42 Minutes With...Charles Bronfman

The face of Birthright Israel turns on the prime minister.

- Lisa Miller

On the tuesday after the Monday when Donald Trump officially moved the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, his daughter and son-in-law performing pseudo diplomacy and wearing mannequin smiles as Israeli soldiers shot live ammunition into crowds of protesters in the Gaza Strip, killing 60 people, I arrived at the 16th-floor Park Avenue suite of the Jewish philanthropist Charles Bronfman. The previous week, in an address to Hebrew Union College, Bronfman had seemed to pick a fight with the government of Israel—a surprising and unprecedented act for a man who has spent his whole life and hundreds of millions of his own dollars investing in Israel, promoting it to Americans, and defending its right to defend itself. The co-founder of Birthright Israel, which sponsors free trips for young Jews to the homeland, turns 87 next month, and when he greeted me, gallantly offering to carry my gym bag, he looked, in his pale-pink shirt, every inch the dapper billionaire. I am Jewish, and still rattled from the news of the bloodshed, I sat on his couch with my back to the busy view and used the word heartbroken.

Bronfman shrugged existentially, an open-palmed gesture that evoked generations. “They’re all bad guys,” he said, meaning Hamas, Netanyahu, Trump, Javanka—the lot. “Why did the Israelis use live fire? Why didn’t they use water cannons and why didn’t they use tear gas and why didn’t they use rubber bullets? I can’t answer any of this stuff. Nobody’s an innocent lamb in this thing. It is such a terrifying situation all around.”

Establishment patriarchs used to not talk like this to reporters. Among American Jews, the ground rules were clear: Like members of a contentious family, the leaders of Jewish organizations may have had their disputes with Israel, but, also like family, they were expected to air those grievances in private.