tenures at Harvard’s law and medical schools to influence the evolution of psychiatric ethics over the last half-century, died on Jan. 23 at his home in Cambridge, MA. He was 92.

Dr. Stone trained as a psychiatrist and as a psychoanalyst and began teaching in the late 1960s, just as the foundations of both fields were coming under scrutiny. He was at the forefront of questions about how psychiatry is used as a tool of public policy; for example, he criticized the role psychiatrists played in laws that banned abortion based on claims about a woman’s mental health, and in the involuntary commitment of millions of Americans to public mental institutions.

As psychiatrists began to build careers as expert witnesses in criminal trials, he made enemies by opposing the practice. That didn’t stop him from becoming the president of the American Psychiatric Association in 1979, the New York Times pointed out, a post where, among other things, he guided the decision to remove homosexuality from the profession’s list of mental disorders.

Mel Mermelstein, an Auschwitz survivor who won a formal apology, $90,000 and a judge’s affirmation that the Holocaust indisputably happened, died Jan. 4 at his home in Long Beach, CA. He was 95.

Mr. Mermelstein was 17 when his family was deported to Auschwitz. His parents and two sisters died in the gas chamber there several months later, and his brother was killed apparently trying to escape.

He published a memoir in 1979 titled By Bread Alone: The Story of A-4685, his prison number. That same year, the Institute for Historical Review, a newly formed group of Holocaust deniers, offered a  $50,000 reward to anyone who could prove categorically that Jews were mass-murdered by the Nazis. Mr. Mermelstein refused to let the world forget. He submitted a notarized account of watching Nazi guards herding his mother and sisters into as gas chamber. In his last conversation with his father, Mr. Mermelstein was told that one of them had to stay alive to tell.

In a pretrial determination, Judge Thomas T. Johnson declared: “This court does take judicial notice of the fact that Jews were gassed to death at Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944. It is not reasonably subject to dispute…It is simply a fact.”

With his collection of artifacts, his book, the court judgment, and a 1991 TNT film, “Never Forget,” starring Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Mermelstein, he fulfilled his father’s hope that “one of us will live to tell.”