When several dozen family and friends gathered last month for a memorial service in New York to celebrate the life of Marshall Weinberg — a New York stockbroker and philanthropist who shared a mentor and seven-decade friendship with Warren Buffett — I knew exactly what story to tell.
It was the spring of 2010, and I was at one of my first board meetings as the relatively new editor in chief of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, there to give an update on our editorial strategy.
“Now wait a minute,” Marshall interrupted with a wave of the hand. In his trademark booming voice, he asked: “Am I the only one here who doesn’t know what a blog is?”
Yes, this white-haired almost octogenarian was the only one in the room who didn’t know a blog from a bagel. What was this guy doing on our board?
Later in the meeting I got my answer.
Like many organizations in the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown, JTA’s outlook was bleak. But we were on the verge of bouncing back, as we closed in on a sizable grant from a foundation that had never supported us. Unfortunately that opportunity suddenly collapsed when the foundation’s chairman offered us an additional smaller grant to do an ideologically driven hit job on a specific organization — and we declined.
One JTA board member expressed dismay that the staff had made this costly decision without seeking board guidance. Several more veteran board members pushed back, arguing that editorial independence required the staff to make these types of journalistic calls.
The argument went on for several very tense minutes – until Marshall suddenly raised his hand and slammed it on the table.
“We wouldn’t do it for a million dollars!”
Conversation closed.
Marshall, who died at 95 in his Upper East Side apartment on Sept. 20, was clueless about blogs, and for that matter smartphones and social media. What he did know — channeling his namesake, the crusading civil rights lawyer Louis Marshall — was right from wrong, the causes he cared about and how to step up when it mattered most.
Marshall served on the board of JTA and its eventual parent organization, 70 Faces Media, for about 45 years, including as president in the early 1990s. Flash forward two decades after his presidency — well into the early 2010s — he was still JTA’s largest individual donor, a distinction he would complain about, lamenting the failure of his fellow board members to do more. When I excitedly told him in 2014 that several of them had finally surpassed him in order to support the merger that created 70 Faces Media, he immediately raised his gift to match the new benchmark.
Marshall was an only-in-New York character, a man of immense wealth who spent freely on culture, travel and, most of all, his philanthropic causes — while living for 65 years in the same one-bedroom rent-controlled apartment that definitely looked its age. He loved food and could afford to eat anywhere but was usually happiest with something basic, like roast chicken or a corned beef sandwich. And was it just me, or did he always seem to be wearing the same dark blue sweater with a small insignia from his beloved alma mater, the University of Michigan?
During his undergraduate years in Ann Arbor, Marshall developed a lifelong love of philosophy, which he decided to pursue as a graduate student at Harvard. But then, he told me, one of his professors warned him that he needed to find a better way to make a living, so he switched to Columbia Business School. It was there that he and several other classmates, including Buffett, became disciples of Ben Graham, one of the most influential investors of his time, who as the father of “value investing” pioneered the use of rigorous financial analysis and intense focus on long-term fundamentals to identify under-valued securities.
Marshall would later recall in a documentary how Graham changed his life with one line. “Ben Graham opened the course by saying, ‘If you want to make money in Wall Street you must have the proper psychological attitude. No one expresses it better than Spinoza,’” Marshall recounted, adding that he nearly fell off his chair and then perked up at the mention of the 17th-century Jewish rationalist philosopher. “I remember exactly what [Graham] said. He said: ‘You must look at things in the aspect of eternity.’”
In a letter read at Marshall’s memorial, Buffett reminisced about the class and the friendships that emerged from it.
“I met Marshall 74 years ago when we were both attending Ben Graham’s class at Columbia,” Buffett wrote. “It was a small group, only about 15 to 20 students. It was the most remarkable learning experience that I have ever had. Ben was a great teacher, combining wisdom, imaginative illustrations and humor in his weekly appearances on Thursday afternoons during the spring semester. Out of those sessions, I made at least five lifelong friends, Marshall among them. Subsequently he became a charter member of what I call the ‘Graham Group.’”
For about 45 years, they met every 18 months or so, with Marshall and Buffett attending every gathering.
“Among our members, Marshall became universally liked and admired. He was a friend to all and a confidant to many,” Buffett wrote. “Marshall was generous in every way, both monetarily and on a deeper one-on-one human basis. He never lost a friend. He had a strong social conscience, but never came across as personally judgmental or overbearing in his beliefs. And for all of the years that I knew him, he practiced those beliefs.”
Buffett’s letter was read by philanthropist and former shoe company executive Jane Weitzman, one of Marshall’s best friends, who served with him for decades on the boards of both JTA and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Exercising her prerogative as the emcee, she corrected the record on one point.
“Now who am I to disagree with Warren Buffett? However, that [Marshall] never came across as personally judgmental … we know a little bit better,” she said, to the laughing agreement of everyone in the room.
Marshall Weinberg stands outside the Dr Harold and Anna Weinberg Child Development Institution, a JDC project at Sheba Medical Center for the care of Israeli children with disabilities, in Israel in 1974. (Courtesy JDC)
After finishing at Columbia, Marshall joined and spent his career at the investment firm Herzfeld & Stern. As a 42-year-old broker, he was interviewed by The New York Times about his approach to investing, which had all the markers of a Graham disciple.
At least when I knew him, in his final two decades of life, Marshall never bragged about his best stock picks. Instead he was constantly talking up his philanthropic portfolio, a range of causes including the JDC, the University of Michigan, and the Center for Reproductive Rights.
Having never married or had children of his own, Marshall’s relationships with the fundraisers, other select staff and fellow board members at the organizations he supported took on added importance in his life.
“We’re here today to remember a giant,” said Alexandra Shklar, a senior development director at the JDC, where Marshall served on the board for 50 years and was one of the largest lifetime donors, supporting the needs of impoverished Jews around the world. “Not only a giant in generosity of leadership, but a giant in spirit. Marshall Weinberg was a tzadik, not in an abstract or poetic sense, but in a very Jewish sense of the word, someone whose life aligned values with action, and responsibility with compassion.”
What made Marshall special, she added, was the “How.”
“He didn’t just give, he showed up,” she said. “He asked hard questions, and he pushed back. He listened closely, and he inspired others to follow.”
Shklar confessed that she hadn’t always understood what Marshall meant when he attributed his business success to a focus on the infinite. But, during discussions at JDC around various global crises, it became clear. “When others felt overwhelmed by the present moment, Marshall would say calmly and with conviction, ‘Think long term – this is just a moment of time, and this shall pass, too.’ He never minimized suffering, but he never let the present erase the future. That is not just optimism, that is wisdom.”
Peggy Burns, who worked with Marshall during her time at the University of Michigan, highlighted his groundbreaking philanthropic investments in different academic fields at the school, including major gifts to launch new undergraduate and graduate programs in cognitive science that anticipated the future importance of artificial intelligence.
Most importantly, she used her remarks to set the record straight: No, Marshall wasn’t always wearing the same sweater. She supplied him with two new ones every year.
Marshall’s nephew, Adam Weinberg, the former director of New York’s Whitney Museum, talked about Marshall’s parents, his extended family and reverence for his maternal grandfather, Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Masliansky.
Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Masliansky, pictured in an undated photograph, was a prominent rabbi in Europe and then the United States; he delivered a farewell lecture in 1895 before leaving England. (National Library of Israel/Getty Images)
Masliansky was a teacher, orator, writer and activist, beloved across Europe in the late 1800s and then for four decades in America after being forced to flee the Russian authorities. Marshall would often recall to me the thousands who turned out for his grandfather’s funeral, with a cross-denominational roster of the country’s most prominent rabbis and the future president of Israel, Chaim Weitzman, serving as pallbearers.
“While he was only a teenager when his grandfather Masliansky died, his influence was lifelong and Marshall often channeled Zvi Hirsch as a speaker and moral leader,” Adam Weinberg said. “I’m convinced that booming voice must have come from Masliansky who didn’t have amplification in those days and when he had to speak to 5,000 or 10,000 people at the Educational Alliance he had to speak loudly.”
Apparently, he lovingly quipped, Marshall forgot that we had microphones today.
The gathering closed with remarks from sociology professor Lenore Weitzman, who echoed several speakers in thanking Marshall’s caregivers; his lawyer, Nina Krauthamer, and Ellen Goetz, a friend he knew from his support of the Center for Reproductive Rights, for all the ways they tended to him over the past few years as his health and facilities declined.
Weitzman recounted her introduction to Marshall’s power as a fundraiser, at a cocktail party for recent college graduates more than 60 years ago sponsored by the United Jewish Appeal. He was there to warm up the crowd and inspire them to give. “Marshall talked about what was happening to poor Jews in Eastern Europe and how important it was to help,” she said. “I had grown up thinking a good Jew was about going to Shabbat services, observing Jewish holidays and supporting Israel. But here was someone who was talking about Jews beyond Israel, Jews who were suffering in countries I knew nothing about.”
And, again, it was about the How.
“He cried. He actually cried when he talked about visiting Jews who didn’t have enough money to buy matzah for Pesach and those in countries where they’re not even allowed to practice Judaism,” she recounted. “I don’t think I had ever seen a man cry in public, and I don’t think I had ever seen or heard a man who was so emotional about his love and his concern for his people.”
As a result of the many ways he translated that passion for his people into action, Marshall’s memory is already a blessing. May those of us who benefitted from his good deeds keep it that way by carrying on all of the important work that he supported and loved.
