Yes, Los Angeles businessman and philanthropist Eli Broad is a Jew. He is the son of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants. Broad grew up in Detroit where he was at first a $75-a-week accountant. He now has a net worth of about $5.2 billion, making him Forbes' 93-richest person in the world. Quite an achievement.Nevertheless, in 2008 Dean Rotbart chastised Broad in the Jewish Journal for not giving enough to Jewish causes.
It turns out now that his weak beneficence to Jewish causes may have been a blessing in disguise. Mr. Broad, it appears, is also a control freak. And yes, saying that highlights the difference between the NY Times and this blog, for those of you who confuse the two.
True, the Times' story, "Wielding Iron Checkbook to Shape Cultural Los Angeles," about Broad's style of philanthropy, does not use the term "control freak." Constrained by the canons of good journalism, it uses circumlocutions and euphemisms for that concept. But the article paints a picture of a man whose involvement in his charity is so intrusive and overbearing that no other description befits him.
Only the Lord knows what Broad would have wanted the Yeshivas to do if he had donated more money to them.
Broad owes a debt so great that it is excluded from Forbes's calculations lest the canons of proper American bookkeeping be opened to a page before the age of openly promoted Jewish causes.
ReplyDeleteThat disguise is hardly a blessing, the least he could do, is NOT give to causes that negate Jewish existence and promote anti-semitism in private or in public through plausibly deniable and twisted tangents. The least any philanthropist could do, no?