Here are the Bronfmans, those latter-day Rothschilds, whose immense wealth and dedication to Jewish causes attract countless petitioners and open closely guarded doors.
When Edgar M. Bronfman, the peripatetic president of the World Jewish Congress, hops continents in his private Gulfstream jet, heads of state seek his attention, and influential legislators listen respectfully. Perhaps even more awesome, when he visited Los Angeles recently, Tinseltown’s reigning royalty, in the form of Steven Spielberg, arranged a private meeting.
When Bronfman’s son, Edgar Bronfman Jr., decided to invest in Hollywood, he plunked down $5.7 billion for a controlling interest in the entertainment conglomerate MCA, Inc.
It all started in 1889, when Ekiel and Minnie Bronfman and their three young children left pogrom-ridden czarist Russia, took ship to Canada and started homesteading on the prairies of Saskatchewan.
The couple’s first Canadian-born son was Samuel, who was to lay the foundation of the family fortune as “a legendary booze runner” during Prohibition, in the words of the Los Angeles Times.
Actually, it was quite legal in Canada to distribute alcohol outside the country,” said Professor Irving Abella, the foremost historian of Canadian Jewry. “Of course, once Prohibition was lifted in the United States and Canada, Sam was in an excellent position to go completely legitimate.”
Simultaneously, Sam Bronfman established the family tradition of intense involvement in Jewish communal life, not just through philanthropy, but hands- on activism.
“For 30 years, from 1936 through the mid-’60s, Bronfman was president of the Canadian Jewish Congress,” recalled Abella, who until recently held the same position. “In the 1930s and ’40s, he personally kept the Congress alive.” Bronfman lobbied strenuously to open Canada’s tight borders to Jewish refugees, though even he could not reverse what Abella described as his country’s miserable record of barring refugees.
Sam’s two sons, Edgar Miles and Charles Rosner, also known as C.R., inherited the family’s flagship Seagram Company Ltd., and its increasingly diverse and far-flung auxiliary enterprises — including fruit juices and wine coolers – – in 34 countries.
“When they were growing up, the boys must have been impacted by the then widespread nativist and anti-Semitic sentiments in Canada,” said Abella, who thinks that these experiences strengthened their commitment to the Jewish people.
Seagram’s official headquarters remain in Montreal, where C.R. Bronfman serves as the company’s co-chairman. The American branch is in New York and is now considered the real nerve center of the multibillion-dollar empire.
The New York-based Edgar M. Bronfman, 65, is Seagram’s chairman, but over the years has turned over the day-by-day duties of running the company to Edgar Jr., who now serves as president and chief executive officer.
It is the younger Bronfman, at 39, who shook the entertainment industry in April, and became an instant major Hollywood player, when he purchased an 80 percent interest in MCA from the locally unpopular Japanese electronics giant Matsushita.
The MCA package includes the Universal Pictures studio; theme parks in Los Angeles and Orlando, Fla.; Geffen Records; a publishing company; and interests in a cable channel and theater chain.
Edgar Jr., known to his friends as “Effer,” as described by the L.A. Times as “Hollywood-handsome” and “a billionaire with a taste for beautiful wives.”
He has long felt an affinity for Hollywood. Some years ago, he produced the movie “The Border,” which, despite Jack Nicholson, proved to be a flop. In earlier years, the bearded Bronfman wrote romantic pop tunes for show-biz pals such as Dionne Warwick.
The purchase of MCA immediately put into play the futures of some of the biggest names in the Los Angeles movie and Jewish communities.
One is Lew Wasserman, at 82 the legendary chairman of MCA and for decades considered the single most influential Jewish personality in the city.
In recent years, that title has been transferred to Michael Ovitz, head of the Creative Artists Agency. Ovitz happens to be a close friend of the younger Bronfman and is being suggested as Wasserman’s possible replacement.
Speculation is further spiced by the likely role of Dream Works SKG, the creative powerhouse recently founded by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen. Spielberg’s films have been a mainstay of MCA’s profits and the creator of “E.T.,” “Jurassic Park” and “Schindler’s List” feels a intense personal loyalty toward Sidney Sheinberg, the longtime MCA president and Wasserman associate. Spielberg has let it be known that if Sheinberg is treated shabbily in any changes at the top, he might jump ship.
But it is the Bronfman clan’s philanthropic record around the world, particularly in their headquarter cities, that has general and Jewish charities in Los Angeles rehearsing their most persuasive pitches.
In Montreal, C.R. Bronfman has put $100 million into the CRB Foundation, primarily devoted to projects furthering Jewish continuity, Israel-Diaspora relations, exposing young people to the Israel experience and encouraging in- depth reporting by Jewish Journalists. The foundation is equally devoted to what its brochure describes as “the enhancement of Canadianism.”
Through another family foundation and his personal fortune, pegged at $2.5 billion by Forbes magazine, the senior Edgar Bronfman has established New York’s Center for Jewish Life, bearing his name, with a multimillion dollar grant. He has been equally generous to the Jewish Museum in New York, and other donations have helped establish professorial chairs in business and Jewish studies as well as student activity centers at Columbia and New York University.
He has been a multimillion dollar supporter of the World Jewish Congress and helped launch a renaissance among Hillel centers by kick-starting the Foundation for Jewish Campus Life.
“Effer” Bronfman leaned heavily on his father’s advice in the acquisition of MCA, but he has been less involved in Jewish affairs than the older generation. Nevertheless, it is fervently hoped that the Bronfman mystique and largess will soon find new outlets in Los Angeles.
“Edgar Bronfman (the father) embodies an extraordinary combination of great Jewish concern with extraordinary economic and political clout,” said Elan Steinberg, the WJC’s executive director. “Edgar Jr. will follow in his footsteps in the business world and the philanthropic world.”
Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, welcomed the Bronfman arrival as “good news for the L.A. Jewish community as a whole. This family takes their charity very seriously.”
Whether any Bronfman money will flow to the Wiesenthal Center is problematic, because relations between the center and the WJC, headed by the senior Bronfman since 1980, have been less than cordial for a number of years.
The bad blood goes back to the role played by Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal himself when former U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim came under fire from the WJC for his record as an intelligence officer in the German army during World War II.
Wiesenthal, who, like Waldheim, lives in Vienna, took a much more cautious approach, and was accused by the WJC of trying to cover up Waldheim’s alleged was crimes. The Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles and WJC in New York have since clashed on other occasions.
However, the feud may be laid to rest in the fashion of monarchs in old-time Europe, who frequently settled territorial disputes by marrying their respective offsprings to each other. If the Bronfmans are the reigning royalty of the WJC, on the other coast, the equivalent position at the Wiesenthal Center is held by the Belzberg family of Los Angeles and of Vancouver and Calgary, two Canadian cities.
At a Yeshiva University dinner in New York some months ago, the senior Edgar Bronfman proudly announced the engagement of his son Matthew to Lisa Belzberg, daughter of Samuel Belzberg, who has served as chairman of the Wiesenthal Center’s board of trustees since its founding. The nuptials will thus unite two of the most prominent Canadian-American families in the Jewish world.
Edgar M. Bronfman’s prominence rose as an early and persistent voice against the Arab economic boycott of Israel and on behalf of Soviet Jewry. But rarely has his fabled, multipronged clout been put into play more effectively than in the recent misfired Conoco deal.
When Conoco, which is entirely owned by the giant Du Pont chemical company, announced that it had concluded a $1 billion arrangement with the Teheran government to develop Iran’s oil fields, Bronfman swung into action on two fronts.
First, he let the Du Pont board know that he strongly opposed the deal, and because Seagram owned close to 25 percent of Du Pont stock, his arguments were persuasive.
Then he went to Washington and expressed strong opposition in private meetings with Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole, House Speaker Newt Gingrich, House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt and Foreign Relations chairmen Jesse Helms in the Senate and Benjamin Gilman in the House.
Of course, Bronfman’s voice was not the only one in opposition, and concrete national security aspects were involved. But in any case, the record shows that within a month, President Clinton issued an executive order scuttling the Conoco deal.
A few weeks later, Seagram sold its stake in Du Pont for $8.8 billion to finance the MCA deal.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
