Noah Gordon, an American author whose novels about history, medicine and Jewish identity transformed him into a literary luminary abroad, died on Nov. 22 at his home in Dedham, MA. He was 95.

Mr. Gordon’s debut novel, The Rabbi (1965), the first of eight novels, dealt with the title character’s marriage to a minister’s daughter. It made The New York Times’s best-seller list for 26 weeks. His work has been published in 38 countries.

“Each morning, I go to my computer in anticipation of the emails I receive from readers in many countries,” Mr. Gordon wrote on his website. “I am grateful to every reader for enabling me to spend my life as a scribbler of tales.”

Sylvère Lotringer, who popularized French critical theory in the United States, helped inspire the “Matrix” movie series, hosted conferences for counterculture celebrities, lent his name to a character in an acclaimed novel (I Love Dick by Chris Kraus) and a television series based on it, provoked rants on Fox News and founded an influential publishing house — all while trying to outrun memories of a childhood spent on the precipice of antisemitic disaster — died Nov. 8 at his home outside Ensenada, Mexico, in Baja California. He was 83.

By background a Parisian Jew and by trade a tenured academic in the Columbia University French department with a specialty in abstruse philosophy, Professor Lotringer somehow charmed his way into a classically American career consisting of successive 15-minute bursts of fame, The New York Times said.

Abraham Schumer, the father of Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) died Nov. 24 in a Long Island hospital after recently undergoing surgery for heart problems. He was 98.

At a news conference, Senator Schumer told the story of his own birth on Thanksgiving Day 1950. “What they used to do in those days — there was none of this spouse in the delivery room, touchy feely — they sent the husbands down to a room; they paced and smoked cigars and waited for the blessed event,” Schumer said, according to the New York Daily News. At some point, his father decided to step out of the hospital to watch the Thanksgiving Day Parade, which was happening just a few blocks away. Abraham Schumer didn’t make it back to the hospital until some five hours after the baby was actually born, “creating the first fight my parents had over me,” Schumer said. “They’ve been happily married for 72 years.”

Sylvia Weinstock, who took the art of baking to new heights with her 10-foot-tall wedding cakes and their garlands of hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of handpainted sugar flowers, died Nov. 22 at her home in Manhattan. She was 91.

Mrs. Weinstock was best known for her elaborate wedding cakes, with flowers cascading down over multiple tiers of buttercream frosting. But she also baked novelty cakes in the shape of cars or dogs or other beloved items for birthdays and other special occasions.

Her clientele included Whitney Houston, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, LeBron James, Robert De Niro, Oprah Winfrey, Martha Stewart, the Clintons, the Trumps, and various Kennedys and Kardashians.

Philip B. Heymann, who served four Democratic presidents over six decades, mostly in the Justice Department, and who helped prosecute major investigations including Watergate and the Abscam bribery sting operation, died Nov. 30 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 89.

Mr. Heymann served in the Kennedy, Johnson, Carter and Clinton administrations in a series of political appointments. His last role was as deputy attorney general, the second in command, in the Clinton Justice Department under Attorney General Janet Reno.

In a 2019 interview for this obituary, his daughter had asked him what he wanted to be remembered for. “He said, ‘Speaking truth to power,’” she said. “He believed in government service. And even though he held positions of consequence, he saw himself as a civil servant. He believed that we all contribute to our government.”

Susan Rosenblatt, who with her husband and law partner, Stanley Rosenblatt, took on Big Tobacco in a Florida case that seemed an absurd mismatch for their small firm. Yet the result was a $144.8 billion jury award in favor of people sickened by cigarettes. She died on Nov. 14 in Houston, at age 70.

In the headline-making tobacco case and in other prominent lawsuits, Stanley Rosenblatt did much of the in-court presenting and after-court news conferencing. But it was Ms. Rosenblatt’s legal scholarship — the research she did, the briefs she wrote — that provided the ammunition that made their successes possible, The New York Times said.

Fred Hiatt, the longtime editorial page editor of The Washington Post, who used his position atop one of the nation’s most visible and influential opinion platforms to support justice and human rights, died Dec. 6 at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 66.

Mr. Hiatt, a three-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in editorial writing, led The Post’s opinion section for more than two decades. In that time, he expanded the staff from about a dozen people to more than 80, broadening its reach and its ranks to include not only seasoned journalists, but also younger, up-and-coming writers, videographers, bloggers and designers.

Mr. Hiatt was best known in recent years, perhaps, for leading the newspaper’s outraged response to the 2018 abduction and murder of one of its Saudi contributors, Jamal Khashoggi, and also his view that Donald J. Trump was unfit to be president of the United States. In 2016, before the general election was underway and long before Mr. Trump was twice impeached, Mr. Hiatt wrote that Mr. Trump’s “contempt for constitutional norms might reveal the nation’s two-century-old experiment in checks and balances to be more fragile than we knew.” He was a Pulitzer finalist for his editorials about Mr. Trump.