Born into a family of musicians Larry Harlow probably was destined for a music career, but it was his walks to class at the High School of Music and Art in Upper Manhattan that put him onto his lifelong passion.

“When I got out of the subway, I would walk up this huge hill and hear this strange music coming from all the bodegas,” he told The Forward in 2006. “I thought, ‘What kind of music is this?’”

What he was hearing was early recordings by Tito Puente and other energetic new Latin sounds. Soon Mr. Harlow, a Brooklyn-born Jew, was fusing those and other influences into a career as a major figure in salsa, as a pianist, bandleader, songwriter and producer.

In the 1960s and ‘70s, onstage and in the production studios of Fania Records, he would help define salsa and spread it throughout the United States and around the world. He was affectionately known in the Latin music world as “El Judio Maravillosol” the marvelous Jew.

Mr. Harlow died August 20 at a care center in the Bronx. He was 82.

Lila Gleitman, whose pioneering work in linguistics and cognitive science expanded our understanding of how language works and how children go about learning it, died August 8 at a hospital in Philadelphia. She was 91.

According to Dr. Gleitman, the structures, or syntax, of language are hardwired into the brain from birth, and that children already have a sophisticated grasp of how they work. “The study of language acquisition was her field in a special sense,” said Dr. Noam Chomsky, a colleague. “She virtually created the field in its modern form and led in its impressive development ever since.”

Ed Asner, the burly character actor who won seven Emmy Awards — five of them for playing the same character, the gruff but lovable newsman Lou Grant introduced on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and later on “Lou Grant” — and then starred in film hits like “Up” and “Elf” — died August 29 at his home in Tarzana, CA. He was 91.

Mr. Asner also served as president of the Screen Actors Guild from 1981 to 1985, and was active in political causes within and beyond the entertainment industry. The issues he supported over the years included unionism and animal rights; he protested against the American military presence in El Salvador.

“The Mary Tyler Moore Show” ran on CBS from 1970 to 1977, and Mr. Asner was nominated for the Emmy for best supporting actor in a comedy series every year. He won in 1971, 1972 and 1975. He won twice for best lead actor, in 1978 and 1980, for “Lou Grant,” which aired on CBS from 1977 to 1982.

Mr. Asner won Emmys also for his appearances in the 1976 mini-series “Rich Man, Poor Man” and the 1977 mini-series “Roots.” He was seen in guest roles in “The Good Wife,” “The Middle,” “Grace and Frankie,” “Hot in Cleveland” and “Cobra Kai.” He was a recurring character in “The Practice” and “ER.” In made-for-television movies, he played Warren Buffet in “Too Big to Fail” (2011) and Pope John XXIII in a movie by that name (2002). 

Mr. Asner continued acting on television and in film through 2019. His last film appearance was as a New York psychologist in “The Garden Left Behind,” a drama that won a SXSW Film Festival audience award. That year he also appeared on several television series, including five episodes of “Dead to Me,” a Netflix drama about grief.

In a 1999 interview, Mr. Asner said, “To me, the best performances come from those milieus where you create the family — of bolstering each other, of love for each other’s work, of trying to help each other, of trying to get the best out of each other. And I believe it pays off.”

Alan Heller, the manufacturer of elegant, often whimsical but always affordable housewares and furniture that married high design with prosaic plastic, died August 13 at his home in Manhattan. He was 81.

“Alan understood how good design could make your life more fun and more pleasurable,” said Suzanne Slesin, a longtime design writer and publisher and a former reporter for The New York Times. “He made plastic objects that had integrity and beauty — something you wanted to collect and show off — and were affordable. It was design for everyone.”

“Without guys like Alan,” Lester Gribetz, then-vice president of Bloomingdale’s, told the design writer Arlene Hirst in 1985, “this would be the dullest industry in the world.”

Mal Z. Lawrence, a mainstay of comedy in the Catskills during the latter years of that resort area’s heyday, and one of the performers who brought borscht belt humor to Midtown Manhattan in 1991 in the hit show “Catskills on Broadway,” died Sept. 30 in Delray Beach, FL. He was 88.

Mr. Lawrence came to prominence in the Catskills in the 1950s but was soon known all over the country, playing Las Vegas, Atlantic City, Florida and other stops on the comedy circuit, where his brand of Jewish humor was greeted enthusiastically. To a Florida audience, he’d poke fun at the Catskills; to a northern audience, he’d joke about Florida.

“I worked a place down there called Century Village of West Palm Beach,” one routine went. “Working there, if you didn’t have a handicapped parking sticker, there was nowhere to put your car.”

Mr. Lawrence, who added the Z to his name to get more marquee space, he said, also acted in films and would occasionally turn up in a play. For his appearance in a Broadway revival of “Candide,” he shaved his signature mustache. “I look 20 minutes younger now,” he told the Jewish Exponent at the time.

Ida Nudel, who personified the Cold War struggle of Jews to emigrate from the Soviet Union to Israel, died Sept. 14 in Israel, where she had lived since 1987. She was 90.

Ms. Nudel, an economist, became known as the “Guardian Angel” for mounting a one-woman campaign to maintain communication and monitor the condition of her fellow “Prisoners of Zion” — Soviet Jews, known informally as refuseniks, who, like her had been imprisoned or persecuted for seeking permission to emigrate. She was banished to Siberia in 1978 after unfurling a banner from her Moscow apartment that read, “K.G.B., Give Me My Visa to Israel.”

Ms. Nudel won her 16-year battle against the Soviet bureaucracy when Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Communist Party general secretary, relented. “I was born here and lived here for 40 years, and you can’t deprive me of my childhood, youth or adulthood,” she wrote of Russia in her memoir, A Hand in the Darkness. “But I am also part of another land, which is the dream of my people.” She elaborated in 1987, when she first landed in Tel Aviv. “For me, it is the moment of my life. I am at home. I am on the soil of my people. Now I am an absolutely free person among my own people.”