>>6787407 lb
DF's husband is in Israel this week.
http://archive.is/O6AJE
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-dianne-feinstein-s-billionaire-husband-and-his-love-affair-with-israel-1.7391006
Dianne Feinstein’s Billionaire Husband and His Love Affair With Israel
In a straight-talking conversation with Haaretz, Richard Blum refers to BDS as ‘bullshit’ and calls the Israeli prime minister a ‘jerk’
Judy Maltz
Jun 18, 2019 5:32 PM
Richard C. Blum, the super-wealthy American investment banker and international do-gooder, gushes when you get him on the subject of Israel.
“I love the country,” he says. “How can you not?”
It is no accident that Israel was the first place he chose outside of the United States to host one of his centers for fighting global poverty, which was the reason for his visit to the Holy Land this week.
His fixation on all the good Israel has to offer the world might surprise those who know his wife: For almost 40 years Blum has been married to California Democrat Dianne Feinstein, currently the longest-serving woman in the U.S. Senate and an outspoken critic of this Israeli government. It is his second marriage and her third.
Just a few months ago, Feinstein and Bernie Sanders came out strongly against legislation that would penalize boycotts against Israel. “While we do not support the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, we remain resolved to our constitutional oath to defend the right of every American to express their views peacefully without fear of actual punishment by the government,” they wrote in a letter to Senate leaders.
Asked for his own views on BDS, her husband gets right to the point. “It’s bullshit,” he says. “I’m in favor of helping good people wherever they are who are trying to do good in the world. So I don’t care about all that stuff. I really don’t.”
Blum, 83, was breaking for lunch just a few hours after landing in Israel on his private plane, gearing up for a jam-packed week of meetings and site visits. The Blum Lab for Developing Economies — a partnership with the Milken Innovation Center at the Jerusalem Institute for Policy Research — was officially launched two years ago. Blum is in town to meet with the first cohort of seven international fellows at the center, almost all of them from Africa. The fellows spend 10 months in Israel working on projects designed to help resolve problems in their homelands, utilizing technologies developed in Israel.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (Democrat of California) at a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting on Capitol Hill in Washington, June 11, 2019.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (Democrat of California) at a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting on Capitol Hill in Washington, June 11, 2019.Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP
“I’m delighted to be part of this,” says Blum, revealing that he has pledged about $2 million to the Jerusalem-based center.
The first such center was established about 10 years ago at the University of California Berkeley. The aim was to encourage students and faculty to brainstorm ways for solving global poverty and other problems endemic to the developing world. Since then, centers have sprouted up at virtually every campus in the University of California system, which is the largest in the United States.
The ‘Jewish daughter’
Blum, whose net worth is estimated at $1 billion, developed a passion for the subject when he first encountered poverty as a young man trekking through Nepal (he even attempted to climb Mount Everest with Sir Edmund Hillary in 1981).
Much of his philanthropic work focuses on Asia and is channeled through an organization he founded, the American Himalayan Foundation. He counts among his close friends the Dalai Lama — whom he brought to Israel in the 1990s — and former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who wrote the forward to his 2016 autobiography, “An Accident of Geography: Compassion, Innovation, and the Fight Against Poverty.”
Although he has visited Israeli about “six or seven times,” Blum reveals that it is his daughter who deserves credit for his newfound fascination with the country. “She’s the reason I’m here,” he says, pointing to Annette Blum, his eldest of three daughters who is joining him for lunch at a popular beachside eatery in Tel Aviv. Annette, whose mother was his first wife, is the only one of his children involved in his philanthropic activities.
“She said to me, ‘Why don’t we open one of the centers in Israel?’ and I said to her, ‘Why not?’” he recounts.
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