US President Donald Trump was in the middle of his Knesset speech when he stopped to thank a woman sitting in the room. She loves Israel, he said. She has $60 billion in the bank. Then he told the Israeli parliament that she had shaped some of the decisions he made about their country.
That was last October, and nobody flinched. A few years ago, we would have.
Miriam Adelson was No. 26 on this list last year. She is in the top five now, and her fortune did not move. What moved was us.
For two decades, we filed her under politics. She and Sheldon were donors, Israel Hayom was Netanyahu’s paper, and every check they wrote got read backward from there. It was a convenient way to avoid thinking about her.
Then the hostages.
While the government briefed and the talks stalled, Adelson worked the one phone line in the world that mattered. Channel 12 named her. Hostage families named her. In the end, Trump named her out loud, from our own parliament. Nobody here had to guess anymore.
Herzog gave her the Presidential Medal of Honor that same month, and she used her remarks, delivered on behalf of all the recipients, to talk about the hostages. In May, the Israeli-American Council gave her a lifetime award in Los Angeles. She said the day they all came home was the best day of her life, that it fell near her birthday, and that God had handed it to her.
The politics have not softened. Forbes puts the family at close to $38b. She is still the largest individual donor in Republican politics, and at the White House Hanukkah reception in December, she was reported to have pushed Trump toward a third term with another $250 million behind it. Six months later, her own paper ran an open letter telling him he had failed on Iran.
Anyone still calling Israel Hayom a PR sheet has not read it recently
Both of those are true about the same woman. Anyone still calling Israel Hayom a public relations sheet has not read it lately.
Now the part Israelis skipped for 20 years.
The Adelsons came into Birthright in 2011 because they heard that 10,000 young Jews were sitting on a waiting list every year for lack of money. They paid for the list. The list doubled. They paid for that, too. A quarter of a billion dollars by 2015, and that is one program. There is also the medical faculty at Ariel, Yad Vashem, the IAC, and the addiction clinics.
I asked them why, in 2020, for Makor Rishon. She did not give me a speech. She gave me a girl.
On the last day of a trip, at Independence Hall, a participant told Adelson she knew there was no such thing as a free lunch and asked what the family wanted back. Adelson told her that if Israel is ever in danger, she will fight for it, and she will go to the White House and shout. Then she told her the investment had already been repaid, because she had shown up.
In June, she wrote about Elie Wiesel, 10 years gone, a friend of hers. Wiesel’s pulpit, she wrote, was his pen.
Baron Rothschild paid for the first moshavim, the early farming villages, and Jews resented him for it while he was alive. We do this. We take the money and mistrust the hand.
Adelson is the most consequential Jewish philanthropist alive. She is also a private line between Jerusalem and the Oval Office. This year, we finally said so.