Roundup of recent Jewish obituaries, tributes, history, news

Reminiscences

Remembering my father, Michael H. Abbey, 27 years later

Remembering Harvey Milk, gay activist, assassin’s victim

Obituaries

Karen Elizabeth Margalit, 29, U.S., Israel, Sept. 26

Jewish obituaries, tributes, history, news this week

Obituaries

Samuel Steinfeld, 101, U.S., lawyer, state chief justice, Nov. 22

Sarit Weiss, 23, Israel, possible alcohol overdose, Nov. 23

Claire Flom, 82, U.S., philanthropist, Nov. 24

Herb Strauss, 78, U.S., ad exec, cantor, fund-raiser, Nov. 25

Mel Tolkin, 94, U.S., pioneering TV comedy writer, Nov. 26

Samuel Steinfeld, 101, U.S., lawyer, state chief justice, Nov. 22

Samuel Steinfeld, 101, a former chief justice of Kentucky’s highest court, died Nov. 22, 2007.

“My dad was dedicated to anything that he went into,” whether it was the law, politics, civic leadership or his family, his son, James Steinfeld, told the Louisville Courier-Journal. “He loved the law, I can tell you that.”

Steinfeld was elected to the Kentucky Court of Appeals, then Kentucky’s highest court, in 1966.

Jewish obituaries this week on In My Heart

Jewish obituaries roundup 2

Paul Wasserman, 73, U.S., celebrity publicist, Nov. 18

Ido Zoldan, 29, Israel, contractor, terror victim, Nov. 19

Norman Mailer, 84, U.S. author, Nov. 10

The words have not stopped flowing since author Norman Mailer, 84, died November 10, 2007, of renal failure. He has been called a Jewish pugilist, a towering writer with a matching ego, and nothing if not ambitious.

We call him the greatest Jewish-American novelist who never wrote about Jewish subjects. It was Mailer’s ambition to get away from his upbringing as a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn that led him to a life of writing about arts and sports giants like Marilyn Monroe and Muhammad Ali, and murderers and tyrants like Gary Gilmore and Adolph Hitler, rather than subjects closer to his own origins, as his contemporaries Philip Roth and Bernard Malamud have done.

We found two pieces that captured some of Mailer’s Jewish essence, as well as all the other facets of his life.

Mailer and his work was influenced by controversial psychiatrist and sex researcher, Wilhelm Reich, whose 50th yahrzeit passed this month.