“If it is not unusual, then what is the point?”

Jacques Barzaghi, a Former Fixture Beside Jerry Brown, Dies at 82?

Richard Rubenstein, 97, Dies; Theologian Challenged Ideas of God

 Richard L. Rubenstein, the leading Jewish voice in the theological groundswell of the 1960s known as the “Death of God” movement, who argued that the Holocaust had invalidated the idea of an omnipotent, benevolent deity who safeguards Jews as the chosen people, died on May 16 in Bridgeport, Conn. He was 97.

“To see any purpose in the death camps,” he continued, “the traditional believer is forced to regard the most demonic, anti-human explosion in all history as a meaningful expression of God’s purposes. The idea is simply too obscene for me to accept.”

While he contended that the God of traditional beliefs did not exist, Dr. Rubenstein never renounced a belief in a God and attended synagogue every Sabbath, his daughter said. He saw God as “the Lord of all creation” who left human beings to make their own moral choices, said Michael Berenbaum, a Holocaust scholar who studied with Dr. Rubenstein for his doctorate at Florida State University in Tallahassee.

“God is the ocean and we are the waves,” was a favorite metaphor of Dr. Rubenstein’s.

“That doesn’t make human life meaningless,” Professor Berenbaum said. “It gives us the opportunity to create meaning.”

Sophie Rivera, Photographer of Latin New York, Dies at 82

 

Sophie Rivera a photographer who won acclaim making luminous portraits of Puerto Rican New Yorkers and other city dwellers before turning the camera on herself, died on May 22 in the Bronx. She was 82.

Her husband, Dr. Martin Hurwitz, a psychiatrist, said the cause was a neurodegenerative disease. She lived in Upper Manhattan and had been in a hospice facility in the Bronx.

Ms. Rivera, who was of Puerto Rican descent, began making portraits of her neighbors in the late 1970s, asking passers-by in front of her Morningside Heights apartment building if they were Puerto Rican. If they said yes, she invited them to be photographed.

The images she made were majestic four-by-four-foot prints of everyday New Yorkers of all ages. They were time-stamped by their hair styles and clothing as citizens of the 1970s and ’80s, but they were made eternal by their direct gazes, formal poses and the nimbus of light with which Ms. Rivera surrounded them.