MIRIAM ADELSON often tells a story from her childhood: Around 1950, when she was 4 or 5 years old and the state of Israel itself was one or two, she wanted to dress up for Purim as Queen Esther. Esther, the Tanakh tells us, was a beautiful Jewish woman who married gentile King Ahasuerus. She used her bravery, smarts, and station to thwart a plot to slaughter the Jews. But Miriam didn't get to be Esther. Her family, like most Israeli families at the time, had no money. Her mother dressed her up in her older brother's clothes instead. Miriam Adelson is now 78 and worth $30 billion. She is effectively a queen-the fifth-richest woman in America and the richest Israeli.
When she met her late husband, the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, in the late 1980s, she was a divorced addiction doctor who had left Tel Aviv for New York to pursue a research fellowship on methadone treatment. She had dedicated her life to lifting up the weak. But like almost all Israelis of her generation, the protection of the Jewish people, the security of the state of Israel, is her true calling. So after she married Sheldon in 1991, she leaned in. As Cicero put it, endless money forms the sinews of war.
Through the 1990s, Adelson learned her weapon. She switched from making modest donations to Democrats-common practice among Jewish Americans-to making large donations to Republicans, then unexpected and strange. In Israel, she and Sheldon backed Benjamin Netanyahu, a then-young right-wing zealot and Washington insider who rose to prominence by equating peace with surrender. The Netanyahu bet paid off. In 1996, he defeated sitting prime minister Shimon Peres. Two years earlier, Peres had won the Nobel Peace Prize, along with Palestine Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, for negotiating the first Oslo Accord.
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