JTA — Every 12 months brings the chance to have fun the accomplishments of well-known Jewish icons in every field and to mourn those we have now lost.
Listed here are 18 Jews who died in 2022 and who leave outsized legacies in politics, the humanities, sports, and all the things in between.
Madeleine Albright
The “first woman secretary of state in the USA” label will all the time follow Madeleine Albright, especially due to her success in such a male-dominated field of policy.
But no matter her gender, Albright’s moves as an element of Bill Clinton’s administration left an enduring mark on US peacekeeping efforts around the globe. Crucial to her worldview was her refugee story, which she didn’t fully grasp until after her time within the limelight.
Her parents were Czech immigrants who had converted from Judaism to Catholicism after which Episcopalianism to avoid persecution before fleeing Europe. Albright didn’t prefer to speak about her parents’ selection to maintain her in the dead of night, but when she did, it was within the voice of a blunt-edged diplomat who understood how the twentieth century robbed some people of agency, and the way they did what they’d to do to reclaim it.
“I can’t query their motivation. I can’t,” she told The Washington Post in 1997.
Albright died on March 23 in Washington, DC, at 84.
Melissa Bank
Melissa Bank published just two books in her profession, but each sets of short stories were bestsellers that explored the lives of Jewish women and still resonate with young readers many years later.
Her 1999 debut, “The Girls’ Guide To Hunting And Fishing,” held a spot on The Recent York Times’ bestseller list for months.
The comic misadventures of her two books’ Jewish protagonists often intersected with Jewish life: In “Wonder Spot,” Sophie Applebaum plays hooky from Hebrew class, considers taking a job with a Jewish newspaper, and contends with a cousin’s bat mitzvah and a sister-in-law’s passive-aggressive attempts to impose kosher rules on her home.
Bank died of lung cancer at 61 in August.
Isaac Berger
Setting Moses and the Maccabees aside, it’s not a stretch to call Isaac Berger one in every of the strongest Jews ever.
Generally known as “Ike,” Berger won three Olympic medals, two World Championships and eight US national championships in weightlifting during a dominant stretch within the Fifties and 60s.
On the 1957 Maccabiah Games, Berger was the primary athlete to interrupt a world record in any sport in Israel. His gold medal was presented by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, who called Berger the “gibor Yehudi,” or “mighty Jew.”
Berger was inducted into the US Weightlifting Hall of Fame in 1965 and the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in 1980.
Berger died in June at 85.
Peter Bogdanovich
Peter Bogdanovich was an Oscar-nominated movie director and actor whose movies, ego and off-camera exploits encapsulated the personality-driven excesses of Seventies Hollywood filmmaking.
He got his start making low-budget fare for shlock pioneer Roger Corman, then broke into the large leagues in 1971 with “The Last Picture Show,” a coming-of-age drama set in small-town Texas starring Jeff Bridges and Cybill Shepherd (who became the director’s partner after he began an affair together with her during filming).
“The Last Picture Show” became a critical and industrial smash, scoring Bogdanovich Oscar nominations for best director and best-adapted screenplay, and turned its 32-year-old director right into a wunderkind whom the press often in comparison with his idol, Orson Welles.
Bogdanovich’s 1972 follow-up “What’s Up, Doc?” was also a success, and as a bonus, the screwball comedy helped make a Jewish sex symbol out of star Barbra Streisand.
Though Bogdanovich rarely discussed his religious background in interviews, he was pleased with his father’s role in rescuing his Jewish mother from Europe.
“He was a extremely great painter and really highly praised in the previous Yugoslavia,” Bogdanovich said of his father Borislav in a 2019 interview with Recent York magazine, “but he gave all that up to avoid wasting my mother and her family because they were Jewish. He wasn’t, but they were.”
Bogdanovich died on January 6 in Los Angeles at 82.
James Caan
One in every of the leading movie stars of the Seventies, James Caan once said he was twice honored as Recent York City’s “Italian of the Yr.”
It made sense, in a way: his fans were used to seeing him in tough guy roles, including one in arguably essentially the most famous Italian gangster flick of all time, “The Godfather.”
But Caan was born to German-Jewish immigrants in Queens, where his father was a kosher butcher, before starring in movies similar to “Brian’s Song,” “The Gambler,” and, later in his profession, Will Ferrell’s hit comedy “Elf.”
His onscreen (and offscreen) persona did much to interrupt stereotypes about weak, wimpy Jewish men.
“He’s in his own lane, Jew-wise,” Seth Rogen wrote in a 2021 memoir, calling Caan an unusually “scary Jew.”
Caan died on July 6 in Los Angeles at 82.
Elana Dykewomon
Despite never earning mainstream industrial success, Elana Dykewomon was a pioneer on the earth of lesbian-themed fiction.
“Beyond the Pale,” her award-winning 1997 novel, traced the intertwined stories of Jewish lesbians from Kishinev, Moldova, to the Lower East Side, in a saga that included each Russian pogroms and the deadly Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.
“It may well’t be that we’re the primary generation of Jewish lesbian activists on the planet,” Dykewoman said on the time. “So a part of what the novel is about is looking for our ancestors and ancestral community as Jewish lesbians.”
Born Elana Nachman in Recent York City in 1949, Dykewomon modified her name after the publication of her first novel, “Riverfinger Women,” in 1974. She desired to distance herself from the Nachman line of rabbis from whom she descended, she told J. The Jewish News of Northern California, in 1997.
She adopted Dykewoman, then Dykewomon, to display her allegiance to the lesbian community — but later regretted not using her name to say her Jewish identity, too. “If I needed to do all of it once more, I may need chosen Dykestein or Dykeberg,” she said on the time.
Though she rejected religion after becoming a radical feminist, she said, she studied Yiddish, Torah and Talmud while writing “Beyond the Pale”; often wrote on Jewish themes; and often included Jewish characters in her work. The 2009 novel “Risk,” for instance, featured a Jewish lesbian who lives in Oakland and makes a living tutoring highschool students.
Dykewomon died in August at 72 from cancer.
Hanna Pick-Goslar
Hannah Pick-Goslar appears multiple times in Anne Frank’s iconic diary — as each an in depth friend and a premonition of the Holocaust horrors to come back for Frank’s family.
As Anne wrote after having a nightmare about her friend: “[Her] eyes were very big and she or he looked so sadly and reproachfully at me that I could read in her eyes, ‘Oh, Anne, why have you ever deserted me? Help, oh, help me, rescue me from this hell!’”
Their final meeting could be at a fence within the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
After recuperating from her liberation from the camp within the Netherlands after which later in Switzerland together with her aunt and uncle, Pick-Goslar emigrated in 1947 to Israel, where she became a pediatric nurse and Holocaust speaker.
Her friendship with Frank was the topic of a book, “Memories of Anne Frank: Reflections of a Childhood Friend,” and a Dutch film, “My Best Friend Anne Frank” (2021).
Pick-Goslar died in Jerusalem on October 28 at 93.
Gilbert Gottfried
For a comic book known for his grating, nasally voice and intensely R-rated jokes, Gilbert Gottfried was a surprisingly sweet and loving Jewish dad who grew more in contact along with his Jewishness after marrying his wife in 2007.
The person often known as the Aflac duck voice got himself nearly canceled greater than once: In 1991, Fox apologized after Gottfried, hosting the Emmy awards, kept joking about fellow comic Pee-wee Herman’s arrest for masturbating in an adult movie show.
He continued to attain gigs in movies, on talk radio (often with Howard Stern), on sketch shows and sitcoms, and as a voice on cartoons.
He was the funny animal sidekick, Iago the parrot, in Disney’s “Aladdin.” Then he famously told perhaps the primary joke concerning the September 11, 2001 attacks, just a number of days after terrorists piloted airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
“I’ve all the time said tragedy and comedy are roommates,” Gottfried told Vulture in 2019.
Gottfried died February 28 at 67 in Recent York from complications related to myotonic dystrophy, a rare condition.
Estelle Harris
Born Estelle Nussbaum, Harris was immortalized on TV as Estelle — Estelle Costanza, to be exact — the all the time shrill and often apoplectic mother to George Costanza, on the sitcom “Seinfeld” from 1992 until the show’s finale in 1998.
Based on Deadline, it was kismet: the character was named Estelle before Harris landed the part.
Harris was born in Recent York City in 1928 where her parents, Jews of Polish descent, owned a candy store in Manhattan.
When Harris was 7 years old, the family moved to Tarentum, Pennsylvania, where Harris suffered from antisemitic bullying in school. She quickly to turning to the theater, aided by elocution lessons, and located her calling.
Though Harris went on to a prolific profession recording voiceovers for commercials and playing minor characters in movies and TV shows, she became so identified together with her “Seinfeld” role that fans often stopped her on the road to inform her she reminded them of their very own moms.
Jason Alexander, who played her character’s son George on “Seinfeld,” remembered his “television mama” in a tweet after her death. “One in every of my favorite people has passed – my television mama, Estelle Harris. The enjoyment of fidgeting with her and relishing her glorious laughter was a treat. I like you, Estelle,” he wrote.
Harris died in April at 93.
Chaim Kanievsky
For probably the most revered Torah scholars on Earth, no less than for a lot of ultra-Orthodox Jews, Chaim Kanievsky had surprisingly small handwriting.
People would write to him from around the globe with questions on postcards, and he would often give “quite short answers,” a professor told JTA. “But from all his answers there are lots of books,” she added.
After the 2017 death of Rabbi Aharon Leib Shteinman, Kanievsky became the preeminent leader of Israel’s non-Hasidic Haredi community, an authority on matters of Jewish law.
He was an isolated figure who kept to himself and studied Jewish texts in town of Bnei Brak, but he became more vocal on political topics late in life.
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Kanievsky first lobbied for yeshivas to remain open, but once vaccines became available, he bucked the opinions of many in his community and pushed Jews to get vaccinated — earning some death threats in the method.
Kanievsky died at 94 in Bnei Brak in March.
Aline Kominsky-Crumb
In one in every of her autobiographical comics, Aline Kominsky-Crumb wrote about seeing one Jewish girl after one other coming into highschool on Long Island after cosmetic surgery.
“Me ‘n’ my friends developed a ‘big nose pride,’” she wrote, and one in every of the characters says, “I couldn’t stand to appear to be a carbon copy!”
Working together with her husband Robert Crumb, also a number one underground comics artist, after which on her own, Kominsky-Crumb brought raw self-lacerating accountability to the genre, subverting stereotypes about Jewish women along the way in which.
Seen by many within the Seventies and 80s as overly crude or controversial, she’s now an icon for a lot of feminist artists. Roz Chast said her influence is seen in “every woman who creates her own cartoon voice.”
Kominsky-Crumb died of pancreatic cancer at 74 in November.
Sam Massell
Sam Massell was Atlanta’s first Jewish mayor, serving from 1970-1974, and town’s last white mayor.
But he was remembered as greater than a single-term bookend: Massell was the primary mayor to prove that town’s Blacks had clout enough to raise their chosen candidate to office, and he embedded Black leaders in government and built its mass transport system, perpetually changing town.
During his term as mayor, the variety of Blacks in leadership positions doubled, to 40%. “Being black means you might be all the time different,” he would say. “But being Jewish means I’m all the time different, too.”
Massell died on March 13 at 94.
Miriam Naor
Miriam Naor served on the Israeli Supreme Court for 14 years and have become the second woman to helm the court as chief justice.
Her tenure presided over a period when the court made several significant rulings around religious pluralism in Israel.
One of the crucial essential got here in 2016, when the court ruled that Israel must recognize conversions to Judaism performed in Israel outside of the rabbinate, which controls all religious matters in Israel, for the needs of citizenship under the country’s Law of Return.
During her tenure, the court also ruled that mikvehs, or ritual baths, in Israel needed to be made available for using non-Orthodox converts to Judaism.
Speaking at her swearing-in ceremony in 2015, Naor spoke concerning the have to preserve Israel’s character as a “Jewish and democratic state that upholds the principle of equality” in addition to to “protect human rights and the rule of law.”
Naor died in Jerusalem on January 24 at 74.
Nehemiah Persoff
Few openly designate themselves as “character actors,” but Nehemiah Persoff didn’t draw back from the term.
From the years following Israel’s independence through the Golden Age of Hollywood and beyond, Persoff had 200 stage and screen roles, working with directors similar to Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock, Barbra Streisand and Martin Scorsese (playing a rabbi for the latter in “The Last Temptation of Christ”).
He often played gangsters, including within the Marilyn Monroe classic “Some Prefer it Hot.”
Born in Jerusalem, Persoff followed his family to the USA in 1929, and after World War II reconnected along with his Israeli roots by performing onstage within the country.
Though Persoff was not religious, he remained a devout Zionist his entire life and expressed regret for forgoing fighting within the 1948-49 War of Independence as a way to further his acting profession back in the USA.
Persoff died in April at 102.
Svika Pick
One of the crucial famous figures in Israeli cultural history, musician Svika Pick was a pioneer in his adopted country in lots of senses.
He lightened up Israel’s pop music with easy chords and lyrics; he borrowed sounds from Mizrahi music and employed Black backup singers at a time when his government was attempting to deport many would-be immigrants; and he set fashion trends with a female, Bowie-like aesthetic.
In 1998, he wrote Israel’s third Eurovision winner, “Diva,” for Dana International, the primary transgender person to win the competition.
In his later years, Pick became a judge on reality shows and his daughter Daniella became paparazzi fodder when she married American director Quentin Tarantino, who moved to Tel Aviv to affix the family.
Pick died on August 14 in Ramat Hasharon, Israel, at 72.
Bob Saget
A healthful dad on network TV, and one in every of the raunchiest standup comedians within the business — few could boast a resume like Bob Saget’s.
Before he got to Hollywood, Saget honed his comedy as a misbehaving Hebrew school student at Temple Israel in Norfolk, Virginia.
“I am going backwards and forwards with my belief system, by the way in which. I’m not the very best, most observant Jewish person you’ve ever met or talked to, and yet I’m Jewish and proud to be,” he once said.
After a brief stint contributing to CBS’ “The Morning Program,” Saget was solid to play a morning show host on TV.
As Danny Tanner on “Full House,” Saget played a widowed dad and TV host raising three daughters in San Francisco with the assistance of his brother-in-law and his best friend.
Saget was also known for hosting “America’s Funniest Home Videos.”
The respected standup died in January at 65 from complications after blunt head trauma.
Gerda Weissmann Klein
Gerda Weissmann Klein’s liberation from concentration camps got here after a brutal 350-mile death march to avoid the advance of the Allied forces. Of the 4,000 women who began the march, fewer than 120 survived.
After moving to the USA, Weissman Klein became a bestselling creator of 10 books, including her 1957 autobiography, “All But My Life,” which is often used as a text by Holocaust educators, and “The Hours After: Letters of Love and Longing in War’s Aftermath,” a chronicle of her and her husband’s correspondence within the years between liberation and their marriage.
A long time later, Weissmann Klein’s story became the premise of the 1995 HBO short documentary “One Survivor Remembers,” which won each an Emmy and an Oscar (and is currently available for streaming on HBO Max).
On the Oscars, she was almost played off before she could deliver an acceptance speech; but she stood her ground, and delivered a memorable message, concluding with, “Each of you who know the enjoyment of freedom are winners.”
Klein died on April 3 in Phoenix, Arizona.
A.B. Yehoshua
Lots of Israel’s leading writers take aim on the country’s moral and political dilemmas. But few attacked the topics with such blatant intensity as A.B. Yehoshua, who authored 11 novels, three collections of short stories and 4 plays, along with other essays.
His fiction centered on the on-the-ground lived experiences of Israelis, but there have been all the time larger societal themes and critique.
He experimented with format, too, leading critic Harold Bloom to compare him to William Faulkner in 1984.
But he was arguably as well-known for his sharp public statements on his homeland, politics and Diaspora Jews.
A firm believer in a two-state solution who critiqued each the Israeli occupation and Palestinian leaders, Yehoshua also infuriated US groups by saying “Only those living in Israel and participating within the day by day decisions of the Jewish state have a major Jewish identity.”
He died on June 14 in Tel Aviv at 85.