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November 12, 1999 - Image 32

Resource type:
Text
Publication:
The Detroit Jewish News, 1999-11-12

Disclaimer: Computer generated plain text may have errors. Read more about this.

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from page 26

Daughter "Pippa" works for a Los
Angeles art gallery.
"I've got five kids in five cities,"
says Charles. "I don't give a damn
what they do, but I tell them,
`Whatever you do, try and be, maybe
not the b e st, but very, very good.'
You cannot be happy unless you're
productive. Every person, whether its
a caliph or a working guy at work,
should find dignity in life. You want
to come home at night feeling that
you've earned that day's pay, that you
accomplished something that makes
you feel good."

Different Challenges

By the time Edgar turned Seagrams
over to his son, Edgar Bronfman Jr.,
the business had grown, says Charles,
into an empire that "would have bog-
gled our father's mind."
Today, The Seagram Company Ltd.
is a giant in the music (its Universal
Music Group is the largest in the
world), movies and recreation
(Universal Studios Group) industries.
Its spirits and wine division operates
in almost 200 countries.

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"Don't expect
what you got
from my father."

began collecting 50-cent donations for
the Canadian Jewish Appeal. He did
it, he says, because he was supposed
to. When Sam Bronfman died in
1971, leaders of the Canadian Jewish
community urged Charles to step up.
He balked, stayed away for a year. "I
will not walk in a dead man's shoes,
he told them. "Don't expect what you
got from my father."
Ironically, Charles, like Edgar, has
given more. Charles' commitment to
Judaism, and Israel in particular, is
more complex. Quieter, certainly.
Deeper, perhaps, if deeper means
committing one's life, soul, spirit and
much of one's fortune in the pursuit
of a vision: the "need not to live in
isolation... to embrace this thing called
community," as Bronfman puts it.
For the first time in a hell of a
long time, he says, "Jews can decide
who they want to be. Nobody is going
to tell us. It's up to us to decide."
The challenge, Bronfman says, is
that "all of a sudden we're asking our-
selves 'Do we want to be Jewish?' That
was never a question. We don't know
how to handle freedom very well. If
we're as good as we say we are in busi-
ness and arts and sciences, let's prove
it to ourselves. Let's take one challenge
we've screwed up in the past, even
though that past was a long, long time
ago, and go forward!"
He pauses, brown eyes shining, then
adds, "By God, as long as I'm around,
this is going to be my driving force!"

"

The Measure Ofiewishness

Charles' challenges were different,
but no less daunting. "I was the one
who was going to build the name of
the family," he says.
After Trinity, Charles enrolled at
McGill University but quickly
dropped out. Like a million other men
and women of his generation, he
began to wrestle with the eternal
"Who am I?" questions. Unlimited
possibilities did not make success or
happiness any easier to define.
One answer kept recurring: "I'm a
member of the Jewish people." The
definition, says Charles, has "stayed
with me for the rest of my life."
In 1951, he went to work for The
Seagram Company, moving as the
scions often do, up the ladder. He was
named a vice president in 1958, chair-
man of the executive committee in
1975, co-chairman in 1986. But he
will tell you that the day-to-day busi-
ness operations of a multinational cor-
poration are not his first love.
As a teenager, Charles Bronfman

The nuts-and-bolts man of UJC is its
newly named president, Stephen
Solender, longtime chief executive of
New York's local UJA-Federation.
It is left to Charles to impart the
passion, the vision. It's part of his
makeup — the serious guy with the
dry humor and the outsized sense of
the possible. Anticipating the GA, he
says, "What people don't get is that we
haven't simply merged organizations,
we have done something that is revo-
lutionary — young, old, veterans in
the game, newcomers are going to
come up with new kinds of program-
ming. We're going to analyze the best
practices, build a young leadership
group, develop specific programs, not
only here, but overseas, that will really
turn people on and juice them up!"
Ultimately his lesson is that as Jews,
we must reimagine who we are. And in
that act, reinvent ourselves.
"The whole name of the game," he
says, "is 'Who I am... Why am I...?
What am I?' By God, that's exciting!" L

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