Wherever Jewish communities find themselves today celebrating Rosh Hashanah, know that I celebrate and will always stand with you and Israel.
Shanah Tovah!
South African Jews have learned to live alongside a government that actively campaigns against Israel. A community that contributed enormously to the struggle against apartheid, and to every part of South African life, found itself abandoned during one of the darkest periods in modern Jewish history.
British Jews are now confronting that same sense of abandonment.
There is, however, an important difference. Most South Africans are not antisemitic. The hostility comes largely from activists who hold disproportionate influence in government, politics and sections of the media.
Walk the streets and speak to ordinary South Africans, and you will generally encounter warmth, not hatred.
That has brought the South African Jewish community enormous comfort.
Britain’s non-Jewish majority now carries a particular responsibility. Like the ANC, Labour has failed its Jews.
But a government is not a country.
British Jews need to hear from their neighbours, colleagues and friends that they are not alone.
Publicly. Not privately.
Because history will not judge Britain only by how its government treated its Jews, but by how many Britons refused to stand silently by.
Hatzibbur HaCharedi has submitted its candidate list to the Knesset: Moti Leitner, Asher Freddy, Dr. Nechumi Yaffe, and Ziva Glantz. Top 4 spots: one Ashkenazi, one Sephardi, and two women. You couldn't get more different than the existing Charedi parties. What a breath of fresh air!
My girlfriend and I attended the Ed Sheeran concert last evening in our company suite at MetLife with a number of guests; 34 to be exact (36 total attendees). I am not Jewish, however some of my guests are Jewish. I have never been more embarrassed, and shocked in my entire life. @macklemore is a complete clown for pulling the nonsense he pulled at BOTH “Ed Sheeran” concerts (Friday & Saturday evening). I have always been a Macklemore fan, but after his political stunt, I cannot support him or his music any longer. When you go WOKE, you have to be prepared to lose fans. After it happened on Friday, it should have immediately been stopped. This antisemitic behavior reflects so poorly on you @edsheeran .
Very sadly you were complicit in allowing it to continue on Saturday evening. When I go to a concert, I am going to hear amazing music. I am NOT going to hear “Free Palestine” rants. Macklemore spread anti-Zionist, and antisemitic propaganda. He also accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. What does any of this have to do with music ? Why do I need to hear this BS at a concert that I’m supposedly going to, to hear amazing music ? If Macklemore feels so strongly about Palestine, then maybe he should donate all of his tour earnings to them ? You were sensational Ed. You seem like such an amazing individual; someone so cool and down to earth. Someone that I would love to actually hang out with. It’s a shame that you would allow someone else’s performance to tarnish your amazing image. I just don’t get it. I saw this same nonsense a few years ago when @U2 , who I happen love, were trying to compare Michelle Obama to Harriet Tubman, and other notable women of African American descent. Why can’t music be about music ? I’m so sick of the attempted “indoctrination” of audiences that attend these concerts. There were young Jewish children in your audience last evening. How do you think they felt hearing these rants about Palestine ? It’s completely uncalled for. As a fan, I am prepared to stop attending concerts for good if this deplorable behavior continues. I will merely listen to the music I like on XM Satellite radio. What’s right is right !! What do you think about this @israeliamerican ? America is a free country. We are free to speak our minds. Maybe Macklemore thinks he is free to spread his propaganda and lies ? I am also free to spend my hard earned money how I see fit, and it won’t be on any more WOKE artists. You’re better than this, Ed Sheeran. Do what’s right here.
Hamas captivity survivors Alon Ohel, Eli Sharabi and Eliya Cohen stand beside Ziv Abud on her and Eliya’s wedding night.
This photo is almost too powerful for words. All three men were abducted by Hamas into Gaza on October 7, while Ziv survived the Nova massacre and fought tirelessly for Eliya’s return from captivity . Now they are here together, free and smiling, celebrating a love that survived the unimaginable.
Hamas dragged them into darkness, but it could not prevent this moment from happening .
Am 🇮🇱 Chai
At midnight on February 6th, earlier this year, the doorbell to our apartment rang. The doorbell was followed by a pounding on the door. I answered the door and a security person in our building handed me his phone. It was my oldest daughter Eloise. She had found my 26-year-old daughter unconscious on the floor of her apartment and had called 911. The EMT team was already there, but they did not know what was wrong with Lucy or to which hospital they would take her.
I threw on some clothes and jumped in an Uber heading east toward Brooklyn. (Lucy lived alone in Williamsburg.) On the way, I learned that they were taking her to Elmhurst, a City trauma hospital in Queens. I arrived about five minutes after the ambulance to join Eloise, Lucy’s mom, and a friend, and waited to learn what was wrong.
After about 15 minutes, I asked a nurse where she was. I looked over his shoulder to his computer. Next to her name, it said “non-responsive.” I walked into the emergency room and wandered around looking for her until I found her unconscious on a gurney surrounded by several doctors and nurses.
By about 2:30am with the results from a CAT scan, Lucy’s doctors had determined that she had a massive brain hemorrhage and would need an emergency hemicraniectomy to release the pressure on her brain and remove the blood from the hemorrhage. I called our wonderful friend and family doctor Eddie Fisher and explained what was going on. He woke up Josh Bederson, Chairman of Neurosurgery at Mount Sinai, to find out more about Zach Hickman, the neurosurgeon on call that night. Dr. Bederson said Hickman was an excellent surgeon, which was comforting as we had no choice.
The surgery to save Lucy’s life began around 3:15am and finished around 5:30am. It was successful.
The following day, I joined Lucy in an ambulance while she was being transferred to Mount Sinai on Madison Avenue. Later that day, we determined from Lucy’s Oura ring that her hemorrhage had occurred around 9am, which meant that more than 19 hours had passed from the time of the hemorrhage to the completion of the surgery to release the pressure on her brain (I only wish @ouraring had an alert for this kind of a medical event. Imagine it could call a family member if the wearer doesn’t cancel the alert).
I later learned that the standard of care is not to do surgery to save a patient with a large brain bleed if more than five hours have passed since the hemorrhage. Even when the surgery is done, I was told that the likely outcome for the patient is a few months in a nursing home and death from pneumonia.
When I met Lucy’s doctors, I did my best to inspire them: “Let’s see what can be accomplished if we give her the best care possible and we invest unlimited resources to restore her to life.” And I promised that whatever we learned we would make available to everyone.
Dr. Chris Kellner, her neurosurgeon, and Dr. David Putrino, Director of Rehabilitation Innovation for the Mount Sinai Health System have led Lucy’s care team since that day. Words cannot describe the remarkable and compassionate care that she has received beginning with the EMT team and then from nurses, doctors, therapists, and the army of people who have worked to save her and return her to life. To this day, we have a daily Zoom where we discuss her progress and make adjustments to her care. While her care and oversight have been incredible, the learnings for the Mount Sinai team have also been elucidating and will assist in the care of many others.
Lucy began in a bad place. She was in a coma for several weeks and then awoke not being able to breathe on her own, unable to walk, see or speak.
Over the last six months, she has recovered her cognition – she understands everything including her circumstance – is able to walk a hundred or more steps at a time with assistance, is making progress with sounds, vowels and consonants and the beginnings of speech, but she remains unable to see.
Each day, she makes a little progress, and daily progress compounds. Every day I tell her that she just needs to make a little progress and it won’t be long before she is back.
We remain optimistic that Lucy will return to normal function. It will likely take years, but I believe it is only a matter of time, hard work, and technological progress, along with some, and perhaps a lot, of divine intervention.
Many people have been praying for Lucy and we are incredibly grateful for the prayers and remarkable support she has received. Lucy’s friends have been with her every day since the beginning, and their presence and friendship have saved her life and helped to rebuild and maintain her spirit. And on a very positive note, Lucy’s challenge has brought together our entire modern family who have all been incredibly devoted to her care and recovery.
Lucy's vision and other faculties may require some form of brain computer interface, work that is underway at Neuralink, Precision Neuroscience, Science, Synchron, Nudge, and other companies in the space.
If you are going to have a devastating brain injury, now is the best time in history for that to happen. We are living in a world when you can be confident that the blind will soon see again. We are going to do everything we can to help make that happen, including by assisting existing companies in the space.
With respect to our promise to make Lucy’s care available to others, we have made good progress. In May, a real estate colleague made me aware of a 93% vacant, brand new, 400,000 square foot Class A+ purpose-built biotech facility on West End Avenue between 65th and 66th Streets that missed the market and was available for sale. The Pershing Square Foundation acquired the building 60 days later.
We also put under contract an adjoining 130,000 square foot building at 320 West 66th Street that is currently being used by Saturday Night Live for studio space. The building has 35-foot ceilings with massive column-free spaces that can be converted into superb rehabilitation facilities. We will close on the SNL building in December.
We are also acquiring an adjoining vacant lot with additional air rights. With just the existing zoning rights, we can add a 150,000 square feet for a total of 680,000 square feet, a lab footprint larger than Rockefeller University, and that’s without including the potential for an upzoning that would allow for substantially more buildable area on the site’s 3.4 acres with spectacular views of the Hudson.
Our goal is to build the world’s greatest brain research, rehabilitation, recovery, human optimization, and longevity institute. We have named it The Ackman Oxman Institute or the AOI for lack of a better name, but also to reinforce the point that Neri and I and our family are all-in on the mission.
The AOI will be patient-centric. It will not be an academic research institute that produces lots of papers, a Nobel Prize winner or two, but little if any results for patients. We will be laser-focused on cures, treatments, devices, rehabilitation and exercise equipment, and targeted and basic research with a goal of massively accelerating the time from idea to innovation to production to helping a patient.
While the AOI will be a non-profit, it will have highly commercial instincts. The AOI will have its own venture funding and will work to develop innovations to create companies that we will seed, assist, and spinout to ensure technologies, treatments, techniques, and drugs get to patients as promptly as possible.
On one 3.4 acre campus in what is still the greatest city in the world, we will do neurosurgery, neuroscience, rehabilitation, nutrition, BCI and device development, human trials, hyperbaric oxygen treatments, and life extension programs, and we will mandate and incentivize collaboration among the teams with no silos, politics, bureaucracy, or any other constraint that is inconsistent with the mission.
Mount Sinai will be an important partner and deservedly so, but it won’t be our only hospital or medical school partner as we don’t believe any institution has a monopoly on the best ideas or the best talent. We don’t believe in exclusive relationships because that is not in the best interest of patients.
Five years ago, we considered launching a brain institute inspired by Neri’s mom who sadly died from Alzheimer’s. We couldn’t make the math work as the real estate was too expensive and we believed it would be too difficult to recruit the best talent from universities to our effort.
Since then, the real estate became available at a 70% discount, universities became a much less attractive place to work due to politics outweighing meritocracy, protests that disrupt learning, the curse of antisemitism, and a decline in funding. Fortunately, during the same time, I made sufficient personal economic progress to make the AOI possible.
The advance of AI in the last few years will also enable us to greatly accelerate our mission. AI still has a lot to learn about human intelligence and the brain, and the AOI should be at the forefront of the interplay between the brain and AI.
Today, I am making a public filing disclosing a gift from Neri and me of ~$400 million or 10,000,000 shares of Pershing Square Inc. (PS) to the AOI. It is very early days for Pershing Square so these shares are intended to anchor the long-term work of the AOI as the shares compound over time while generating what we expect will be a growing stream of quarterly dividends to fund the Institute.
We will also be announcing an additional gift of similar and potentially greater size which won’t be in the form of Pershing Square stock to provide the AOI with the short- and intermediate-term runway necessary to enable it to achieve its goal of becoming a self-sustaining institute, which reinvests all of its revenues, royalties, and the economic rewards of company formation to advance the fields of brain health and human longevity.
Neri and I have chosen to anchor the funding of the AOI to maintain vision alignment and limit the need for the organization to focus on fundraising. We expect the AOI to be the best-resourced brain, rehab, recovery, and longevity institute in the world.
We are grateful to have been able to form a board which includes Dean Kamen (our generation’s Thomas Edison), George Yancopoulus (CEO of Regeneron), James Rothman (Nobel Laureate), Bernardo Sabatini (neuroscientist), Chris Kellner (neurosurgeon), Olivia Flatto (CEO Pershing Square Foundation), Neri Oxman, and myself.
We have recently identified a CEO who we expect to announce by October along with other key hires, and are beginning searches for a Chief Scientific Officer, a Chief AI/Technology Officer, a Chief Operating Officer, a Chief Financial Officer, and other key leadership roles.
If you find what we are building compelling and want to be part of the leadership team that creates and builds the AOI from a standing start, please send an email to: [email protected] with a short note as to why you believe you can help. Please include your best three ideas for the AOI along with a summary of your background and your most important accomplishments.
We promise strict confidentiality to those expressing interest in working with us.
We have learned from Lucy that the brain can recover from even catastrophic injury. There is so much more work to be done as the mind is a terrible thing to waste.
For details from my Pershing Square SEC filing see:
https://t.co/gZKafCw6Ia
Seems @Bandcamp have removed @BoyGeorge song and profile!!
“We will dance again” even though nobody right now can buy the record!! However it can still be shared via his original link
All those @Bandcamp are despicable! 😡🤬😡
Sign The Petition
Bandcamp removed Boy George’s track after he stood with Jews.
If you host anti-Israel rage but silence Jewish solidarity, that is not neutrality. It is discrimination.
Restore “We Will Dance Again.”
Explain the decision.
Stop punishing artists for refusing to bend.
https://t.co/W3fTktuadF
Just randomly saw someone putting on tefillin on the streets of Manhattan, and turns out to be the former hostage Omer Shem Tov.
From 505 days in Hamas captivity to proudly putting on tefillin in the streets of NYC during a time of rising antisemitism, this was a beautiful sight.
Am Yisrael Chai.
Happy birthday @realDonaldTrump !
Am Yisrael, the people of Israel, stand together today to wish President Donald Trump a historic 80th birthday.
Your leadership has carved an unforgettable chapter in the history of our nation.
You stood unbreakable by our side in our darkest hours, championed the return of our hostages back home, recognized our sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and courageously made Jerusalem, our eternal capital, the honored home of the American Embassy.
Mazal Tov!
זו ישראל היפה.
אתמול, בתוך המראות הקשים אחרי שהפורעים פגעו בבית משפחת סולברג באלון שבות, ראיתי גם מראה אחד מרגש.
שני ראשי ישיבת הר עציון, הרב יעקב מדן (יהודי בן 75!) והרב משה ליכטנשטיין, כורעים על הידיים והרגליים ומנקים שברי זכוכית מהחצר המנופצת.
זו הציונות הדתית שגדלתי עליה.
תורה וענווה. אחריות ודרך ארץ. יהדות של דוגמא אישית ושל דרכי נעם.
בקרוב יגיע התיקון🇮🇱