They died in the last little while, leaving a lasting legacy …
Robert Fogel, 86, a University of Chicago economist, shared the Nobel Prize in economic science in 1993 for his work in explaining the role of railways and slavery in the development of the American economy. His books on these topics, Railroads and American Economic Growth and Time on the Cross, became classics.
Rita Levi-Montalcini, 103, a neurologist and co-winner of the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1986, discovered a protein used by the body to build nerve networks and manage cell growth. Born in Italy, she was one of the founders and the first director of the Institute of Cell Biology in Rome.
Donald Arthur Glaser, 86, won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1960 in recognition of inventing the bubble chamber, a device that traces the paths of sub-atomic particles. In 1971, he co-founded the Cetus Corp., one of the first bio-technology companies in the United States. Cetus developed the cancer therapy Interferon.
Francois Jacob, 92, shared the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1965 for a discovery showing how cells switch on and off to impart certain genetic information. A citizen of France and a member of the Free French Army during World War II, he was associated with the Pasteur Institute and the College de France.
Alexander Leaf, 92, a physician, was an early advocate of diet and exercise to combat heart disease. He was the director of preventive medicine at Harvard University Medical School.
Hilary Koprowski, 96, a virologist from Poland who settled in the United States in 1944, developed the first viable vaccine against polio and tested it successfully on humans.
Joyce Brothers, 85, the mother of mass media psychology, was the host of nationally syndicated television advice shows (The Dr.Joyce Brothers Show) and the author of self-hep books (The Brothers System for Liberated Love and Marriage).
Geza Vermes, 88, a religious scholar born in Hungary and associated with the Oxford University Center for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, translated the Dead Sea Scrolls into English, and in his book, Jesus the Jew, placed Jesus within the tradition of Judaism.
Arthur Rosenthal, 93, founded Basic Books, a New York-based publisher of intellectual masterworks, and then steered Harvard University Press to profitability.
Peter Israel Workman, 74, was the founder of Workman Publishing, which published The Silver Palate Cookbook, one of the most successful books on the culinary arts.
Joseph Frank, 94, a literary biographer and an academic, wrote the definitive account of the life of the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky in five volumes.
Klemens von Klemperer, 96, one of the deans of German studies in the United States and the scion of a German Jewish family that converted to Christianity, was the author of German Resistance Against Hitler: The Search for Allies Abroad, 1938-1945.
Haim Hefer, 86, an Israeli songwriter and poet whose 1950s song, The Red Rock, was an anthem of daring and adventure during an austere period in Israel, was the founder of the first entertainment troupe in the Israeli army.
Yoram Kaniuk, 83, was an Israeli author whose books ran the gamut from Adam Resurrected to 1948.
Joe Kubert, 85, a comic book artist, created two iconic characters: Sgt. Rock, a World War II infantryman, and Hawkman, an airborne crime fighter.
Gerda Lerner, 92, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was instrumental in creating the first graduate program in women’s studies in the United States.
Tereska Torres (Szwarc), 92, wrote Women’s Barracks, the first lesbian pulp novel published in the United States.
Shulamith Firestone, 67, was a Marxist whose first book, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, was a landmark of radical analysis.
Beate Gordon, 89, a civilian attached to Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s U.S. army of occupation in Japan after World War II, was a member of the team that enshrined women’s rights in Japan’s new constitution.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, 85, was a novelist who won the Man Booker Award for Heat and Dust. Working with producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory, she won two Academy awards for her screenplay adaptations of E.M. Forster’s novels, Room with a View and Howard’s End.
Mickey Rose, 77, collaborated with Woody Allen in writing scripts for two of his earliest comedies, Take the Money and Run and Bananas.
Gary David Goldberg, 68, a TV writer and producer, created Family Ties, which was broadcast from 1982 to 1989, as well as two other shows, Brooklyn Bridge and Spin City.
Susan Douglas Rubes, 87, founded Toronto’s Young People’s Theatre, the first professional theatre in North America dedicated to the younger set, and headed the radio drama department of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
Harry Reems, 65, was the first major American male porn star, having appeared in Deep Throat, which grossed more than $600 million. Reems, who starred in more than 100 porn films, including The Devil in Miss Jones, became a born-again Christian and a real estate agent, though his impact on the adult film industry has lasted for decades and is still seen in the films on sites like videoshd.xxx to this day.
Jack Klugman, 90, was a television actor, playing a sportswriter in The Odd Couple and a medical examiner in Quincy.
Rise Stevens, 99, was a mezzo-soprano at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City for 23 years, often portraying Carmen in Bizet’s opera.
Fran Warren, 87, was a band vocalist during the big-band era, best known for her 1947 hit, A Sunday Kind of Love.
Janos Starker, 88, was a Hungarian-born master cellist, with more than 150 recordings to his credit
Bernard Sahlins, 90, was a founder of Chicago’s Second City nightclub, which played a pivotal role in popularizing improvisational sketch comedy.
Gerry Anderson, 83, a British filmmaker, created futuristic action heroes in the 1960s children’s show Thunderbird.
Ada Louise Huxtable, 91, was the first fulltime architectural critic on the staff of an American daily newspaper, writing for the New York Times for 18 years until 1981. The last of her 11 books, On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century of Change, was published in 2008.
Pauline Phillips, 94, wrote the syndicated Dear Abby advice column, which has a daily readership of more than 110 million today. Her sister, Eppie Lederer, was her chief competitor, writing the Anne Landers column.
Anthony Lewis, 85, was a legal reporter and columnist for the New York Times, covering the U.S. Supreme Court and writing the column At Home Abroad. He won two Pulitzer Prizes.
Stanley Karnow, 87, was a foreign correspondent in Asia for, among other publications, Time and the Washington Post. His book, Vietnam: A Television History, was converted into a 13-part PBS series.
Richard Ben Cramer, 62, a journalist for the Philadelphia Inquirer who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1979 for his reporting from the Middle East, was the author of a book on the 1988 U.S.presidential campaign, What it Takes: The Way to the White House. He also wrote a book on Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, How Israel Lost: The Four Questions.
Murrey Marder, 93, a Washington Post reporter for 40 years, covered the so-called “Red beat” in the 1950s. Through meticulous research, he discovered that U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy’s claims were exaggerated or false, thereby discrediting that politician.
Teresa Toranska, 69, a Polish journalist, wrote Them: Stalin’s Polish Puppets, a scathing indictment of Poland’s communist-era leadership, as well as a book on Polish-Jewish history, We Are.
Ralph Martin, 92, a best-selling author of celebrity and political novels, wrote biographies of Winston Churchill’s mother, Golda Meir and Henry and Clare Luce.
Joe Weider, 93, and his brother, Ben, founded the International Federation of Body Builders, created a business empire of fitness equipment and body building magazines and discovered the Austrian body building champion, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Joseph Woodland, 91, a mechanical engineer, conceived the modern bar code, a laser scanning technique that revolutionized commerce.
Murray Menkes, 87, a Toronto real estate tycoon, founded Menkes Developments Ltd., a major builder of high-rise condominiums, suburban divisions, shopping centers and commercial towers.
Sherman Cohen, 91, was a developer whose portfolio of properties, comprising 12 million square feet, stretched from New York City and Los Angeles to Houston and Miami.
Harold Milavsky, 81, was president of Trizec Corp., reportedly the largest publicly traded real estate company in North America, with assets of almost $10 billion.
Leonard Marsh, 80, was one of the founders of the Snapple Beverage Company, which makes juices, fruit punches and teas.
Helen Kutscher, 89, was the matriarch of Kutcher’s, the legendary Borscht Belt resort in New York state whose featured performers included Jerry Seinfeld and Tony Bennett.
Daniel Edelman, 92, was the founder of one of the world’s largest public relations firms, Edelman, whose clients run the gamut from Microsoft and Sara Lee to General Electric and Samsung.
Edward Kresky, 88, a New York investment banker, was one of the architects of the 1970s fiscal plan that saved the city from bankruptcy.
Marc Rich, 78, a commodity trader based in Switzerland, cornered the market in silver, zinc and aluminum and developed the spot market in oil. A Holocaust survivor whose family immigrated to the United States in the early 1940s, Rich was indicted on a variety of charges, including income evasion, but was pardoned by President Bill Clinton on his last day in office.
Boris Berezovsky, 67, a Russian oligarch hounded out of the country after criticizing President Vladimir Putin, amassed a vast fortune after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. A mathematician who was close to Putin’s predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, he fled to Britain after being convicted of fraud.
William Ginsburg, 70, a civil malpractice lawyer in Los Angeles, briefly represented Monica Lewinsky, the White House intern embroiled in a scandal over her 1990s affair with President Bill Clinton.
Morris Kramer, 71, a lawyer, played a role in the 1980s in revolutionizing the mergers and acquisitions business.
Carmen Weinstein, 82, was the president of the Jewish community in Cairo, best known for her struggle to save the Jewish cemetery in Bassatine from vandals, squatters and neglect and to persuade the Egyptian government to classify Jewish artifacts as Egyptian antiquities.
Leonard Garment, 89, President Richard Nixon’s White House counsel and former law firm partner, played a key role in the Watergate scandal, urging him not to destroy an 18 and a half minute gap in an incriminating Oval Office tape, calling for his early resignation and persuading his successor, Gerald Ford, to pardon him.
Helmut Sonnenfeldt, 86, a refugee from Nazi Germany, was a U.S. State Department expert in Soviet and Eastern European affairs who worked closely with Henry Kissinger, the secretary of state, during the Nixon and Ford administrations.
Max Kampelman, 92, was a Washington lawyer-turned American diplomat who negotiated treaties on nuclear weapons and human rights with the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Frank Lautenberg, 89, was a five-term U.S. Democratic party senator from New Jersey. The oldest member of the Senate, he was first elected in 1982.
Warren Rudman, 82, represented New Hampshire for two terms as a Republican U.S. senator. He co-sponsored two bills to balance the U.S. budget.
Arlen Specter, 82, was a U.S. senator from Pennsylvania for almost three decades, first as a Republican and then as a Democrat. He led the judiciary committee through two Supreme Court confirmations.