Sheldon Adelson and my dad grew up in the same shtetl: Dorchester, once the Jewish heart of Boston, with its deli-lined Blue Hill Avenue. They were seven years and about a mile apart, both of which were big gulfs back then, but Adelson's partner in the COMDEX trade show and the Sands Hotel & Casino was Irwin Chafetz, a lifelong friend of dad's who was at my Bat Mitzvah and my wedding; in the 1990s, when I worked at the Los Angeles Times and dad took me on my first trip to Las Vegas, we stayed at the Sands.

So when I was appointed Jerusalem Bureau Chief of The New York Times, Adelson -- despite his hard-line right-wing Zionism that made him a fierce critic of Times coverage of Israel -- was among the people across the political spectrum I reached out to for a coffee. A secretary named Betty seemed to be trying to make it happen, but the Adelsons were not in New York and then we missed each other by a few days in Washington.

A year later, I was invited to what was billed as "an exclusive lunch" with Adelson and his wife, Miriam, who were getting a lifetime achievement award at the Jerusalem International Tourism conference. Of course I went. 

My visions of an intimate table and frank conversation were dashed when I walked into a ballroom at the Jerusalem convention center filled with perhaps 100 guests, where I was seated, along with the L.A. Times correspondent, at the round table farthest from the dais. It was an odd little affair -- Adelson had flown in entertainers from his $2.4 billion resort in Macau, three male crooners in brocade jackets and three-cornered hats who sang "That's Amore!" and "O Sole Mio." We sat through the chicken thighs and salatim, the laudatory speeches and ceremonial presentation of the key to Jerusalem, and during dessert approached the Adelsons for a chat. We were pleasantly surprised that he seemed quite game to talk.

About five minutes in, as we held our phones out in voice-record mode, someone from Adelson's entourage approached and asked in horror, "Are you taping?" Adelson dismissed him with a "Who cares, let them tape!" and continued to hold court, ranting about the Palestinians; denouncing critics of Birthright Israel as "stupid;" insisting he was uninvolved in the operations of Israel Hayom, the free daily newspaper he owned; claiming credit for putting "Israel on the high-tech map by promoting it" at COMDEX; and talking about how his Lithuanian-born cabdriver dad never got a chance to visit the Jewish state.  (After his father's death, Adelson told us, "I brought him here spiritually," by walking across Israeli soil in an old pair of dad's shoes.) 

There were fairly incendiary comments, especially about the Palestinians ("They teach their children that Jews are descended from swine and apes, pigs and monkeys") and then-Secretary of State John Kerry's plan to infuse $4 billion into the economies of the West Bank and Gaza Strip ("Why would I want to invest money with people who want to kill my people"), but nothing that he had not, essentially, said before. He also had many harsh words about The Times' Israel coverage -- we were stupid and didn't know history and never wrote anything positive. About a half-hour in, he complained that no Times bureau chief had ever contacted him before, so I mentioned how I had tried, through Betty, when I first got the gig, and then I mentioned Chafetz and my dad, who Adelson remembered. It ended pretty soon after that, and when I got back to the office and decided to write it up, I reached out to the conference organizer and Adelson's man in Jerusalem for a few fact checks. Then all hell broke loose. 

The aide said, "that wasn't an interview," and I said, "well, he knew we were taping and said he didn't care." Then Adelson himself called, irate, and said "this was a private conversation" and "you never asked for an interview." I said: You knew who we were and you knew we were taping, why else would we do that? He threatened to call my boss, and either he or his lawyer did just that, alleging that I never identified myself as a reporter and had led with the dad-connection. That wasn't true, and I had it all on the phone-recording to prove it, so we went ahead with the story, which was hardly news-breaking. Miriam Adelson emailed me that night, "I saw the happy end when it worked," signing the note, "Brachot," and I never heard directly from the Adelsons again.

I've been thinking about all this, of course, since Tuesday morning, when Miriam announced Adelson's death at 87 from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. That day in Jerusalem he had proclaimed, "80 is the new 60," but he had already had some struggles with illness, and had been quite sick for much of the past two years, according to news reports. He was a bigger-than-life figure, the largest single donor to Republican causes and backer of both President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and major news outlets ran lengthy obituaries. I was struck by some of the details: how his massive philanthropy was inspired by a stranger sending him to Jewish summer camp during his impoverished childhood. How he loaned his private planes to political allies and also to wounded veterans and NBA stars and friends who needed medical treatment. How he ran both his businesses and foundations largely on instinct, and never stopped selling. How he kept his company payrolls pumping throughout the pandemic. 

Love him or hate him, Adelson was a giant. The distance he traveled -- from immigrant cabdriver's son to casino magnate and political kingmaker; from Dorchester's Blue Hill Avenue to the glittery Cotai Strip of shiny hotel-casinos in Macau -- is a mind-boggling example of the Jewish-American dream.  
 

Your Weekend Reads 

Monday, Monday

In honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day on Monday, the Forward is going to "close" our newsroom. Instead of our regular coverage, our morning newsletter and website will be filled with news, feature and opinion articles about Jews and race that we have published in recent months, as well as a few new pieces on those themes. We won't have an afternoon newsletter. I hope you dig into them, and otherwise have a meaningful holiday. 

You could start observing now by checking out the video of the Zoomversation I moderated Thursday afternoon called, "From civil rights to anti-racism." We had a truly great panel -- Prof. Marc Dollinger, author of "Blacks and Jews;" Prof. Susannah Heschel, historian of antisemitism and daughter of Abraham Joshua Heschel; Ginna Green, writer/speaker/activist/leader among Jews of color; and Prof. Anthea Butler, who studies race, religion and politics in America and Africa -- and the discussion was both insightful and inspiring. We talked about how much has changed since last MLK Day (see: Georgia's election of a Black pastor and a Jewish filmmaker to the U.S. Senate) and what they'd like to see happen before the holiday comes around again in 2022.   

Join the conversation

I also hosted, on Tuesday, the first in our series of Zoom events featuring members of the Forward 50, in which Rabbi Susan Talve started us off with a d'var about the importance of listening, and the journalist James Bennet said what we need in 2021 is "more intolerance of the wrong things and more tolerance of the right things." Amen. You can check out that video here.

This Tuesday, I've got another stellar and diverse group of Forward 50 stars: the rapper Kosha Dillz; Alex Goldstein, the face behind the @facesofcovid Twitter account chronicling our collective loss; and Yael Goldstein, the former CIA agent who worked at Facebook trying to keep the site secure from disinformation and quit in disgust. Sign up here to join us (or be sent the video).

And coming up on Feb. 4 we've got an incredibly important panel on White supremacy and far-right extremism: Is the Capitol siege the end or the beginning? Molly Boigon, our investigative reporter, will be speaking, along with Joanna Mendelson of the ADL, Eric Ward of the Southern Poverty Law Center and Amy Spitalnick of Integrity First for America. (Worth noting that this, like both the Forward 50 and anti-racism ones we hosted this week, will feature four women including myself and one man. Just saying.)

Jodi Rudoren
Editor-in-Chief
rudoren@forward.com