They died in 2013, leaving a lasting legacy…
Saul Kagan, 91, was the founding director of the Conference of Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which was established in 1951 by major Jewish organizations to seek reparations from Germany for the Nazi genocide during World War II. Thanks to Kagan, born in Lithuania, 600,000 Holocaust survivors received pensions, stipends and old-age benefits. But Kagan, knowing that no amount of money could make up for the murder of six million Jews, observed that his achievement represented only “a small measure of justice.”
Edgar Bronfman, 84, a Canadian-born businessman and philanthropist, was chairman of the Seagram Company, a U.S.-based liquor-conglomerate that at one point accounted for one-third of the distilled alcohol drinks consumed in the United States. Bronfman presided over the affairs of the WJC from 1981 to 2007, turning it into a muscular organization that fought for the religious and cultural rights of Jews in the Soviet Union and their freedom to emigrate. He also exposed the Nazi past of Kurt Waldheim, the former secretary-general of the United Nations and future president of Austria, and succeeded in forcing Swiss banks to fork over restitution payments of more than $1 billion to the relatives of Jews who had deposited funds in Switzerland prior to the Holocaust.
Al Goldstein, 77, was the founder, editor and publisher of Screw, the first American magazine to present hard-core pornography to a mass audience. A major force in a $10 billion-a-year industry, Goldstein was bold and unapologetic, promising in the inaugural 1968 issue “never to ink out a pubic hair or chalk out an organ.” His company went bankrupt in 2003 and he died penniless.
Richard Heffner, 88, a historian, educator and broadcaster, was the long-time host of the PBS TV public affairs show The Open Mind, which raised the level of television in the United States.
Herbert Kaplow, 86, was a domestic and foreign correspondent for two U.S. TV networks, NBC and ABC. He covered the White House, 10 presidential campaigns, the civil rights movement, the space program and the revolution in Cuba, becoming the first American journalist to interview Fidel Castro.
Peter Kaplan, 59, was the editor of The New York Observer, a weekly which chronicled the days and nights of the Big Apple for 15 years.
Stanley Kauffmann, 97, was a movie reviewer for The New Republic and chief theater critic of The New York Times. A former actor and stage manager, as well as a novelist, he wrote for The New Republic for 55 years and for the Times briefly.
Hugh Nissenson, 80, an American novelist who explored the nature of faith and stretched the novel as a form, wrote The Tree of Life, a finalist for the National Book Award in 1985. He was also the author of, among other works, The Song of the Earth and My Own Ground.
John Hollander, 83, a poet influenced by W.H. Auden and John Donne, wrote The Night Mirror: Poems, Spectral Emanations, Visions from the Ramble and Harp Lake, and was a professor of English at Yale University.
Barbara Branden, 84, wrote The Passion of Ayn Rand, an unauthorized biography of Ayn Rand, the philosopher of rational self-interest, and played a role in popularizing her views.
Marcella Hazan, 89, was the guru of Italian cuisine in the United States, producing six cook books, ranging from The Classic Italian Cook Book to Marcella’s Italian Kitchen.
Andre Schiffrin, 78, was editor-in-chief and managing director of Pantheon Books, which championed the work of Gunter Grass and Studs Turkel, and founder of the New Press, which published books on current issues.
Charlotte Zolotow, 98, was a children`s book editor at HarperCollins. Her most famous titles were Maurice Sendak`s Mr. Rabbit and the Lovely Present and M.E. Kerr`s Night Kites.
Arik Einstein, 74, was an Israeli folk singer and song writer who recorded almost 50 albums from the 1960s onward. Among his Hebrew songs were Me and You, Fly, Baby Bird and Cry for You.
Lou Reed, 71, was an American song writer, singer and guitarist whose albums ran the gamut from Transformer to New York and whose themes encompassed love, alienation and sexual deviance.
Eydie Gorme, 84, a chanteuse who performed the classic songs of Cole Porter and Irving Berlin, performed with her husband, Steve Lawrence. Her 1966 rendition of If He Walked Into My Life, taken from the Broadway musical Mame, was a hit.
Chana Mlotek, 91, was an archivist of Yiddish music, cataloguing thousands of sheets of music at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City, often in tandem with her husband, Joseph, and playing a role in the revival of the klezmer genre.
Joe Bihari, 88, and his brothers, Jules and Saul, founded Modern Music Records, which recorded, pressed and distributed some of the most influential blues and blues and rhythm records of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, and was instrumental in making a star out of B.B. King.
Saul Leiter, 89, one of the first professional photographers to portray New York City in color, was the subject of a documentary film, an exhibition and an illustrated book.
Lawrence Klein, 93, an economist who lectured at the University of Pennsylvania, won the 1980 Nobel Prize in economics for developing models to predict global economic trends. He correctly predicted that the American economy would flourish after World War II.
Leonard Herzenberg, 81, revolutionized the field of immunology by inventing a device that can isolate individual cells from trillions of cells, thereby advancing the treatment of cancer and HIV infection and facilitating stem cell research.
William Pollack, 87, helped develop a vaccine to treat a blood disorder commonly known as Rh disease, which had caused 10,000 infant deaths in the United States annually.
Abraham Nemeth, 94, invented the Nemeth Code, a form of Braille that improved the ability of blind people to study complex mathematics.
Bill Mazer, 92, a New York City broadcaster who pioneered sports talk radio, was the host of the weekend roundup program, Sports Extra, on WNEW TV and provided color commentary for CBS TV’s hockey game of the week.
Ossie Schectman, 94, scored the first point in the inaugural game of the Basketball Association of America, now referred to as the National Basketball Association. A New York Knicks guard, he scored that point on Nov. 1, 1946 in a game against the Toronto Huskies at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto.
Michael Weiner, 51, the executive director of the major League Baseball Players Association, signed landmark agreements with club owners that brought years of labor peace and enhanced drug testing.
Peter Lewis, 80, transformed the Progressive Corporation into one of the United States’ biggest auto insurance companies, with more than $16 billion in annual sales and 28,000 employees.