Billionaires are teaming up for pro-Israel, anti-Hamas media drive: Report

The campaign is seeking million-dollar donations from dozens of the world’s biggest names in media, finance and tech, Semafor reported.

Source aljazeera 12 Nov 2023

Image Demonstrators rally in support of Palestinians at the Colorado State Capital in Denver, Colorado, November 5, 2023

A billionaire real estate tycoon in the United States is rallying support for a high-dollar media crusade to boost Israel’s image and demonise the Hamas armed group amid global pro-Palestinian solidarity protests.

The media campaign — called Facts for Peace — is seeking million-dollar donations from dozens of the world’s biggest names in media, finance and technology, according to an email seen by news website Semafor.

More than 50 individuals are being courted, including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Dell CEO Michael Dell and financier Michael Milken. They have a combined net worth of around $500bn, Semafor said.

Some of the individuals, such as investor Bill Ackman, have publicly threatened to blacklist pro-Palestine students who are critical of Israel. On October 10, Ackman wrote on X, formerly Twitter, that he and other business executives wanted Ivy League universities to disclose the names of students who are part of organisations that signed open letters criticising Israeli policies in Gaza.

‘Get ahead of the narrative’

US billionaire Barry Sternlicht, who started the project, said the campaign would help Israel “get ahead of the narrative” as the world has reacted to the intensive Israeli attacks in the Gaza Strip.

“Public opinion will surely shift as scenes, real or fabricated by Hamas, of civilian Palestinian suffering will surely erode [Israel’s] current empathy in the world community”, Sternlicht wrote in an email soliciting contributions from the wealthy figures shortly after Hamas’s October 7 attacks on Israel, according to Semafor. “We must get ahead of the narrative.”

Israel has carried out relentless air strikes on the besieged Gaza Strip since October 7, killing at least 11,078 Palestinian people, including 4,500 children, displacing 1.5 million people, and wrecking much of the territory’s infrastructure, Gaza officials say.

Hamas’s surprise attack on Israeli territory on October 7 killed some 1,200 Israelis, according to Israeli officials.

Sternlicht’s media drive aims to brand Hamas as a “terrorist organisation” that is “not just the enemy of Israel, but of the United States”, he wrote. The goal is to draw $50m in private donations, paired with a matching contribution from a Jewish charity. Hamas is already designated as a “terrorist” organisation by the US and the European Union for its armed resistance against Israeli occupation.

It is unclear which figures have donated, but the campaign has raised at least a few million dollars already, Semafor reported, citing “people familiar with the matter”.

It is being advised by Josh Vlasto, a communications strategist who previously worked for US Senator Chuck Schumer and former Governor of New York Andrew Cuomo, Semafor reported.

The US is Israel’s strongest global ally, providing it with billions of dollars of aid annually and staunch diplomatic backing. Despite the mounting humanitarian crisis in Gaza, the US government has continuously rebuffed global calls for a ceasefire and reiterated that Washington will not give Israel “red lines” in the war. On November 2, the US Congress passed a $14.3bn emergency military aid package for Israel.

However, public support for the US’s position appears to be ebbing, with nearly half of US Democrats disapproving of how Joe Biden has handled the conflict, according to a recent poll by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Social media giants such as Instagram, X, YouTube and TikTok have been accused of censoring pro-Palestine voices by reducing their reach, a practice known as shadowbanning.

Axios reported last month that pro-Palestine posts on TikTok were being viewed four times more than pro-Israel posts. This came as people around the world have reacted with horror to the mounting death toll in Gaza where most of the killed are civilians.

Facts For Peace, the media campaign launched by Sternlicht, aims to win back public favour for Israel, posting videos on its social media pages blaming Hamas for the plight of Palestinians and denying claims of Israeli rights violations.

The most recent video posted on its Facebook page argues that “Israel is not an apartheid state”.

This contradicts findings from Palestinian, Israeli and international rights experts, including from the United Nations, that Israel is practising apartheid through its “deeply discriminatory dual legal and political system” in the occupied territories.

Israel occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza in the 1967 war and later annexed East Jerusalem. It withdrew its forces from Gaza in 2005 but continues to maintain a siege on the territory of 2.3 million people. Israel has continued to expand settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem – a step considered illegal under international law.

Settlements pose the biggest hurdles in the realisation of an independent and sovereign Palestinian state living side-by-side with Israel, experts say. The US has condemned the settlements’ expansions but done little to stop its closest ally.

From <https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/12/billionaires-are-teaming-up-for-pro-israel-anti-hamas-media-drive-report>

#Hamptons #chabad | wsj |  2014 Heard & Scene: Soaking Up Summer in the Hamptons 

Heyman, Marshall

Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 26 Aug 2014: A.18.  

From <https://www.proquest.com/usnews/docview/1555925472/1B35FB07609F48ABPQ/2?accountid=6749&sourcetype=Newspapers>

Abstract

Guests included Elettra Wiedemann and James Marshall, Nacho and Delfina Figueras, filmmaker Paul Haggis, Calvin Klein, Sandy Gallin, Anjelica Huston, Molly Sims, Christie Brinkley, Petra Nemcova, and Rachel Zoe and Rodger Berman, who enjoyed some outdoor paella, a poolside performance by the Haitian band DjaRaRa and helped raised nearly $250,000 for student scholarships through baseball-cap sales.

At the moment, the Hamptons are in a kind of melancholy overdrive.

There are people trying to take advantage of the last glorious days of summer before returning to the reality of a bustling September in New York City, and there are organizations attempting to capitalize on the generosity of those people.

On Sunday, Michael Milken, Jonathan and Sheryl Sokoloff, Douglas Elliman Chairman Howard M. Lorber, Gym Source Chief Executive Richard Miller, MDC founder Miles Nadal, Bruce and Avis Richards, Aby Rosen, Kathleen Rice, Raymond Kelly, Lyor Cohen, Michael Fuchs, Leon and Leesa Wagner and around 600 others attended the Chabad of Southampton's 13th annual dinner to celebrate what could be seen as the "Bar Mitzvah year" of the organization's Jewish Center.

The dinner took place at the Southampton home of Aela and Don Morgan to honor Irwin D. Simon, the founder of the natural-foods company Hain Celestial Group, raising about $1 million for the Southampton Chabad.

The center's rabbi, Rafe Konikov, said that the event usually finds its way onto the late-summer calendar, before Labor Day, the start of school and the Jewish holidays. "It's one of the last opportunities for people to see all of their friends together."

Mr. Simon was the first host of this fundraiser more than a decade ago, and "it's been growing like a technology stock every year," said Aryeh Bourkoff, the founder of investment bank LionTree and one of the evening's dinner chairs.

Southampton "wasn't a town known historically for its Jewish presence," Mr. Bourkoff said, "but even people who don't go to the synagoguewant to support it."

Mr. Milken, in particular, had a busy weekend. He also hosted a benefit for his prostate cancer foundation at the Parrish Art Museum on Saturday evening. Among the heavy-hitting guests were David and Sybil Yurman, Glenn and Jennifer Myles, Richard and Karen LeFrak, and Steve and Christine Schwarzman. The party raised just more than $1.5 million for cancer research.

Last year's benefit in East Hampton was a sock hop, and guests were encouraged to dress like Danny and Sandy from "Grease." Many obliged.

This year, the proceedings didn't quite have a theme, though there were lots of glowsticks in vases, and the evening culminated with a performance by the 1980s throwback Kenny Loggins, which had David Koch dancing out of his seat.

Most attendees, it seemed, were glad they didn't have to dress up as if they were prepared to perform "Greased Lightnin' " or "You're the One That I Want."

"Yes, I'm happy," said Mr. LeFrak.

"The poodle clutch stayed at home," replied Ms. LeFrak.

"We're going to go back to costumes next year," said Mr. Milken. "But I'm going to have to confer with the LeFraks first."

That same night, in the deep woods of East Hampton, Donna Karan hosted a benefit for the organization Artists for Peace and Justice at one of her waterfront homes.

Guests included Elettra Wiedemann and James Marshall, Nacho and Delfina Figueras, filmmaker Paul Haggis, Calvin Klein, Sandy Gallin, Anjelica Huston, Molly Sims, Christie Brinkley, Petra Nemcova, and Rachel Zoe and Rodger Berman, who enjoyed some outdoor paella, a poolside performance by the Haitian band DjaRaRa and helped raised nearly $250,000 for student scholarships through baseball-cap sales.

Artists for Peace and Justice raises funds for and awareness about Haiti, and the evening was titled "Haiti in the Hamptons."

"I love Haiti and I love the Hamptons," said Ms. Karan, who travels to Haiti whenever she can. "I thought this was a way to bridge the two worlds."

She caressed the couch on which she sat before doing a small tour of the upstairs of the home where the party took place.

"All these fabrics are Haiti," she said. "A lot in my house is Haiti. This necklace I'm wearing, which is cow horn, is from Haiti. All these tobacco leaves are Haiti. The candlesticks with the crystals are Haiti. I'm walking Haiti. Once you go there, it gets under your skin."

Credit: By Marshall Heyman

Word count: 668

(c) 2014 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. Reproduced with permission of copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.

From <https://www.proquest.com/usnews/docview/1555925472/1B35FB07609F48ABPQ/2?accountid=6749&sourcetype=Newspapers>

Works Cited

Heyman, Marshall. "Heard & Scene: Soaking Up Summer in the Hamptons." Wall Street Journal, Aug 26, 2014. ProQuest, http://ezproxy.lapl.org/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/newspapers/heard-amp-scene-soaking-up-summer-hamptons/docview/1555925472/se-2.

#Chabad 2013sep17 Business networking Chabad style 

Lann, Shlomit 

. McClatchy - Tribune Business News; Washington. 17 Sep 2013.  

From <https://www.proquest.com/usnews/docview/1433085878/D0879DACCEEE4669PQ/5?accountid=6749&sourcetype=Wire%20Feeds>

Abstract

TranslateLearn more about Translate

People donate because they identify with Chabad's special approach, which does not seek to bring you back to orthodox Judaism, but to enrich your spiritual life and to connect you with your Jewish heritage.\n

Sept. 17--In the prosaic world of economics, two foreign Jewish tycoons are battling for control of IDB Holding Corp. Ltd. (TASE:IDBH): Eduardo Elsztain from Argentina, and Alexander Granovsky from Ukraine. But this is not how things appear in Shturem.net, one of Chabad's online newspapers. It recently ran a headline, "Indications: The supporter of Wolf Yigbor (error in the original) against the supporter of Greenblatt". In other words, Granovsky, a supporter of the Chabademissary in Odessa, Rabbi Avraham Wolf, is facing off against Elsztain, who supports the chief Chabademissary in Argentina Zvi Greenblatt.

For the IDB deal, and with Rabbi Wolf's blessing, Granovsky even set up Chabad770 BV (for the building number on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn of the late Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson, and therefore of special significance for Chabadhassidim), to make money, which would be used for charity. "I assume that something will be left over for himself," said cynically a Chabadsource who does not view with favor the use of Chabad's name by the Ukrainian oligarch. Granovsky, for his part, made certain that it was known that he "received the rabbi's blessing" for the acquisition of IDB. He obtained the blessing when he made a pilgrimage to the grave of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, who, physically at least, has not been with us for almost 20 years.

IDB chairman Nochi Dankner, visited New York in early September, where he took time off to lay tefillin at the Lubavitch World Headquarters in Brooklyn. God moves in mysterious ways, and Dankner did not achieve much: on his return to Israel, a recommendation for an indictment by the Israel Securities Authority was waiting for him.

Chabad, known for excellent relations with the authorities in Washington, Moscow, and Jerusalem, is now an organization for global Jewish financial networking, connections, and involvement. The network is open, with no central financial organization, comprising thousands of strings that start in small communities around the world, especially in the former USSR, but also everywhere else, from Katmandu to Buenos Aires, and Mazkeret Batya. This voluntary network, with its near-missionary ideological elements, has moral and spiritual ties with the center in Brooklyn, but no financial or organizational anchors.

Businessmen identified with Chabadto some degree or other include, besides Dankner, Australian tycoon Joseph Gutnick, Israeli venture capital Shlomo Kalish, Shari Arison through the Ted Arison Foundation, Mordechay Zisser, Lev Leviev, and his former business partner Shaya Boymelgreen.

A long list of Russian oligarchs, some of whom were far removed from Judaism before they encountered Chabad, are among its supporters and donors, including Mikhail Mirilashvili of Georgia, Ukrainian billionaire Gennadiy Bogolyubov, and Alexander Mashkevich. Around the world, Chabadsupporters include South African billionaire Nathan Kirsh, Starkist Foods co-owner and CEO Michael Mittelman, and American billionaire RonaldPerelman.

Chabadis not always pleased by its supportres. Chabadbusinessman Avraham Taub, the CEO of Shefa Yamim Ltd. (TASE: SEFA), which has diamonds exploration license in Israel, claims that the late Rebbe Schneerson told him that diamonds would be found in the Kishon River below Mount Carmel. Chabadtakes umbrage at the claim, saying that it is an interpretation of one of the rabbi's allegorical remarks.

Adv. Mordechai Tzivin, who is familiar with the world of Jewish philanthropy, emphasizes that he does not speak for Chabad("I am unworthy"), but who sought its permission to speak with "Globes", says, "Chabadhas become a magnet for big donors, without us approaching them. The donors usually come to us at their own initiative."

In contrast, Menachem Friedman the co-author with Samuel Heilman of "The Rebbe: The Life and Afterlife of Menachem Mendel Schneerson", published by The Princeton University Press in 2010, says otherwise. "Chabaddefinitely functions as a business network," he says. "If an emissary visits a Ukrainian oligarch and says, 'There is a Jew in Israel who is in trouble. I believe in him. Meet him and you will both profit.' The oligarch will say to himself, 'The rabbi's word is good. He won't lie to me, unlike the businessmen I meet, and I have no way to check thoroughly."

Tzivin angrily refutes this, saying, "Chabaddoes not sell connections for money. Chabademissaries do not use the argument of connections to get money. A rabbi is completely forbidden to offer such an exchange for a donation. Emissaries are not in business, and they do not offer to open doors. People donate because they identify with Chabad's special approach, which does not seek to bring you back to orthodox Judaism, but to enrich your spiritual life and to connect you with your Jewish heritage."

In every corner of the world

The foundation for Chabad's huge financial activity is its emissaries enterprise, who reach every remote corner of the world, and must use local donations to finance the establishment of the community that were sent to found, as well as its institutions -- schools, synagogue, poorhouse, Chabadhouse, etc. The emissary is a man who completed his studies at a yeshiva, is usually a rabbi, newly married, and is sent to a place, especially since the collapse of the USSR, where there is no Jewish community, but there are some Jews and people who might be Jews.

Unless something unusual happens, the emissary will live in this place for the rest of his life. In the first year, he will receive a basic stipend from the Lubavitch World Headquarters to begin activity, generally $3,000-4,000 a month. Later, he must establish his own financial base. His connection with Headquarters will be spiritual, moral, and if necessary, such as medical problems, Headquarters will use its global network to help him. But there is no regular economic relationship between "the company headquarters" and its "branches".

The Lubavitch World Headquarters has an annual budget of $30 million, reportedly from donations from wealthy men who prefer to donate directly to it rather than to one of the "agencies". Chabaduses the budget for maintenance, publishing, and activities such as an online school for emissaries' children who are far from a Jewish school.

"Chabadhas an interesting hierarchal structure," says Rabbi Menachem Brod. "Usually, an organization of this size achieves command and control by paying people. Here, you are not paid, but you have authority in a hierarchy built from the bottom up."

"What is unique to Chabad," says Prof. Friedman, "is that it is a missionary group that takes in all kinds of people, some of whom have made great wealth in the modern financial world. It can do this because even though its people are haredi (ultra-orthodox), they are not typical haredim. They have an education, and maybe more importantly, a great openness to the modern world and the modern business world. On the other hand, these businessmen live with huge risks and terrible anxiety, they are walking over a pit, and when the insecurity builds up, they seek help."

Chabadhas a Chinese wall

Chabad's main annual event is its emissaries convention at the Brooklyn headquarters, especially the concluding evening. Participating emissaries, each of whom pays his own way and stays with friends or relatives, is a demonstration of power to which Chabad-associated tycoons from around the world are invited. "The emissaries convention is a kind of multinational company that nearly raises anti-Semitic connotations from the 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion'," says Prof. Friedman.

Rabbi Brod has a different take on the demonstration of power, where emissaries compete to bring the richest and most respectable donors. "Every emissary may bring friends, donors, or people for whom it is important to demonstrate his standing," he says. "Many emissaries come with their donors to strengthen their ties with the local emissary by showing them a complete picture of the organization."

"Globes": What do you think about the IDB drama, in which two businessmen, brought by their rabbis, are starring in, and every scene is depicted as 'Chabadversus Chabad'?

Rabbi Brod: "We've often been asked what is a Chabadnik. It's hard to define. Unlike other communities, Chabadis heterogeneous, even amorphous. Neither Granovsky nor Elsztain are classic Chabadniks, but if a person joins Chabadand feels close to the Lubavitcher Rebbe, who am I to tell him that he is or is not a Chabadnik?"

What about Granovksy's Chabad770?

"This is not a Chabadcharity. It is a private foundation of a private individual. We have a dilemma about this. There are Chabadhassid businessmen who use the name Chabadin their businesses. There have been cases in which people were asked to remove the name. We are not bothered that the company is called Chabad, but we are bothered that people might think that Chabadis acquiring companies."

Have there been requests to change the name?

"I don't know. If there have been, it obviously has not been through me."

Why shouldn't Chabad, with all its money, not operate as a kind of investment fund to increase its wealth?

"The rebbe made a clear separation of activities. Chabadis not supposed to be engaged in business, and there is a ban against joining business partnerships. There were emissaries who asked the Rebbe about joining kashrut businesses. He told them they should see to that Jews ate kosher. Others would provide them with kosher meat."

Credit: Globes, Tel Aviv, Israel

Word count: 1549

_(c)2013 the Globes (Tel Aviv, Israel) Visit the Globes (Tel Aviv, Israel) at www.globes.co.il/serveen/globes/nodeview.asp?fid=942 Distributed by MCT Information Services

Works Cited

Lann, Shlomit. "Business Networking Chabad Style." McClatchy - Tribune Business News, Sep 17, 2013. ProQuest, http://ezproxy.lapl.org/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/wire-feeds/business-networking-chabad-style/docview/1433085878/se-2.

From <https://www.proquest.com/usnews/docview/1433085878/D0879DACCEEE4669PQ/5?accountid=6749&sourcetype=Wire%20Feeds>

#perelman 2019jan17 | Raymond Perelman Dies At 101 

Bernstein, Jesse

Jewish Exponent 

; Philadelphia. 17 Jan 2019: 1,14-15.  

From <https://www.proquest.com/usnews/docview/2174220263/D0879DACCEEE4669PQ/1?accountid=6749&sourcetype=Newspapers>

RAYMOND PERELMAN, the businessman and philanthropist whose name adorns institutions across the Philadelphia area, died Jan. 14. He was 101.

"We are deeply saddened by the loss of my father Raymond G. Perelman, who passed away peacefully last night," said Ronald O. Perelman, in a family statement. "Raymond was not only a renowned businessman and an extraordinarily generous philanthropist but most importantly for me, he was a mentor and a wonderful father, as well as a deeply loving grandfather and great grandfather."

Born in Philadelphia in 1917, Raymond Perelman was the son of a Lithuanian immigrant father, Morris, who spoke no English. Morris Perelman founded the American Paper Products Co., which Perelman took over after graduating from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

The company enjoyed fabulous success, and Raymond Perelman became extremely wealthy. Over the next few decades of his career, Perelman expanded his business, opening manufacturing plants and mills in the Philadelphia area and, in the 1960s, buying Belmont Iron Works, at the time one of the largest structural steel producers in the Northeast. All of his interests were eventually consolidated as part of RGP Holding Inc., of which he was president and chairman of the board.

He served, at various points, on the boards of directors for Temple University Hospital, the National Museum of American Jewish History and the Albert Einstein Health Center. He had stints as the chairman of the board for the Philadelphia Museum of Art, as general chair of the Allied Jewish Appeal and as a trustee at Penn Medicine, in addition to numerous other leadership posts.

Perelman was married to Ruth Çaplan from 1941 until her death in 2011. They had two sons, Ronald and Jeffrey; the former is one of the wealthiest men in the world, reported to be worth more than $9 billion and a major donor to Chabad, while the latter was locked in litigation with his father that was rumored to have ended their speaking relationship. Perelman is survived by his sons, nine grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren.

"I am saddened to hear of the loss of Raymond Perelman, one of our city's great civic leaders and philanthropists," Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney said in a statement. "Throughout his. life, he demonstrated an exceptional commitment to Philadelphia's advancement as a world-class city."

During his lifetime, Perelman made a series of philanthropic contributions to institutions across Philadelphia, including to the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia. His original $3 million donation to the Raymond and Ruth Perelman Jewish Day School, with branches in Elkins Park and Wynnewood, was followed by additional pledges in excess of $3 million.

"Raymond was an incredibly generous philanthropist who understood the importance of supporting Jewish identity and investing in a Jewish future through the Jewish Federation and so many institutions in our community," said Naomi Adler, president and CEO of the Jewish Federation. "He was an irreplaceable asset to our community and we were so fortunate to have known him."

"Our school and its students continue to benefit from the Perelmans' philanthropic vision to this day," said Judy Groner, the head of school at the Perelman Jewish Day School.

He perhaps made no greater gift than a $225 million donation to the School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, now named after him and his wife. That was just one among several gifts he made to his alma mater, including an endowed professorship in the medical school and to the Center for Advanced Medicine, home to the Abramson Cancer Center.

"I considered Ray a dear friend - both to me and the university - and I am so gratified to know he will be remembered for the countless lives he has touched through his philanthropy," said Amy Gutmann, president of the University of Pennsylvania.

In 2014, Perelman made a $6 million pledge for the construction of the Raymond G. Perelman Center for Jewish Life at Drexel University (just two years after a $5 million pledge for the Raymond G. Perelman Plaza on campus).

"Ray's generous contribution to Drexel University made the dream of a permanent home for Jewish life on our campus a reality," said Rabbi Isabel de Köninck, executive director and campus rabbi at the now-completed center. "May Ray's legacy continue to be a blessing for us, helping us to provide relevant, engaging and innovative pathways to Jewish life and learning for our Drexel students for years to come."

Image A Raymond Perelman as a younger man Exponent archives

In the same year, he made a $50 million pledge to the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia to establish the Raymond G. Perelman Campus and the establishment of three research endowments.

"Thanks to his generosity and advocacy, CHOP'S Raymond G. Perelman Campus has become the site of ambitious breakthroughs poised to transform the lives of children for generations to come," CHOP President and CEO Madeline Bell said. "We are extremely grateful for his gracious spirit, enduring friendship and unwavering commitment to all children, especially those living in the city of Philadelphia."

"I am saddened to learn of Ray Perelman's passing, a friend to me and a friend to The Kimmel Center for ihe Performing Arts," said Anne Ewers, president of CEO of the Kimmel Center, itself the recipient of $6 million in gifts from Perelman. "May Ray rest in peace knowing his legacy will bless generations to come."

"Ray certainly knew the importance of good timing - and, of course, Ruth had something to do with that," said C-ail Harrity, president and COC of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where the main build.ng is named after Perelman and to which he donated $15 million. "He always seized the day, as a businessman, as board chair and in countless initiatives over the course of a lifetime that was as remarkable as it was long."

"The National Museum of American Jewish History mourns the loss of our trustee emeritus and generous patron," museum CEO Ivy Barsky and chair Phillip Daviroif said in a statement. "May his Only in America legacy live on at NMAJH and may his memory be a blessing."

"Raymond Perelman is an individual, in my humble opinion, that symbolized and reflected a very important part of the period of prior to, and during and after, the Holocaust," said Rabbi Avarham Shemtov. Shemtov, a leader in the worldwide Chabadmovement for decades, is a close friend and confidante of RonaldPerelman.

"I was there yesterday," the rabbi said, "just before he passed, and I looked at him, and I saw in him a reflection of a very important part of our history, of Jews in America. And that's how we saw him off, just now in the funeral." *

jbernstein@jewishexponent.com; 215-832-0740

image A Raymond Perelman was 'one of our city's great civic leaders and philanthropists,'

Sidebar

FTRaymond was an incredibly generous philanthropist who understood the importance of supporting Jewish identity and investing in a Jewish future."

NAOMI ADLER

Copyright Jewish Exponent Jan 17, 2019

Works Cited

Bernstein, Jesse. "Raymond Perelman Dies at 101." Jewish Exponent, Jan 17, 2019, pp. 1-15. ProQuest, http://ezproxy.lapl.org/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/newspapers/raymond-perelman-dies-at-101/docview/2174220263/se-2.

==========#NEXTDOC

Perelman Wiki

Ronald Owen Perelman

January 1, 1943 (age 81)

Greensboro, North Carolina, U.S.

Education

Villanova University

University of Pennsylvania (BS, MBA)

From <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Perelman>

==========#NEXTDOC

2013jul07 | Perelman Sues Old Friend Milken (Not to Worry. It Isn’t Personal.)

Peter Lattman

cnbc.com

Ron Perelman, chairman and CEO of MacAndrews & Forbes.

Adam Jeffery | CNBC

The billionaire deal maker Ronald O. Perelman loves to litigate, having tussled over the years with, among others, his former vice chairman, his onetime chief financial officer and the investment bank Morgan Stanley— not to mention his four former wives.

Now he has begun a legal battle against a man who helped put him on the map: Michael R. Milken.

One of Mr. Perelman’s companies, Harland Clarke Holdings, filed a little-noticed lawsuit last month accusing Mr. Milken of fraud. The case stems from Harland Clarke’s 2011 purchase of GlobalScholar, an education technology company backed by Mr. Milken, the fallen financier and philanthropist.

(Read More: Corporate ClimateGood for Earnings, Not Jobs: Ronald Perelman)

The lawsuit, filed in state court in San Antonio, was said to have surprised Mr. Milken, who had done business with Mr. Perelman for decades and counts him as a friend, according to a person briefed on the matter who is not authorized to discuss the lawsuit publicly.

For Mr. Perelman, people close to him said, the lawsuit is nothing personal against Mr. Milken — just business.

After Harland Clarke executives came to believe that Mr. Milken and other individuals deceived them during negotiations for the company, they decided to seek legal redress. Mr. Perelman was briefed and decided to let the action proceed, these people said.

More From The New York Times:

Madoff Case Puts Focus on Duties of Custodial Banks

Pension Proposal Aims to Ease Burden on States and Cities

RegulatorsExamining Sales of Early Financial Data

A spokesman for Mr. Milken, Geoffrey Moore, characterized Harland Clarke’s complaint as a case of buyer’s remorse.

“If under the plaintiff’s subsequent management the purchased company failed to meet their expectations, those failings are certainly not the fault of the defendants,” Mr. Moore said.

The legal clash adds a colorful chapter to the story of the two men’s lucrative business relationship. Mr. Milken, 67, is the well-known 1980s-era junk bond salesman whose career ended in disgrace after he pleaded guilty to securities law violations and spent two years in prison. But before his legal troubles, Mr. Milken and his former firm, Drexel Burnham Lambert, provided financing for several of Mr. Perelman’s early deals, including his audacious 1985 buyout of the cosmetics giant Revlon.

Mr. Perelman was “dependent on Drexel for the multibillion-dollar deals he craved,” Connie Bruck wrote in her book “The Predators’ Ball,” an account of Mr. Milken and his band of takeover artists.

After Mr. Milken’s incarceration, he maintained a business relationship with Mr. Perelman.

In 1998, Mr. Milken agreed to pay $47 million to settle a Securities and Exchange Commission complaint that he violated a lifetime ban from the securities industry by advising on two transactions, including one involving Mr. Perelman.

(Read More: Perelman:Rich Should Pay High Taxes, but Not Estate Tax)

Today, the 70-year-old Mr. Perelman, who is said to be worth more than $12 billion, controls a sprawling business empire through his conglomerate MacAndrews & Forbes. His conflict with Mr. Milken centers on a major holding, Harland Clarke, the country’s largest check-printing company.

In January 2011, as part of Harland Clarke’s push into the education field as it sought to diversify away from the dying business of check printing, Harland Clarke acquired GlobalScholar. It paid $135 million for the company, which provides software for teachers to better assess students’ performance.

Yet the GlobalScholar acquisition soured quickly, according to the complaint, with the business’s performance falling far short of expectations.

“Much of the software was ‘vaporware,’ ” said the complaint. The lawsuit describes vaporware as “software that appears to be robust and fully functioning, but that is no more than a mirage intended to appear complete but not actually functional.”

In its complaint, Harland Clarke takes direct aim at Mr. Milken, who over the last several decades has become an influential player in the profit-making education field. He serves as the chairman of a group of education companies called Knowledge Universe. Among his holdings are KinderCare Learning Centers, a chain of day care centers. Knowledge Universe also had an investment in GlobalScholar, and in 2010 it began discussions to sell the business to Harland Clarke.

“Milken represented that his 30 years of experience in the education and technology field assure the success of Knowledge Universe and its related companies, specifically GlobalScholar,” the complaint said.

The lawsuit highlighted a meeting, just months before the deal was struck, that Mr. Milken attended with the chief executive and another senior official at Harland Clarke. During the negotiations, Harland Clarke said its officials were misled about GlobalScholar’s relationship with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, an educational publishing company in which Mr. Milken also had an investment. Mr. Milken and others made false representations that Houghton Mifflin would play a crucial role in GlobalScholar’s growth, the complaint said.

(Read More: No Doom, LittleGloom But Lots of Caution at Milken)

In addition to Mr. Milken, Harland Clarke also named as defendants Knowledge Universe and Kal Raman, the founder and former chief executive of GlobalScholar, who left just eight months after the acquisition. Mr. Raman now serves as chief operating officer of the online coupon provider Groupon.

The lawsuit seeks $135 million in financial damages, as well as punitive damages and other costs.

Mr. Moore, the spokesman for Mr. Milken, noted that the transaction was a heavily negotiated deal with a 77-page purchase agreement. “This is a baseless action brought by a sophisticated buyer of technology represented by equally sophisticated counsel,” said Mr. Moore, alluding to Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, which advised Harland Clarke on the deal. “They negotiated a comprehensive agreement and had abundant opportunity for extensive due diligence before they completed the purchase.”

Mr. Perelman has also recently been wrangling with federal regulators. Last month, MacAndrews & Forbes agreed to pay a $720,000 civil penalty to resolve accusations that the company violated reporting requirements related to acquiring shares in the Scientific Games Corporation. And a week before, Revlon, which he still controls, said it would pay $850,000 to settle claims that it deceived shareholders during an attempt to take the company private.

—By Peter Lattman of The New York Times

https://www.cnbc.com/2013/07/09/perelman-sues-old-friend-milken-not-to-worry-it-isnt-personal.html

# Ira Rennert's 1998jun05 Forward | THE FEATHERMAN FILE Of Noteworthy Items in the Press

By Eskin, Blake Forward ; New York, N.Y.. 05 June 1998: 2.  

Abstract

Businessman Ira Rennert's plans to build the biggest house yet in the Hamptons, reports Frank DiGiacomo in the June 1 issue of The New York Observer, have come under fire from neighbors who say they are "horrified by the size and makeup of Mr. Rennert's planned villa (and its ramifications on the environment) and skeptical of his assertion that the home is intended solely for his family." Indeed, although Mr. Rennert received a permit to build a one-family home, the design calls for a 100-car garage. However, writes Mr. DiGiacomo, "Behind the facade of Mr. Rennert's monstrous home, say some, lurk potential issues of that ages-old Hamptons problem: anti-Semitism."

Mrs. Jungreis, a widowed rebbetzin, was "thrilled" that Ms. Haft, a lawyer and theatrical producer, had opened her home to Mrs. Jungreis' private Torah-study class, according to Eileen Daspin's article in the May 29 Wall Street Journal. In the apartment, however, was "Beth," a four-and-a-half-by-six-and-a-half-foot "rear-view portrait."

"`It was a painting of someone's buttocks,' says Rebbetzin Jungreis, who first asked Ms. Haft to cover up or take down the $40,000 painting, by John Kacere. `I didn't think it was the proper backdrop for a Torah class,'" reports Ms. Daspin.

Full Text

THE FEATHERMAN FILE Of Noteworthy Items in the Press

Not in My Back Yard: Residents of the Hamptons are fearful that a Jewish businessman's planned 100,000-square-foot Italian-style compound will turn into "some sort of Orthodox Jewish refuge."

Businessman Ira Rennert's plans to build the biggest house yet in the Hamptons, reports Frank DiGiacomo in the June 1 issue of The New York Observer, have come under fire from neighbors who say they are "horrified by the size and makeup of Mr. Rennert's planned villa (and its ramifications on the environment) and skeptical of his assertion that the home is intended solely for his family." Indeed, although Mr. Rennert received a permit to build a one-family home, the design calls for a 100-car garage. However, writes Mr. DiGiacomo, "Behind the facade of Mr. Rennert's monstrous home, say some, lurk potential issues of that ages-old Hamptons problem: anti-Semitism."

"The stories that keep popping up are that Mr. Rennert has plans to devote some of the ample space to an Orthodox synagogue or even a yeshiva," reports Mr. DiGiacomo, who identifies Mr. Rennert as an Orthodox Jew who belongs to the Fifth Avenue Synagogue.

"Unlike the other well-known Jewish philanthropists who have migrated to the South Fork and support a wide swath of causes (RonaldPerelman, George Soros, Mortimer Zuckerman) Rennert's giving seems to be confined largely to Orthodox and Zionist organizations," reports Nancy Hass, who wrote about Mr. Rennert's dream house in the inaugural issue of Hamptons Country magazine.

Mr. Rennert is a sponsor of the Torah Ethics Project of the Orthodox Caucus, which aims to encourage Orthodox Jews to be as rigorous about behaving scrupulously in their business dealings and interpersonal relationships as they are about adhering to rituals.

Southampton town supervisor Vincent Cannuscio told the Observer that he was aware of fears of a religious community, and that when he discussed the matter with Al Bialek, a Jewish real estate developer who heads the Sagaponack Homeowners Association, a group opposed to Mr. Rennert's grandiose plans, Mr. Bialek "said he has that same fear that Mr. Rennert might end up donating this place to a religious sect. I told him I was offended by that. He said that, be that as it may, he was fearful of that possibility."

In response, Mr. Bialek said of Mr. Cannuscio, "He's lying," according to Mr. DiGiacomo.

In the past, non-Jews in the Hamptons have given a cold shoulder even to secular Jews -- Jews have formed new golf clubs there, for instance, because Jews were largely excluded from existing country clubs -- but one person Mr. DiGiacomo spoke to "said that the association's early complaints smacked of `Jews hating Jews.'"

Improper Backdrop: Esther Jungreis never would have borrowed Elsa Haft's New York apartment if she had known about "Beth."

Mrs. Jungreis, a widowed rebbetzin, was "thrilled" that Ms. Haft, a lawyer and theatrical producer, had opened her home to Mrs. Jungreis' private Torah-study class, according to Eileen Daspin's article in the May 29 Wall Street Journal. In the apartment, however, was "Beth," a four-and-a-half-by-six-and-a-half-foot "rear-view portrait."

"`It was a painting of someone's buttocks,' says Rebbetzin Jungreis, who first asked Ms. Haft to cover up or take down the $40,000 painting, by John Kacere. `I didn't think it was the proper backdrop for a Torah class,'" reports Ms. Daspin.

Ms. Haft, however, insisted that "Beth" would remain in view, and, from that point on, the class became a showdown between text and tuches:

"When Ms. Haft refused, the rebbetzin tried holding class with `Beth' behind her. But she thought that distracted her students. Then she tried sitting across from `Beth,' but couldn't tolerate looking at her. After a few meetings, the rebbetzin moved the class elsewhere.

"`Sadly,' she says, `the painting was a contributing factor.'"

It's another case of how art intimidates life.

Kafka at Carnaval? In a conversation with Brazilian Jewish writer Moacyr Scliar in the Spring issue of Pakn Treger, Ilan Stavans asks Mr. Scliar to "imagine, for a second, that Kafka didn't die in 1924. Instead, he emigrated from Prague to London and then to Brazil. How would he have ended up?"

Mr. Scliar responds,"Kafka would have become a lawyer in an insurance company, perhaps in Sao Paulo. He would have married a nice Jewish girl and would have a large, ostentatious house. In the middle of the night, he would wake up to write his phantasmagorias but no one would give a damn for them. They would seem too realist, too idiosyncratic. As a writer, he would have been finished in Brazil."

Word count: 807

Copyright Forward Newspaper, L.L.C. Jun 5, 1998

Works Cited

Eskin, Blake. "THE FEATHERMAN FILE of Noteworthy Items in the Press." Forward, Jun 05, 1998, pp. 2. ProQuest, http://ezproxy.lapl.org/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/newspapers/featherman-file-noteworthy-items-press/docview/367684066/se-2.

From <https://www.proquest.com/usnews/docview/367684066/487B9650DC994ECFPQ/11?accountid=6749&sourcetype=Newspapers>

#trump #palm beach | 1997apr30 WSJ Trump's Palm Beach Club Roils the Old Social Order

 By Jacqueline Bueno  Wall Street Journal  , Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 30 Apr 1997: F1.  

Abstract

It's a warm Saturday night, and the party is getting hot at Mar-a-Lago, the Palm Beach estate that owner Donald Trump recently converted into a private club. As the Beach Boys harmonize on a makeshift stage, hundreds of revelers, many of them decked out in Hawaiian shirts, straw hats and leis, dance in the aisles and gyrate on wooden lawn chairs.

For Mr. Trump and his club set, Mar-a-Lago is a saving grace, affronting hypocrisy in a corseted culture of snobs. "Palm Beach is very much changing for the better," says the New York real-estate tycoon, "and a lot of that is because of Mar-a-Lago."

For many longtime residents, Mr. Trump's decision to set up camp here was bad enough. That was in 1985, when Mr. Trump paid about $7 million for the 128-room Mar-a-Lago mansion, built 70 years ago by cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post. Over the decades, Ms. Post's party schedule had placed the estate at the center of Palm Beach social circles. By the time she died in 1973, it was a local institution. (Part of the original guest quarters eventually became the Bath and Tennis Club.)

Full Text

It's a warm Saturday night, and the party is getting hot at Mar-a-Lago, the Palm Beach estate that owner Donald Trump recently converted into a private club. As the Beach Boys harmonize on a makeshift stage, hundreds of revelers, many of them decked out in Hawaiian shirts, straw hats and leis, dance in the aisles and gyrate on wooden lawn chairs.

At the height of the fete, Mr. Trump asks the crowd: "Does this remind you of the Bath and Tennis Club, anybody?"

The answer is a definite no -- among the evening's partygoers, and for many more of the nearly 10,000 residents of this posh island town. But whether the contrast between the freewheeling Mar-a-Lago Club and the more-formal Bath and Tennis Club, as well as Palm Beach's other traditional social establishments, is good or bad depends on whom you ask.

For Mr. Trump and his club set, Mar-a-Lago is a saving grace, affronting hypocrisy in a corseted culture of snobs. "Palm Beach is very much changing for the better," says the New York real-estate tycoon, "and a lot of that is because of Mar-a-Lago."

But for the old money that has long dominated this town -- mostly staid, conservative, publicity-shy philanthropists who donate tens of thousands of dollars at social functions each "season" -- Mar-a-Lago and its owner are the town's vulgar future made unpleasantly present.

"We're youthenizing here," says James Jennings Sheeran, publisher of Palm Beach Society magazine, which has covered the town's social scene for more than 40 years. "Before it was just old, graceful people who partied and gave to charity for reasons other than their own aggrandizement. Today, many of the young people tend to give money for their egos and the publicity it generates."

Palm Beach is suffering from a classic case of culture clash -- between a patrician aristocracy and a band of new-money colonizers led by the brash, boastful and ostentatious Mr. Trump. A lot of it may seem silly: socialites boycotting functions associated with Mar-a-Lago; others fretting over the fate of a landmark estate.

But Mr. Trump also has resorted to the courts to secure his foothold here, and many residents wince at the attention his legal battles with the town have drawn -- to the town in general, and to the admission practices at some of Palm Beach's older clubs in particular.

For many longtime residents, Mr. Trump's decision to set up camp here was bad enough. That was in 1985, when Mr. Trump paid about $7 million for the 128-room Mar-a-Lago mansion, built 70 years ago by cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post. Over the decades, Ms. Post's party schedule had placed the estate at the center of Palm Beach social circles. By the time she died in 1973, it was a local institution. (Part of the original guest quarters eventually became the Bath and Tennis Club.)

Mr. Trump arrived well-known, though not necessarily well-regarded. He brought with him a reputation as a real-estate developer accustomed to battling local residents who resist his wishes and as a latecomer to high society who hadn't learned the art of discretion.

He lived up to expectations. In his book titled "The Art of the Deal," Mr. Trump bragged that he had acquired the estate at a bargain price. But soon after, he challenged on appeal the county's property-tax appraisal. (Later, he would boast that Britain's Prince Charles and Princess Diana had joined Mar-a-Lago -- an assertion that Buckingham Palace denied.)

In the early 1990s, Mr. Trump found himself mired in a costly divorce just as real estate markets began to slide. He complained openly about the $3 million a year in maintenance costs that the estate was costing him. He proposed subdividing the 17-acre property into smaller lots for residential development.

That set the stage for Mr. Trump's first big battle with Palm Beach leaders. The town, which years earlier had approved a subdivision proposal for the site from another developer, rejected Mr. Trump's plan, prompting him to sue for $50 million in damages. He dropped the suit when the idea emerged to turn the home into a private club. The town council agreed to that, but placed restrictions on the club, such as allowing no more than 500 members, to allay residents' fears about traffic congestion and noise. In the spring of 1995, the Mar-a-Lago Club officially opened, and is now charging $75,000 for membership, plus annual dues.

The club, like most in Palm Beach, doesn't make its membership list available. Among its known members is financier RonaldPerelman. Mar-a-Lago became an effective means for Mr. Trump to contribute to the flow of a comparatively young and indiscreet crowd into town.

As one of the first "young monied guys to come down," says Mr. Sheeran, Mr. Trump "was the prime mover of all the young money coming into the market." Recent arrivals have included singers Rod Stewart and Jimmy Buffett.

But this is a town where until recently, city ordinance required that male joggers wear shirts. Residents bemoaned the rise of a culture in which consumption is meant to be conspicuous. Ten years ago, Mr. Sheeran estimates, about 65% of Palm Beach residents lived on trust money or inherited wealth. Today, he estimates, only about 25% do so. "This was a very graceful senior-citizen market," he says. "It was nice, clean people. Now, you have a lot of junk-bond money. The quality of the money is not pure."

Adds Shannon Donnelly, society writer for the Palm Beach Daily News: "I tend not to go to Mar-a-Lago." Gatherings there, she says, don't attract "a high-end social crowd. If they were high-end, they'd be at one of the other clubs." Besides, covering functions at Mar-a-Lago "would lend [Mr. Trump] credibility he doesn't deserve yet," she says.

Mr. Trump, who still occupies a private wing of Mar-a-Lago, considers such sentiments the last gasps of a dying breed. "You have two groups here," he says, "the doers and those who inherited. Mar-a-Lago is composed of the doers. At the other clubs, you probably wouldn't recognize the [members'] names."

The culture clash began to approach a climax last fall, when Mr. Trump's lawyer sent members of the town council a copy of the film "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," a film that deals with upper-class racism. Mr. Trump then approached the town council about lifting the restrictions that had been placed on the club. He also asked some council members not to vote on the request because their membership in other clubs created a conflict of interest.

Last December, after the council refused to lift the restrictions, Mr. Trump filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Palm Beach, alleging that the town was discriminating against Mar-a-Lago, in part because it is open to Jews and African-Americans. The suit seeks $100 million in damages.

The town denies the allegation and says it was merely deciding a zoning matter. (The Everglades Club denies that it discriminates in admissions; Palm Beach's other clubs generally decline to comment on Mr. Trump's allegations.)

The episode shook the Palm Beach establishment, unaccustomed to having its linen, dirty or not, aired publicly. Some organizations now find they have to tread lightly if they want to hold a function at Mar-a-Lago. When an arm of the Junior League of Palm Beach recently decided to hold a luncheon at the estate, organizers received incensed calls and letters from some members, though the luncheon kept to schedule and was well-attended.

Among the angry was Estelle Curran, a stalwart of the local social scene. "Mr. Trump has made so much trouble in this town," Ms. Curran says. "A lot of people feel that if we boycott the place, we won't help him make money."

Even the Anti-Defamation League in New York, which in a 1994 battle forced Palm Beach's Sailfish Club to open up its membership, was concerned that Mr. Trump was using the charge of anti-Semitismfor his own mercantile ends. The league's national director, Abraham Foxman, met with Mr. Trump soon after to air his concerns. According to Mr. Foxman, Mr. Trump agreed to modify his claims to allege only that the town council has treated Mar-a-Lago unfairly, compared with other clubs in town.

Now, Mr. Foxman seems pleased that Mr. Trump has elevated the issue of discriminatory policies at social clubs. "He put the light on Palm Beach," Mr. Foxman says. "Not on the beauty and the glitter, but on its seamier side of discrimination. It has an impact."

In recent weeks, Mr. Foxman says, the league has received calls from Jewish residents telling of how Palm Beach clubs are changing. Locals concur that in the past year, organizations such as the Bath and Tennis Club have begun to admit Jewish patrons. The Palm Beach Civic Association, which for many years was believed to engage in discriminatory behavior, this month named a Jewish resident as its chief officer.

Mr. Trump's critics credit a more general social evolution. "You see gradual change, changes in attitudes," says Frank Chopin, lawyer for the Preservation Foundation of Palm Beach.

For others, the future remains a scary prospect of unwanted social upheaval and the extinction of a way of life. Palm Beach, says Mr. Sheeran, "is going to be less graceful, noisier, flashier and younger."

---

The Art of the Lawsuit

A history of Donald Trump's battles with Palm Beach

1985 Trump buys Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach

1991 Trump proposes subdividing the estate into several lots; Subdivision request is denied

1992 Trump sues town for $50 million for denying subdivision

1993 Trump proposes turning Mar-a-Lago into private club; Drops subdivision proposal

1994 Palm Beach approves club, with restrictions

April 1995 Mar-a-Lago Club opens

June 1995 Trump sues county over airport traffic near the estate

Sept. 1996 Settlement reached on airport-traffic suit; Includes deal for club golf course

Fall 1996 Trump asks for lifting of membership restrictions at Mar-a-Lago; most of request is denied

Dec. 1996 Trump sues town for $100 million, claiming discrimination

Credit: Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

Word count: 1674

Copyright Dow Jones & Company Inc Apr 30, 1997

Works Cited

By, Jacqueline B. "Trump's Palm Beach Club Roils the Old Social Order." Wall Street Journal, Apr 30, 1997, pp. F1. ProQuest, http://ezproxy.lapl.org/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/newspapers/trumps-palm-beach-club-roils-old-social-order/docview/398684304/se-2.

From <https://www.proquest.com/usnews/docview/398684304/fulltext/487B9650DC994ECFPQ/12?accountid=6749&sourcetype=Newspapers>

1997jun17 Divorce Rich & Jewish | INN DISCREET CHECKING OUT THE N.Y. HOTELS WHERE ALL THE BEST SOON-TO-BE-SINGLES STAY: [DU PAGE SPORTS FINAL, NED Edition] 

Warren, James Chicago Tribune (pre-1997 Fulltext) ; Chicago, Ill.. 17 June 1993: 2.  

Getting divorced may not be easy for a rich New York male, but at least he can briefly enjoy the nightly pleasure of a bedtime mint on his pillow, according to the June 14 New York Observer.

The engaging cultural and political weekly offers "Heartbreak Hotels," a look at the lodging patterns of rich men whose marriages become unraveled, of late including financial tycoons Henry Kravis and RonaldPerelman.

This is largely a primer on Manhattan's most exclusive hotels for well-heeled transients and how the hotels zealously guard the privacy of guests who pay from $4,500 a month for a studio to $17,000 monthly for a three-bedroom suite. Clearly, it's cheaper to hang out, as most forlorn souls still do, on a friend's couch.

Full text

Getting divorced may not be easy for a rich New York male, but at least he can briefly enjoy the nightly pleasure of a bedtime mint on his pillow, according to the June 14 New York Observer.

The engaging cultural and political weekly offers "Heartbreak Hotels," a look at the lodging patterns of rich men whose marriages become unraveled, of late including financial tycoons Henry Kravis and RonaldPerelman.

This is largely a primer on Manhattan's most exclusive hotels for well-heeled transients and how the hotels zealously guard the privacy of guests who pay from $4,500 a month for a studio to $17,000 monthly for a three-bedroom suite. Clearly, it's cheaper to hang out, as most forlorn souls still do, on a friend's couch.

The Carlyle, Lowell, Regency, Waldorf Towers, Wall, Plaza Athenee and Surrey are among the in spots.

"A hotel has everything your marriage didn't: A hotel has room service," explains one divorce survivor and one-time hotel resident. "Staying there is great until the rot sets in and you become the dreaded lonely guy who mournfully goes to dinner as the extra man, clutching a bottle of beaujolais."

The likelihood of finding in one of these swank spots others enduring divorces, rather than a potentially depressing "happy American tourist family just back from the zoo," can be a lure. "At the Wales," says one recently divorced man, "there always were a few divorced men you could pull aside and talk to. It was nice. You could talk about the (shafting) you were getting from your wife's lawyers."

Yet, one would apparently be well-advised to not pick just any room at a luxury hotel, even if you can afford it. Raoul Felder, a famous divorce lawyer and publicity hound, counsels that it's best to get a single while your case is pending. "This shows the court a degree of poverty. You don't want the opposing lawyers saying, `Look what this guy's spending a month; take that money away.' Once the deal's done, you move into a suite, so the kids can stay over. And when the final papers are signed, that's when you start looking for your co-op."

Alas, that search may not be easy. As this story underscores, co-op boards in fancy Manhattan buildings "are famous for frowning on prospective buyers who are divorced," or in the process of breaking up, no matter how big their wallets.

Thus, Revlon Chairman Perelman, whose wealth was recently heralded in Business Week, was just spurned by two such buildings. Writes reporter Rich Cohen, "Like all prejudice, this one is based on fear: fear of the next wife, that unknown vulture who may someday burst on the scene and ruin the ambience of the lobby." A top real-estate executive confirms, "For some of the boards, the next wife is a wild card."

Divorced women find the high-priced Manhattan house search even tougher, especially if they're living on alimony (a co-op board will fret as to when those payments will cease). But some do discover that money talks. Thus, designer Carolyne Roehm, who's splitting from leveraged buyout tycoon Kravis (a central figure in the book and HBO movie "Barbarians at the Gate"), just plunked down $3.95 million for an 11-room apartment.

It beats sleeping on a chum's couch and eating cold Chinese.

Quickly: "I have AIDS. I am surprised that I do," begins longtime New Yorker writer and novelist Harold Brodkey's "To My Readers" piece in the June 21 issue. He says his homosexual experiences ended in the 1970s, and this is an alternately pained, compelling and stoic essay about how Brodkey, 62, has come to terms with the "silence and privacy" of death. . . . In June 14 In These Times, Salim Muwakkil argues that Rev. Louis Farrakhan's recent "fiddle diplomacy," namely both his concert violin playing of music by composer Felix Mendelssohn, who was of Jewish ancestry, and his reaching out to Jewish opinion-makers like Sun-Times columnist Irv Kupcinet, obscure the reality of a rise in black anti-Semitismand the black community's push toward greater Afrocentrism. . . . Yes, it's time for the summer pest-control issue from June Horse Illustrated ("the magazine for responsible horse owners"), focusing on what the editor calls the "disgusting creatures (that) return each summer to attack you and your horse." . . . July Spin offers us David Koresh, frustrated rocker, as it interviews folks in the Waco music scene who portray him as a guy who tried to be God after failing to be a Mick Jagger.

Illustration

PHOTO; Caption: PHOTO: Carolyne Roehm (and) Henry Kravis

Word count: 763

Copyright Chicago Tribune Co. Jun 17, 1993

Works Cited

Warren, James. "INN DISCREET CHECKING OUT THE N.Y. HOTELS WHERE ALL THE BEST SOON-TO-BE-SINGLES STAY: [DU PAGE SPORTS FINAL, NED EDITION]." Chicago Tribune (pre-1997 Fulltext), Jun 17, 1993, pp. 2. ProQuest, http://ezproxy.lapl.org/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/newspapers/inn-discreet-checking-out-n-y-hotels-where-all/docview/283486472/se-2.

1990feb21 wapo #milken | Undercurrent of Religious, Cultural Antagonism in Drexel's Rise, Fall: [FINAL Edition]

 By Warsh, David   The Washington Post (pre-1997 Fulltext) ; Washington, D.C.. 21 Feb 1990: c03.  

by Milken, the Wall Street Journal's editorial page, various corporate raiders and not a few economists, is that access to institutional money was instrumental in restructuring American industry, putting it back on its toes, bringing into existence strong new branches of the productive apparatus. The other view is associated with the government's prosecution of Milken, corporate executives and author Connie Bruck, whose superb "The Predators' Ball" is the indispensable first draft of the history of Milken. It holds that the junk bond business was essentially a fast-moving con game, quickly built with the help of a series of criminal acts.

Throughout the rise of the junk bond market, there was always a dark undercurrent of anti-Semitismat work: There is never any question that Milken and the highly visible junk bond raiders he financed were mostly Jewish. Neither is there any doubt that their targets were usually companies run or owned by WASPs. The extreme delicacy of the discussion is what led financial writer Michael Thomas to resort to fiction to treat it. In the last two chapters of his new novel, "Hanover Place," Thomas limns the decline and fall of a Drexel-like firm at the hands of evangelical Christians, abetted by an uncharacteristically laissez-faire WASP establishment. The result has been a chorus of accusations that Thomas himself is anti-Semitic.

Full Text

To understand what happened last week to Drexel Burnham Lambert Group Inc., it is necessary to go back to May Day 1975. That was when deregulation first hit Wall Street, bringing an end to the fixed brokerage commissions that had served the white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant establishment as the equivalent of a private tax system. It was the usual combination of technical change and the Justice Department that brought about the introduction of competitive rates, breaking up a cartel that had financed WASP dominion since it was established under the famous Buttonwood Tree 183 years before.

In a variety of ways, new competitors arose and the traditional white-shoe firms run by Ivy League graduates from America's "first families" of finance either adapted or declined. One of the most determined and inventive musclers-in was a bond salesman named Mike Milken. A Wharton School graduate, Milken started selling low-grade investment bonds known as "fallen angles" and "Chinese paper" in the early 1970s for Drexel Firestone, the WASPish firm that would in time become Drexel Burnham Lambert. By the end of the 1970s, he was successful enough to move his operation to Beverly Hills (he was a native Californian).

And when tax law changes in the early 1980s gave a powerful new impetus to debt financing, Milken was in a unique position to take advantage of it. Within a few years, almost single-handedly, he created a new portion of the spectrum of the American capital markets by persuading big institutional investors to lend money to corporations that had previously been unable to borrow and persuading Wall Street mainstays like Salomon Brothers and First Boston to join him in the junk bond underwriting business. He made a personal fortune doing it-and he made a financial powerhouse of Drexel Burnham Lambert.

There are two broad schools of thought on what Milken wrought. Each has something to recommend it. One, pushed by Milken, the Wall Street Journal's editorial page, various corporate raiders and not a few economists, is that access to institutional money was instrumental in restructuring American industry, putting it back on its toes, bringing into existence strong new branches of the productive apparatus. The other view is associated with the government's prosecution of Milken, corporate executives and author Connie Bruck, whose superb "The Predators' Ball" is the indispensable first draft of the history of Milken. It holds that the junk bond business was essentially a fast-moving con game, quickly built with the help of a series of criminal acts.

Throughout the rise of the junk bond market, there was always a dark undercurrent of anti-Semitismat work: There is never any question that Milken and the highly visible junk bond raiders he financed were mostly Jewish. Neither is there any doubt that their targets were usually companies run or owned by WASPs. The extreme delicacy of the discussion is what led financial writer Michael Thomas to resort to fiction to treat it. In the last two chapters of his new novel, "Hanover Place," Thomas limns the decline and fall of a Drexel-like firm at the hands of evangelical Christians, abetted by an uncharacteristically laissez-faire WASP establishment. The result has been a chorus of accusations that Thomas himself is anti-Semitic.

The fact is that religious and cultural antagonisms have been an unmistakable part of the daily life of Wall Street for years. When Warren Buffett rescued Salomon Brothers from the clutches of the raider RonaldPerelman, some traders griped that an Omaha Episcopalian had rescued a "Jew with a Christmas tree." Virulent anti-Semites continue to turn up among financial firms, though in continually diminishing numbers. And more than a few Jewish participants still suffer from what writer Peter Schrag has called "the goy complex," the conviction that "at the heart of things there is a WASP patriciate which, if it so desires, can manipulate all the lesser goys (Italians, Irishmen, whatever) to make them do its bidding."

That the United States deals so well with these unpleasant human habits of the mind is part of the genius of the nation. In "Crashing the Gates; the de-WASPing of American's Power Elite," Robert Christopher writes, " ... As a general proposition, the reality that all across the top levels of American society power is now dispersed among people drawn from diverse ethnic backgrounds is one that is often overlooked and seldom accorded the importance it deserves as a portent of the nation's future." He's right, of course. The quiet and, in general, peaceful revolution on Wall Street in the last 15 years is testimony to an extraordinary American capacity for democratic change and its ability to find the strength and joy in religious diversity rather than the weakness. In contrast, the Japanese are far less able to accommodate such differences of outlook, domestically or among their international allies. The current newsletter of the Simon Wiesenthal Center lists more than 40 new Japanese books with strong anti-Semitic overtones.

The other good news to be found in the fall of Drexel Burnham is that the American establishment did relatively well in managing the largest-ever securities industry bankruptcy. The markets for both equities and debt stayed buoyant; there was no crisis.

On the other hand, when Drexel Burnham Lambert started to go under for the third time for lack of a $300 million bridge loan, it was to Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady that the firm had to look for the lender of last resort. Scion of an old WASP family, former chairman of Dillon Read, long-time opponent of junk bond financing-and architect of "the Brady Plan" for keeping innumerable second-rate banks afloat in the face of lagging Third World interest payments-Brady apparently gave as little thought as possible to bailing Drexel out.

Word count: 952

Works Cited

Warsh, David. "Undercurrent of Religious, Cultural Antagonism in Drexel's Rise, Fall: [FINAL Edition]." The Washington Post (pre-1997 Fulltext), Feb 21, 1990, pp. c03. ProQuest, http://ezproxy.lapl.org/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/newspapers/undercurrent-religious-cultural-antagonism/docview/307226871/se-2.

#milken 1990feb18 boston globe #milken DREXEL'S FATE: A GATE-CRASHER CRASHES AND BURNS: [THIRD Edition] 

Warsh, David oston Globe (pre-1997 Fulltext) 

; Boston, Mass.. 18 Feb 1990: A1.  

The other view, associated with the government's prosecution of [Mike Milken], with many lawyers, corporate executives, and author Connie Bruck, whose superb "The Predators' Ball" is the indispensable first draft of the history of Milken, is that the junk bond business was essentially a fast-moving con game, quickly built with the help of a series of criminal acts. Milken has yet to go to trial on the government's charges, but as part of its plea-bargaining with the US attorney's office in New York, Drexel fired him and consented to a $650 million fine. Certainly among many of the people in companies which Drexel investment bankers helped to start there was no sorrow last week when the firm entered bankruptcy. "They had a way of making you take your pants down when your were negotiating for a deal that was just excruciating," recalled a frequent participant last week.

The other good news to be found in the fall of Drexel Burnham is that the American establishment did relatively well in managing the largest-ever securities industry bankruptcy. The markets for both equities and debt stayed buoyant; there was no crisis. On the other hand, if you are Mike Milken, it is not enough that the federal prosecutors want to put you in the slammer. When Drexel Burnham Lambert started to go under for the third time Monday, for lack of a $300 million bridge loan, it was beyond Federal Reserve System chairman Alan Greenspan, to Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady that the firm had to look, for the lender of last resort. Scion of a old WASP family, former chairman of Dillon Read Inc., long-time opponent of junk bond financing -- and architect of "the Brady plan" for keeping innumerable second-rate banks afloat in the face of lagging Third World interest payments -- Brady apparently gave as little thought as possible to bailing Drexel out.

Full Text

Economic Principals / DAVID WARSH

To understand what happened last week to Drexel Burnham Lambert Group Inc. it is necessary to go back to May Day 1975. That was when deregulation first hit Wall Street, bringing an end to the fixed brokerage commissions that had served the white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant establishment as the equivalent of a private tax system. It was the usual combination of technical change and the Justice Department that brought about the introduction of competitive rates, breaking up a cartel that had financed WASP dominion since it was established under the famous Buttonwood Tree 183 years before.

In a variety of ways, new competitors arose and the traditional white-shoe firms run by Ivy League graduates from America's "first families" that had dominated finance either adapted or declined. One of the most determined and inventive musclers-in was a bond salesman named Mike Milken. A Wharton School graduate, Milken started selling low-grade investment bonds known as "fallen angels" and "Chinese paper" in the early 1970s for Drexel Firestone, the WASPish firm that would in time become Drexel Burnham Lambert, commuting daily to New York City from suburban Philadelphia. By the end of the 1970s, he was successful enough to move his operation to Beverly Hills (he was a native Californian).

And when tax law changes in the early 1980s gave a powerful new impetus to debt financing, Milken was in a unique position to take advantage of it. Within a few years, almost single-handedly, he created a new portion of the spectrum of the American capital markets by persuading big institutional investors to lend money to corporations that had previously been unable to borrow and persuading Wall Street mainstays like Salomon Brothers and First Boston to join him in the junk bond underwiting business. He made a personal fortune doing it -- and he made a financial powerhouse of Drexel Burnham Lambert.

There are two broad schools of thought on what Milken wrought. Each has something to recommend it. One, pushed by Milken, The Wall Street Journal editorial page, various corporate raiders and not a few economists, is that access to institutional money was instrumental in restructuring American industry, putting it back on its toes, bringing into existence strong new branches of the productive apparatus. As Saul Steinerg, an early practitioner of the art, once put it, "I think that the corporate raider has a very, very valuable place in this country. The corporate raider helps to keep management honest . . . Many managements thought they owned the company, that the company was run for their benefit. Many companies -- not even giant companies, but mid-sized companies -- had shooting lodges and apartments all over. They were like kings."

The other view, associated with the government's prosecution of Milken, with many lawyers, corporate executives, and author Connie Bruck, whose superb "The Predators' Ball" is the indispensable first draft of the history of Milken, is that the junk bond business was essentially a fast-moving con game, quickly built with the help of a series of criminal acts. Milken has yet to go to trial on the government's charges, but as part of its plea-bargaining with the US attorney's office in New York, Drexel fired him and consented to a $650 million fine. Certainly among many of the people in companies which Drexel investment bankers helped to start there was no sorrow last week when the firm entered bankruptcy. "They had a way of making you take your pants down when your were negotiating for a deal that was just excruciating," recalled a frequent participant last week.

Throughout the rise of the junk bond market, there was always a dark undercurrent of anti-Semitismat work. There is never any question that Milken and the highly visible junk bond raiders who he financed were mostly Jewish. Neither is there any doubt that their targets were usually companies run or owned by WASPs. The extreme delicacy of the discussion is what led financial writer Michael Thomas to resort to fiction to treat it. In the last two chapters of his new novel, "Hanover Place," Thomas limns the decline and fall of a Drexel-like firm at the hands of evangelical Christians, abetted by an uncharacteristically laissez-faire WASP establishment. The result has been a chorus of accusations that Thomas himself is anti-Semitic.

The fact is that religious and cultural antagonisms have been an unmistakable part of the daily life of Wall Street for years. When Warren Buffett rescued Salomon Brothers from the clutches of the raider RonaldPerelman, some treaders griped that an Omaha Episcopalian had rescued a "Jew with a Christmas tree." Virulent anti-Semites continue to turn up among financial firms, though in continually diminishing numbers. And more than a few Jewish participants still suffer from what writer Peter Schrag has called "the goy complex," the conviction that "at the heart of things there is a WASP patriciate which, if it so desires, can manipulate all the lesser goys (Italians, Irishmen, whatever) to make them do its bidding."

That the United States deals so well with these unpleasant human habits of the mind is part of the genius of the nation. In "Crashing The Gates: the De-WASPing of America's Power Elite," Robert Christopher writes, ". . . As a general proposition the reality that all across the top levels of American society power is now dispersed among people drawn from diverse ethnic backgrounds is one that is often overlooked and seldom accorded the importance it deserves as a portent of the nation's future." He's right, of course. The quiet and, in general, peaceful revolution on Wall Street in the 15 years since Mayday is testimony to an extraordinary capacity for democratic change, its ability to find the strength and joy in religious diversity rather than the weakness. In contrast, the Japanese are far less able to accommodate such differences of outlook, domestically or among their international allies. The current newsletter of the Simon Wiesenthal Center lists more than 40 new Japanese books with strong anti-Semitic overtones.

The other good news to be found in the fall of Drexel Burnham is that the American establishment did relatively well in managing the largest-ever securities industry bankruptcy. The markets for both equities and debt stayed buoyant; there was no crisis. On the other hand, if you are Mike Milken, it is not enough that the federal prosecutors want to put you in the slammer. When Drexel Burnham Lambert started to go under for the third time Monday, for lack of a $300 million bridge loan, it was beyond Federal Reserve System chairman Alan Greenspan, to Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady that the firm had to look, for the lender of last resort. Scion of a old WASP family, former chairman of Dillon Read Inc., long-time opponent of junk bond financing -- and architect of "the Brady plan" for keeping innumerable second-rate banks afloat in the face of lagging Third World interest payments -- Brady apparently gave as little thought as possible to bailing Drexel out.

WARSH ;02/15 NKELLY;02/20,15:18 WARSH18

Word count: 1173

Copyright Boston Globe Newspaper Feb 18, 1990

From <https://www.proquest.com/usnews/docview/294488907/487B9650DC994ECFPQ/16?accountid=6749&sourcetype=Newspapers>

2024mar07 | Selfridges tycoon files for insolvency

Rene Benko’s decision comes four months after his property empire Signa collapsed

Daniel Woolfson7 March 2024

From <https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/03/07/selfridges-tycoon-rene-benko-files-insolvency/>

Mr Benko's filing comes after an Austrian lawyer alleged he failed to make financial commitments during Signa's insolvency process Credit: Franziska Krug/German Select

Selfridges tycoon Rene Benko has filed for insolvency following the implosion of his property empire Signa.

In the latest chapter of Mr Benko’s downfall, the embattled businessman voluntarily filed for personal insolvency in Austria, four months after his business Signa collapsed.

Signa, which remains a shareholder in Selfridges, has been battling financial turmoil ever since higher interest rates piled pressure on multibillion-pound debt pile.

Mr Benko’s decision to file for insolvency, first reported by Bloomberg, comes after an Austrian lawyer alleged he failed to make financial commitments during Signa’s insolvency process.

After founding Signa in 1999, Mr Benko was ousted by the company’s shareholders in November after restructuring experts were brought in to oversee the business.

Signa’s portfolio includes stakes in London’s Selfridges, New York’s Chrysler Building and Berlin’s KaDeWe luxury department store.

However, Thai retailer Central Group seized majority control of Selfridges’ operating company in November by converting a €364m (£317m) loan into equity.

The collapse of Signa has proven to be one of the most complicated insolvencies in Austria’s history, thanks in part to its sprawling corporate structure.

The business is made up of more than 100 companies held through trusts and shell companies based in Switzerland and Liechtenstein.

Prior to Signa’s collapse, Mr Benko was ranked as one of Austria’s richest people, and is reportedly said to have joked that only the property portfolios of the Catholic church and the British royal family could match that of Signa.

Questions over Signa’s insolvency recently led to creditors filing a criminal fraud complaint against the business, as they have called for an investigation into alleged “unlawful transactions”.

At the time of Signa’s failure, it owed European lenders almost £7bn.

Born in a small apartment in Innsbruck, Mr Benko developed an interest in property during his school years, when he began converting attics into living spaces.

While Signa’s best-known assets were arguably the likes of Selfridges and the Chrysler building, Germany was also major focus for the company, as it launched projects in cities including Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt and Munich.

Mr Benko’s representatives were contacted for comment.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/03/07/selfridges-tycoon-rene-benko-files-insolvency/

2023nov29 | He Bought a Piece of the Chrysler Building. Now His Empire Is Falling Apart. René Benko's Signa filed for insolvency, marking one of the most dramatic falls in the property sector in recent years 

Brown, Eliot Margot, Patrick Wall Street Journal (Online)

; New York, N.Y.. 29 Nov 2023.  

The property slump sweeping the globe has claimed a new high-profile victim: René Benko, an Austrian-born retail and department-store magnate who also co-owns New York's Chrysler Building.

Benko's main holding company, Signa Holding , said Wednesday it is filing for insolvency in Austria. The move, similar to U.S. bankruptcy procedure, puts billions of dollars of company debt at risk and casts uncertainty over a property empire that includes stakes in the largest department store chains in Europe, upscale British retailer Selfridges and a now-stalled Hamburg tower that would have been among the tallest in Germany.

Signa, which valued its property portfolio at nearly $30 billion at the peak, doubled down on investments as the market crested. It buckled over recent months because of rising interest rates and poor performance of Benko's trophy holdings. The collapse has already led some European banks to mark down the value of their loans to the group.

The region's regulators have been on guard against the ripple effects from the downturn in commercial real estate on the banking system and are closely watching Signa's unraveling.

Benko, 46, stepped aside as chairman of Signa's advisory board earlier this month, and ceded control of the company to Arndt Geiwitz, a restructuring manager. Signa said efforts to negotiate with lenders in recent weeks had failed and it now intends to undergo a restructuring.

It pointed to troubles in the retail sector. "Investments in this area have not brought the expected success," it said.

Analysts at JPMorgan Chase estimated earlier this month that Signa's two largest subsidiaries had over $14 billion of debt and other liabilities. Swiss bank Julius Baer has around 606 million Swiss francs in lending to the group, equivalent to around $690 million.

Austria's Raiffeisen Bank International has a roughly 755 million euro exposure across several Signa commercial properties, equivalent to around $830 million, according to people familiar with the loans. Both banks have taken partial provisions on the debt. The European Central Bank and Switzerland's financial regulator are monitoring the situation, according to the people.

The filing marks the most dramatic fall in years in the European property sector, where years of ultralow—and even negative—interest rates provided landlords with a cheap fuel for growth. Commercial mortgage rates have soared over the past 18 months. One of the biggest commercial landlords in Sweden and several large German home builders have struggled to pay off giant debt tabs.

Benko's reach is larger, and higher profile.

A high-school dropout from the quaint Austrian mountain city of Innsbruck, Benko kicked off his own real-estate business, renovating apartments. He vaulted into prominence with a 2012 acquisition of most of Germany's Karstadt department-store chain, which included the upscale KaDeWe store in Berlin.

His business grew rapidly over the next decade, expanding in part through savvy connections.

Some of the most storied names in the European firmament backed Benko, including Ernst Tanner, executive chairman of Swiss chocolatier Lindt & Sprungli, and the foundation of Niki Lauda, a Formula One driver who died in 2019.

Benko accompanied Austria's then-chancellor Sebastian Kurz on a trip to the Middle East that helped lead to financing deals, people familiar with the trip said.

Benko grew his empire despite brushes with the law. In 2012 he was convicted of tax fraud over alleged attempts to bribe Italian government officials. In 2023, he was acquitted of separate bribery charges regarding payments to an Austrian politician.

He pushed into Switzerland and Italy. In 2019, he bought the Chrysler Building in partnership with RFR Holding, the firm run by New York developer AbyRosen—a year in which Benko also bought bigger stakes in his own department stores and purchased Austrian newspapers.

"We wish Signa well in their endeavor to resolve the company's issues," said an RFR spokeswoman. She added that RFR operates the building and would be happy to increase its stake.

As Covid-19 swept the world, Benko joined with Thai conglomerate Central Group to purchase Swiss luxury-department-store chain Globus and pushed ahead with giant developments such as the 64-story Hamburg tower. Signa's website featured videos of Benko on stage and his face on a magazine cover.

Even as property markets began to pull back, he continued to expand. Signa joined again with Central Group in 2021 to buy most of Selfridges, a ritzy chain with an ornate flagship on London's Oxford Street.

The retail sector—already faltering when Benko stepped on the gas in the early 2010s—has struggled in the past few years.

Losses mounted, and debt costs rose. Analysts at JPMorgan estimate that more than half—over $4.5 billion—of the debt on Signa's two main property subsidiaries is floating rate, which means its costs have surged from when the loans were issued.

Loans coming due has been another problem, because falling prices have made it difficult to refinance. Of Signa's debt, well over $1 billion of loans were set to come due in 2023, an additional 37% is set to mature between 2024 and 2027, JPMorgan analysts said.

Georgi Kantchev contributed to this article.

Write to Eliot Brown at Eliot.Brown@wsj.com and Margot Patrick at margot.patrick@wsj.com

Credit: By Eliot Brown and Margot Patrick

Word count: 852

Copyright 2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Works Cited

Brown, Eliot, and Patrick Margot. "He Bought a Piece of the Chrysler Building. Now His Empire is Falling Apart. René Benko's Signa Filed for Insolvency, Marking One of the most Dramatic Falls in the Property Sector in Recent Years." Wall Street Journal (Online), Nov 29, 2023. ProQuest, http://ezproxy.lapl.org/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/newspapers/he-bought-piece-chrysler-building-now-his-empire/docview/2894904518/se-2.

DISTRESS CONTINENTAL EUROPE GLOBAL HOTELS & LEISURE INVESTMENT RETAIL UK &

IRELAND

René Benko: the rise and fall of

Innsbruck’s golden boy

20 Dec 2023 18:01 GMT | by Michael Minarzik, Mira Kaizl, Julie Cruz

https://insights.greenstreet.com/hubfs/Ren%C3%A9%20Benko_%20the%20rise%20and%20fall%20of%20Innsbruck%E2%80%99s%20golden%20boy.pdf

DISTRESS CONTINENTAL EUROPE GLOBAL HOTELS & LEISURE INVESTMENT RETAIL UK & IRELAND

René Benko: the rise and fall of Innsbruck’s golden boy

20 Dec 2023 18:01 GMT | by Michael Minarzik, Mira Kaizl, Julie Cruz

How it all went wrong for the Austrian billionaire, who has been ousted from Signa more than two decades after founding the company

In 1999, 22-year-old Austrian René Benko founded real estate firm Immofina Holding, which later became Signa Holding. Over more than two decades, the self-made billionaire built an empire with iconic investments such as Park Hyatt Vienna, the Chrysler building in New York City and Selfridges in London.

Benko’s personal fortune was most recently estimated at €6bn by Forbes.

But last week Signa’s shareholders called for Benko to step down after the property market turmoil plunged the Innsbruck-headquartered company into increasing financial difficulties. Restructuring expert Arndt Geiwitz, who played a role in the insolvency proceedings of Signa’s German department store chain Galeria Kaufhof-Karstadt, will take over the  business.

Signa operates from 11 locations in Austria, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and Switzerland. The company says it values its gross asset portfolio at €27bn and its gross development volume at about  €25bn.

The holding firm is divided into Signa Prime Selection, which owns properties in prime inner-city locations in Austria, Germany, Switzerland, northern Italy and  the UK; Signa Development Selection, which invests in office, residential, retail and hotel projects in the German-speaking region and northern Italy; Signa RFR US Selection, which focuses on New York City and Signa Luxury Hotels, which holds a portfolio including Chalet N in Lech am Arlberg, Austria, Park Hyatt Vienna, Villa Eden on Lake Garda and Hotel Bauer Palazzo in the heart of Venice.

React News analyses how ongoing market distress has led to the billionaire, once seen as having the Midas touch, being ousted from the company he created.

Upbringing and first jobs

Benko was born on 20 May 1977 in Innsbruck, Austria, where he was raised with his younger sister. His mother worked at a kindergarten and his father was employed by the city.

He went to a business-focused secondary school but left without a degree, having started to work for German private financial planning company AWD, selling insurance and investment products.

Louis Vuitton opened one of its largest European stores in Vienna’s Golden Quarter

It’s at AWD that he “started to want to make money,” according to a source who has interacted with Benko in a professional capacity for more than two decades. There he was trained to approach people and make cold calls – and learned selling techniques that he would use to build a network throughout his career.

“In a way, the techniques that he learned at AWD at the age of 17-18 are still  the skills that he used later. You give your interlocutor the feeling that there’s no one else but them and that it’s the most important conversation in their life.

That’s the way it worked 30 years ago, and that was still the case last year or maybe even this year.”

Benko started his own business by converting attics into luxury penthouses in Innsbruck and Vienna. That’s when he met his first large investor, petrol station heir Karl Kovarik, at the age of 24 in 2001 after founding Immofina, which later became the Signa Group.

Building the Signa empire

Benka closed his first major real estate deal in 2004, aged 27, with the acquisition of department store Kaufhaus Tyrol, which locals describe as having a toy floor every child in Innsbruck, including Benko, “dreamed about”.

Benko demolished the Old Town building in 2005 and had built a new 33,000 sq m (355,209 sq ft) department store, designed by UK architect David  Chipperfield, on the same site by 2010. The entrepreneur is said to have invested about €155m in the development.

In June 2011 Benko bought the Oberpollinger luxury department store and a Karstadt Sport store in Munich – in a joint venture with Centrum Group of Uwe Reppegather – for €250m, and in September 2013 the JV paid €300m for the business operations of Karstadt Premium and Karstadt Sports, including historic retail asset Alsterhaus in Hamburg.

Signa bought KaDeWe in a joint venture with Israeli billionaire Beny Steinmetz in 2012

In December 2012 the entrepreneur made a retail coup with the acquisition of the buildings used by Karstadt’s 17 department stores, including Berlin’s iconic KaDeWe department store, for more than €1.1bn in a joint venture with Israeli billionaire Beny Steinmetz. KaDeWe was estimated to have changed hands for about €500m at the time.

In 2012 Benko also convinced French luxury brand Louis Vuitton to have one of its largest European stores at its “Golden Quarter” shopping area, which  opened in 2014 in Vienna’s old city – the same year as the opening of Park  Hyatt in Vienna. Vuitton joined the likes of Emporio Armani, Miu Miu, Prada and

Saint Laurent at the exclusive retail location.

“He created this image of Midas who turned everything he touched into gold,” said a source, who has known him for more than two decades. “He just went bigger and bigger in just over 15 years. Everything was glamorous and glitzy.”

“Benko created this image of Midas who turned everything he touched into gold. Everything was glamorous and glitzy “

Since 2015, Signa has sold majority stakes in Berlin’s KaDeWe, Oberpollinger and Alterhaus to Thai luxury retailer Central  Group.

In 2020 Signa and the Thai group which is owned by the Chirathivats – one of Thailand’s wealthiest families – teamed up again to acquire Globus, Switzerland’s largest department store chain. In 2022  the partners closed  the

£4bn acquisition of luxury retailer Selfridges Group from the Weston family.

Across the pond, Signa teamed up with RFR Holding, which was founded in 1991 by Germany-born Aby Rosen and Michael Fuchs, to buy the 77-storey Chrysler building in New York City – the tallest brick building in the world – from the Abu Dhabi Investment Council for about $150m in 2019.

The lifestyle and personality

Having built an empire worth billions in less than two decades, it is no surprise that people who have interacted with Benko in a professional capacity describe him as ambitious and a workaholic.

“He has always been extremely ambitious. He taught himself tax laws and regulations so he impressed a lot of people with his knowledge. He would also say that he was getting up at 5am in the morning, started sending emails and worked until midnight or 2am. So it’s an 18-20 hours day. And in terms of management style, you have to cut your vacation short or come to your office at 6.30am when necessary. He’s a total  workaholic.”

The father of four is also understood to have always been making the final decisions at Signa despite the fact that in his role as chairman of the advisory board, he would not have been officially involved in day-to-day operations.

Benko withdrew from operational management of Signa Holding and took over the chairman role two months before being convicted for “attempted prohibited intervention” in 2009 for offering money to an intermediary in an Italian tax case. In this advisory role, he was still able to use his network to attract new investors and financiers.

Lech am Arlberg, Austria. Signa owns Chalet N, named after Benko’s wife Natalie, in the luxury ski resort

Some sources indicate that he was paying salaries and fees over market values and was known to be generous with business partners. He would often invite bankers, investors and politicians to champagne parties and expensive stays on his yacht or at his luxury chalet and villas.

Alongside financial partners, Benko has repeatedly managed to attract support from Austrian politicians. Former federal chancellor Sebastian Kurz is said to have helped him in his search for financial backers in the Middle East, and  sitting by his side on Signa’s advisory board are former federal chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer and former vice chancellor Susanne  Riess-Hahn.

Meanwhile, the former mayor of Hamburg Ole von Beust has advised Signa Prima since 2018, mainly on the Elbtower project in the Hanseatic capital.

The business partners & DACH lenders

One thing that marks Benko’s career out is the fact that his financial partners were almost exclusively from the DACH region, with some business partners from Asia or the Middle East. US and UK investors have been far less involved,

with the exception of Madison International, which bought a 5% stake in the

€12.5bn Signa Prime portfolio in October 2019 and then raised it to 7.2% a year later.

“He was in New York and London often – and I know he was introduced to various international lenders there – but it didn’t ever really materialise,” a source said.

“You never understood exactly where the money came from,” added a German property agent. “But in the boom years, that didn’t bother anyone.”

Other Signa business partners include German RAG Foundation, the R+V insurance group, the Peugeot family and logistics mogul Klaus-Michael Kühne, who hold minority stakes in Signa Prime.

The most renowned institutional joint venture partner, Commerz Real, which invested in 10 Galeria properties in 2019, has been slowly exiting the partnership. This week, the manager of the Hausinvest fund announced that it had withdrawn Signa’s development mandate for the Mynd office project on Berlin’s Alexanderplatz and now wants to build it  itself.

“You never understood exactly where the money came from. But in the boom years, that didn’t bother anyone”

On the debt lending side, it is also German and Austrian banking institutions that are most exposed to Signa’s financial  difficulties.

In February 2023 the Financial Times reported that Deutsche Bank had severed its ties with Benko after prosecutors named the property billionaire as a suspect, along with other prominent businessmen and politicians, in a long-running corruption probe in Austria.

Signa’s headquarters in Innsbruck were later raided by police, but no charges have been made against the group or Benko so far, with both denying any wrongdoing in relation to the corruption allegations. In January this year, Benko was cleared of wrongdoing in a separate bribery case against him and other  real estate developers.

Deutsche Bank has provided limited commercial services to subsidiaries of Signa in the past and has helped to advise the property group. Despite the issue, the bank has retained its relationship with Galeria Kaufhof, part of Benko’s holdings, as the German department store filed for bankruptcy protection in October 2022 and is now in the middle of a restructuring.

The ECB looked into the credit relations of Signa this year

Over the summer, the ECB conducted an investigation into the credit relations  of Signa. This was the first time the European supervisors had examined banks’ relationships with one single borrower, according to German newspaper Handelsblatt.

The audit’s aim was to clarify whether Signa’s lenders have complied with the lending standards, whether all interest payments have been made and whether the financial covenants agreed in the loan agreements have been complied with or possibly breached.

Lenders include Signal Iduna and Helaba in Germany as well as Raiffeisen Bank International and UniCredit Bank Austria,  React understands.

Top location versus cashflows

Some sources say that overpaying for some assets also created difficulties for the company. “Other investors were not willing to buy at prices paid by Benko. He was very focused on location but sometimes overlooked the cashflows,” according to one source.

When Signa bought Kaufhof-Karstadt in 2018, Germany’s retail giant Metro Group had been looking for a buyer for its 139 Kaufhof stores since 2008. Signa had already made a failed attempted to take over the stores together with Greek shipowner George Economou at the end of 2011. Instead, Canadian Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) stepped in in 2015 and took over Kaufhof for €2.8bn.

Signa did not acquire Kaufhof until 2019, when the Karstadt and Kaufhof chains were merged in a deal valuing the Kaufhof properties at €3.25bn.

“Location, location, location is good, but if the cashflows aren’t good enough, then it’s still not working”

In March 2023 Galeria Karstadt Kaufhof announced that it would close 52 out of its 129 locations within the next year after having filed for insolvency for the second time in two years in October 2022. The chain has received €680m in bailouts from the government.

“Location, location, location is good, but if the cashflows aren’t good enough, then it’s still not working,” an Austrian source told  React.

Galeria Karstadt Kaufhof filed for insolvency for the second time in two years in October 2022.

In February 2020 Signa also bought the Swiss Globus department stores chain, which owner Migros had put on the market in summer 2019. Benko snapped it up in a joint venture with Central Group at a negotiated purchase price was

CHF1bn, although the value of the portfolio was reduced by more than CHF100m during the Covid-19 pandemic. The chain has 13 department stores across Austria.

Selling assets & refinancing woes

After investing in Selfridges in 2022, Signa divested some assets and put a series of buildings on the market. The company sold the building housing Vienna’s Apple store to the private foundation of Austrian businessman Josef Rainer for a reported €95m in May, while also putting three Berlin and Munich properties on the market.

Meanwhile, Signa’s refinancing troubles became obvious before the summer. In May React revealed that the company was looking for  €800m of new financing to inject into its portfolio of luxury assets across  Europe.

Signa sought new financing to renovate the historical Hotel Bauer in Venice

Signa was seeking at least two main facilities in two separate processes: around €300m was needed for the renovation of the Hotel Bauer in Venice, which it bought in 2020 with the help of Raiffeisen. And the company sought around €500m of mezzanine lending for German and Austrian trophy assets of Signa Prime Selection, which last year raised €750m in equity. In both cases, part of the additional capital was expected to be used to complete refurbishments  and developments.

In May React also revealed that Signa was rushing through negotiations with Attestor, a secretive player mostly known as a distress investor, in a bid to

reach an agreement on a €750m financing package for the assets.

Projects on hold

Financial woes hit Signa’s construction sites in mid-October in Hamburg, where the company halted construction work on its €250m neighbourhood project on Gänsemarkt, citing difficulties with preletting the 18,000 sq m development.

At the time, construction work on the €950m prestigious Elbtower project – also in Hamburg – was still said to be on track. However, before the end of October, Lupp Group, the company in charge of the structural work on the 245 metre tower, withdrew its construction workers due to a lack of payments . Talks are now under way with co-owner Commerz Real and the city  regarding the future of the project.

Another one of Signa’s Hamburg’s projects was hit in October as construction company Max Hoffmann stopped work at Rödingsmarkt due to unpaid invoices. Offices, stores and flats are expected to be built by next year at the 8,600 sq m, four-building ensemble, which is partially  listed.

Elbtower project in Hamburg

Signa is also putting the brakes on a project in the planning stage in Stuttgart, with construction delayed at the Zwei Hoch Fünf building on central shopping street Königstrasse. Signa said that further tenders for the 7,300 sq m building are necessary due to tenant requirements, but it is uncertain when (or whether) construction work will start.

Meanwhile last week, several service providers stopped construction work at the Carsch-Haus building site in Düsseldorf’s city centre, also due to unpaid invoices. Signa had planned to reopen the historic department store in spring 2025 as a 10,000 sq m KaDeWe branch.

What happens next?

For now, there seems to be no alternative to Benko stepping down, but the success of restructuring expert Geiwitz stands or falls on his ability to find his way through Signa’s web of individual  companies.

It is also very likely that the positions of various Signa executives who have been loyal to Benko will be put under review. When Geiwitz takes over as chief representative, his first task will be to bring order to the company’s complicated network and independently assess debt and asset values. Only then will it be clear what Signa’s future looks like. As investors fear for their money, new owners will be sought for at least part of the company’s huge portfolio, but it is unlikely Signa Group will continue to exist in its current form, according to sources.

Representatives for Signa and Benko did not respond to a request for comment from React.

2022Oct21 FT | René Benko: Austrian property billionaire thrust into the limelight

The sense of invulnerability cloaking one of Europe’s most politically connected billionaires is punctured

FINANCIAL TIMES

René Benko: Austrian property billionaire thrust into the limelight on facebook (opens in a new window) René Benko: Austrian property billionaire thrust into the limelighT

 Sam Jones in Berlin October 21 2022

René Benko was talking to investors in Saudi Arabia when he found out the headquarters of his sprawling property empire, deep in the Alps, had been raided by a squad of Austrian police.

Benko, 45, may not be a global household name, but many of his buildings are. The property conglomerate he controls is the co-owner of London’s upmarket department store Selfridges. It owns half of New York’s Chrysler Building.

In Germany, it has the department store KaDeWe, as well as the Galeria Karstadt Kaufhof chain, the country’s largest, which employs more than 24,000 people.

Add to this dozens of other buildings — luxury hotels, resorts, offices; in Munich, Venice, Vienna and Zurich — and the portfolio of Benko’s Signa Group, and its hundreds of subsidiaries, trusts and holding companies is worth close to €30bn on paper.

He likes to joke that only two people have more prestigious real estate under their control in Europe: the British monarch and the pope.

This week, however, the sense of invulnerability that has long cloaked Benko, who is also one of Europe’s most politically connected billionaires, was rudely punctured. René Benko is very good at telling stories. And those stories — about why his properties are worth so much, and [why] his business model is so successful — are compelling Leonhard Dobusch, University of Innsbruck.

Signa’s offices in sleepy Innsbruck, Benko’s hometown, were in panic mode, one insider said, as police downloaded years’ worth of email inboxes and hauled out stacks of documents, all at the behest of Austria’s state prosecutor for economic crime and corruption (WKStA).

Benko is the latest Austrian establishment figure to become ensnared in the WKStA’s sprawling, multiyear investigation into corruption at the heart of government — a probe that only last year toppled the government of the young conservative chancellor, and former Benko ally, Sebastian Kurz. For Signa and Benko, it is an unwelcome distraction.

They, like others close to Kurz, believe the WKStA is pursuing a nakedly political agenda aimed at Austria’s conservative establishment. The scandal comes at a tricky juncture: longstanding doubts over the complex financial engineering that underpins Signa’s rapid expansion have become harder to allay, as many retail and hospitality businesses across Europe have struggled to recover from the pandemic and must now contend with a looming recession. Signa and Benko declined to comment for this article.

But Signa’s responses to questions about the sustainability of its business model have been consistent over the years: prime properties are ultra-resilient. And no property portfolio is more prime than Signa’s. “René Benko is very good at telling stories,” said Leonhard Dobusch, professor of management at the University of Innsbruck. “And those stories — about why his properties are worth so much, and [why] his business model is so successful — are compelling. He is undoubtedly a very good real estate investor.

But Signa also has a highly financially-engineered model . . . and for outsiders it is very, very difficult to understand what is going on.”

Benko was born in 1977 into a modest household. His native Tyrol, of which Innsbruck is the regional capital, is archetypal Austria, all soaring Alps and lowing dairy cows. His father worked for the city council and his mother was a kindergarten teacher. Their son did not excel at school. Aged 17, he quit and found a job with a local construction business.

He struck out on his own four years later, with a bold development gambit that would set the pattern for his career.

IMAGES Signa owns half of New York’s Chrysler Building Signa owns half of New York’s Chrysler Building © AP

He converted a series of attics in a local tenement block into luxury penthouse apartments, persuading reluctant residents on lower floors to agree to his plans by offering to install elevators at his expense. He fended off opposition by making the deal work for all stakeholders. The final ingredient to power Benko’s rise — capital — soon followed. A millionaire friend of a new penthouse resident put down a small fortune to back Benko’s foray into property development.

Five years later, after a string of lucrative conversions, Benko, then 27, bought the venerable Kaufhaus Tyrol, a staid shopping centre in Innsbruck. He knocked it down and English architect Sir David Chipperfield was brought in to redesign it. Rents and the property’s valuation rocketed. For someone so young, especially in conservative Austria, it seemed a breathtakingly bold step. Boom years followed, as Signa acquired prime properties across Austria as well as Germany, including KaDeWe. The complexity of Signa’s business model grew too. It was an investment bankers’ dream, recounted one Swiss banker, who recalled an almost limitless potential for earning fees on the ingenious structures Benko and Signa favoured to maximise their financial potential. In 2013, the first serious problem for Benko arose.

An Austrian court found him guilty of bribery, ruling that he had paid the former Croatian prime minister, Ivo Sanader, to intervene with Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi to quash a tax bill Signa was liable for in Milan. Recommended Property sector Police raid Austrian HQ of Selfridges owner Signa The KaDeWe department store in Berlin The conviction forced Benko to formally step back from the day-to-day running of Signa.

Behind the scenes, however, he has remained in charge. As Signa’s portfolio grew — turning its founder into a multi-billionaire — so did Benko’s contact book. “Benko became known for keeping close connections to politicians of the major parties,” said Stephanie Krisper, an Austrian parliamentarian with the country’s liberal Neos. “He put the former chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer of the [social democrats] on the board ,” she noted, “[and] he built a relationship with Sebastian Kurz.” Kurz, a young iconoclast like Benko, would become chancellor of Austria at 31 in 2017. “He was soon a regular at Benko’s lavish parties,” Krisper said. Benko even accompanied Kurz on foreign trips, including to Moscow and the Middle East, where he forged new business relationships.

In recent years, money has flown into Signa from such sources, in some cases even through Benko’s own private foundation in Liechtenstein. This has made it hard, if not impossible, to keep track of. Signa has pointed out that it is a private company, and fulfils all of its reporting obligations. Its lenders and its investors, it has said, conduct their own extensive due diligence.

Selfridges the UK-based department store chain was acquired in a £4bn deal by Signa and Thai conglomerate Central Group Selfridges the UK-based department store chain was acquired in a £4bn deal by Signa and Thai conglomerate Central Group

© AFP via Getty Images Benko’s last big deal — his acquisition of Selfridges for £4bn — is a case in point. Signa partnered with Thailand’s Central Group, a property mega-investor known for its careful selection of partners.

How the WKStA’s move against him will play out, remains to be seen. “He used to get called an ‘Austrogarch’. He was seen as being untouchable,” said Marcus How, head of analysis at the Viennese risk consultancy VE Insight. “But particularly after the fall of Kurz, his reputation in the Austrian financial world has sunk.

There’s a sense that he might be running out of road.” Benko’s annual Törggelen, a traditional Tyrolean autumn party, used to be a highlight of the social season, How added. Chancellors and politicians would come to be photographed with him at the Signa-owned ultra-luxurious Park Hyatt in Vienna.

But it hasn’t been held since 2019. And even with the Covid-19 crisis over, it seems there are no plans for another one soon.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2024. All rights reserved.

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Convicted Real Estate Speculator Rene Benko to Take Over German Retailer

By Vered Weiss

August 25, 2014 

The German department store chain Karstadt is going to be sold to real estate shark Rene Benko, who was recently brought up on corruption charges. In August, right before the Karstadt deal closed, Benko was convicted of corruption charges with a 12 month suspended sentence. In 2009, he was tried to manipulate tax findings in Italy and tried to manipulate Italian government officials. 

Benko, who is just 37 years old, along with his Signa real estate company, will take possession of  83 stores with employ 17, 000 people. More interested in real estate than retail, he plans to close a large number of stores and convert the remainder into shopping malls, which will command high rents. The current owner, Nicolas Berggruen, has instituted wage cuts and layoffs, declared that the sale would be a success. Many workers fear that the union is in cohoots with Benko, and don’t count on a fair shake when the ink dries on the deal.

From <https://jewishbusinessnews.com/2014/08/25/convicted-real-estate-speculator-rene-benko-to-take-over-german-retailer/>

2023oct19 Rene Benko: The unbelievable Rise and Controversies of the Austrian selfmade Billionaire Business Mogul

 October 19, 2023

From <https://www.founderstoday.news/rene-benko-rise-and-controversies/>

The Austrian Entrepreneur’s journey from attic expansions to a multi-industry empire is nothing short of astonishing. In the world of high-stakes finance, René Benko, the 45-year-old mastermind behind Signa Holding, boasts an estimated fortune of 4.9 billion euros, as reported by “Trend” magazine.

His rags-to-riches story began with his first million in Schilling at the tender age of 20, and by 40, he had skyrocketed to billionaire status in euros, securing his place as the sixth wealthiest Austrian. However, his path to success is now clouded by serious allegations from an old acquaintance, Thomas Schmid, who has accused him of bribery in connection with a Signa tax audit. Benko has yet to issue a statement, but the presumption of innocence remains.

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Born in Innsbruck in 1977 to a municipal worker and a kindergarten teacher, Benko’s early fascination with real estate led him to drop out of high school before graduation, choosing instead to dedicate himself to transforming attics into luxurious living spaces. In 2001, he teamed up with Karl Kovarik, heir to Stroh-Tankstellen, to found Immofina, a precursor to the Signa Group.

Rene Benko’s big break came with the acquisition of the Tyrol department store, leading to a real estate empire that includes the Golden Quartier, the opulent Park Hyatt hotel, the iconic Postsparkasse in Vienna, and a 50% stake in the Chrysler Building in New York. Additionally, he has ambitious plans for the Elbtower in Hamburg, set to reach a staggering one billion euros by 2025. Signa Holding is predominantly owned indirectly by Benko’s family, with a 78% stake, while a family foundation associated with Hans Peter Haselsteiner holds 15%.

Expanding into Retail

Rene Benko’s expansion into the retail sector in 2012, alongside Israeli entrepreneur Beny Steinmetz, saw the acquisition of Berlin’s famous KaDeWe department store and the purchase of 16 properties from the German Karstadt department store group, totaling over a billion euros. In 2019, the acquisition of the Kaufhof Group led to the creation of Galeria Karstadt Kaufhof Group, which sought government protection during the pandemic. Despite two billion euros in debt forgiveness, around 4,000 employees were laid off, and approximately 40 stores closed.

Signa made headlines in Austria in 2018 with the acquisition of furniture retailer Kika-Leiner and expanded to Switzerland in 2020 with the purchase of the Globus department store chain, partnering with Thai investors. They also acquired Sport Scheck in Germany. In August of the current year, Rene Benko and his Thai partners made headlines again by purchasing the prestigious British department store chain Selfridges for a staggering four billion euros. Simultaneously, the Elbtower project in Hamburg continued to evolve, while in Vienna, the “Viennese KaDeWe” emerged on the site where “Leiner” once stood. Signa also actively operates in the sports and outdoor retail sector through Signa Sports United, boasting around a hundred online shops.

Entry into the Media Industry

Around 2018, Rene Benko, who was already the founder and chairman of Signa Holding’s advisory board, extended his influence into the media industry. Signa entered the media sector through its media GmbH and the German WAZ Group, acquiring major shares in the Austrian Newspapers “Krone” and “Kurier.” This move raised eyebrows, particularly due to the discontent of Christoph Dichand, co-owner, editor, and chief editor of “Krone.”

Despite his impressive achievements, Rene Benko has not escaped controversy. He has faced criticism for receiving German government funds through Signa and subsequently downsizing and closing branches. His close political associations with figures such as Heinz-Christian Strache (FPÖ), Alfred Gusenbauer (SPÖ), and Sebastian Kurz have also come under scrutiny. Notably, his connection to the influential former Green Party spokesperson and Vienna city council member, Christoph Chorherr, has led to charges in the so-called Chorherr donation case. Rene Benko’s involvement in this case coincided with other allegations that led to a conviction, although the sentence has been served. The Chorherr case will begin in November, and the presumption of innocence prevails.

The Signa Group’s business practices were questioned by Bloomberg, but the company defended itself, citing independent appraisals and audits conducted by financial examiners. In Austria, the Kika-Leiner deal and its circumstances raised eyebrows and generated critical questions in a parliamentary committee. Furthermore, the Kika-Leiner department store group received government COVID-19 assistance while placing employees on short-time work.

Germany’s Galeria Department Store Crisis

The woes facing the Galeria department store group in Germany show no sign of abating. In the 2020/21 fiscal year, losses exceeded a staggering 620 million euros, while Galeria’s revenues amounted to approximately two billion euros. The outlook for this year is equally grim, with expectations of a “net loss in the low to mid million range” and a decline in sales. Reports indicate that the department store group is poised to once again seek government assistance.

Rubbing Shoulders with Celebrities

In contrast to his media-shy demeanor, René Benko, who has five children in total, including four with his second wife, has been hosting high-profile Törggelen events since 2009. The autumn Törggelen gatherings, a South Tyrolean tradition centered around chestnut feasting, have been graced by a multitude of notable figures at Signa Holding on Freyung. Rene Benko has had amicable relations with key political figures, including those from the Turquoise party and their associates, such as Thomas Schmid, as evidenced by numerous chats. What unfolds from these interactions and the investigations by the WKStA remains to be seen.

In a candid interview with the German “Handelsblatt,” Rene Benko once outlined the prerequisites for a successful investor. According to him, success requires ample time, “the intuition and acumen of a born entrepreneur,” and the meticulous cultivation of a network over the course of many years. He notably omitted the potential pitfalls and challenges inherent in this process.

From <https://www.founderstoday.news/rene-benko-rise-and-controversies/>

2019jan20 Interview | Aby Rosen

Jan 20, 2019

From <https://www.alainelkanninterviews.com/aby-rosen/>

MAKING GOOD THINGS BETTER. AbyRosen is an American-German real estate investor.  He runs RFR, one of the largest real estate companies in the United States, with his partner and best friend Michael Fuchs. They have known each other since nursery school in Frankfurt.

How old are you?

I am 58 years old.  I was born in May 1960 in Frankfurt, a Jew when only 1% of the population wasJewish.  My father was Polish and was in Auschwitz until April 1945.  My mother was born in Brussels in 1935, and in 1940 she was brought by my grandfather to a none-Jewish family of farmers, very simple people, and she lived with them until 1945.  Later she became a painter, an art where she could express her fury.

How was it to grow up as a Jew in Germany 15 years after the war ended?

We were too young to realisewhat had happened.  It was later we realisedwhat it meant.  For myself Ithought it was nice to be special, different.  My father made money and we felt financially secure.  I was positive, friendly, outspoken, driven.

How did your professional success start?

My father had a heart attack and therefore retired from work when I was 18.  I was in Law School then and I worked in my father’s real-estate business.  He gave me the keys.

Why did you go to the United States?

I didn’t want to be a lawyer.  I always liked America: it was smart, new, innovative.  New York is a town you choose, not because it is beautiful butbecause it suits you.

How old were you when you went to New York?

I was 27.  I took a loan from my father.  I wanted to be independent.

“I feel gratitude towards America, who enabled my success.”

The courtyard of RFR’s newly opened 5 star The Jaffa Hotel & Residences in Tel Aviv, Israel.

What did you do?

I bought an empty building on the corner of 44th Street and Lexington Avenue, a fantastic location.  I hired a very good architect and I spent too much money, to turn the building into a great building.  When you have a great location you would not usually upgrade the building, but I was smart to make it aesthetically very nice and lease it to McDonald’s.  It became the nicest McDonald’s in the city.  From then on I understood how much real estate and architecture were connected.  You also have a premium for great architecture. 

What kind of real estate is interesting to you today? Where is the money to be made?  

RFR is actively seeking to invest in high quality, architecturally significant, real estate in strong core markets across the US and Europe.  We are targeting all asset classes where there is a value-add component through strategic ownership or property level repositioning.

Doyou now own some very significant buildings?

Yes, I own the Seagram Building by Mies van der Rohe and then Philip Johnson.  And Lever House.  Built in 1954, it was the first glass building in the world.  In one year I bought two of the best pieces of real-estate ever.  I have built 15 buildings, renovated more than 30, and I own over 70 buildings.

All in New York City?

No, also in Miami and Las Vegas – and a big portfolio of real-estate in Germany. 

How are the two restaurants that you have in the Seagram building at the place of the Four Seasons doing, and how is your hotel and restaurant business doing?

The hotels, as well as the restaurants, are 24 hour businesses.  If you do not stay on top of them and maximize your guest experiences, you are dead.  I can report that our restaurants and hotels continue to meet my expectations.  It is personally rewarding to see my vision executed.  It takes an enormous amount of work and personal commitment to conceive a product and then to maintain their quality and freshness each and every day.

“I continue to be attracted to great architecture and design and good art.”

Which are your hotels in America?

The W South Beach in Miami, the Paramount in Times Square and the Gramercy Park Hotel in New York.

Are you very close to Israel?

We had big ambitions to build in Israel, buttwenty-two years later we have only built The Jaffa Hotel in Tel Aviv.  I was disappointed not to do much, butit was too competitive.  Israelis are very tough.

How is The Jaffa hotel going? 

We opened The Jaffa, Israel’s best hotel and residences, in August 2018.  We are offering 5-star hospitality in a country seeing exponential tourism growth.  The feedback and reviews have been extraordinary.  The old city of Jaffa is the most exciting and diverse area in Tel Aviv.  The hotel is beautiful, restaurants superb and courtyard divine – time feels like it stops when you are there.  It is that good.

Does art still have a lot to do with your work?

I realisedthat art and architecture have a strong relationship and I started to put art in all the buildings, plazas, and rented apartments.  We commissioned lots of artists’ work.  We buy art for our spaces and also help our tenants to put together collections.

What kind of art?

Progressive artists as well as established ones.

Is the art business still booming and which are the artists that you collect or admire?

The art world is doing well.  I continue to be attracted to great architecture and design and good art.  Collecting art and being active in the creative community is a pleasure of mine.  I have 8 to 900 paintings.  From Warhol, Twombly, Basquiat, Koons, Ed Ruscha, Damien Hirst, Richard Prince…. I collect many artists and am open to discovering new artists.  I feel it is important to display my art and share with others.  Our Lever House Art Collection gallery space is very active again and exhibiting exciting works from a diverse range of artists.  I love sculpture because it is a form, you can place it anywhere you want.  With a painting it stays on the wall and doesn’t change the shape of the room.  Sculpture is a form in the room.

The idiosyncratic, eclectic vision of the Gramercy Park Hotel in New York City attracts both business and leisure travelers.

Jeff Koons. HULKS. Lever House Art Collection, Dec 2005-April 2006

The Paramount Hotel, a refuge of edgy elegance close to Times Square in New York City.

The East Side Mall in the Berlin-Friedrichshain district of Berlin, Germany. The shopping mall was designed by architect Ben van Berkel.

Jean-Michel Basquiat. HOAX, 1983. W South Beach Hotel, Miami

Damien Hirst. THE VIRGIN MOTHER, 2005

Painted Bronze. Lever House, New York

“I would like to be remembered as someone who had a good eye.”

After so much success and many years, do you now feel German or American?

100% American.  I have an American wife, American children.  I feel gratitude towards America, who enabled my success.  I have to be appreciative, and it is my home.

What is the impact of Trump’s Presidency on real estate? 

Trump’s tax laws have not been good for home ownership in New York, but in general I feel little negative impact.  I do not worry about micro-economic changes – I do not have a crystal ball.  I invest for the long term and will find opportunities in any market.  At times I may have to be more patient or a little smarter, but I will always be in the game.

What about art?

It is an asset and people want to buy, for investing, for pleasure, for documenting (like the museums).  Art is the reflection of what is going on and by acquiring it you own your segment of the time, like a photograph.  Today peoplewho make money are more and more sophisticated.  There is so much money!  There are so many billionaires and millionaires everywhere. 

Your Instagram is full of pictures of you travelling to exotic destinations.  Is travelling one of your passions?

I will always be a student and endeavour to maintain a worldly perspective.  I very much enjoy, and think it is important, to see and immerse myself in different geographies and cultures.  It is so interesting and stimulating to witness differing lifestyles, aesthetics, politics and beauty – it helps me shape my own points of view which surely have an influence on my work and personal character.

What are your new projects? 

I am looking at high quality architecturally significant properties in up and coming neighbourhoods where we can create value using imagination and creative vision.  I have expanded our presence in Brooklyn and in downtown New York.

What about your future?

I think that one has to have a conviction and a plan.  Time is your enemy if you are not decisive.  Time is also a healer when you make a mistake.  My program is very similar and simple.  I continue to do what I do: create good housing, good spaces and use art for longevity, for long term things.  I look for commercial success and I make good things better.  I would like to use great architects, work with landscapers.  Landscape architects have to be recognised.

How would you like to be remembered?

I am a capitalist butif I can do it with good architects, good landscapers, good artists and create longevity this makes me happy.  I would like to be remembered as someone who had a good eye.  A good eye means a good judgement.

Art and Portrait Photography by Jesse David Harris  All images courtesy of RFR.

From <https://www.alainelkanninterviews.com/aby-rosen/>

2006oct26 NYT Aby Rosen A Builder Dusts Off His Starry Rolodex

New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Oct 26, 2006.

From <https://www.proquest.com/usnews/docview/2225259995/4778469C6E444687PQ/4?accountid=6749&sourcetype=Blogs,%20Podcasts,%20&%20Websites>  

Abstract

Artist Jeff Koons, fashion designer Tory Burch, Revlon chairman Ronald Perelman and dermatologist Dr Patricia Wexler have banded together to support controversial proposal for 30-story glass tower atop 1950 building at 980 Madison Avenue, designed by Norman Foster; supporters are drawn to project because developer of project is AbyRosen, man known for acquiring architectural touchstones and renovating them at considerable effort and expense; opponents of project paint Rosen as just another greedy developer interested in profit but he casts himself as champion of bold invention; photos (M)

Full Text

It's definitely unusual to see an art-world star like Jeff Koons take the microphone at an hours-long public meeting on local architecture, as he did last week and again on Tuesday. Nor is it customary to hear testimony on land use from the fashion designer Tory Burch; Revlon's chairman, Ronald Perelman; or the dermatologist Dr. Patricia Wexler.

Yet this unorthodox team of cheerleaders has quickly coalesced behind a controversial proposal for a 30-story glass tower atop a 1950 building at 980 Madison Avenue, across from the Carlyle Hotel. And they turned out not just because of the celebrity architect who designed it -- Norman Foster -- but because of who is paying for it: the developer AbyRosen.

Unlike many New York real estate moguls, who simply tear down the old to build the new, the German-born Mr. Rosen, 46, has established a track record of acquiring architectural touchstones like Lever House, the Seagram Building and the Gramercy Park Hotel and renovating them, at considerable effort and expense.

What's more, Mr. Rosen, who lives about three blocks from the proposed tower, is one of the country's leading collectors of contemporary art, with about 800 works. He's also a fixture on New York's social scene, which allows him to call in some high-cachet chits when he needs them. And in this case, he is pulling out the stops.

"I am asking you for your help here," he said in an Oct. 11 letter sent to Upper East Side gallery owners and residents, "and would be extremely grateful for your support and assistance."

Many neighborhood residents vehemently oppose the Foster tower, which would be built atop a low-rise gallery building officially protected as part of the Upper East Side Historic District. Last week, the local community board voted to recommend that the Landmark Preservation Commission withhold a "certificate of appropriateness," which is required for the project.

Opponents of the tower have tried to depict Mr. Rosen as just another greedy developer interested in profit, but he casts himself as a champion of bold invention. "There is more at stake here than just me building this tower," he said in an interview. "This is an argument about expressing your times. It's about history. It's about heritage -- what we leave behind.

"What everybody has forgotten in this big hoopla, this big uproar, is I am taking something that is there and I'm making it better. Nobody likes change. Everybody wants the status quo. You want the Pan Am Building to be the Pan Am Building. We all don't want change. But if we don't have the vision and the strength to create something that leaves a history behind, we will live on the Upper East Side in a medieval town."

Mr. Rosen cultivates the image of art-world insider, wearing his white hair long and his button-down shirts open. At his offices, you can't turn a corner without running into an Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst, Sol Lewitt, Garry Winogrand or Jean-Michel Basquiat.

A feature article on his town house residence in the current issue of Vogue Living highlights the art as much as the furniture: Tom Wesselman's "Smoker #6" in the smoking room, Richard Serra's "Memorial Day" in the dining room. His wife, Samantha Boardman, a psychiatrist, is also a glamorous figure in New York society.

Though still in the early throes, the battle over 980 Madison is already shaping up to be a bitter one. Aggravating local sensitivities, it comes just months after a similar clash over a proposed addition to the Whitney Museum, just two blocks south. (That nine-story project won approval from the landmarks commission, although it is unclear whether the Whitney will proceed with it.)

The Foster building would include 18 apartments within the tower. It would devote 24,000 square feet in the base to contemporary exhibition space -- Mr. Rosen calls it a Kunsthalle -- and restore the garden on the 1950 structure's roof.

"I made the decision to restore the base, bring back the original design, add public space -- not to appease anybody," he said.

Top-tier gallery owners like Lawrence Salander and Larry Gagosian sent letters on Mr. Rosen's behalf to last week's community board meeting and to a landmarks hearing held on Tuesday. (Mr. Gagosian's uptown gallery is at 980 Madison.)

"I believe the project will be a godsend to the neighborhood," Mr. Salander said. "I would trust your motives and artistic sensibility to do the right thing and without reservation."

Defenders of the neighborhood's traditional aesthetic were also out in force on Tuesday. "This is not evolution, this is a revolution," William Kahn, a resident of Carlyle House on East 77th Street, said. "Mr. Rosen has camouflaged the real thrust of his efforts. In military terms, it's an invasion."

Ward Blum, an East 77th Street resident, said that adding the glass tower to Madison Avenue would be "like the Philharmonic inviting a heavy-metal punk rocker to join the orchestra."

But some residents said they would welcome an exciting new piece of architecture. Mark Ehret, a Madison Avenue shop owner, said the tower could be "a feather in the cap" of the "austere" 1950 structure.

"I, for one, don't want to live in a neighborhood so frozen in time that it's lost its heartbeat," he said.

Some people who spoke out at last week's community board meeting clearly suspect Mr. Rosen of a cynical quid pro quo. They suggest, for example, that Mr. Koons has a purely financial incentive for supporting Mr. Rosen's project. At the close of last spring's contemporary art auctions in Manhattan, Mr. Rosen paid the highest price of the evening -- $2.7 million -- for Mr. Koons's "Buster Keaton," a sculpture of the silent film comedian on a pony. He keeps Mr. Koons's mirrored-glass "Lilac Cow" in his breakfast room at home; at the reception desk of his Lever House office, visitors are greeted by a Koons piece, "Encased Five Rows," a grid of glass shelves holding boxes of basketballs.

Mr. Rosen said he had not been aware that Mr. Koons was going to testify on his behalf at the community board meeting or landmarks hearings. (Mr. Koons did not return calls this week seeking confirmation.) In his public testimony, Mr. Koons said the neighborhood needed contemporary architecture to be part of its legacy.

Mr. Rosen said that as a developer he wanted to help the city catch up to European countries that had erected far more progressive buildings in recent decades.

"New York has had a lack of great architecture happening over the last 30 or 40 years -- not that they need me to tell them that," he said of his opponents. "Classic developers are mostly families who have been doing this for generations. They took the easy route of building cookie cutters, wedding cakes, setbacks -- very boring but very profitable buildings."

Mr. Rosen said his enthusiasm for architecture dated from his childhood in Frankfurt. "I always loved the prewar," he said. "I always loved the high ceilings, I always loved the stucco and the moldings."

It isn't easy to hear people attack him, Mr. Rosen says. But the anti-Semitismhe experienced as a Jewish child in Germany helps give him perspective. "I grew up with kids telling me, 'They forgot to gas your father,' " he said.

"So I have zero fear. Fear is not something I have."

Word count: 1230

Copyright 2019 The New York Times Company

Works Cited

A Builder Dusts Off His Starry Rolodex. New York Times Company, New York, 2006. ProQuest, http://ezproxy.lapl.org/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/blogs-podcasts-websites/builder-dusts-off-his-starry-rolodex/docview/2225259995/se-2.

From <https://www.proquest.com/usnews/docview/2225259995/4778469C6E444687PQ/4?accountid=6749&sourcetype=Blogs,%20Podcasts,%20&%20Websites>

#Lauder - Brothers Backing Opposite Candidates 2022 | Lee Zeldin wins critical Jewish support as he gains on Gov. Kathy Hochul

By Jacob Henry October 24, 2022 

From <https://www.jta.org/2022/10/24/ny/lee-zeldin-wins-critical-jewish-support-as-he-gains-on-gov-kathy-hochul>  

Rep. Lee Zeldin, center, meets with Rabbi Shea Hecht, left, and Rabbi Shimon Hecht from the National Committee for Furtherance of Jewish Education in Crown Heights. (Zeldin Campaign)  

From <https://www.jta.org/2022/10/24/ny/lee-zeldin-wins-critical-jewish-support-as-he-gains-on-gov-kathy-hochul>  

(New York Jewish Week) —  The New York State governor’s race has become close in recent weeks, good news for an influential Orthodox voting bloc and a Jewish billionaire who is supporting the Republican candidate, Long Island Rep. Lee Zeldin.  

A Quinnipiac University survey released last week found Gov. Kathy Hochul with only a slight 50 percent lead to Zeldin’s 46 percent, with Zeldin gaining on the once heavily favored Democratic frontrunner who took over for former Gov. Andrew Cuomo after he resigned amidst sexual harrassment allegations.  

Gothamist reported last week that Zeldin, who earned former President Donald Trump’s endorsement this month, received a $4 million campaign boost through a pair of Super PACs largely funded by Jewish billionaire Ronald Lauder, who is an heir to the Estèe Lauder cosmetics company.  

Lauder is a significant donor to Jewish causes, including the World Jewish Congress, of which he is president. Zeldin is one of only two Jewish Republicans in the House of Representatives. 

Safe Together NY Super PAC has used Lauder’s money to buy ads criticizing Hochul on rising crime, which Republicans in various states see as a winning strategy, citing recent gains in the polls. Lauder is also the largest donor of the Save Our State NY Super PAC, which is led by Republican New York City Council member Joe Borelli.  

#NYGOV candidate Lee Zeldin (R) and #NY17 candidate Mike Lawler (R) met with more than a dozen Orthodox Jewish elected officials from Rockland county as well as a number of community leaders pic.twitter.com/01GhSkaQW4

— Joel Weingart (@JoelWeingart_) October 16, 2022

At the same time, Zeldin has made significant inroads with the Orthodox community across the state, whose adherents lean conservative and supported Trump in the presidential election.  

Over the weekend, the candidate received an endorsement from Rabbi Shea Hecht, the chairman of the National Committee for the Furtherance of Jewish Education, who is also a principal in the Chabad Hasidic movement.  

“You are the only candidate who is truly pro-Yeshivas and public safety, which are the two prominent issues facing our community,” Hecht wrote in a public letter to Zeldin. “I enthusiastically support your campaign.” 

After the New York Times’ bombshell piece showing that some Hasidic schools received taxpayer money while not adequately providing adequate secular education under state law, Zeldin began touring yeshivas and pledging to support them.  

A Borough Park political insider who wished not to be named told the New York Jewish Week that he supports Zeldin because of the candidate’s support of yeshiva education. “This is our number one issue at this point in our time,” the insider said. “People feel that Hochul has been silent on this issue. They feel that Zeldin has been very vocal and hopefully when he becomes governor he’ll continue with that.” 

After the New York Times story came out, Zeldin said in a statement that “New York is wrong for pushing these substantial-equivalency standards,” adding, “as Governor, I will promote more school choice, not less, and do everything in my power to fight for students first and empower parents to be in control of the family’s destiny in life.” 

In recent weeks, Zeldin has toured different yeshivas around the state, and he has had multiple meetings with prominent Orthodox rabbis throughout his campaign.  

Yossi Gestetner, a Monsey resident who runs the Orthodox Jewish Public Affairs Council, told the New York Jewish Week that Zeldin met with multiple influential people in Monsey and Kiryas Joel over the last few months.  

“Orthodox voters would feel a basic accomplishment if Zeldin wins,” Gestetner said. “In all fairness to Hochul, she also has a good record to run on when it comes to Jewish support, but there is a certain laidback aura coming from her office in a time of rising crime and an attack on our way of life in regards to the yeshivas that makes people wonder about her.” 

Politicians often court the haredi Orthodox leadership in Brooklyn and in Rockland and Orange counties in the belief that the communities often vote as a bloc. At the same time, Orthodox leaders have been careful to cultivate politicians on both sides of the aisle: Mayor Eric Adams privately attributed his election win to their support in a closed door meeting last month, and in June, Hochul secured endorsements from rival factions in the Satmar Hasidic community. 

Zeldin voted against certifying the 2020 presidential election, which Trump erroneously claims he won. In that election, a survey from Orthodox magazine Ami showed that 83% of Orthodox voters supported Trump.

Polls typically show the majority of Jewish voters, who are not Orthodox, back Democratic candidates at about the same rate. UJA-Federation of NY estimates that Orthodox Jews represent 32% of the Jewish population in the metropolitan area, although a large percentage are too young to vote. 

New York voters have not elected a Republican to statewide office since then-Gov. George Pataki won a third term 20 years ago.

Rabbi Jan Uhrbach of the Conservative Synagogue of the Hamptons, which falls in Zeldin’s congressional district, told the New York Jewish Week that they “have no direct relationship with him or his office.”

While Zeldin has focused on crime and education in his campaign, Hochul has emphasized Zeldin’s ties to Trump and his record on abortion as a reason to vote for her. Zeldin appeared to welcome the Supreme Court’s decision overturning of Roe v. Wade, but said recently that he would not change the state’s abortion laws if elected. 

Hochul also has some strong Jewish donors, including director Steven Spielberg and producer Jeffrey Katzenberg, as well real estate executive Steven A. Roth, the investor Aby Rosen and Leonard A. Lauder, Ronald’s brother and an investor and philanthropist in his own right.  

Another Jewish donor, Vornado executive Haim Chera, has contributed to both Hochul and Zeldin’s campaigns.  

The two will face off against each other on Tuesday night for the only gubernatorial debate to take place before the election.  

Election Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.

From <https://www.jta.org/2022/10/24/ny/lee-zeldin-wins-critical-jewish-support-as-he-gains-on-gov-kathy-hochul>

#leonard lauder

Jewish Insider’s daily kickoff: February 11, 2019. (2019, Feb 11). The Times of Israel Retrieved from http://ezproxy.lapl.org/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/newspapers/jewish-insider-s-daily-kickoff-february-11-2019/docview/2178204513/se-2

PROFILE: "Howard Rubenstein: From starting a business in his mother's kitchen to rubbing shoulders with giants" by Steve Barrett: "The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York had set up an advisory board on community relations, and over the years [Howard] Rubenstein helped build a truly cross-denominational group. "I became very friendly with the archdiocese and they invite me to more Catholic things than the Jewish things I go to," Rubenstein jokes to PRWeek. "I was invited to Rome with Cardinal Egan and I met the pope I was seated outside in the first row and Pope Francis comes out, walks past me, and goes to get into his car, but somebody from the archdiocese ran after him, walked him back to me, and introduced him," remembers Rubenstein. "He blessed some of my rosaries and left. He didn't say hello to all these other people sitting around me The guy sitting next to me says, 'You're Jewish, right?' I said yes, and the guy just muttered, 'How did this happen?'"

"Rubenstein also represented New York scions such as George Steinbrenner, Larry Silverstein, Michael Bloomberg, Rupert Murdoch, Leonard Lauder, Leona Helmsley, and Mike Tyson, city mayors from Abe Beame to Ed Koch to Rudy Giuliani, governors Mario Cuomo and George Pataki, Senator Chuck Schumer, and, most notably in the present-day context, President Donald Trump." [PRWeek]

"Why Are Jews Funny?" by Mark Horowitz: "In "Jewish Comedy: A Serious History," the Columbia professor Jeremy Dauber skates through more than 2,000 years of material without ever settling on one overarching theory. Instead, in the manner of a field biologist, he lays out a detailed taxonomy of Jewish humor: seven categories to cover everything from the Book of Esther to "Curb Your Enthusiasm," with one chapter devoted to each category. There's a chapter for humor about anti-Semitism; one for satirical humor; one for highbrow wit and wordplay; another for theological or philosophical humor; and a vaguely defined catchall subgenus, the comedy of disguise, that somehow covers all the work of Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, the Marx Brothers and Jerry Seinfeld."[NYTimes]

Jewish insider's daily kickoff: December 1, 2017. (2017, Dec 01). Haaretz Retrieved from http://ezproxy.lapl.org/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/newspapers/jewish-insiders-daily-kickoff-december-1-2017/docview/1970706976/se-2

From <https://www.proquest.com/docview/1970706976/695DC43F29D946D7PQ/8?accountid=6749&sourcetype=Newspapers>

================#nextdoc

Leonard Lauder acquisition lipstick bobbi brown

LU STOUT: Welcome back.

Now makeup mogul Bobbi Brown started her billion dollar brand with

just $10,000 and a desire to champion the so-called natural look.

Now Poppy Harlow sat down with Brown to ask her about how she went

from makeup artist to the top of the beauty business.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

POPPY HARLOW, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Bobbi Brown is a makeup artist

turned makeup mogul.

BOBI BROWN, FOUNDER, BOBBI BROWN COSMETICS: This is gel, longwear

eyeliner. And this is a product I totally invented.

HARLOW: She's the founder and chief creative officer of Bobbi Brown

Cosmetics.

Sitting down with Brown is anything but your typical CEO interview.

BROWN: I like to dance.

HARLOW: I hear you're a pretty big hip hop fan.

BROWN: I love hip hop. I do. I even hopped on stage with Flo Rida

gold chain and all.

HARLOW: After floundering at first in college, she got her degree in

theatrical makeup, then packed her bags for Manhattan.

You moved to New York City, didn't know anyone, opened up the phone

book.

BROWN: The yellow pages.

HARLOW: And what did you look up?

BROWN: I looked up makeup. I looked up modeling. I looked up

fashion.

HARLOW: She worked her way up, eventually landing her first Vogue

cover in 1987.

What was that moment like?

BROWN: I'll never forget. It was Naomi Campbell's first cover. The

photographer Patrick De Marchlier (ph) and it was shot on the beach early

in the morning and you never know if it's a cover or not. And when I heard

it was a cover I was beyond.

HARLOW: By 1991, with just $10,000, she and her partner launched

Bobbi Brown Essentials with a singular mission.

BROWN: To make a lipstick that looked like lips, because most of the

lipsticks on the market looked artificial.

HARLOW: That lipstick line burgeoned into a billion dollar business,

reaching new heights when the company was acquired by Estee Lauder in 1995.

LeonardLaudersaid to you we want to buy your company in part because

you're beating us in all the stores.

BROWN: Yes. Yes, we were beating them in the stores. And he did say

that.

HARLOW: Brown will be the first to admit she's no good at dealing

with corporate bureaucracy and has gone against the grain from the start.

BROWN: Yellow foundation -- women don't want yellow foundation.

Well, guess what, that's what makes a woman look natural.

HARLOW: But she also makes clear it's not about looking perfect.

BROWN: My philosophy of my company is to help women appreciate who

they are and be who we are.

HARLOW: Today, 63 percent of its business is international from

Dubai to Shanghai, Bobbi Brown is sold in more than 1,700 stores across 68

countries.

Works Cited

Stout, Kristie L., et al. Israeli-Palestinian Ceasefire Agreements Falls Apart before it Began; Leading Women: Bobbi Brown; IBM's Smarter Cities Initiative Partners with Beijing on Pollution. CQ Roll Call, New York, 2014. ProQuest, http://ezproxy.lapl.org/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/other-sources/israeli-palestinian-ceasefire-agreements-falls/docview/1795799230/se-2.

2020 Leonard A. Lauder funds Tulane University professorship on American history and values / Walter Isaacson

March 09, 2020 10:30 AM

Roger Dunaway roger@tulane.edu

View PDF

Leonard A. Lauder, who spent three decades as chief executive officer of The Estée Lauder Companies, Inc., has made a gift to establish The Leonard A. Lauder Professor of American History and Values. (photo courtesy of the The Estée Lauder Companies)

Leonard A. Lauder, Chairman Emeritus of The Estée Lauder Companies, Inc., has made a gift to Tulane University to establish The Leonard A. Lauder Professor of American History and Values. The inaugural holder of the professorship will be Walter Isaacson, professor of history in the Tulane School of Liberal Arts and co-chair of The New Orleans Book Festival at Tulane University.

The gift will also support speakers on American history and values at The New Orleans Book Festival at Tulane University, which debuts March 19-21, 2020, as well as the Values in America Speaker Series, which features a variety of leading voices on the topic of values in America.

“A primary mission of universities is to create a forum for the discussion and exchange of great ideas, as well as to serve as a home for today’s leading thinkers such as Walter Isaacson,” Tulane President Mike Fitts said. “This generous gift helps Tulane achieve both of these goals. Walter’s presence on campus as a Lauder Professor places us at the forefront in the study of history, the examination of social progress and the understanding of social change and innovation.”

"I hope that this professorship allows the next generation to learn from the lessons of the past and from a variety of voices so that together we can continue to build a brighter future."

- Leonard A. Lauder

“As a student of history, a veteran and someone who loves the common values that unite this nation, I hope that this professorship allows the next generation to learn from the lessons of the past and from a variety of voices so that together we can continue to build a brighter future,” Lauder said.

Lauder spent three decades as chief executive officer of The Estée Lauder Companies, Inc., one of the world’s leading manufacturers and marketers of prestige skin care, makeup, fragrance and hair care products. In addition to his role with the company, Lauder is extremely involved in education, art, politics and philanthropy. His contributions in the education sector are well documented, including the Joseph H. Lauder Institute of Management & International Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, which he co-founded in 1983 with his brother, Ronald, in honor of their father.

“Leonard Lauder has always been interested in American history and how it informs our values,” Isaacson said. “He’s been generous in funding American history and values programs at the University of Pennsylvania and the Aspen Institute. He has helped fund a speaker series at Tulane that brought people such as Madeleine Albright, Jon Meacham, Annette Gordon-Reed and Ken Burns to campus in the past year to talk about American history and values. I am thrilled that he has decided to make a more significant gift that will help both the teaching of history and bringing speakers to Tulane.”

Isaacson, who joined Tulane University in 2018, is a New Orleans native and a former Times-Picayune reporter. A best-selling author, he is the former chairman and CEO of CNN, managing editor of TIME and leader of the Aspen Institute.

From <https://news.tulane.edu/pr/leonard-lauder-funds-tulane-university-professorship-american-history-and-values>

Bronfmon wjc Israel

Bronfman was accused by another WJC official of "perfidy" when he wrote a letter to President Bush in mid-2003 urging Bush to pressure Israel to curb construction of its controversial West Bank separation barrier,[27] co-signed by former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger.[28] Former Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres said in support of Bronfman, "Clearly, issues that are open for debate in Israel should be open for debate in the Jewish world."[29]

Resignation

Bronfman stepped down from his post as president on May 7, 2007, amid scandals and turmoil about Israel Singer.[30][31][32] Bronfman's leadership is known for transforming the World Jewish Congress into the powerful organization it is today. As president, Bronfman is remembered most for his diplomacy with the Soviet Union in freeing Soviet Jews.[33]

At his memorial held in January 2014, Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said of Bronfman, "Edgar was never shy of pressing an issue in the face of injustice," as she spoke about the many causes he championed in his lifetime.[34]

From <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Bronfman_Sr.>

================#nextdoc

WJC scandal and resignation

On 14 March 2007 Singer was forced to resign from the WJC as a result of alleged misappropriation of financial resources. The Assurance of Discontinuance from the New York Attorney General describes in detail much of Singer's actions that lead to his termination.[6][7][8]

On 17 August 2007, lawsuits were filed by both Bronfman and the WJC in the Supreme Court of New York County; Bronfman's suit claimed "that Singer did not pay back more than $500,000 in personal loans stemming from a 2004 investigation by the New York State Attorney General into the WJC's finances." As a result of that investigation, Singer was required to pay back more than $300,000 to the organization. The WJC suit claimed that Singer "never returned WJC property such as computers, televisions, cellular phones and BlackBerries, that amount to $19,500."[9]

From <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_Singer>

2023nov14 nyt #friedman The Most Revealing Moment From My Trip to Israel

Nov. 14, 2023

By Thomas L. Friedman

Opinion Columnist, reporting from Tel Aviv.

Sign up for the Trump on Trial newsletter.  The latest news and analysis on the trials of Donald Trump in New York, Florida, Georgia and Washington, D.C. Get it sent to your inbox.

During my nine days of reporting recently in Israel and the West Bank, little did I know that the most revealing moment would come in the final hours of my visit. As I was packing to leave on Saturday night, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a news conference in which he indicated that Israel and the United States do not have a shared vision of how Israel should complete its war in Gaza or how to convert any Israeli victory over Hamas into a lasting peace with the Palestinians.

Without such a shared strategy, the Biden administration and the American people, particularly American Jews who support Israel, will need to make some fateful decisions.

We will have to either become captives of Netanyahu’s strategy — which could take us all down with him — or articulate an American vision for how the Gaza war must end. That would require a Biden administration plan to create two states for two indigenous peoples living in the areas of Gaza, the West Bank and Israel.

Yes, I am talking about a wartime peace plan that, if Israel agreed, could help give Israel the time, legitimacy, allies and resources it needs to defeat Hamas — without getting stuck governing all of Gaza and all of the West Bank forever, with no political horizon for the Palestinians.

And have no illusion, Netanyahu is offering only one vision right now: Seven million Jews trying to govern five million Palestinians in perpetuity — and that is a prescription for disaster for Israel, America, Jews everywhere and America’s moderate Arab allies.

The Biden plan — are you sitting down? — could actually use as one of its starting points President Donald Trump’s proposal for a two-state solution, because Netanyahu embraced that in 2020, when he had a different coalition. (Netanyahu and his ambassador in Washington practically wrote the Trump plan.) More on that in a second.

Here is why we are at a juncture that demands bold ideas, starting this past Saturday night. Speaking in Hebrew in a news conference with Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Minister Benny Gantz, Netanyahu rejected U.S. and world concerns over the thousands of Palestinian lives already lost to the war to uproot Hamas from Gaza. Even more important, he declared that Israel’s military would remain in Gaza “as long as necessary” to prevent the Gaza Strip from ever again being used to launch attacks on Israeli civilians.

Sign up for the Israel-Hamas War Briefing.  The latest news about the conflict. Get it sent to your inbox.

Gaza “will be demilitarized,” he said. “There will be no further threat from the Gaza Strip on Israel, and to ensure that, for as long as necessary, I.D.F. will control Gaza security to prevent terrorism from there,” he added, referring to the Israel Defense Forces.

Those are legitimate Israeli concerns, given the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7, but Netanyahu also indicated that Israel would oppose the return of the Palestinian Authority — Israel’s partner in the Oslo peace process that governs Palestinians in the West Bank — to Gaza after the war. The authority, Netanyahu said, is “a civil authority that educates its children to hate Israel, to kill Israelis, to eliminate the State of Israel … an authority that pays the families of murderers based on the number they murdered … an authority whose leader still has not condemned the terrible massacre 30 days later.”

Bibi — who never gives the Palestinian Authority credit for how it works every day with Israeli security officials to dampen violence in the West Bank — offered no suggestion of how and from where an alternative, legitimate Palestinian governing authority ready to work with Israel might emerge.

This was an in-your-face rebuke of the Biden administration position articulated by Secretary of State Antony Blinken last Wednesday. As The Times reported, Blinken declared during a meeting of foreign ministers in Tokyo that Gaza should be unified with the West Bank under the Palestinian Authority once the war is over.

To retain America’s Arab and Western allies, Blinken said that right now — today — we must articulate “affirmative elements to get to a sustained peace.” And “these must include the Palestinian people’s voices and aspirations at the center of postcrisis governance in Gaza,” he said. “It must include Palestinian-led governance and Gaza unified with the West Bank under the Palestinian Authority.”

My four-word translation of Blinken’s proposal to Israel: “Help us help you.”

Blinken, though, also offered no details of how that might happen. The Biden team needs to flesh that out.

Why is Netanyahu trying to destroy the Palestinian Authority as a governing option for a postwar Gaza? Because he is already campaigning to hold on to power after the Gaza war is over, and he knows there will be a huge surge of Israelis demanding he step down because of how he and his far-right cronies distracted and divided Israel and its military by pursuing a judicial coup that Israeli intelligence sources told Netanyahu was emboldening and tempting enemies such as Hamas and Hezbollah.

The only way Netanyahu can stay in power is if his far-right allies don’t abandon him, particularly Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. So to hold the support of the Jewish supremacists in his cabinet — some of whom want Israel to erect settlements in Gaza as soon as possible — Netanyahu has to declare now that the Palestinians will have no legitimate, independent representation in Gaza or the West Bank.

Yes, I know it is hard to believe, but Netanyahu is campaigning in the middle of this war.

It is time for President Biden to create a moment of truth for everyone — for Netanyahu, for the Palestinians and their supporters, for Israel and its supporters and for AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby. Biden needs to make clear that America will not be Netanyahu’s useful idiot. We are going to lay down the principles of a fair peace plan for the morning after this war — one that reflects our interests and that will also enable us to support Israel and moderate Palestinians and win the support of moderate Arabs for an economic reconstruction of Gaza after the war.

I cannot see any major economic support for the rebuilding of Gaza coming from Europe or from countries like the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia unless Israel and some legitimate Palestinian authority are committed to the principles of a peace framework to create two states for two peoples.

Biden needs to say: “Israel, we are covering your flank militarily with our two aircraft carriers, financially with $14 billion in aid and diplomatically at the U.N. The price for that is your acceptance of a peace framework based on two states for two indigenous peoples in Gaza, the West Bank and pre-1967 Israel.” This plan is based on U.N. Resolutions 242 and 338, which was also the cornerstone for negotiations in the peace plan put forward by Trump in 2020.

“Bibi, do you remember what you said about that Trump plan that gave Palestinians about 70 percent of the West Bank for a state, plus an expanded Gaza Strip and a capital in the area of Jerusalem?” Biden could add. “Here’s the Associated Press story of Jan. 28, 2020, to remind you: ‘Netanyahu called it a “historic breakthrough” equal in significance to the country’s declaration of independence in 1948.’”

The Palestinian Authority foolishly rejected the Trump plan outright instead of asking to use it as a starting point. This is a chance to make up for that mistake — or be exposed as unserious.

In his valuable new book on the history of the peace process, “(In)Sights: Peacemaking in the Oslo Process Thirty Years and Counting,” Gidi Grinstein, a member of Ehud Barak’s negotiating team at Camp David, argues that the Trump plan provides a natural foundation for a revived peace process for a two-state solution.

That is not only because Netanyahu already agreed to it, Grinstein told me in an interview, even if the settler hard-liners in his cabinet did not and still would not. It’s also viable because the Trump plan was actually based on the condition that peace was possible only after Hamas was removed from power in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority could assume control of the Gaza Strip, which, the Trump plan argued, would be expanded by land carved from Israel’s Negev Desert.

Biden could also propose that with the help of our moderate Arab allies, such as the U.A.E., Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and Bahrain, we would come up with a plan to overhaul the Palestinian Authority, purge its education system of anti-Israel material, upgrade its forces that work daily with Israeli security teams in the West Bank and phase out its financial support for Palestinian prisoners who harmed Israelis.

Is the Palestinian Authority up to such a deal? Are progressive Palestinian supporters in the West who chant the eliminationist mantra “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” up for it? Will Israel’s silent majority be if Hamas is defeated?

Let’s see what they all really stand for — or if they have a better answer — because neither is going to disappear. Biden needs to put them all to the test.

I know that a lot of American Jewish leaders privately would love Biden to put forward such a plan, but so far only one, Ronald Lauder, a longtime Republican and the president of the World Jewish Congress, has had the courage to call for it — in a Saudi newspaper, no less, in an essay titled, “A Time for Peace and a Two-State Solution.” As he explained, “Only a two-state solution would guarantee Israelis and Palestinians a life in dignity, safety and with a better perspective on the economic situation, which would lead to a sustainable future.”

Such a plan would protect America’s interests and make clear that we care about what’s best for Israelis and Palestinians and our allies in the region, not what’s best for Bibi’s political future — which several Israeli analysts told me would be to drag out the war, so he couldn’t be ousted by mass demonstrations, or to drag us into a conflict with Iran in hopes that it would overshadow all his mistakes.

If a two-state plan was embraced by Israel, even with reservations, it would reinforce for the world that Israel sees its war in Gaza as one of necessary self-defense and a prelude to lasting peace. And if such a plan was embraced by the Palestinian Authority, even with reservations, that would reinforce that the authority intends to be the alternative to Hamas in shaping an independent future for Palestinians alongside Israel — and that it will not be a bystander to Hamas’s madness or a victim of it.

From <https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/14/opinion/israel-war-biden.html>

Jewish Insider’s Daily Kickoff: February 11, 2019

 The Times of Israel

; Jerusalem, Israel. 11 Feb 2019.  

From <https://www.proquest.com/docview/2178204513/695DC43F29D946D7PQ/5?accountid=6749&sourcetype=Newspapers>

NEW NEWSLETTER — From now through Israel’supcoming April election and beyond, subscribe to Kafe Knesset, a sister publication to JI’s Daily Kickoff focused on Israeli politics. Delivered Sunday through Thursday and curated by Israel-based journalist Neri Zilber, this daily briefing provides a quick, yet comprehensive and engaging briefing on everything driving the conversation in Israel, from the cafes in Tel Aviv to the Knesset in Jerusalem and the taxi cabs in between.

The daily newsletter is $9.99 per month (less than 50¢ an issue). You can also subscribe to a weekly version of Kafe Knesset for free. [KafeKnesset]

SNEAK PEAK AT TODAY’S KAFE KNESSET — The Labor party is holding its primaries today to choose its electoral list ahead of April’s general election. The party of Ben-Gurion and Eshkol, Peres and Rabin — the party that built the State of Israel— is arguably at its lowest ever point.

Recent polls have it garnering between five to seven seats, with speculation rampant about whether it will even pass the (four seat) electoral threshold. Party officials hope that positive media attention on the slate picked by the party’s sixty-thousand members will change its fortunes. Yet even under the best-case scenario only a fraction of those chosen by the membership will have a realistic shot at making it to the Knesset. A key metric of remaining support will therefore be voter turnout.

DRIVING THE CONVO — Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) ignited a fresh political firestorm Sunday evening, accusing the American IsraelPublic Affairs Committee (AIPAC) of paying members of Congress to support Israel.

In response to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s call on Speaker Nancy Pelosi to admonish Omar and her colleague Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Omar tweeted: “It’s all about the Benjamins baby.” The Minnesota Congresswoman doubled down when asked whom she thinks “is paying American politicians to be pro-Israel?” “AIPAC!” Omar replied. She also retweeted a criticism from a Jewish Twitter user, “She might as well call us hook-nosed.” She later unretweeted it.

— LAST WEEK — In an interview with CNN last Tuesday, Omar said it’s “actually exciting” that her controversial views on Israelare sparking debate. And Tlaib explained her support for the BDS movement in an interview with NowThis News, claiming that she wants to “be able to humanize this issue.”

AIPAC responded on Twitter: “We are proud that we are engaged in the democratic process to strengthen the US-Israelrelationship. Our bipartisan efforts are reflective of American values and interests. We will not be deterred in any way by ill-informed and illegitimate attacks on this important work.”

REACTION — Rep. Max Rose (D-NY) said in a statement: “Congresswoman Omar’s statements are deeply hurtful to Jews, including myself… When someone uses hateful and offensive tropes and words against people of my faith, I will not be silent.”

Republican House members called on Speaker Pelosi to remove ⁦Rep. Omar⁩ from the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Chelsea Clinton‏ tweeted: “We should expect all elected officials, regardless of party, and all public figures to not traffic in anti-Semitism.”

— In response to criticism, Clinton added: “I will reach out to her tomorrow. I also think we have to call out anti-Semitic language and tropes on all sides, particularly in our elected officials and particularly now.” Omar appeared to accept the offer.

Amb. David Friedman: “Congresswoman from Minnesota falsely claims U.S. officials are paid to support Israel. I find that painful but amusing. This U.S. official gladly took a massive pay cut for the privilege to serve & the honor of advancing U.S.’ best interests by supporting the U.S.-Israelrelationship… Impugning the motives of U.S. officials who support Israelwith false allegations of payoffs is disgusting.”

Sen. Ted Cruz: “Why is a Member of Congress launching anti-Semitic slurs on Twitter? Caricaturing support for Israelas purchased by Jewish $$— ‘about the Benjamins’— is an old slander. Do other Dems agree? Will the media ask them? As more Dems support BDS, anti-Semitism becoming far too common.”

IPF’s Michael Koplow: “Stunning that Ilhan Omar is spending her first few weeks as a Congresswoman spreading anti-Semitic tropes about moneyed Jews buying off elected officials… Supporters of Israelhave every right to participate in politics and have their voices heard, and Israelis one of the U.S.’s most valuable allies on the globe, making it worthy of support irrespective of anything else. What Omar is doing is shameful bigoted hate mongering.”

HEARD YESTERDAY — Prominent members of the New York Congressional delegation addressed the Jewish community’s concern about a drift in the Democratic Party’s support for Israel, amid the recent comments made by Tlaib and Omar, at the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) of New York congressional breakfast in Midtown Manhattan on Sunday morning. [Pic]

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY): The Jewish-American community and supporters of Israel“are complacent. We assume because we know the story of Israelthat everyone knows. What we need is a massive education campaign. We need our biggest philanthropists to put money into this, I don’t care if they’re Democrat or Republican. We need to be online, we need to be on the campuses, and not with the occasional effort that we see, but all the time. We need all of us to be missionaries and explain the history… I urge you to think about this, to talk about this, and I will be happy to be one of the people leading, putting this together and making it happen because the future of Israelis at stake.”

Schumer on bipartisanship: “I work very hard for Israelevery day, I try to do it in a bipartisan way. There are some who try to make Israela partisan issue. That is detrimental to Israel. We cannot let that happen.” [Pic]

— WATCH — Schumer tells the crowd that he babysat his oldest grandson, Noah Melvin Schumer-Shapiro, for the first time on Saturday night. [Video; Pic]

Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY), Chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee: “We have our work cut out for us and there are things we have to do, but support for Israelis strong and it’s bipartisan… We have a few people who are vocal and who are not supporters of Israel. Okay. This is a free country. They got elected. We have a story to tell and our story is better than their story. I know that with the facts we are going to do well, and I want to pledge to you that on the Foreign Affairs Committee we are going to stand by Israel… And I want to assure you that there is nothing to be afraid of. We have work to do, and we are going to do it.” [Pic]

Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-NY): “What I can pledge to you is that the future of the Democratic Party is not going to involve BDS and anti-Semitism… and you will see us tested on that in the days to come.” [Pic]

Jewish Insider’s Jacob Kornbluh also spoke with Rep. Maloney as well as Reps. Tom Suozzi (D-NY) and Gregory Meeks (D-NY) after the event. Full comments here [JewishInsider]

Maloney: “If there are people who are engaging in anti-Israelrhetoric, they are going to hear from me. Our party shouldn’t be the home of people targeting the state of Israel, and it concerns me when I hear some of the rhetoric that bends in that direction. So I intend to speak out against it.”

Meeks: “Republicans are trying to play politics with this issue because they know how strong Democrats are on Israel. But you know what? Israeland anti-Semitism, there’s no room to play politics with that. Whether you are a Democrat or a Republican, whether you come from America or someplace else in the world, we should not let any room get in between us because this is a human subject matter. You always have certain minority groups, and that’s why you speak out and say that what they are saying is wrong. You can’t silence everybody, but when you hear something that is not correct, then you need to speak out about it.”

Rep. Meeks also told JI that he supports the anti-BDS bill.

TOP OP — Bret Stephens writes… “The Progressive Assault on Israel: The Israel-Palestinianconflict is far more complicated than the black-and-white picture drawn by Israel’sprogressive critics. But the deeper flaw in progressive thinking on Israel— the flaw that has resulted in this efflorescence of bigotry — isn’t that it rests on a faulty factual foundation. It’s that its core intellectual assumptions are wrong and rotten… The striking feature of anti-Zionist rhetoric is how broadly it overlaps with traditionally anti-Semitic tropes.” [NYTimes] #bret stephens

ULTIMATE DEAL WATCH — Trump administration’s Middle East peace plan finished, officials say — by Trey Yingst: “The final draft of the administration’s ‘Deal of the Century’ is 175 to 200 pages long — and fewer than five people have access to the complete document, sources told Fox News. ‘The plan is done… [the president] is happy with the parameters of the deal,’ a senior administration official said. Trump was briefed by U.S. Ambassador to IsraelDavid Friedman, Senior Adviser Jared Kushner and special envoy for Mideast peace Jason Greenblatt multiple times on the specifics of the deal.”[FoxNews]

Israeli report says Saudis won’t back Trump peace plan without concessions — by Barak Ravid: “A classified Israeli Foreign Ministry report — circulated in mid-December among top Israeli government national security and foreign policy officials — determined that Saudi Arabia will not support the Trump administration’s Middle East peace plan and won’t normalize relations with Israelunless the Israeli government makes a substantive concession to the Palestinians… A Foreign Ministry official who read the report told me it said that Saudi Arabia’s King Salman had taken back the Israeli-Palestinianfile back from his son, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.”

“The Foreign Ministry official told me, ‘There was a feeling in the last year that there was a window of opportunity to reach a breakthrough with Saudi Arabia — but, even if there was such an opening, this window is closed for now.’” [Axios]

DEEP DIVE — Private Mossad for Hire: Inside a plot to influence American elections — by Adam Entous and Ronan Farrow: “Psy-Group stood out from many of its rivals because it didn’t just gather intelligence; it specialized in covertly spreading messages to influence what people believed and how they behaved. Its operatives took advantage of technological innovations and lax governmental oversight. Social media allows you to reach virtually anyone and to play with their minds,’ Uzi Shaya, a former senior Israeli intelligence officer, said. ‘You can do whatever you want. You can be whoever you want. It’s a place where wars are fought, elections are won, and terror is promoted. There are no regulations. It is a no man’s land.'”

“Psy-Group had more success pitching an operation, code-named Project Butterfly, to wealthy Jewish-American donors. The operation targeted what Psy-Group described as ‘anti-Israel’ activists on American college campuses who supported the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, known as BDS… In early meetings with donors, in New York, [Royi] Burstien said that the key to mounting an effective anti-BDS campaign was to make it look as though Israel, and the Jewish-American community, had nothing to do with the effort. The goal of Butterfly, according to a 2017 company document, was to ‘destabilize and disrupt anti-Israelmovements from within.’” [NewYorker]

REPORT — Mossad helped smuggle Iranian nuclear scientist to Europe: “An Iranian nuclear scientist was reportedly smuggled out of the Islamic Republic to the UK in a joint operation of the British Intelligence Agency MI6, the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Israel’sMossad intelligence agency, according to the Sunday Express. According to the newspaper, the British agents took advantage of the migrant crisis plaguing Europe in order to smuggle the Iranian scientist on a dinghy on New Year’s Eve to the town of Lydd in Kent.” [Ynet; SundayExpress]

COMING SOON — Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump bracing for releaseof Vicky Ward book — by Richard Johnson: “Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump are bracing for the publication of ‘Kushner, Inc.: Greed, Ambition, Corruption’ by Vicky Ward. The book, subtitled ‘The Extraordinary Story of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump,’ due March 19 from St. Martin’s Press, will delve into the sordid case that got Jared’s father, real-estate developer Charles Kushner, a two-year prison sentence for witness tampering and other charges.” [PageSix]

Nikki Haley to be honored at high-flying GOP donor dinner — by Mike Allen: “In a sign of Nikki Haley’s continuing star power, the former UN ambassador will be the guest of honor at a dinner with about 20 of Manhattan’s top GOP donors on Feb. 27… The dinner will be the first of a series being organized by Paul Singer, the hedge-fund magnate, to spotlight key surrogates for the congressional races of 2020. Singer is working to identify and recruit female candidates to help Republicans hold the Senate and regain ground in the House.” [Axios]

2020 WATCH — Sen. Elizabeth Warren Officially Enters 2020 Presidential Race — by Joshua Jamerson: “Ms. Warren announced Saturday her official 2020 presidential candidacy before a crowd of about 3,500 in Lawrence, Mass. Within hours of that event, she traveled to New Hampshire and appeared at a town-hall meeting… Ms. Warren got one question about how she, as commander-in-chief, would act to improve stability in the Middle East. ‘We need a strong Israelthere, but we need to think about what our support for Israelmeans,’ Ms. Warren said, adding that the U.S. should be pushing Israeland the PalestinianAuthority toward a two-state solution.” [WSJ]

Sen. Amy Klobuchar jumped into the 2020 presidential race on Sunday… Bernie Sanders and Beto O’Rourke are way ahead in the race for small-dollar donors… Michael Bloomberg to announce his 2020 decision by end of the month… New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has made some initial steps towards exploring a presidential bid… Colorado Senator Michael Bennet hints about joining the crowded Democratic race for president… Sen. Cory Booker has a school choice problem… ‘Middle Class Joe’ Biden courtsWall Street oligarch, BlackRock’s Larry Fink…

** Good Monday Morning! Enjoying the Daily Kickoff? Please share us with your friends & tell them to sign up at [JI]. Have a tip, scoop, or op-ed? We’d love to hear from you. Anything from hard news and punditry to the lighter stuff, including event coverage, job transitions, or even special birthdays, is much appreciated. Email Editor@JewishInsider.com **

BUSINESS BRIEFS: Mikhail Fridman seeks to replicate Russian success with Dia buyout [FinancialTimes] • Les Moonves Starts New Company Weeks After Leaving CBS [HollywoodReporter] • Larry Silverstein tests Tel Aviv’s shaky bond market with $50M raise [TheRealDeal] • Laurie Segall: What I learned when I went inside Facebook [CNNBusiness] • If there is a god of five-star hospitality, Isadore Sharp built Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts [MontrealGazette] • Jonathan Cordish says he’s not in favor of fast-tracking sports betting [Bizjournals] • In the face of a potential economic slowdown, the reliability of LeonardLauder’scoined term ‘lipstick index’ is being called into question [CNBC]

MEDIA WATCH — TV Magnate Shari Redstone Now Prefers to Curl Up With Podcasts — by Anousha Sakoui: “Redstone… has a new fondness for audio as more waking hours are filled with computers and mobile phones. She’s one of the growing number of consumers who choose to listen to a podcast rather than stare at a screen. ‘Audio is going to be a big driver of media consumption going forward,’ Redstone, 64, said in a phone interview… Redstone, who runs her own investment fund, was among the first-round investors last year in Wondery Inc… It’s one of several audio-based investments for her firm, Advancit Capital, which focuses on the intersection of technology and media.” [Bloomberg]

TALK OF THE TOWN — Philadelphia councilwoman delayed major city land deal to help a developer — by Jake Blumgart: “The city’s stalled redevelopment of a property at 4601 Market St. finally advanced Thursday after West Philadelphia Councilwoman Jannie Blackwell reversed her opposition. A document indicates Blackwell’s reservations stemmed from the concerns of a single real estate developer: Michael Karp, leader of two large West Philadelphia organizations — University City Housing and the Belmont Charter Network. ‘I got a letter from the mayor stating that he would work with us to make sure that all the issues that needed to be resolved will be resolved,’ Blackwell said when asked the reason for her sudden change of heart.”

“Karp said in an interview on Friday that he knew nothing about correspondence on his behalf between the mayor and Blackwell. ‘I have not seen the letter, I was not involved in her discussions with the mayor around that letter,’ said Karp, when told that Blackwell only lifted the hold when she received assurances about mayoral attention to his specific ‘issues.'” [WHYY]

After Synagogue Attack, Pittsburgh’s Push for Stricter Gun Laws Sparks Backlash — by Kris Maher: “A little more than three months after 11 people were shot to death while worshiping at a synagogue here, city leaders and residents are battling over proposed gun restrictions. The legislation put forward by the city’s mayor and city council members would ban within city limits semiautomatic rifles, bump stocks and certain types of ammunition, as well as expand the ability of courts to seize guns from people determined to be a threat to family members or law enforcement… Some members of Dor Hadash have formed an independent organization called Squirrel Hill Stands Against Gun Violence, which supports the mayor’s proposals.” [WSJ]

Orthodox Jewish EMT service faces fight from L.A. fire department, and a powerful fire union — by Leila Miller: “Hatzolah’s ultimate goal is to be permitted by the city to transport patients and respond with ambulances to emergency calls using lights and sirens — a practice called Code 3 — just like the fire department. But this has been met with strong pushback from the Los Angeles Fire Department and its firefighters’ union, which both point to their agency’s jurisdiction and argue that allowing another entity to respond to emergencies creates a public safety issue.” [LATimes]

HEARD THE OTHER DAY — Avi Loeb, professor of science and the chair of astronomy at Harvard University, on CNN with Michael Smerconish explained his suggestion that a mysterious object spotted tumbling through our solar system last year may have been an alien spacecraft sent to investigate Earth: “Currently, all our eggs are in one basket here on earth, but in order to avoid the risk of a catastrophe, we’ll have to move into space at some point and it’s quite likely that other civilizations have done that already… All I am saying is that we have now the technology to figure out whether we are the smartest kid on the block.” [Video]

HOLLYWOOD — IsraelFilmmaker Yuval Adler Discusses Berlin Festival Film ‘The Operative’ — by Malina Saval: “The film is not really about Mossad or about Israel— it’s really a film about a woman who’s recruited into an intelligence outfit. The story is Mossad, but the film really examines this concept of espionage, which I found really interesting. And on a deeper level, it’s about people who don’t know what their place in the world is, and that’s something Diane Kruger and I have in common. I’m Israeli, but I lived most of my adult life in New York. I’m always not sure where I belong and where I should be.” [Variety]

‘Ben Hecht’ Review: A Difficult Man to Pin Down — by Jeremy McCarter: “Hecht was born (on the Lower East Side, in 1893) to Jewish immigrants from Russia; late in life, he looked back fondly on boyhood days spent with his family in Racine, Wisc., as ‘a sort of Yiddish Canterbury Tales.’ What Hecht meant is that he began to ‘look on the world with Jewish eyes.’ He felt impelled to become an activist, an agitator, a champion of international Jewish causes, first demanding that the world address the plight of European Jews amid the depredations of the Nazis, then becoming a prominent supporter of the Irgun, which was fighting to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. His newfound devotion to activism surprised and baffled his friends. Hecht himself seemed uncertain what to make of his commitments… Sorting out those contradictions is precisely the task that Adina Hoffman, an American essayist and biographer who splits her time between New Haven and Jerusalem, sets for herself in this latest installment in Yale’s Jewish Lives series.” [WSJ; Amazon]

A Christian Group Is Building a Movement That Could Destabilize Jerusalem’s Most Explosive Holy Site — by Naomi Zeveloff: “Cry for Zion, an Israel-based organization started in 2014, is recruiting Christians worldwide in its campaign to push Israelto fully control the Temple Mount… Cry for Zion says that it does not promote the destruction of any building on the Temple Mount, nor does it advocate the rebuilding of the temple. But at the first Cry for Zion conference in December several speakers contradicted the group’s official stance, sometimes in fiery terms. Mordechai Persoff, a rabbi and the head of the Mikdash Educational Center, spoke openly about constructing a new temple, calling Trump’s decision to move the embassy to Jerusalem a prophetic event.” [DailyBeast]

SPOTTED — in the audience at Pop-up Magazine at the Warner theater on Saturday night: The Atlantic’s Jeff Goldberg.

DESSERT — A Luxury Seafood Chef Turns Kosher – In The Heart Of Tel Aviv — by Diana Shawn Clark: “NOMI [is] a newly opened kosher restaurant in Tel Aviv’s David Intercontinental Hotel… NOMI’s founding head chef Yoram Nitzan made his reputation at Tel Aviv’s late and much lamented Mul Yam restaurant, which was renowned for… shellfish… ‘For twenty years, I cooked lobster. People who loved food but kept kosher heard about my cooking, but couldn’t try it,’ Nitzan [said]. So for the hotel, it was an opportunity to ‘give their customers a chance to try my cooking.'” [Forward]

REMEMBERING — Walter H. Munk, Scientist-Explorer Who Illuminated the Deep, Dies at 101 — by William Dicke: “Walter H. Munk, one of the foremost oceanographers of the 20th century, who sent pulses of sound through the vast oceans — probably startling a few whales — to measure changes in water temperatures, forecast waves and seek signs of global warming, died on Friday at his seaside home in the La Jolla section of San Diego… Walter Heinrich Munk was born on Oct. 19, 1917, in Vienna into a wealthy banking family of Jewish heritage, a son of Dr. Hans Munk and Rega Brunner. The couple divorced when Walter was a child. His maternal grandfather, Lucian Brunner, was a prominent banker and Austrian politician. His stepfather, Dr. Rudolf Engelsberg, was later briefly a member of the Austrian government of Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, who was assassinated by Nazi agents in 1934.” [NYTimes]

BIRTHDAYS: Journalist, writer, political commentator and author of a Passover Haggadah co-written with his wife Cokie Roberts, Steven V. Roberts turns 76… NYC-based physician, he is the past president of American Friends of Likud, Julio Messer, M.D. turns 67… Second son of former President George H. W. Bush, he was the Governor of Florida (1999-2007) and a candidate for US President in 2016, John Ellis “Jeb” Bush turns 66… ProPublica’s editor-in-chief, Stephen Engelberg urns 61… National medical director of Seasons Hospice and Palliative Care, former EVP and chief medical officer for Erickson Retirement Communities (1989-2005), Gary E. Applebaum, MD turns 60… Principal at Conduent HR Services and Buck Global, LLC, Alan Vorchheimer turns 59… Founder and president of RAINN, the nation’s largest anti-sexual violence organization, he is also the CEO of A&I Publishing, a firm that specializes in media start-ups, Scott Berkowitz turns 50… Lieutenant Governor of Hawaii since December 2018, he was previously a Hawaii State Senator (2009-2018) and a member of the Hawaii House of Representatives (2005 to 2009), Joshua B. Green turns 49…

Elected as a member of the Broward County (Florida) School Board in the months following the death of her 14-year-old daughter Alyssa at the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, Lori Alhadeff turns 44… Executive producer for Atlantic Live (the events division of The Atlantic), Rob Hendin turns 42… VP and deputy head of communications at News Corp., Ilana Ozernoy turns 41… Tight end on the NFL’s Carolina Panthers for four seasons (2003-2006), having played college football at UCLA, Mike Seidman turns 38… Republican strategist, political commentator, author and columnist, Evan Siegfried turns 36… VP of global healthcare banking at Bank of America / Merrill Lynch, he was previously chief of staff for Congressman Bob Dold (R-IL-10) (2015-2017), David B. Stern turns 35… Technical project manager for Politico, Michelle Zar turns 30… Account Manager at Politico, Rachel Kosberg turns 29 (h/t Playbook)… Associate at the NYC office of Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, Alix Simnock turns 28… Student at Yale Law School, Scott Wasserman Stern… and his twin brother, Eric Wasserman Stern, both turn 26… Joy Neuberger… and her brother IsraelNeuberger..

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#mogul  #jay ruderman 2023apr28 Jpost | Influential philanthropists view Israel as a vehicle for bolstering American Jews’ identity 

Klein, Zvika

Jerusalem Post

; Jerusalem. 28 Apr 2023: 6.  

Klein, Z. (2023, Apr 28). Influential philanthropists view israel as a vehicle for bolstering american jews’ identity. Jerusalem Post Retrieved from http://ezproxy.lapl.org/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/newspapers/influential-philanthropists-view-israel-as/docview/2811651333/se-2  

From <https://www.proquest.com/docview/2811651333/E5101014D3D4BB5PQ/2?accountid=6749&sourcetype=Newspapers>  

A popular brand of jeans seems like an unlikely symbol of the early friendship between Israelis and American Jews. Yet, when asking two titular figures of the Jewish world what their first memories were of that relationship, they both remembered the little packages of Americana that arrived on many an Israeli doorstep.

Jewish-American philanthropist and social justice activist Jay Ruderman, president of the Ruderman Family Foundation, recalls growing up in the US knowing that he had relatives in Israel. 'We had relatives from my father’s side who made aliyah in the late ’40s, and we always had a close connection with them. My mother’s family was involved in Young Judaea and made aliyah after 1967. So we always had these family ties in Israelthat connected us with the country,' Ruderman says.  

Meanwhile, first-generation Israeli Ofra Strauss remembers hearing of her almost mythological relatives from the US who sent coveted goodies to their home. Strauss is now the head of one of Israel’slargest food and beverage enterprises, but she came from humble beginnings. Born in Nahariya in northern Israel, Strauss joined the family business as a young girl. She had even joined her father in the family’s night delivery route carrying heavy packages of dairy products.

To her family and many Israelis, American Jews were 'the Big Brother' – someone who takes care of everyone. 'I remember my mother’s stories of the Jewish Agency after the war [of Independence], before making aliyah in 1949 from Croatia,' Strauss says. 'Everyone was very poor, and the locals were jealous of the Jews who had Israelfor starting a new life.'

Ruderman’s memory of a young and struggling Israelmirrors Strauss’s experience. 

Visiting Israel for the first time when he was 13, after his bar mitzvah in the early 1980s: 'On one hand, it was a developing country at the time. I remember being picked up at the airport by my cousin and asking him, ‘Why is there so much trash on the side of the road?’' 

As Israel continued to grow and flourish, so has Ruderman’s involvement in the discourse surrounding key issues concerning the Israel-American Jewry relationship, even when it occasionally veers in a controversial or even confrontational direction. Ruderman notes that the foundation’s current efforts hearken back to his roots.  

'I grew up as a minority in the Boston area. I was made to feel like a minority, and there was a great deal of antisemitism. So, when we landed in Israeland we were going around the country, it was such a magical feeling for me personally, as a young teenager, that almost everyone in the country was Jewish,' he recalls.  

'I had never experienced anything like it. The only time I was around a lot of Jews was in the synagogue. The idea of running into someone on the street, the policeman or someone picking up the garbage being Jewish was a mind-blowing experience for me at the time.'  

The foundation has spearheaded multifaceted initiatives for more than two decades that solidify Israel’srelationship with American Jewry. Activities have included the Knesset Caucus for Israel-American Jewry Relations, which aims to elevate the concerns of American Jews within the Israeli legislature’s deliberations; the University of Haifa’s Ruderman Program for American Jewish Studies, a master’s degree that covers a range of issues pertaining to American Jewish life and American society; conferences and research projects that provide thought leaders and decision-makers with the data needed to properly understand the current trends in Israel-American Jewry relations; and a 10-part original video series, Jewish Foodie, which enticed Israelis to deepen their knowledge about the US Jewish communities by presenting different Jewish culinary scenes from around the country.

The foundation’s initiatives represent a manifestation of Ruderman’s unique personal philosophy and approach to change-making: the idea that advocacy and philanthropy, traditionally seen as separate sectors, can actually go hand in hand. 

'To create disruption and ultimately, pro-social outcomes, we bring advocacy to our work. We’re comfortable with criticizing certain aspects of the community that we’re trying to change,' he explains. 'We take staunch positions and use very strong language.  

'Why don’t other foundations and philanthropic organizations do this? Many of them are too slow. They need to go through an entire process; it’s not natural for them to do it. They respond timidly to major news events or don’t respond at all, often out of fear of disappointing donors, grantees and other partners. Others fund advocacy but don’t take it on themselves.' 

MEANWHILE, STRAUSS, a prominent figure in the business and philanthropic worlds, says that finding kinship between the Israeli and American Jewish communities has been a natural process. 

She first visited the US when she moved to New York at 25, after her father-in-law had a meeting with LeonardLauderand landed her a job with Estee Lauder. 

'My husband and I moved to New York, and we had relationships only with American Jews, but it was really quite natural.' They would meet Jews through their parents and at work. 'Two questions, and you knew whether they’re Jewish or not,' she recalls. 

During that period, Estee Lauder International sent her to run training programs in different countries in Europe. 'It was Yom Kippur. I flew to Austria and suddenly I thought to myself, ‘Wow, I’m never going to do work on Yom Kippur again.’

'It felt like I missed something important. Suddenly being away from home was a big revelation: I decided back then that there are certain things we’re going to start to do [as a family], such as going to the synagogue because otherwise, we’re not going to feel Jewish.'

She recalls that this was her big 'aha' moment. 'As Israelis, we can feel Jewish everywhere we go in our country; but when we leave, we have to actively try to be Jewish.' 

Strauss points to the time she spent in the US that later led her to become a member of the Jewish Agency’s board of trustees. In 10 years on the board, Strauss notes, she learned to appreciate the 'structure of the Jewish communities in the US. I always said to myself: ‘Wow, I’m really lucky to be part of this tribe.’' 

She explains that now, as the chairperson of the Strauss Group, a prominent international food and beverages company, 'I work my way through our tribe every time I’m abroad. We have businesses in different parts of the world, and it has become natural for me to reach out to people and ask the right questions to find out whether or not they are Jewish.'  

For Ruderman, navigating the Israeli Jewish world was something he never imagined he would do. The first time he truly got to know Israelis – not American Israelis but native-born – was when he met Shira and her family. He remembers it being 'sort of a culture shock' because 'not only were they Israelis, but they were Sephardic. All of a sudden, I was surrounded by hundreds of new relatives.'

As titular figures in the philanthropic world, Strauss and Ruderman are keenly aware of how Israel’sprosperity has helped ignite its own need for philanthropy without relying exclusively on donations from abroad. Ruderman notes that Israelused to be a highly socialist country, and for decades philanthropy was not a big priority.

'At the beginning, the government took care of every aspect of life. Then, all of a sudden, Israeli philanthropists entered the picture and said, ‘We’re going to be involved in projects, even if the government has already been involved.’ Initially, there was suspicion. People would wonder, ‘As a philanthropist, why are you getting involved with these projects? What’s your specific motivation and what do you have to gain?’' Ruderman says. 

Strauss agrees. 'It’s also a generational thing. People just started to earn money from scratch. Many Israeli entrepreneurs began selling their businesses to American companies for big money.' She adds that 'wherever I go in the US for business, and the people I’m meeting discover that I’m Israeli or Jewish, they always talk about the generosity of the Jewish community in America. It’s like a myth. It’s not proportional at all to its size.' 

Strauss emphasizes something she wants readers of this interview to understand: 'I don’t think it’s just about creating a melting pot. We don’t need to be the same. But when push comes to shove, we do share so many things in common. Our Judaism does not center only around faith. We need to develop other common values that can elicit mutual respect.' 

With Israelapproaching its 75th birthday, Ruderman believes that 'the survival of Israelis of the utmost importance for the Jewish people. We know what it was like to be a Jew without a state of Israel, without the security of a Jewish state; a place to go to, a place to defend, and a place to be when Jews are in trouble. I don’t think we want to go back there... So, I think we want to do everything possible to make sure that the Jewish state is around, and we never lose it.'  

As far as American Jews are concerned, he adds that 'they need Israel; they need Israelas a place to help shore up their identity.' 

Jay Ruderman is the president of the Ruderman Family Foundation and an American lawyer, disability rights activist and philanthropist. He lives in the Greater Boston area with his wife Shira and their four children. 

Ofra Strauss is the chairperson of the public Strauss Group, which is traded on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and is a prominent international food and beverages manufacturer in Israel. Strauss has also been the chair of the Israel-America Chamber of Commerce since 2011.

The interview is a joint project of the Ruderman Family Foundation and The Jerusalem Post in honor of Israel’supcoming 75th Independence Day, recognizing its special connection with US Jewry.

For more information: rudermanfoundation.org 

© Copyright Jerusalem Post. All rights reserved.

Word count: 1664

Copyright The Jerusalem Post Ltd. Apr 28, 2023

From <https://www.proquest.com/docview/2811651333/E5101014D3D4BB5PQ/2?accountid=6749&sourcetype=Newspapers>

#uncle tom I’m a Columbia Professor. The Protests on My Campus Are Not Justice.

April 23, 2024

Credit...Karsten Moran for The New York Times

By John McWhorter

Opinion Writer

From <https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/23/opinion/columbia-protests-israel.html>

Your Daily Phil: ADL CEO not meeting Netanyahu + Elan Carr named CEO of Israeli American Council

September 19, 2023

SIn today’s edition of Your Daily Phil, we report on the appointment of Elan Carr as CEO of the Israeli American Council and the opening of the Perelman Performing Arts Center in New York City, and feature an opinion piece by Jeffrey I. Abrams. Also in this newsletter: Susan Samueli, Doron Almog and Taylor Swift. We’ll start with a meeting planned for later this week between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. Jewish leaders.

Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt will not attend a meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and American Jewish communal leaders that is scheduled for Friday afternoon, an ADL official told eJewishPhilanthropy’s Haley Cohen.

The official said Greenblatt would not attend as he has a prior “long-standing commitment”: A speaking engagement in Austin, Texas, at the Texas Tribune Festival. Ben Sax, the chair of the organization’s board of directors, will attend in Greenblatt’s place.

This comes as Netanyahu met with Elon Musk, the owner of the social media platform X, whom the ADL has accused of permitting antisemitism to run rampant on the site since he took control of the company, formerly called Twitter, last year. During a one-on-one interview with Musk in California yesterday, the Israeli premier repeated that Musk was “committed” to combating antisemitism, while also calling on him to “roll back” antisemitism on the platform. After the meeting, Netanyahu posted on X that Musk was also a “stalwart… against antisemitism.”

Netanyahu’s meeting with Musk has riled some U.S. Jewish figures, including the former CEO of the ADL, Abraham Foxman, who called it “a slap to majority American Jewish community and damaging to efforts to keep antisemitism off social media.”

Netanyahu, who is visiting the U.S. to speak at the United Nations General Assembly on Friday, is scheduled to meet with American Jewish leaders in New York on Friday at 2 p.m. The full list of attendees has not yet been announced.

Elan Carr, incoming CEO of the Israel-American Council, in an undated photograph. (Courtesy/IAC)

The Israeli American Council (IAC) on Monday named Elan Carr, former U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, as its next chief executive officer. He is taking over from Shoham Nicolet, the IAC co-founder who has led the organization as CEO for the past eight years, reports eJewishPhilanthropy’s Haley Cohen.

Which Israelis?: Carr, who has had close ties with the IAC since its inception in 2007, is set to begin his new role on Oct. 1. He is tasked with combating significant challenges Israeli Americans currently face, in addition to regaining the trust of liberal Israeli Americans who have fled the organization in recent years due to its right-wing affiliations. Carr takes the reins at a particularly fraught moment given the roiling debate in Israel over the government’s judicial overhaul; that debate has spilled over to the U.S., including this week, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu traveled to New York for the U.N. General Assembly. Along the way, Netanyahu has already been met with protests by hundreds of Israeli expats — the presumed constituents of IAC — during his stop in Fremont, Calif., with more expected to attend demonstrations in New York.

Trump ties: In 2019, Carr served in the Trump administration as the State Department’s antisemitism monitor. Liberal supporters further distanced themselves from the IAC when then-President Donald Trump delivered controversial remarks at the council’s summit in December 2019. “I am deeply honored to assume the helm of the IAC at this important time, and I’m excited by the organization’s enormous potential,” Carr said in a statement. “Our community of Israeli-Americans and Jewish-Americans is grappling with significant challenges, including assimilation and antisemitism. I am privileged to help lead that cause.”

From <https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/your-daily-phil-adl-ceo-not-meeting-netanyahu-elan-carr-named-ceo-of-israeli-american-council/>

Billionaire Ally of Putin Socialized With Kushner, Ivanka Trump

• • Abramovich wife Dasha Zhukova is friends with Trump’s daughter

  • The Kushners noted the relationship on their security forms

Jared Kushner’s Rise to Power Mirrors Trump's

By Stephanie Baker, Irina Reznik, and Katya Kazakina

August 17, 2017 at 9:00 PM PDT

This article is for subscribers only.

Follow @bpolitics for all the latest news, and sign up for our daily Balance of Power newsletter.

As federal investigators probe possible Kremlin links with the Donald Trump campaign, one connection that hasn’t gotten much attention is that between Jared Kushner and one of Russia’s most powerful and influential billionaires: Roman Abramovich.

From <https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2017-08-18/billionaire-ally-of-putin-socialized-with-kushner-ivanka-trump>

https://markets.ft.com/data/funds/tearsheet/summary?s=wsmvx

https://fundresearch.fidelity.com/mutual-funds/summary/971897806?redirect=1

It invests, generally, in companies with relatively low price to book value ratios, relatively low price to earnings ratios and relatively high dividend yields (dividend yields for small companies are generally less than those of large companies).

#NEXTDOC===============

#Zell

 WILSHIRE SMALL COMPANY VALUE FUND
  PROPOSAL                                              PROPOSED BY MGT. POSITION REGISTRANT VOTED
  1.9. Elect Sidney Ribeau                          Management For      Voted - For
  1.10. Elect Charles Sullivan                      Management For      Voted - For
  1.11. Elect Jacqueline Woods                      Management For      Voted - For
  2.   Ratification of Auditor                      Management For      Voted - For
  3.   Increase in Authorized Common Stock          Management For      Voted - Against
  4.   Amendment to the 2005 Long-Term Performance
    Compensation Plan                           Management For      Voted - Against
ANIXTER INTERNATIONAL
  CUSIP: 035290105 TICKER: AXE
  Meeting Date: 5/13/2008      Meeting Type: Annual
  1.1. Elect James Blyth                            Management For      Voted - For
  1.2. Elect Linda Bynoe                            Management For      Voted - For
  1.3. Elect Robert Crandall                        Management For      Voted - For
  1.4. Elect Robert Eck                                 Management For      Voted - For
  1.5. Elect Robert Grubbs, Jr.                     Management For      Voted - For
  1.6. Elect F. Philip Handy                       Management For      Voted - For
  1.7. Elect Melvyn Klein                           Management For      Voted - For
  1.8. Elect George Munoz                           Management For      Voted - For
  1.9. Elect Stuart Sloan                           Management For      Voted - For
  1.10. Elect Thomas Theobald                       Management For      Voted - For
  1.11. Elect Matthew Zell                          Management For      Voted - For
  1.12. Elect Samuel Zell                           Management For      Voted - For
  2.   Ratification of Auditor                      Management For      Voted - For

From <https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/890453/000113542809000433/wilshire_standardnpxv.txt>

ILSHIRE 5000 INDEX FUND
  PROPOSAL                                                PROPOSED BY MGT. POSITION REGISTRANT VOTED
COSTCO WHOLESALE CORPORATION
  CUSIP: 22160K105 TICKER: COST
  Meeting Date: 01/28/2009 Meeting Type: Annual
  1.1. Elect James Sinegal                            Management For      Voted - For
  1.2. Elect Jeffrey Brotman                          Management For      Voted - For
  1.3. Elect Richard Galanti                          Management For          Voted - Withhold
  1.4. Elect Daniel Evans                                 Management For      Voted - For
  1.5. Elect Jeffrey Raikes                           Management For      Voted - For
  2.   Ratification of Selection of Independent Auditors. Management For      Voted - For
COVANCE INC.
  CUSIP: 222816100 TICKER: CVD
 Meeting Date: 05/07/2009 Meeting Type: Annual
  1.1. Elect Robert Barchi                            Management For      Voted - For
  1.2. Elect Sandra Helton                            Management For      Voted - For
  1.3. Elect Joseph Scodari                           Management For      Voted - For
  2.   Ratification of Auditor                        Management For      Voted - For
  3.   Shareholder Proposal Regarding Animal Welfare  Shareholder Against      Voted - Against
COVANTA HOLDING CORPORATION
  CUSIP: 2.23E+106 TICKER: CVA
  Meeting Date: 05/07/2009 Meeting Type: Annual
  1.1. Elect David Barse                                  Management For      Voted - For
  1.2. Elect Ronald Broglio                           Management For      Voted - For
  1.3. Elect Peter Bynoe                                  Management For      Voted - For
  1.4. Elect Linda Fisher                                 Management For      Voted - For
  1.5. Elect Joseph Holsten                           Management For      Voted - For
  1.6. Elect Richard Huber                            Management For      Voted - For
  1.7. Elect Anthony Orlando                          Management For      Voted - For
  1.8. Elect William Pate                                 Management For      Voted - For
  1.9. Elect Robert Silberman                         Management For      Voted - For
  1.10. Elect Jean Smith                              Management For      Voted - For
  1.11. Elect Clayton Yeutter                         Management For      Voted - Withhold
  1.12. Elect Samuel Zell                                 Management For      Voted - For
  2.   Amendment to the Equity Award Plan for Employees

From <https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/890453/000113542809000433/wilshire_standardnpxv.txt>

#NEXTDOC===============

  WILSHIRE 5000 INDEX FUND
  PROPOSAL                                            PROPOSED BY MGT. POSITION REGISTRANT VOTED
  2.   Ratification of Auditor                    Management For      Voted - For
ESTEE LAUDER CO.
  CUSIP: 518439104 TICKER: EL
  Meeting Date: 11/07/2008   Meeting Type: Annual
  1.1. Elect Charlene Barshefsky                  Management For      Voted - For
 1.2. Elect Leonard Lauder                       Management For      Voted - For
  1.3. Elect Ronald Lauder                        Management For      Voted - For
  2.   The Executive Annual Incentive Plan        Management For      Voted - For
  3.   Ratification of Auditor                    Management For      Voted - For
EV3 INC.
  CUSIP: 26928A200 TICKER: EVVV
  Meeting Date: 05/26/2009   Meeting Type: Annual

From <https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/890453/000113542809000433/wilshire_standardnpxv.txt>

#NEXTDOC===============

https://www.comingsoon.net/true-crime/news/1628775-evil-lives-here-who-is-andrew-luster-and-what-was-he-convicted-of

Andrew Luster, the handsome heir to a vast cosmetics fortune, was convicted in 2003 of doping and raping three women and videotaping his crimes. With a sentence of 124 years in prison, the sordid case has gone down in the annals of California legal history.

From <https://www.thedailybeast.com/max-factor-heir-andrew-luster-my-lawyer-made-me-do-it>

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Factor

Children

5, including Francis "Frank" Factor (Max Factor Jr.)

Relatives

·         John Factor (half-brother)

·         Andrew Luster (great-grandson)

From <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Factor_Sr.>

In 2003 Andrew Luster (born December 15, 1963), one adopted great-grandson, was convicted of multiple sexual assaults involving the use of GHB to render his victims unconscious.[15]

Max Factor's half-brother John (October 8, 1892 – January 22, 1984) was a Prohibition-era gangster and con-artist affiliated with the Chicago Outfit.

From <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Factor_Sr.>

==========#NEXTDOC

Merger with Norton Simon[edit]

By the early 1970s Sidney Factor had retired from the board, and Barbara Factor, Donald Factor and Davis Jr. Factor from the third generation had also left the company to pursue other interests. As a result, there was decreasing family involvement. Davis Factor was still board chairman while Alfred Jay Firestein was president and CEO when in 1973 the company agreed to merge with Norton Simon. This event was marred weeks later by the sudden death of Alfred Jay Firestein at the age of 48. Chester Firestein succeeded him as president of the company, only to resign three years later in 1976, to devote his time to his personal interests; he was replaced by a non-family member. His departure, together with that of Max Factor, Jr., in the same year, meant that there were now no members of Max Factor's immediate family working for the company.

During Chester Firestein's time in charge the company expanded overseas and launched many new products including Musk For Men, UltaLucent Waterproof make-up and, in 1975, the successful Halston line of fragrances, which quickly became the second best-selling designer fragrance in the world, trailing Chanel No. 5.

It was under Norton Simon that Max Factor launched "Maxi", a line of makeup aimed at a younger, more savvy consumer. Maxi sold products aimed at adolescent tastes, such as lip gloss, color rubs and "mood" lipsticks. Maxi was priced to compete with market leaders Bonne Bell and CoverGirl. Neither Maxi, Geminesse, nor Max Factor were able to lift the company's declining profits and market share.

In 1983 Norton Simon was taken over by Esmark, by which time no one in the Factor family was involved in the company's day-to-day operations. A year later Esmark merged with Beatrice Foods, which lumped Max Factor into their Playtex beauty division and moved the Max Factor headquarters from Los Angeles to Stamford, Connecticut. In 1986, Ronald Perelman of Revlon bought the Playtex beauty division for $500 million. In 1991, Revlon sold Max Factor to Procter & Gamble for $1.5 billion.

By the first quarter of 2010, Procter & Gamble had discontinued Max Factor in the United States, instead focusing its marketing efforts on the more successful CoverGirl cosmetics line. Max Factor continued to be marketed overseas.[12]

In June, 2015, Max Factor was one of a number of beauty brands purchased from P&G by Coty[13] for $12 billion. Coty relaunched Max Factor in 2018.[14][15][16]

From <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Factor>

Len Blavatnik 

By Della Bradshaw May 2 2013

https://www.ft.com/content/5108fd98-b323-11e2-b5a5-00144feabdc0

Harvard receives $50m from Len Blavatnik Len Blavatnik, the billionaire music and media entrepreneur, has given Harvard University $50m to help convert biochemical research into medical therapies and promote entrepreneurship at the University. 

The gift has been given through the Blavatnik Family Foundation. Mr Blavatnik, who graduated from Harvard Business School in 1989, has been active in endowing arts and science projects in both the US and UK. 

In 2010, he committed £75m to establish the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford. Mr Blavatnik said he hoped the establishment of Blavatnik Biomedical Accelerator would help develop closer links between the science departs and the business school. “By increasing the collaborative efforts between Harvard Business School and Harvard’s scientific community, we will empower the next generation of life science entrepreneurs and provide a further catalyst for innovation and research development.” Part of the gift will be used to create the Blavatnik Fellowship in Life Science Entrepreneurship at HBS, to give MBA students experience in entrepreneurial activities in the life science. The accelerator will be housed in Harvard’s Office of Technology Development. otd.harvard.edu

Ronald Perelman gives Columbia B-School $100m for new campus New York business school receives nine-figure donation from billionaire businessman Columbia University © Columbia University Ronald Perelman gives Columbia B-School $100m for new campus

Columbia Business School has received a further $100m gift towards the construction of its Manhattanville campus in New York. The pledge comes from billionaire businessman Ronald Perelman, chairman and chief executive of MacAndrews & Forbes Holdings, after whom a building on the new campus will be named the Ronald O. Perelman Center for Business Innovation. 

Though a graduate of the Wharton school at the University of Pennsylvania, Mr Perelman has been a member of the Columbia Business School’s Board of Overseers since 1994. This is the second time the school has received such a large gift as part of the Manhattanville construction project. In 2010, Henry Kravis, co-founder of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, and at the time co-chair of the Board of Overseers, pledged an initial $100m. The total cost of the New York business school project is expected to be $600m and dean Glenn Hubbard says the school has already raised $460m. Mr Perelman, who is well-known for his philanthropy, says business has been completely transformed since he graduated from Wharton in 1966. “Business leaders are becoming more and more important. You have global economics and geo-political activities are being driven by business leaders.” “Most of the world’s big problems are about management and leadership,” adds Prof Hubbard. The building on the Manhattanville campus will be designed to encourage a more integrated curriculum, according to dean Glenn Hubbard. It will be designed by New York architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro and will be situated opposite the Henry R. Kravis Building. Mr Perelman praises Columbia as one of the world’s great business schools. “I think it is incumbent on me to do something in education in New York, in the city where I live and which I love,” says Mr Perelman. “I think sometimes we take it [Columbia University] for granted because it is just round the corner.” Prof Hubbard says the Manhattanville campus will be open in 2017-2018. “Right now there’s a great hole in the ground.” www4.gsb.columbia.edu . . .

https://www.ft.com/content/5108fd98-b323-11e2-b5a5-00144feabdc0

Sequoia Capital’s Michael Moritz calls Donald Trump ‘little more than a hustler’

The Silicon Valley VC compares Trump's business record to those of Michael Bloomberg and other billionaires.

 By Dawn Chmielewski Jun 16, 2016, 11:44am EDT

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Michael Moritz added his voice to the growing number in Silicon Valley denouncing Donald Trump, describing him as "little more than a hustler who takes from the rich ... and also takes from the poor."

The Sequoia Capital chairman attacked Trump's business acumen and his antipathy toward immigrants in an op-ed appearing in the Financial Times. Using the presumptive Republican presidential nominee’s own terminology, Moritz said Silicon Valley's "winners" have managed to fashion something out of nothing.

Many of them are the sort of people Mr Trump wants to keep from entering America and are victims of prejudice and oppression. Jan Koum, the founder of WhatsApp, queued with his mother waiting for food stamps when he came to America from Ukraine. Jerry Yang, the co-founder of Yahoo, could only speak one word of English — "shoe" — when, as a 10-year-old, he came with his mother from Taiwan. The family of Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, fled anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union in the 1970s. The late, great Andy Grove, the CEO of Intel, walked across the border from Hungary to Austria in 1956.

Moritz takes aim at Trump’s business narrative:

In Silicon Valley, Mr. Trump also fails to get more than a passing grade for his business skills because his actual performance, compared to the myth he has assiduously cultivated, is so mediocre. Look at the arithmetic. Assume 30 million dollars was plonked into a Standard & Poor’s index fund in 1968, when Mr Trump started to work in his father’s business, and leveraged, like many real estate deals, at about 66 per cent. This would now be worth $4.5bn, or about the same as Forbes estimates Mr Trump is really worth (as opposed to the much larger and entirely unverified number he has insisted upon).

The prominent Silicon Valley investor compared Trump’s record, unfavorably, to that of other New York billionaires, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Related Companies' Stephen Ross, a real estate developer, "whose business careers put Mr. Trump’s in the shade."

Compared with Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Ross, Mr. Trump seems little more than a hustler who takes from the rich (lenders he has short-changed, partners he has sued) and also takes from the poor (hapless students of Trump University, tenants whom he has allegedly bullied).

Moritz, whose firm has backed Google, PayPal, Zappos.com and other companies with an aggregate public market value of more than $1.4 trillion, took particular issue with Trump’s attacks on one of the most successful tech entrepreneurs, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos.

Mr. Trump’s recent campaign promise — to pursue Amazon for antitrust violations after the Washington Post, owned by Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, published articles that displeased him — illustrates the difference between the Republican nominee and a real winner. Amazon, started in 1994, now has a market value of about $250 billion and Mr. Bezos has a net worth of $63 billion — a figure even Mr. Trump might label, should he ever suffer an attack of humility, as "huge."

Recode co-founder Walt Mossberg spoke with Bezos about Trump at the recent Code Conference. Here’s the interview:

From <https://www.vox.com/2016/6/16/11954290/sequoia-capital-michael-moritz-donald-trump-hustler>

Jeff Bezos vs. Peter Thiel and Donald Trump | Jeff Bezos, CEO Amazon | Code Conference 2016

The Third Man

By Charlayne Hunter-Gault

June 28, 2010

NewsletterLetter from South Africa New yorker

The captain of a Robben Island soccer team is host to the World Cup.Illustration by Vladimir Mochalov

On an unseasonably chilly morning in April, hundreds of South Africans, many wrapped in the country’s traditional woollen blankets, turned up on the grounds of the Natalspruit Hospital, about half an hour southeast of Johannesburg. They had come to hear President Jacob Zuma describe a new AIDS initiative, whose goal is to have fifteen million of the country’s forty-nine million people get H.I.V. testing and counselling in the next year. Michel Sibidé, the United Nations AIDS program’s executive director, called the initiative’s ambitions “unprecedented.”

Zuma has been President for a little over a year, and, as his country prepared to host the World Cup, he spent much of the spring opening new airports and stadiums. He was, as they say here, all over the show. But the event at the hospital was particularly important to Zuma, in part because it would demonstrate how much he differs from his predecessor Thabo Mbeki, who questioned the connection between H.I.V. and AIDS, and whose Health Minister believed in treating the disease with garlic and beetroot. Even Nelson Mandela, Mbeki’s predecessor, largely ignored the issue while in office. The U.N. estimates that about one in five South Africans between the ages of eighteen and forty-nine is H.I.V.-positive, and that around a thousand people die from AIDS-related causes every day.

Zuma sat in a chair in the middle of a crowded stage and watched as Chomee, a stunning young singer of kwaito, urban-township music that sounds something like hip-hop, bounded up. Dressed in a short red satin skirt and black fishnet stockings, and joined by a backup group of similarly sultry young women, Chomee was singing a song that was written for the campaign: “No blame, no shame / We need no stigma / You got to test in order to be treated.”

Within a few minutes, Zuma, who is sixty-eight years old and was wearing a dark-blue suit, a white shirt, and a red tie, had sprung out of his chair and joined the singers. He swayed back and forth, bending his knees and rhythmically dropping his body down, until you could see the shiny top of his clean-shaven head. He smiled broadly as he shimmied back up beside one of the young women. There was a blast of applause, and Zuma moved to a lectern and began to describe his new campaign. After a short while, he declared that he had recently taken an H.I.V*.*{: .small} test and wanted to make an announcement. The crowd grew quiet. “After careful consideration, I have decided to share my results with all South Africans,” he said. Then he laughed and added, “I’m sure South Africans know I’m open about my life generally. No surprises.”

The whole world knows quite a bit about Zuma’s private life. In 2006, he was acquitted of raping an AIDS activist who was H.I.V.-positive. He conceded that he had had unprotected sex with the woman, but he insisted that it had been consensual—and that taking a shower afterward was one way he had reduced the risk of contracting the disease. Zuma is a Zulu, and he made a debatable ethnic assertion at the trial to justify his behavior: “In Zulu culture, you cannot leave a woman if she is ready.”

In 2008, Zuma, a polygamist who had already married three women (one of whom he divorced, and another of whom committed suicide), took a fourth wife. In January of this year, he took a fifth, and in February he admitted to fathering a daughter with yet a different woman, the daughter of a friend. This gave him, officially, twenty children. After the revelation, Zuma apologized to the nation and paid the traditional compensation to the woman’s family. A survey taken after the announcement found that his approval had dropped to forty-three per cent, fifteen points lower than it had been a few months before.

Now, on the hospital grounds, the President paused and then said that the test results had been negative. Wild applause and ululating followed. Afterward, long lines formed as people sought H.I.V. tests at stations that had been set up, and the event was widely publicized in the press. Speaking with wit and warmth, the President had done what he does best: confounded his critics and upended expectations. Jacob Zuma, the world’s most famously non-monogamous head of state, had launched a huge public campaign against AIDS.

On a recent Sunday morning, I went to interview Zuma at his official residence, an elegant Dutch-colonial-style mansion in Pretoria. It has spacious receiving rooms lined with generic African art and vases filled with king proteas, the national flower. While I waited in one of the rooms, I pulled the day’s newspapers out of my tote bag. As is frequently the case, stories about the President’s sex life filled the front pages.

Zuma rushed into the room and apologized for keeping me waiting. He was dressed casually, in a white linen African-style shirt, beige pants, and matching shoes. He sat on the sofa across from me, surrounded by pillows.

When I asked if he saw any conflict between his polygamy, his illegitimate child, and the message that he was trying to deliver at the Natalspruit Hospital, Zuma scowled, as if to say that he was tired of dealing with such questions, and replied, “The question is: How do you carry yourself? Many people have got one wife, but they’ve got many mistresses. What do you say to them? The only thing is that the mistresses are not talked about. At times, they’re discovered, whatever.” Why don’t people “deal with an honest man who is transparent,” he added.

I asked whether young men, knowing that the President had not worn a condom, might be less likely to use one themselves. The President responded with a typical Zuma answer—it takes a second to process and it includes a joke.

“They don’t know the reasons,” Zuma began, clearing his throat as his smile faded. “They don’t know the reasons for why people at a particular point do not condomize. They don’t know the reasons. Otherwise you’d be saying, ‘All human beings in the world should condomize,’ and there’s no birth. Or nothing.”

Zuma scooted back among his pillows and laughed at the idea of a suddenly depopulated world. He added, “I’ve just said to you I’m the only person at the moment who has stood up and said, ‘I’m negative.’ I’ve tested in public and I’m negative. If that’s not a good model, I don’t know what is.”

At one point, I asked him to help me with the pronunciation of his middle name, Gedleyihlekisa, and he did so patiently, syllable by syllable. The name, he said, means “someone who laughs with you while actually endangering you.” I told him that a Zulu prince had given me a slightly different definition, one that the prince said many Zulus find quite amusing: “a person who eats you up while he’s smiling at you.” Zuma laughed heartily.

Zuma’s father, a policeman, died when Zuma was very young, and Jay Zed, as he is known, spent his days herding cattle to help his mother, a domestic servant. Although he had no time for formal schooling, he sought out other children and asked to see their books. A young woman in the village who had completed the fourth grade helped him study in the evenings. Remembering her, he speaks of education with the passion of a man who believes that reading saved him from life as a cowherd or a criminal.

In 1962, when Zuma was twenty, he joined the guerrilla wing of the African National Congress, Umkhonto we Sizwe—or Spear of the Nation—formed by Nelson Mandela and others. The next year, he was arrested by the South African security police, briefly held in solitary confinement, and then sentenced to ten years in prison for conspiracy to overthrow the white regime. He spent his term incarcerated, with Mandela, on Robben Island, where he got to know the future leader and continued his academic and political education in what was known informally as Mandela University. Athletic and tough, Zuma was captain of one of the soccer teams; when he wasn’t playing, he served as a referee.

After his release, in 1973, Zuma rejoined the resistance. He lived in Swaziland and Mozambique and recruited comrades from home for guerrilla training. While in exile, he established a friendship with Thabo Mbeki, another activist who had fled the country. Zuma travelled to the Soviet Union for military training and worked in Mbokodo (“the stone that crushes”)—the security department of the A.N.C., which dealt with members charged with disobedience or disloyalty, sometimes rather harshly. Zuma may not have been born into tribal royalty, like Mandela, or political royalty, like Mbeki, the son of prominent A.N.C. activists. But he was a skilled politician who easily made alliances. He spent a decade and a half moving up the hierarchy of the A.N.C., becoming close to the trade unions and Communists on the party’s left. In 1990, Mandela was released, and Zuma returned to the country. After he got back, he started an education trust to help young people in rural areas escape poverty; this ongoing project is one of the topics about which he speaks most passionately. “It took time for me to educate myself,” he said to me. “Because education empowers, I moved forward and understood things. That’s partly what made me what I am today.”

In 1994, just as the country was preparing to become a non-racial democracy, serious violence broke out in Zuma’s home region, now called KwaZulu-Natal, where Zulus, the largest ethnic group in the country, make up most of the population. Hundreds of people were killed there in disputes between the A.N.C. and the Inkatha Freedom Party, which had taken up arms to demand a measure of self-rule for the region. Zuma went there to help defuse the conflict. Frank Mdlalose, who was the national chairman of the I.F.P., travelled throughout the region with him. “We spoke to our different groups and told them there is to be peace,” Mdlalose recalled. Zuma “was charming, clear, soft-spoken, and laughed quite easily.”

By the end of the year, Zuma, who can get by in most of the country’s eleven official languages, had earned a reputation as a conciliator and was elected national chair of the A.N.C., replacing Mbeki, who had moved up to become Deputy President under Mandela. That year, I asked the outgoing President, F. W. de Klerk, whether he was going to miss the supremacy of the National Party. He responded that it would not be out of office for long. He wasn’t the only one who believed that liberation movements often fail at governing.

Mandela sought to heal the social wounds of apartheid. Mbeki sought to transform an economy that had stalled and that he believed was designed to perpetuate inequality. In 1996, as Deputy President, Mbeki, with Trevor Manuel, the Finance Minister, introduced a program for financial liberalization.

By the time Mbeki took over the Presidency, in 1999—he appointed Zuma as his Deputy—the economy had started to improve, aided by increased international investment and a boom in commodity prices.

The government reduced the national deficit from 3.8 per cent of G.D.P., in 1997-98, to 1.5 per cent, in 2004-05, and ushered in the longest period of uninterrupted growth in the country’s history. A black middle and upper class soon appeared, with the more conspicuous consumers earning the nickname Black Diamonds.

Only eight per cent of the seats on the Johannesburg stock exchange are owned by blacks, but the showrooms of Mercedes-Benz and BMW are fully integrated; so are the exclusive shops in the increasingly upscale malls, and so are the previously all-white neighborhoods, which are still gated, because criminals don’t discriminate.

“Everybody was anticipating a racial war in 1994,” Adam Habib, a former activist who is now deputy vice-chancellor of the University of Johannesburg, said. We were sitting on his back veranda in a prosperous, leafy neighborhood, overlooking a lovely swimming pool. “Sixteen years later, there’s been no killing. There is no racial war. There are racial tensions surfacing every now and then, in part because of the nature of economic inequality.” Habib then described his son’s fully integrated and racially mixed public school. “These kids are growing up in a new environment,” he said.

But Habib pointed out that, contrary to Mbeki’s goals, the benefits of the boom have not been widespread.

Jobs were created in South Africa’s highly sophisticated financial-services sector, but these were not jobs for the unskilled and uneducated. Although the country is by far the richest in sub-Saharan Africa, millions of blacks remain desperately poor—both the main victims and the perpetrators of crime. Mbeki’s market-driven economic policies alienated the trade unionists and Communists on the left wing of his party, and gradually the poor and uneducated turned on him. And while Mbeki has a graduate degree from the University of Sussex and a penchant for quoting “King Lear” that may have endeared him to the crowds at Davos, these qualities led many of his countrymen to feel that he was distant and too cerebral.

In 2005, a friend of Zuma’s named Schabir Shaik was convicted of corruption for soliciting a bribe from a French arms manufacturer and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. Zuma, too, was accused of corruption in the deal, and Mbeki fired him.

Zuma called the charges a politically motivated outrage; the left wing of the A.N.C. sided with him and, two years later, helped him challenge Mbeki in an election for the presidency of the party. At the convention hall, hundreds of delegates held two fingers in the air to signify “Two terms is enough” (for Mbeki as president of the A.N.C.) or rolled their fists over each other to signal “It’s time for a change.” Zuma won handily in a vote that seemed mainly anti-Mbeki.

A year and a half later, in April of 2009, two weeks before national elections, the director of public prosecutions dismissed the corruption charges against Zuma, declaring that there had been political interference in the handling of the case.

South Africa is a parliamentary democracy, and, after the A.N.C. won the vote, Zuma became President, replacing Kgalema Motlanthe, a legislator who had served temporarily as President after Mbeki’s resignation and before the new elections. (Shaik, meanwhile, was released from prison just before Zuma came to power, on the ground that his health was seriously deteriorating. When he was seen shopping in a Durban supermarket, he declared that his health was improving, thanks, in part, to a diet that included goji berries.)

Zuma’s allies thought that he was a populist who would reverse Mbeki’s policies. His enemies and other critics thought that power had been handed to a buffoon and a demagogue.

What everyone seemed to agree on was that he would be able to connect with his least fortunate countrymen, and also that, in so turning the corruption investigation to his advantage, he had shown that he possessed remarkable political skills. “His opponents are lucky he’s not educated,” Aubrey Matshiqi, one of South Africa’s most prominent political analysts, told me. Shortly after Zuma’s election to the party leadership, Habib said, “You’re going to have a President who jigs”—dances—“on the conference floor. He is not going to be quoting Shakespeare. He’s going to strike it easy with poorer people.”

• Zuma’s jigging, the traditional leopard-skin outfits he wears on ceremonial occasions, and his casual manner initially won the public over. He earned credit for appointing a diverse cabinet, comprising Communists, trade unionists, and capitalists. It included competent men like Aaron Motsoaledi, the Health Minister, and Trevor Manuel, the head of a new National Planning Commission. Even de Klerk, who had long since given up hope of returning to power, praised Zuma. The enthusiasm, however, quickly waned as the unemployment rate climbed to 25.2 per cent and as manufacturing continued to decline. The nation produces about one-third less gold than it did in 1994. South Africa currently has the worst income inequality in the world.

• The President didn’t help matters with a lumbering State of the Nation speech in February, during which he seemed to lose his place at one point. Although Zuma hasn’t substantially changed Mbeki’s economic policies, the sex scandals have created the sense that he can no more control the economy than he can his libido. South Africa also continues to have one of the highest crime rates in the world and a police service woefully in need of professionalization. There are close to fifty murders a day—about seven times the per-capita rate in the United States—along with some two hundred sexual offenses and three hundred armed robberies. Two out of five women say that rape was their first sexual experience.

The number of protests has surged since Zuma took office, many in response to the government’s failure to deliver such basic services as water and electricity. In the first three months of 2010, there were more protests than at any point since 1994. Zuma’s great political strength was supposed to be his ability to win the trust of the poor. Yet the unrest has been worst in the poorest areas, including Orange Farm, a sprawling informal settlement about forty-five miles from Johannesburg. In February, protesters there blocked a thoroughfare, burned tires, and threw stones to call attention to what they insisted were years of neglect and corruption on the part of local officials. Eventually, the protest turned chaotic, with hordes of young people looting foreign-owned stores.

I travelled to Orange Farm a day after the tumult—the smell of burning tires lingered in the air, causing my eyes to burn. A group of women gathered around me. Many spoke at once. “We don’t have sewers and no lights in the streets or on the road,” a woman named Dorothy Diphoko said. “We want Zuma to come here!” Amanda Sikhahleli shouted.

• After a little while, the women started gently shoving me away and telling me that I should move—that it was no longer safe. Across the street, growing numbers of young men and some women were dancing the toyi toyi—the historic dance of protest, in which demonstrators move forward military style. Other men and women were jabbing the air with tree branches, sticks, or long black whips known as sjamboks, which I had seen the apartheid police slam down on protesters in 1985. I then noticed police nearby preparing their riot gear and long rifles. Eventually, a delegation of officials showed up, and the agitated crowd surrounded them. The crowd quieted down when the officials said that they had heard the grievances, and that work on resolving them would begin the following day.

• I returned a few days later to see Pretty Methe, one of the women I had met on my earlier visit. When I reached the spot where the demonstration had occurred, all was quiet, and Methe—who is thirty-eight years old, tall, and highly self-composed—was sitting on a bench nursing her fourteen-month-old baby. She got in my car, and we drove slowly through the neighborhood. “Look at this,” she said, pointing to a tangled mound of wires and wooden slabs on the side of the street. “It’s been left behind by contractors hired by the government who were supposed to fix the road. They say they left because they weren’t getting paid. And we want to know why not. What happened to the money?”

• Most of the streets were full of wide, deep ruts, but Methe took us on a route where the residents had piled bricks into the holes. We reached her house, secured the car behind an iron fence, and walked to a small yard, where she pointed to an orange plastic crate. “That used to be an open pit latrine, and that’s where the child fell in,” she said, explaining that a four-year-old girl had been playing with friends when her shoe came off. She attempted to retrieve the shoe from the latrine and slipped in. Her playmates kept running ahead, unaware that she had fallen into the slimy muck. Unable to scream, she suffocated and died.

• We stepped on bricks arranged in a street overgrown with squishy grass, and stopped at the tiny cement house of a friend of Methe’s. She invited us inside, where I saw a tiny baby lying on top of a thick stack of blankets. They had been laid out to protect the child from water that seeps into the house because there are no pipes anywhere nearby. The baby’s father, Peter Mvundla, was in a small kitchen that doubles as a living room. He is twenty-five years old and had been arrested during the demonstration. “I was protesting because this water is leaking down,” he said, adding, “We are severely sick and tired.”

“It’s a place where you can’t even get sick,” Methe said. The roads are so bad, she said, that ambulances refuse to drive in. Anyone needing to get to the hospital has to be carried to a nearby highway to meet the ambulance. “It’s a place for pigs, not people,” she said.

“It’s also a place that breeds criminals,” Mvundla added. “That Jacob Zuma, he says he’s going to create jobs. How many times we look for jobs but there’s no jobs?”

Jacob Zuma didn’t create the job crisis in Orange Farm, nor is he directly responsible for the uncovered pit latrines. He has been in power for a little over a year, and his term started just six months after the peak of the world financial crisis. But Zuma clearly knows that if he loses the trust of the poor he will lose any chance of governing effectively.

And so he has begun a campaign to improve the civil service, which he has denounced as the worst in the world. He told me that he is prepared to get tough on delinquent officials and that he has already started making unannounced visits to check on them. People who ignore his urgings to work harder, he proclaimed, will be fired. He told me about one community where he says that he found the mayor playing hooky. “When I went back for the second time, there was change,” he said.

• This story scarcely illustrates a national strategy, particularly since the second visit came only after a series of violent protests had shaken the town. All it showed was that the President could pop in on lazy officials and get them to shape up. But Zuma sees it in grander terms. “People were telling me, ‘We now have water. The houses have been built,’ et cetera.” Then, referring to my encounter at Orange Farm, he said, “That’s why those people are right. ‘We want Zuma here.’ Tomorrow, I’m going to be somewhere.”

• The lack of a broad strategy has earned the President widespread criticism. When he came into office, he reorganized government departments and gave them sophisticated new names. Foreign Affairs, for example, became International Relations and Coöperation. Analysts complain that he has only created confusion, particularly in financial matters. Azar Jammine, the chief economist at the consulting firm Econometrix, points out that there are now several ministries in charge of economic policy, headed by people with different ideologies. Judith February, an analyst with the Institute for Democracy in South Africa, says that Zuma—who declared that 2010 would be a “year of action”—talks a lot and does nothing. “It’s the nature of the Presidency that he may be finding his feet, but, at the moment, there is a sense of drift,” she said. Mbeki was criticized for deciding without listening; Zuma is called out for listening but not deciding.

• Still, Zuma’s position is secure for now. His term runs until 2013, and he does not have an obvious successor within the A.N.C., a political behemoth so dominant that South Africa is essentially a one-party state. Trevor Manuel, currently the head of the National Planning Commission, may be the most respected government official in the country, but he has a fatal political flaw. He comes from a mixed-race background, and was classified as “colored” by the apartheid government, even though he identifies himself as black. When I asked people about the prospect that Manuel would himself become President, they often responded with a silent no, pointing a finger at their skin. Many other top officials are involved in claims and counterclaims about corruption, and that subject has become the second-favorite topic of the press. (The President’s sex life continues its primacy; the latest scandal involved one of his wives and an alleged affair with a bodyguard who supposedly committed suicide when the affair was discovered.)

Much of the current political intrigue surrounds Julius Malema, the leader of the A.N.C. Youth League, who, at twenty-nine, is too young to succeed Zuma directly but who could eventually be part of a coalition that tries to bring him down.

• In the past, he has declared that he would “kill for Zuma,” but he has also criticized the President, and has caused no small amount of trouble for the party. In April, for example, Malema travelled to Zimbabwe, where he embraced President Robert Mugabe and his party, ZANU-PF.

• Malema declared support for Mugabe’s land-reform policy, which consisted of confiscating land from white farmers—leaving thousands of their black laborers jobless—and handing much of it over to political cronies who could neither care for the chickens nor fix the tractors. This policy is widely believed to have destroyed Zimbabwe’s economy. At a press conference a few days later, Malema began vigorously criticizing Zimbabwe’s opposition party, Movement for Democratic Change, noting that it has “air-conditioned offices” in Sandton, a wealthy part of Johannesburg. A British journalist interjected that Malema himself lived in Sandton.

• Malema erupted and threw the journalist out of the press conference, calling him a “bloody agent,” a “bastard,” and a “small boy.” Just before that, Malema had been involved in an even more racially charged incident: he had led a large group of supporters at a rally in singing an old struggle song that includes the line “Shoot the Boer,” referring to the Afrikaans word for “farmer.”

• Soon thereafter, a right-wing extremist whom Malema has criticized in the past, Eugene TerreBlanche, was killed. Though no one has proved a direct connection between the song and the murder, Zuma criticized Malema for continuing to sing it at other events after a court banned it. Malema responded by lashing out at Zuma. In May, the A.N.C. sent Malema to classes on anger management.

All of this was seen as undermining Zuma, who is mediating peace talks between ZANU-PF and the M.D.C., and is trying to position himself as a moderate on racial and social issues. Zuma has said that he will not confiscate farms, and he has been trying to assuage poor Afrikaners who insist that they are being discriminated against by the government’s affirmative-action policies. Zuma is, after all, far better at smiling at people than at eating them up.

“He’s a communicator,” Jesse Jackson said during a visit to South Africa this spring. “He’s not difficult. He’s a very down-to-earth person. He’s as formal as required and informal as he needs to be.” Unlike many other leaders, Zuma doesn’t blame the apartheid past for all his country’s problems.

• At a meeting of government officials in April that I attended, he began by talking about the government’s successes during the sixteen years of black-led rule. But then his tone grew sombre. Four years from now, South Africa will celebrate twenty years of freedom, he told the attentive audience. At that time, he said, “we will not be able to blame apartheid if some villages still have no water, no electricity, and no roads.”

• Since coming to power, Zuma has consistently countered expectations: he has defended his personal promiscuity while becoming an avowed AIDS activist; he is a populist who has maintained free-market economic policies and alienated the poor; he is a powerful leader in a dominant party who has a hard time taking action.

• On the day he was rushing to prepare his response to critics of his budget vote in Parliament, the President and I sat down in his luxurious offices at Tuynhuys, a neoclassical structure that has been the seat of government in Cape Town for close to two and a half centuries. A giant bronze sculpture of Louis Botha, an Afrikaner who was the country’s first Prime Minister, still sits outside. I asked Zuma about the criticism that he is too much of a conciliator, and he responded wistfully by describing his rural home village, where men and women sit comfortably under trees and reason things through, for as long as it takes. Then he turned to the subject of his critics: “I don’t think they know what they’re talking about. The very people who say so, they would criticize the dictator who doesn’t listen to anyone. One of the charges or allegations is that this Zuma is a friend to everybody else. But, if you are a leader, why should you hate some people and love others?”

When the World Cup games started, in early June, Zuma revelled in the attention. In a speech on June 16th, marking the thirty-fourth anniversary of a historic anti-apartheid revolt, he praised South Africa’s youth, along with the national soccer team, Bafana Bafana. He declared that the team had made the country proud in its “dazzling opening encounter” with Mexico, which ended in a 1–1 draw. Beaming, chest expanding, he told the highly energized crowd that South Africans had “displayed amazing patriotism and national pride” during the tournament. Zuma knows that such moments of shared national identity have been rare in the country’s history—particularly as Mandela, known to his countrymen as Madiba, has stepped offstage. But South Africans of all identities are flying their country’s single flag on their BMWs, their bicycles, and their bakkies. A few days after the speech, Ferial Haffajee, the editor of the City Press, one of South Africa’s largest newspapers, told me that the country now feels “as if somewhere in our tattered souls we had all found our inner Madibas.”

Zuma’s challenges, however, have not disappeared in the blare of the vuvuzelas. The day after his speech, I phoned Pretty Methe to find out how she and her neighbors were reacting to the World Cup. “It’s bad now,” she said, lamenting South Africa’s 3–0 loss to Uruguay, which came shortly after Zuma’s speech, and which eventually led to the team’s elimination. But she added that she and her family “are not watching all the matches, because we don’t have electricity. There is no electricity anywhere here since May.”

Methe said that she doesn’t think the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on the World Cup will make any difference in places like Orange Farm. “Those people are just keeping the money for themselves. I don’t have hope.” The sounds of screaming children almost drowned out Methe’s voice. “They are playing soccer,” she said. ♦

Published in the print edition of the July 5, 2010, issue.

Charlayne Hunter-Gault is the author of “In My Place,” “New News Out of Africa,” “To the Mountaintop,” and “Corrective Rape.”

More:African National Congress (A.N.C.)AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome)AIDS (H.I.V.)Nelson MandelaPovertyRace RelationsSouth AfricaUnemploymentWorld CupZimbabwe

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From <https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/07/05/the-third-man-7>

The Reputation-Laundering Firm That Ruined Its Own Reputation

A P.R. company that worked with dictators and oligarchs deliberately inflamed racial tensions in South Africa—and destroyed itself in the process.

By Ed Caesar

June 18, 2018

#PEOPLE STEPHEN GROOTES, JOURNALIST

#PEOPLE Percepto - THE reputation laundering israeli company

#people Branko Brkic, the editor of the South African newspaper the Daily Maverick

#people Jonathan Lehrle, one of the geopolitical publicists on the Oakbay account, also left Bell Pottinger. He founded a new P.R. agency, Sans Frontières Associates, and named Bell its chairman. Within months, Sans Frontières had hired several other former Bell Pottinger publicists.

Geoghegan told Henderson that Jonathan Lehrle, the South African-born publicist, had come up with the site….a briefing document from March, 2016, written by Lehrle, proposed creating a blog that contained “emotive language” and “powerful imagery.”

#people MARK TURNBULL (1995 TO 2012) / CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA

#people Peter Bruce, a South African journalist who had called the Guptas corrupt, became the subject of a smear campaign

#people Thuli Madonsela, the Public Protector of South Africa, whose mandate is to expose threats to the country’s democratic system,

#PEOPLE MOGUL Richemont, Johann Rupert’s company, and Mediclini

#PEOPLE Solly Mapaila, the Party official who posted it, told me that an anti-Zuma group had given it to him.

#PEOPLE 2017 report about the Gupta affair, which Henderson commissioned from the law firm Herbert Smith Freehills. (The full text has not been released to the public.)

Tim Bell, one of London’s most powerful publicists, is vocally unrepentant about representing dictators and oligarchs.Illustration by Ben Jones; photographs by (clockwise from top): David M. Benett / Getty; Martin Rhodes / Gallo Images / Business Day / Getty; Foto24 / Gallo Images / Getty; David M. Benett / Bell Pottinger / Getty

Listen to this story

On January 14, 2016, four publicists from Bell Pottinger, one of London’s leading public-relations firms, flew to Johannesburg and met with a potential client:

Oakbay Investments, a company controlled by Atul, Ajay, and Tony Gupta, three of South Africa’s most powerful businessmen.

The Guptas, brothers who had holdings in everything from uranium mining to newspapers, maintained close ties with Jacob Zuma, the President of South Africa, and were notorious for having leveraged this connection for profit and influence. Three members of Zuma’s family had worked in Gupta-owned businesses.

In 2015, South Africans staged large protests against Zuma’s Administration, calling it inept and corrupt. They also accused the Guptas, who were born in India, of running a “shadow government” that swung procurement decisions their way and appointed government ministers aligned with their interests. That December, an adviser to BNP Paribas Securities South Africa told Bloomberg News that the relationship between Zuma and the Guptas was “deeply troubling,” noting, “This goes beyond undue influence.”

CLIENT MEETING

Tony Gupta attended the Johannesburg meeting, as did Tim Bell, one of Bell Pottinger’s founders.

TIM BELL - FOUNDER

Lord Bell, perhaps the best-known figure in British public relations, has worked for decades in South Africa, including a stint as an adviser to President F. W. de Klerk, the final leader of the apartheid era.

TONY GUPTA-BRAGGARD, BILLIONAIRE--CRONY CAPITALISM

Bell can be charming or cutthroat, as the moment requires. After tea was served, Bell recalls, he sat through “an hour and a half of Tony Gupta lecturing us on how wonderful he was—he’d made so much money, he didn’t need to make any more money, he was just a good man, he had empowered brown people, he was very well connected to the government, knew Zuma very well.”

CAMPAIGN IDEA--IT'S THE WHITES!

Gupta requested Bell Pottinger’s help in launching a P.R. campaign to highlight economic inequality in South Africa. The goal was to persuade South Africans of color that they were far poorer than they should be, mainly because large white-owned corporations had outsized power. The campaign, Gupta suggested, would not only be beneficial to the country but would also bolster his family’s financial position, by casting the brothers not as overstepping oligarchs but as outsiders countering white supremacy.

Bell told me that Gupta’s proposal did not strike him as cynical; he found it “eminently reasonable.” On January 18th, he e-mailed James Henderson, Bell Pottinger’s C.E.O., and described the P.R. campaign’s theme as one of “economic emancipation,” adding, “The trip was a great success.”

BELL WINS OAKBAY GUPTA ACCOUNT-3M TRIAL

Against competition from another London agency, Bell Pottinger won the account, and Oakbay agreed to a monthly fee of a hundred and thirty thousand dollars, plus costs, for a three-month trial period. In addition to launching the economic-emancipation campaign, Bell Pottinger would provide traditional P.R. services for Oakbay, including “crisis communications.”

COVERT CAMPAIGN

Bell Pottinger’s work in South Africa included the covert dissemination of articles, cartoons, blog posts, and tweets implying that the Guptas’ opponents were upholding a racist system. As the brothers’ influence over Zuma’s government fell under increasing scrutiny, Bell Pottinger’s tactics were exposed. More details of the Oakbay account became public, including revelations about the inflammatory economic-emancipation campaign. Soon, one of the world’s savviest reputation-management companies became embroiled in a reputational scandal. Bell Pottinger could not contain the uproar, and, in September, 2017, it collapsed.

TIM BELL BIO ---- BELL POTTINGER  / PIERS POTTINGER

By the time of its demise, Bell Pottinger, which was founded by Bell and his longtime colleague Piers Pottinger, had existed, in various incarnations, for nearly twenty years.

1970S AD MAN