Elliot Lawrence, who after leading a big band in the 1940s and ‘50s, won a Tony Award for his conducting on Broadway and spent nearly a half-century in charge of the orchestra that plays on the Tony’s annual broadcast, died July 2 in Manhattan. He was 96.

A pianist by training, Mr. Lawrence was a leader from a young age, forming one youth ensemble, the Band Busters, at age 12. In his 20s, he started Elliot Lawrence and His Orchestra, which was voted the most promising new big band in Billboard’s college polls in 1947 and 1948. His later work as conductor of the Tony Awards orchestra — a job he got because of his success on Broadway and in television — earned him two Emmy Awards.

Elliot Lawrence Broza was born Feb. 14, 1925, in Philadelphia. His father, Stan Lee Broza, was a founder and executive of the local radio station WCAU. He and Elliot’s mother, Esther Malis Broza, produced the long-running variety show “The Horn and Hardart Children’s Hour” on radio and later on television. [Those of us, like this editor, who grew up near Philadelphia, wouldn’t dare miss an episode of the radio program. Thank you Stan Lee; thank you Elliot.]

Rabbi Yoel Kahn, who as leading disciple of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the revered leader of the Lubavitch Hasidim, had the uncanny ability to memorize virtually verbatim the grand rabbi’s hourslong speeches and discourses, which he then compiled into roughly 150 published volumes, died July 15 in Manhattan. He was 91.

From Rabbi Schneerson’s ascension to the leadership of the movement in 1951 until his death in 1994, Rabbi Kahn dedicated himself to preserving a record of the leader’s speeches, off-the-cuff talks, and other teachings, regarding them as the collective wisdom of a modern-day Talmudic sage or prophet. Rabbi Schneerson would expound in Yiddish on passages of Torah, Talmud and kabbalah, or on Hasidic philosophy, ethical behavior and world events, always without notes or written text. Rabbi Kahn, with a memory described as photographic, was able to recall the grand rabbi’s words in their entirety.

Herbert Schlosser, a longtime NBC executive who put an indelible stamp on the network by negotiating Johnny Carson’s deal to host “The Tonight Show,” putting “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In” on the air, and overseeing the development of “Saturday Night Live” died August 6 at his home in Manhattan. He was 95.

Another model of late-night success under his watch was “The Midnight Special,” a series featuring pop and rock performers, broadcast Fridays after “The Tonight Show.” He told The Television Academy that NBC had a tradition of success with shows like that. “To me, it was a no-brainer,” he said.

Carl Levin, a liberal Michigan Democrat who served 36 years in the U.S. Senate, from 1979 to 2015, and who scared the wits out of America’s biggest CEOs by demanding explanations for shadowy schemes that hid billions in profits overseas and avoided vast corporate taxes at home, died July 29 in Detroit. He was 87.

Mr. Levin was regarded by Senate colleagues and Washington observers as a paragon of probity as the chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. He wielded subpoena power, huge briefing books, a big gavel, and an unquenchable zeal for grilling high-profile witnesses at public hearings.

According to The New York Times, he confronted the titans of JPMorgan Chase, Apple, American Express and other corporate giants, and extracted admissions about overseas banking havens and tax-avoidance maneuvers that rendered profits invisible and made tax burdens vanish into thin air.

“I will miss Carl Levin when he leaves the Senate after the next election — and you will too,” Joe Nocera, then an Op-Ed columnist for The Times wrote at the time. “Levin has done more than anyone to expose the scams, the conflicts, the wrongdoing and the sheer idiocy of the financial industry from the run-up to the financial crisis to the present day.”

Ruth Pearl, the mother of Daniel Pearl, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal who was brutally murdered by Muslim extremists in Pakistan in 2002, died on July 20 at her home in Los Angeles. She was 85.

Daniel Pearl, The Journal’s South Asia bureau chief, was kidnapped while reporting in Karachi. Despite pleas from his parents and desperate efforts to win his release by the U.S. government, his kidnappers beheaded him on Feb. 1, 2002, recording a video of his last words: “My father’s Jewish, my mother’s Jewish, I’m Jewish.

Mrs. Pearl, a software developer, had retired by the time of her son’s murder. Afterward, she threw herself into running the Daniel Pearl Foundation. Her grief drove her, she said, but so did her memories of growing up in Iraq, and her desire to counter the hatred both she and her son had encountered.

Donald Kagan, a Yale historian whose impassioned teaching and writing about the ancient Greeks inspired generations of scholars as well as Washington strategists, including many of the officials who crafted American foreign policy under Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, died on August 6 at a retirement home in Washington. He was 89.

Professor Kagan was considered among the country’s leading historians. His four-volume account of the Peloponnesian War, from 431 B.C. to 404 B.C., was hailed as “the foremost work of history produced in North America in the 20th century.”

He was equally renowned for his classroom style, in which he peppered nuanced readings of ancient texts with references to his beloved New York Yankees and inventive exercises in class preparation. He once had students form a hoplite phalanx to demonstrate how Greek soldiers marched into combat.

Professor Kagan received a National Humanities Medal in 2002. Three years later, he delivered the annual Jefferson Lecture, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Ilana Royce Smithkin, who as an orange-haired nonagenarian with matching two-inch eyelashes caught fire in the world of fashion — a muse for photographers, filmmakers and entertainers — died August 1 at her home in Provincetown, MA. She was 101. In her obituary in The New York Times, Alex Traub described her as “a joyous persona that took a lifetime to build after a grim childhood” in Nazi Germany.

In 2010, the photographer Ari Seth Cohen heard from a friend about a “magical woman with fiery red hair and the longest eyelashes anyone had ever seen.” Soon after, he spotted a woman in the street in the West Village, who was about 4 feet 9 inches tall and wore hand-painted sneakers, matching baby blue clothes and diamond-studded sunglasses, with eyelashes poking out.  Mr. Cohen asked to take Ms. Smithkin’s photograph. She exclaimed, “Of course,” and kicked a leg in the air. “I instantly fell in love,” Mr. Cohen said.

Ms. Smithkin painted and made a living as a milliner, a factory worker, a painter of glass lantern shades, and a movie theater usher. In the 1960s and ‘70s, she began teaching art classes in Kentucky and South Carolina, traveling to small towns and using church basements and funeral parlors as classrooms.

In interviews, Ms. Smithkin referred to having a revelation and finally becoming her authentic self around the age of 80, roughly the same time she started performing songs by Marlene Dietrich and Edith Piaf. She would wear stilettos, stockings, and a revealing dress, and until she had hip surgery in her mid-80s, she finished every show by doing a split.