Good Tuesday morning!
In today’s edition of Your Daily Phil, we report on Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt’s appearance at the Aspen Ideas Festival, and feature an op-ed from Glenn Northern and Shira Zemel. Also in this newsletter: Larry Fink, Bonnie Marks and Yuli Novak. We’ll start with the death of James Crown in a car accident this weekend.
The Chicago Jewish community is mourning the sudden death of James “Jim” Crown, a towering philanthropic figure in the city who hailed from one of its most prominent families. Crown was killed on Sunday in a single-car crash at the Aspen Motorsports Park where he was celebrating his 70th birthday, reports eJewishPhilanthropy’s Judah Ari Gross.
Crown, a member of the city’s prominent Crown family, has made major donations over the decades to a wide variety of Jewish causes, municipal causes and Democratic campaigns. He was chairman and CEO of his family business, the investment firm Henry Crown and Company, as well as the director of General Dynamics and a board member of JPMorgan Chase & Co.
“The Crown family is deeply saddened by the sudden passing of Jim Crown,” a representative of the family said in a statement. “The family requests that their privacy be respected at this difficult time.”
Lonnie Nasatir, the head of Chicago’s Jewish United Fund, who has worked closely with the entire Crown family for years, told eJP that Crown’s death represented a “great loss” for the Jewish community, both in the city and around the world.
“It’s a loss for the Jewish people. It’s a loss for the [Chicago] Jewish community. And for our city of Chicago. It’s just a great loss because this was a really creative mind who had so much business experience and understood our city and understood our community. It’s just — it’s too soon. It’s too soon,” Nasatir said.
“He had a love for the Jewish people, a love for Israel, and really just wanted to make sure that we in Chicago were taking care of our most vulnerable, both Chicago’s Jews and Chicago writ large,” he said.
At the Aspen Institute’s Ideas Festival, which is taking place this week, the former president and CEO of the organization, Walter Isaacson, praised Crown as embodying the types of values that are needed in this day and age. “He had a deep sense of values,” said Isaacson, who has written several books about inventors, visionaries and leaders. “When you write about geniuses enough… the problem is not their genius, but their values. Especially as we move into the era of [Artificial Intelligence], the people who [create it] have to have the values that work. If someone were to say to me, ‘How do you define those values?’ You’d say, ‘Jim Crown.’”
Jim was one of seven children of Renee and Lester Crown. “He was the leader of our family both intellectually and emotionally, and he looked out for everybody,” his 98-year-old father, Lester Crown, told the Chicago Sun-Times on Monday. “He also was a great leader also for the community.”
Read the full story here.
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