In 1992, Art Spiegelman’s Maus won the Pulitzer prize.

The first graphic novel to win the award, Maus testified both to Spiegelman’s singular brilliance and to the graphic novel’s acceptance as a serious medium. This owed a great deal to one man: Will Eisner.

A legendary figure within the comic book and graphic novel industries, yet comparatively lesser-known without, a new biography of Eisner from longtime graphic novelists Steve Weiner and Dan Muzur introduces Eisner to a new generation.

And to do justice to the life and career of the man who coined the term graphic novel, the duo have written — you guessed it — a graphic novel, entitled Will Eisner: A Comics Biography.

“What, it should be an opera?” Mazur joked, when I met him and Weiner over Zoom. “If you want to learn about Will Eisner, and you don’t want to read a graphic novel, I don’t know how that works.”

Mazur and Weiner had moved in the same comics circles in Cambridge, MA, for several years. Their work had even appeared side by side in 2017’s Cambridge Companion to the Graphic Novel. But they officially met only in 2022, when Weiner pitched Mazur a graphic novel about Eisner-the-artist and Eisner-the-man.

The pair clicked immediately. “We just started talking about the books and comics we liked,” said Weiner, who has a shock of curly white hair. “I thought: This is going to work.”

Mazur, an expert on early comic history, was especially taken by the idea of illustrating Eisner’s “grubby, romantic career beginnings.” What’s more, he and Weiner both felt Eisner’s early career had never been properly examined.

“We wanted to think about what the challenges really were for him in this industry that wasn’t yet an industry,” Weiner told me.

Striking out on his own

The biography’s first section takes the reader from Eisner’s upbringing in 1920s Jewish Brooklyn to the still-fledgling world of comics in the 1930s. Mazur’s drawings are effective at capturing the poverty of Depression-era New York, while Weiner, who wrote the narrative, details the considerable drive Eisner needed to pull himself up.

Interestingly, though the biography is about Eisner’s work, we don’t see examples of his drawings; the duo are less concerned with the specifics of Eisner’s art than with the life that made it possible and the stories he told.

During the first half of the 1930s, Eisner eked out a living as a writer-cartoonist for the New York Journal-American, a now-defunct New York City daily that was the first American newspaper to publish a daily comic strip. He also found work as a freelance illustrator for various pulp magazines. One such publication was the short-lived Wow!, which lasted just four issues, but whose editor — Jerry Iger, now perhaps overshadowed in popular memory by his grand-nephew Bob, CEO of the Disney corporation — took a particular liking to Eisner’s work.

The two formed Eisner & Iger in 1936, which established itself as the most important comic book packager of its time. Several artists who would eventually rank among America’s most influential passed through the business’ one-room office on East 41st Street — including, most notably, Jack Kirby (Jacob Kurtzberg, by birth), who went on to create many of the Marvel Comics characters that are today Hollywood staples.

Eisner, though, sold his share of the firm to Iger in 1939, having signed an agreement with a Sunday newspaper to draw comics. The Spirit, an Eisner character that first appeared in the Des Moises Register in June 1940, would morph into a regular 16-page Sunday comic strip supplement known colloquially as “The Spirit Section.” At its height, it featured in 20 Sunday newspapers and had a circulation of more than five million copies.

The Spirit was the first truly highbrow comic strip, and Eisner’s most enduring creation. (“It made a big impact on me,” said Mazur.) The domino mask-wearing private investigator possessed no superpowers, relying on his wit and physical prowess alone. In many ways, he was a vehicle for Eisner to experiment with genre and tone, exploring the kind of thorny moral terrain that conventional superhero comics wouldn’t even gesture at.

P’Gell of Paris, for example, a supporting character in The Spirit Section, was a none-too-subtle allusion to the Parisian district of Pigalle, which, during World War II was a red light district popular among U.S. servicemen. Her dark, seductive demeanor was Eisner’s tribute to the femme fatales of the noir films that dominated 1950s cinema, while her success in getting under the Spirit’s skin — Eisner’s protagonist was usually unflappable — upended the gender dynamics of 1950s superhero comics.

In time, The Spirit would provide a blueprint of sorts for a later generation of graphic novelists. In its depth and ambition, however, it was wholly out of step with the so-called Marvel Boom of the 1950s and ‘60s.

“He was too far ahead of his time,” Mazur said. “That’s why he left.”

The graphic novel arrives

After the United States entered WWII in 1941, Eisner spent four years in the Pentagon designing instructional comics for military magazines. He enjoyed the relative dependability of the work, Mazur told me. He had also grown tired of the homogeneity of superhero comics, so what began as a wartime position grew into a peacetime business.

For the better part of three decades, Eisner supplied the military and other companies with educational comics. His most frequent publication was Preventive Maintenance Monthly, which colorfully detailed ways to guard against equipment mishaps. (Its protagonist was G.I. Joe Dope, a chronically wayward infantryman.)

Two things revived Eisner’s interest in the comics industry. First, the emergence of a new, and decidedly Eisner-esque, approach to comics. Eisner attended various comics conventions in the early 1970s, where he was surprised by the variety of offerings and, on occasion, feted as a returning hero.

“Guys in their 20s were running up to him, saying, ‘Oh, Will Eisner! The Spirit is so great!’” Mazur said. “For a guy who’d always wanted to be creative, what was happening then was just too appealing to not want to be part of.”

The second was less heartening: The death of Eisner’s 16-year-old daughter Alice, from leukemia, in 1970.

The result was Eisner’s profoundly personal 1978 book, A Contract with God: and Other Tenement Stories, about life in an impoverished Jewish tenement in New York City; the titular story described a religious man giving up his faith after his young daughter dies.

Eisner presented Contract with God to publishers as a “graphic novel,” the first known use of the term. Though comics had already outgrown their superhero origins, Eisner wanted to make this difference obvious for audiences.

Contract with God ushered in the era of the graphic novel as a longer, more literary endeavor, distinct from comics; Eisner would write no fewer than 20 over the next 30 years. Many explored Jewish themes — Fagin the Jew, expanding the backstory of the Charles Dickens character, is an obvious example — while others were artistic takes on classic novels like Moby Dick.

Though Mazur’s more expressive drawing style is nothing like the rigid, straight-edged approach Eisner favored, it is nonetheless superb at conveying Eisner’s evolution. The result is warm and inviting, or, as one reviewer put it, a haimish biography, a term Eisner would have doubtless recognised.

It’s a worthy tribute to a man who, first with The Spirit, and later with Contract with God, laid the foundation for Spiegelman’s Pulitzer win.

“Eisner saw what no one else saw,” Weiner said. “He saw that there was no limit to how this form could be used,” Mazur added.

The post A legendary graphic novelist gets the (bio)graphic novel treatment appeared first on The Forward.

My grandfather, Reuven Helman, was born in Palestine in 1927. He fought for Israel’s independence in 1948, and competed in the international Maccabiah Olympics. He and my grandmother, Leah, raised their children, including my mother, in the town of Kfar Chabad outside Tel Aviv. I have visited Israel many times. I studied at a rabbinical school in Jerusalem. Zionism is a deeply meaningful part of my story.

But I was born in the United States, live in the United States, and will always claim it as home. Which is why I’m so dismayed to see ardent Zionists insisting that all Jews belong in Israel — unconsciously echoing a call that’s becoming increasingly popular among antisemites, too.

Antisemites intend the statement that Jews belong in Israel as a threat. Zionists intend it as a calling. Either way, they deny the central truth that Jews built lives across a dispersed world, and that dispersal helped us survive.

Influencers like tech marketer and Israel advocate Hillel Fuld have repeatedly urged American Jews to migrate to Israel, arguing that there are “millions of people around the world who want to see a Holocaust 2.0,” making security in the diaspora precarious. After the recent Bondi Beach massacre in Sydney, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar said that Jews in Western countries should immigrate to Israel.

But Judaism did not endure because we concentrated in one place. We endured because our identity, values, and Torah are portable. Because we dispersed, no single empire could target every Jew at once. No single campaign could end us. Diaspora didn’t just happen to us. It preserved us.

After the Holocaust, some survivors rebuilt in Israel, but many others chose instead to make new lives in the U.S., and in other democratic countries that opened their doors. Their choice reflected the reality that Jews need multiple safe havens — one of the lessons of the Shoah itself. (Think of the many Jewish Holocaust refugees rejected by every country to which they turned, in desperation, for aid.) As a people, we thrive when we are members of societies that protect minorities.

Antisemites would have our American society, instead, treat minorities as permanent outsiders. After his recent friendly interview with the right-wing podcaster Tucker Carlson, the white nationalist Nick Fuentes said Jews who don’t accept his “America First” vision should “get the f*** out of America and go to Israel.” His message: You don’t belong here.

What’s the reason for this odd alignment in rhetoric? Why would some impassioned advocates for Israel and open antagonists of Jews appear, when it comes to this one point, to agree?

The reality is, of course, that they don’t.

The Zionist voices in this equation are telling Jews to retreat, rather than work toward helping their countries — whether the U.S., Australia, or any of the other nations to experience contemporary upswings in antisemitism — to restore values of pluralism and equality. And the antisemitic voices are saying, simply, that they want fewer Jews in their countries.

I refuse to accept either proposal. I cannot speak for all diaspora Jews. But I don’t want to retreat. Instead, I want my country, the U.S., to enforce its own ideals and protect minorities, because that is what a free country does.

The Torah warns that Jews may be scattered “among the nations,” yet it insists that even “in the land of their enemies” God will not cast the Israelites away. Jeremiah tells Jews exiled to Babylon not to flee, but rather to build homes, plant, raise families and “seek the peace of the city,” because our welfare intertwines with its welfare. Joseph sustains his family and feeds nations from inside Egypt, and Esther saves Jews inside Persia.

These many biblical endorsements of a diasporic Jewry don’t deny the Jewish connection to the land of Israel. Instead, they refute the idea that the only answer to antisemitism is for Jews to disappear when it crops up.

We survive by carrying Torah into the world, speaking truth where we stand, and spreading light precisely where darkness tries to push us out. And the surest way to do that is to build Jewish traditions sturdy enough to outlast any moment and thrive in any place. The late Rabbi Jonathan Sachs said it best: “To defend a country, you need an army. But to defend a civilisation, you need schools.”

After all, while Israel offers Jews dignity and sovereignty, it does not function as a simple refuge from antisemitism. Palestinian terrorists murdered my cousin, Meir Tamari, two years ago, leaving his wife a widow and his two small children fatherless. Just this weekend, two Jews in Israel were murdered in a car ramming terrorist attack. In our current reality, Jews face real danger in Israel precisely because it sits at the center of conflict and terror. That isn’t an argument against Israel, but it shows that moving there does not automatically solve Jewish vulnerability.

So I hold two commitments at once. I support Israel’s right to exist and defend itself. I also support Jews returning to their ancestral homeland so long as that choice is driven by meaning and longing. But I reject the idea that Jews should leave the U.S. in fear of growing antisemitism at home. Our country needs Jews who stay visible, who speak truth and who bring light into public life, and above all, Jews who teach their children that belonging is not something you beg for. It is something you live.

The post When Jews face violence, we’re told to move to Israel. Does that really make us stronger? appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) — Jews around the world were already reeling after nearly two years of war and death in Gaza and the grim confirmation that many hostages hadn’t survived the Oct. 7 attacks or two years of captivity. Then came news of the shootings in Sydney, Australia, where 15 people were gunned down at a celebration of Hanukkah.

Despite its grief, the Jewish world also took time to celebrate the lives lived by a constellation of figures who made lasting contributions to film, architecture, politics and Jewish scholarship and letters.

In chronological order, here are obituaries of 18 notable Jews who died in 2025.

Marion Wiesel

Marion Wiesel (born Mary Renate Erster), a Holocaust survivor and humanitarian, married the writer and human rights activist Elie Wiesel in 1969, and was the translator of many of his award winning and influential books on the Holocaust, including the final edition of “Night.” Following Wiesel’s 1986 Nobel Prize win, the couple founded the Beit Tzipora Centers in Israel, an educational program for Ethiopian-Israeli youth, which Marion Wiesel went on to lead for a number of years. “In the alignment of stars that helped make Wiesel the international icon he became, his marriage to Marion was among the most significant,” wrote Joseph Berger in his 2023 biography “Elie Wiesel: Confronting the Silence.” She died on Feb. 2 at 94.

Jacqueline van Maarsen

In 1942, Anne Frank immortalized her friendship with Jacqueline van Maarsen, writing that she “is now my best friend.” While the pair were forced apart during the war, never to be reunited, van Maarsen went on to write multiple books about Frank, including 2008’s “My Name is Anne, She Said, Anne Frank.” In 1986, van Maarsen also began lecturing on the Holocaust and antisemitism at schools. “In her books and during school visits, Jacqueline spoke not only about her friendship with Anne but also about the dangers of anti-Semitism and racism, and where they can lead,” the Anne Frank House said of van Maarsen. She died on Feb. 13 at age 96.

Leonard Lauder

Leonard Lauder built his Jewish family’s business, The Estée Lauder Companies, into a cosmetics empire, serving as its president from 1972 to 1995 and as CEO from 1982 through 1999. But beyond his entrepreneurial prowess, Lauder also was a major patron of the arts, at one point donating a collection of paintings to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York valued at more than $1 billion. “The number of lives he touched and positively impacted across all his endeavors is immeasurable,” his younger brother, Ronald, said. “His passion and generosity have inspired us all, and there are no words to express how much he will be missed.” He died on June 14 at 92.

David Schaecter

After losing 105 relatives during the Holocaust, David Schaecter went on to spend his life pushing for restitution, Holocaust education and vigilance against antisemitism. In 1989, Schaecter founded the Holocaust Memorial in Miami Beach and in 2000 created the Holocaust Survivors’ Foundation USA, which often took a more aggressive stance than other Jewish organizations in pursuing restitution of goods looted during the Holocaust. “I am here to remind everyone that there are still thousands of survivors alive today who are in desperate need, and who cannot be forgotten,” Schaecter told the Senate Special Committee on Aging on April 30. He died on Sept. 4 at 96.

Ruth Posner

After Ruth Posner escaped the Warsaw Ghetto along with her aunt as a child, she went on to flee to the United Kingdom at 16 where she began an illustrious career as an actress and dancer. She was a founding member of the London Contemporary Dance Company and worked for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and also starred in films including “Leon the Pig Farmer” and “Love Hurts.” In 2022, she was awarded a British Empire Medal for her commitment to Holocaust education. She died on Sept. 21 at 96.

Aron Bell

Aron Bell was only 11 or 12 when he and his older brothers formed the famed Bielski partisans, a group that saved more than 1,200 Jews from the Nazis during the Holocaust. The brothers’ tale of defiance also inspired several adaptations of their story, including the books “The Bielski Brothers” by Peter Duffy and “Defiance: The Bielski Partisans” by Nechama Tec, which was later made into the 2008 film “Defiance” with actor George MacKay portraying Bell. “If you were in the company of those three brothers, you felt like you had a whole army behind you, you were fearless,” said Bell in his 1996 testimony to the USC Shoah Foundation. He died on Sept. 22 at 98 at his home in Palm Beach, Florida.

Katherine Janus Kahn

Katherine Janus Kahn’s vibrant watercolor illustrations in Jewish children’s books helped shape the imaginations of generations of Jewish children. Beginning with her paper-cut illustrations for “The Family Haggadah,” which became a bestseller when it was published in 1987, Janus Kahn later went on to illustrate more than 50 books for Kar-Ben, a publishing house for Jewish children’s books. Among her work for Kar-Ben was the “Sammy Spider” franchise, which includes more than two dozen books about Jewish holidays, prayers and practices. ““We are profoundly grateful for her legacy, and for the countless stories and memories she leaves behind,” said Kar-Ben. She died on Oct. 6 at age 83.

Rabbi Moshe Hauer

Rabbi Moshe Hauer, the executive vice president of the Orthodox Union since 2020, was widely respected across denominations and was considered an exemplar of Modern Orthodoxy’s historical blend of religious and secular expertise. In 2023, he testified about antisemitism on college campuses at a hearing of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, which prompted several investigations. “Rabbi Hauer was a true talmid chacham, a master teacher and communicator, the voice of Torah to the Orthodox community and the voice of Orthodoxy to the world,” the Orthodox Union said after his death. He died on Oct. 14 at 60.

Susan Stamberg

When Susan Stamberg first got behind the microphone at the newly minted National Public Radio in 1972, some board members feared she was “too New York” for Midwest audiences. But Stamberg nevertheless became one of the station’s “founding mothers,” helping to craft its intimate, often humorous and consistently eclectic voice. Stamberg was the co-anchor of “All Things Considered” for 14 years, before pivoting to cultural stories. “I think all of that is very Jewish, the telling of stories, but also the seeking of opinions and also being open to the range of opinions that are out there,” Stamberg told the Jewish Women’s Archive in 2011. She died on Oct. 16 at 87.

Tova Ben-Dov

Tova Ben-Dov devoted six decades of her life to the Women’s International Zionist Organization, serving as the president of World WIZO from 2012 to 2016. She also served as the vice president of the World Jewish Congress, a member of the executive committee of the Jewish Agency for Israel and a member of the International Council of Women according to JNS.“For 60 years, Tova devoted her heart and soul to WIZO—a lifetime of love, leadership and giving to women, children and families in Israel,” said World WIZO chairperson Anita Friedman. She died on Oct. 17 at 88 in Tel Aviv.

Arthur Waskow

Rabbi Arthur Waskow first became one of the most notable progressive rabbinic voices in 1969 when he created the “Freedom Seder,” a version of the Passover Haggadah that blended contemporary liberation struggles with the ancient passover story. Throughout his career, Waskow authored more than two dozen books that offered a Jewish perspective on civil rights, economic injustice, nuclear arms control and climate change. He was arrested more than two dozen times at protests. He died on Oct. 20 at 92.

Mark Mellman

At the height of his illustrious career as a pollster and political consultant, Mark Mellman was the go-to pollster for Democrats as well as a wide variety of firms and interests, including the NBA’s Washington Wizards, United Airlines and both Pepsi and Coca-Cola. In 2019, he founded the Democratic Majority for Israel, a group he said was formed to “strengthen the pro-Israel tradition of the Democratic Party, fight for Democratic values and work within the progressive movement to advance policies that ensure a strong U.S.-Israel relationship.” He died on Nov. 21 at 70.

Carrie Soloway

Carrie Soloway, a Jewish psychiatrist in Chicago, came out as a transgender woman at 70-years-old, a milestone that formed the basis for her children’s hit Amazon TV series “Transparent.” After the show’s 2014 premiere, Soloway visited the White House under then-President Barack Obama and became friends with trans elected officials, while “Transparent” blazed a path for modern LGBTQ Jews exploring their identity. “She loved the show and us and the character, but sometimes she wasn’t in the mood to be everyone’s favorite trailblazer,” her son, Joey, said after her death. She died on Nov. 21 at the age of 88.

Tom Stoppard

Tom Stoppard was in his 80s and had already won four Tony Awards during his prolific career as a playwright and screenwriter when he finished “Leopoldstadt,” which portrayed a Jewish family dealing with rising antisemitism in Vienna, and a young writer, much like him, who only earned of his Jewish forebears as an adult. His final work won the Tony for best play after it opened on Broadway in 2022. Stoppard’s other era-defining plays include “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead” (1968), “Travesties” (1974), “The Real Thing” (1986) and “The Coast of Utopia” (2007). “I just live my life and let the Jewishness take care of itself,” Stoppard told the New York Times Magazine in 2022. He died Nov. 29 at 88.

Frank Gehry

Frank Gehry, born Ephraim Owen Goldberg, was one of the most influential talents in the history of modernist architecture. Among his most acclaimed works, which feature his signature sculptural style, are the Bilbao Guggenheim, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris, DZ Bank Building in Berlin and oversized fish sculptures he said were inspired by the carp his grandmother would turn into gefilte fish. In 1989, Gehry won the prestigious Pritzker Prize, considered one of the top awards in the field of architecture, and in 1999 won the Gold Medal from the American Institute of Architects. While Gehry identified as an atheist throughout his adult life, he told the Jewish Journal that “there’s a curiosity built into the [Jewish] culture” that influenced his career. He died on Dec. 5 at 96.

Rabbi Eliezer Diamond

Rabbi Eliezer Diamond taught at the Jewish Theological Seminary for over three decades, where he also published several texts on the Talmud and left an indelible mark on generations of rabbis and Jewish scholars. In 2003, he published “Holy Men and Hunger Artists: Fasting and Asceticism in Rabbinic Culture.” “Wherever I am, God is there too. I hope that I will return home soon,” wrote Diamond in his last post on Facebook, where he detailed his long struggle with cancer. He died on Dec. 11 at 73.

Rob Reiner

Rob Reiner, a beloved Jewish film director, actor and liberal activist, left his mark on modern American comedy and drama with his generation-defining classics from the 1980s and 1990s, including “When Harry Met Sally…,” “The Princess Bride,” “Stand By Me,” “A Few Good Men” and “This Is Spinal Tap.” The son of legendary Jewish comedian Carl Reiner, he also starred in the ’70s sitcom “All in the Family” and became a prominent Democratic Party activist later in life. Reiner, 78, and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, 70, were found dead in their California home on Dec. 14. The couple’s son, Nick, has been charged in connection to their killing. Days after his death, Reiner gave a pre-recorded address at a virtual Holocaust survivor event where he told attendees, “If ever we needed to be resilient, it’s now.”

Norman Podhoretz

Norman Podhoretz was 30 when he was appointed to run the American Jewish Committee’s thought journal Commentary. Over his career, he charted a path from Jewish liberal to pro-Israel neoconservative, serving as the godfather to a movement that long dominated late- and post-Cold War conservative politics. He made waves in 2016 for endorsing Donald Trump in his first run for president. “He was a man of great wit and a man of deep wisdom and he lived an astonishing and uniquely American life,” his son, John Podhoretz, wrote in a remembrance for the magazine announcing his father’s death. “And he bound himself fast to his people, his heritage, and his history.” He died on Dec. 16 at 95.

As the year concludes, the New York Jewish Week also remembers 13 Jewish New Yorkers who died in 2025. Among them are people who left an indelible mark on New York City, including rabbis, musicians, writers, activists and a supercentenarian.

Peter Yarrow 

As one-third of the American folk band Peter, Paul and Mary, the Jewish musician and progressive activist Peter Yarrow was one of the writers of the group’s hit song “Puff the Magic Dragon” and their Hanukkah hit “Light One Candle,” which Yarrow said he wrote to express his opposition to Israel’s 1982 war in Lebanon. The band performed “Light One Candle” in Jerusalem in 1983 to a positive response.

Yarrow died on Jan. 7 at 86.

Rose Girone

A rare supercentenarian, Rose Girone was thought to be the world’s oldest living Holocaust survivor, turning 113 years old in January. As a young mother during the Holocaust, Girone was able to rescue her husband from the Buchenwald concentration camp, and the small family of three sought refuge in Shanghai, where they survived the war and Girone built a business selling her handmade clothing. In New York, she taught knitting and also ran a knitting shop in Forest Hills. She later divorced and remarried. Even after she closed her shop, she continued knitting until the end of her life.

Girone died on Feb. 24.

Michelle Trachtenberg

Michelle Trachtenberg was a child and teen star known for her roles in “Harriet the Spy,” “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “17 Again,” “Ice Princess,” and “Gossip Girl.” Born in New York City and raised in Brooklyn, Trachtenberg was the daughter of Jewish immigrants: Her mother was from the former Soviet Union, and her father was from Germany. In 2022 and 2023, she reprised her “Gossip Girl” role in the series reboot.

Trachtenberg died Feb. 26 at age 39 from complications related to diabetes.

Max Frankel 

The former executive editor of The New York Times fled the Nazis as a child, starting at the paper at  just 19 years old as a Columbia University campus correspondent. In his 40-plus-year career at The Times, he wrote the memo that convinced the paper’s lawyers that it should cover the Pentagon Papers — the leaked documents that revealed how the government deceived the public about the scope of the U.S. war in Vietnam. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for his coverage of President Richard Nixon’s visit to China. In 2001, after his retirement, Frankel published an article in The New York Times acknowledging that before and after World War II, the publication had a policy of “reluctance to highlight the systematic slaughter of Jews.”

Frankel died on March 23 at age 94.

Ted Comet 

A Jewish communal leader and longtime Upper West Sider, Comet founded New York’s Celebrate Israel Parade (originally the Salute to Israel Parade). In the 1960s, he helped organize some of the first large demonstrations in support of Soviet Jewry. He was also a founder of the annual Israel Folk Dance Festival. Following his wife Shoshana’s death in 2012, he conducted tours of the tapestries she made telling the story of the trauma she endured as a teenager fleeing Belgium during World War II and in the years beyond. 

Comet died at age 100 on March 19. 

Helena Weinstock Weinrauch

Helena Weinstock Weinrauch survived a 500-mile death march to Bergen-Belsen and eventually found her way to New York. After her husband of 56 years, Joe Weinrauch, died in 2006, she discovered, at 88, the solace and  joy of ballroom dancing. Her story of survival and resilience was the subject of a 2015 documentary, “Fascination: Helena’s Story.” 

Weinrauch died at her home on the Upper West Side on May 25, one week shy of her 101st birthday.

Tom Lehrer

The New York-born mathematician and satirist Tom Lehrer enrolled at Harvard University at just 15 years old. Though his post-college music career was relatively brief, he gained a cult following for musical parodies like “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park” and “The Vatican Rag.” Lehrer described his family’s relationship to Judaism as “more to do with the delicatessen than the synagogue.” But his iconic song “(I’m Spending) Hanukkah in Santa Monica” became what he called “a sort of answer to ‘White Christmas.’”

Lehrer died Jul. 25 at the age of 97.

Wesley LePatner

One of the highest-ranking women at Blackstone and a mother of two young children, Wesley LePatner was an alumna of Yale University, a board member for UJA-Federation of New York and an active member of various Jewish communities in New York and Massachusetts. On July 29, a gunman opened fire at her office building, 345 Park Ave., killing three people including LePatner. “She was the most loving wife, mother, daughter, sister and relative, who enriched our lives in every way imaginable,” her family said in a statement.

LePatner died Jul. 29 at the age of 43.

Julia Hyman

Julia Hyman was also a victim of the shooting at 345 Park Ave. A Manhattan native, Cornell graduate and an associate at Rudin Management, Julia Hyman was a fan of the United States women’s soccer team and Jewish singer-songwriter Gracie Abrams, her friends and family recalled at a memorial service in July.

Hyman died July 29 at the age of 27.

Saul Zabar

The son of the immigrant Jewish founders of the iconic Upper West Side grocery store and delicatessen Zabar’s, Saul Zabar served as the president and principal owner of the “food emporium” for more than seven decades. Zabar was known for his hands-on approach, often working behind the fish counter — the gem of his family’s market. Zabar’s is known for serving traditional Ashkenazi foods like bagels, babka, deli meats, fish salads, pickles and rugelach. On an average week, Zabar’s sells 2,000 pounds of smoked fish and 8,000 pounds of coffee each week to about 40,000 customers, according to The New York Times.

Zabar died Oct. 7 at 97.

Rabbi Alvin Kass

The longest-serving NYPD chaplain, Rabbi Alvin Kass served New York’s police for 60 years. His career included managing the NYPD’s 9/11 response, and in the days following the terror attack, hosting Rosh Hashanah services at LaGuardia Airport for first responders. He attended the funerals of every NYPD officer who was killed on 9/11, including two who were Jewish. Kass was the third Jewish chaplain to work for the NYPD. In 1981, he attempted to disarm a Jewish hostage-taker by bribing him with a pastrami sandwich from Carnegie Deli. 

Mayer Moskowitz

The early life of Rabbi Mayer Moskowitz, longtime educator at the Upper East Side’s Ramaz School and Camp Massad in the Poconos, was forever altered by the Holocaust.

Born in Czernowitz in what was then Romania and today Ukraine, Moskowitz watched the Gestapo shoot and kill his father, a 30-year-old Hasidic rabbi, in their synagogue. In the following years, he would be deported to a ghetto, separated from his mother and sister, escape the ghetto, make a life for himself in Israel, and learn his mother and sister had both survived the war, leaving his new life in Israel behind to join his mother in New York City, where he became a prominent teacher of thousands of students, including Israeli president Isaac Herzog. Moskowitz recounted his life story in his autobiography, “A Memoir of Sanctity.”

Moskowitz died Nov. 11 at 98 years old.

Helen Nash

Starting with “Kosher Cuisine” in 1984, philanthropist Helen Nash wrote cookbooks that proved that kosher cooking “could be as varied, elegant and exciting as one wished to make it,” as she put it. A refugee from Poland, she married Jack Nash, a pioneer in hedge funds, and together they supported numerous Jewish organizations in New York City, including UJA-Federation of New York, Mount Sinai Medical Center, the Israel Museum, Shaare Zedek Medical Center and Yeshiva University.

Nash died on Dec. 8 at the age of 89.

The post 18 notable Jews who died in 2025 appeared first on The Forward.