Leonard Polonsky, Philanthropist Who Supported the Arts, Dies at 97
The cause was diastolic heart failure, his wife, Georgette Bennett, said.
Mr. Polonsky made his fortune in the financial services sector, when his company, Hansard Global, a successor to one he founded in 1970, went public on the London Stock Exchange in 2006, earning him a profit of 99 million pounds. But his philanthropy began earlier, in 1985, when he started the Polonsky Foundation, in an effort to support the arts.
Among its many beneficiaries was the Theatre for a New Audience in Brooklyn, where Mr. Polonsky was born. The theater, which specializes in preserving, performing and studying the works of Shakespeare, received a gift of $10 million in 2013, and its venue was renamed the Polonsky Shakespeare Center.
In 2021, Mr. Polonsky made a $12 million donation to establish a new permanent exhibition at the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue. Library employees spent three years sifting through 56 million artifacts in storage to identify 250 or so of the most awe-inspiring.
The resulting display, known as 'The Polonsky Exhibition of the New York Public Library's Treasures,' resembles a gilded curio shop of priceless items — among them, George Washington's copy of the Bill of Rights (with 12 amendments instead of 10); Thomas Jefferson's annotated version of the Declaration of Independence; a Gutenberg Bible; an Andy Warhol painting of a Studio 54 ticket; and stuffed animals that inspired A.A. Milne's 'Winnie-the-Pooh.'
The idea for the exhibition — which, as of June 2024, had attracted some two million visitors — emerged from a 2016 meeting Mr. Polonsky had with Anthony W. Marx, the president and chief executive of the New York Public Library.
Mr. Marx happened to show Mr. Polonsky a letter Christopher Columbus wrote in 1493, informing the Spanish royal court of land he had discovered. 'The whole colonial enterprise was laid out in that letter,' Ms. Bennett, his wife, said in an interview. 'Leonard said, 'This is the New York Public Library — why am I the only one who's seeing this?''
Mr. Polonsky's foundation also made it possible, in 2011, for the Cambridge University Library to digitize Isaac Newton's early papers and an annotated first edition of his 'Principia.' Beginning in 2012, the foundation funded a collaboration between Oxford's Bodleian Libraries and the Vatican Library, resulting in the digitization of 1.5 million pages from early printed books written in Greek, Latin and Hebrew. And in 2014, it helped establish the Polonsky Academy for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences, at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute.
In a 2013 ceremony, Queen Elizabeth II named Mr. Polonsky a Commander of the British Empire for charitable services.
'Support for the arts seems so natural to me that it would be strange if I didn't do it,' he said in 'The Art of Being Leonard,' a 2010 documentary commissioned by his family.
Leonard Selwyn Polonsky was born on April 13, 1927, in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, the eldest of three sons of Murray Polonsky, who owned a tobacco store, and Sadie (Futoran) Polonsky, who oversaw the home.
He attended Townsend Harris High School, in Queens, where students were required to take a version of the Ephebic Oath, which concludes, 'I shall not leave my city any less but rather greater than I found it.'
After high school, he attended New York University, graduating when he was 18, in 1944. Following a year and a half of Army service, he traveled to Europe in 1947, basking in what he called the 'curious intimacy' of postwar London and cultivating an interest in art in Paris.
The next year, he married Beata Herzfeld, who died in 1989. In addition to Ms. Bennett, whom he married in 2001, he is survived by three children from his first marriage, Alan, Marc and Nicole Polonsky; a stepson, Joshua-Marc Tanenbaum; six grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. Toby, a son from his first marriage, died in 1986.
During his time in Europe, Mr. Polonsky studied at Oxford, where he earned a bachelor's degree in literature, and the Sorbonne, where he received a doctorate in literature. He began his financial career in 1955, selling mutual funds in Rome.
He established his foundation in Britain, with the intent of democratizing knowledge and preserving international cultural heritage. Soon after, around 1986, he renounced his U.S. citizenship, in part for tax reasons, and settled in London, where he kept a home.
Well into his 70s, Mr. Polonsky retained his enthusiasm for learning. In 2002, he enrolled in a Ph.D. program in literature at the City University of New York, cramming for tests and writing term papers as he had done in his youth.
'He still needed to get straight A's,' Ms. Bennett said. 'And he did.'
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'In a way, we achieved what we set out to do, which is to prove that there was an appetite and interest for people to invest in the Global South,' says Al Suwaidi. The UAE plans to earn a healthy return on its $30 billion investment, but the opportunity is really much bigger. Alterra is the center of an emerging business cluster, much like venture capital in Silicon Valley or the entertainment industry in Hollywood. By tapping into the business of financing climate infrastructure in the Global South early, the country is placing a down payment for capturing a much bigger opportunity. Emerging markets represent the largest source of emissions reduction or prevention. And that means, sooner or later, significant capital must flow to make it happen. 'The ecosystem is building here,' Al Suwaidi told me from his office, explaining that the Alterra fund has helped attract smaller climate-focused fund managers. Today, ADGM, short for Abu Dhabi Global Market, the city's financial free zone where regulation is based on English common law, counts more than 180 local funds and other institutions that say they are focused on sustainability. Indeed, ADGM, Abu Dhabi's Wall Street, has created an entire system to put wind in the sails of these efforts. The organization has crafted a comprehensive sustainable-finance regulatory framework that includes environmental standards for funds, portfolios, bonds, stocks, and other financial instruments linked to the environment. ESG disclosure standards are clear and simple. 'We've been busy,' says Lawrence Paramasivam, who oversees the sustainability work at the Financial Services Regulatory Authority at ADGM. Paramasivam describes the regulatory approach as 'part of a broader diversification strategy' for ADGM. The global reach and sway of the government in the UAE has helped open doors. 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To fully understand Singapore's approach would require unpacking a dizzying array of programs, international partnerships, and regulatory structures. Through the Singapore-Asia Taxonomy for Sustainable Finance, the country created a framework to rate investments on their sustainability characteristics. Critically, the program was developed with all of Asia in mind, helping advance the country's position at the middle of the region's flow of sustainable finance. And the government ponied up $500 million as the public-sector contribution to a finance initiative that combines public and private money to invest in climate projects in the region. That effort has attracted other funds, including from the private sector, says Menon. A key asset for Singapore is Temasek, the country's $300 billion state-owned investment fund. The fund's charter includes a mandate to protect the planet, but just as important is the fund's goal of providing long-term returns for generations to come. 'If I'm going to hold assets for the long term, then I've got to think about what it means to be in a climate-challenged position,' said Dilhan Pillay-Sandrasegara, the CEO of Temasek, at a World Economic Forum event in January. 'And so that's what motivates us to invest in things like sustainability-focused sectors or sustainable solutions.' One essential area of interest for Temasek has been carbon-credit companies. Today, carbon credits remain complicated and controversial. And yet most experts deep in the weeds of climate policy and finance see their growth as an inevitability because they provide one of the most effective ways to finance emissions reduction and can easily channel money from the Global North to the Global South. Temasek's investments in carbon-credit companies, combined with government policy to facilitate it, have proved critical in turning Singapore into a carbon-credit hub—certainly the most important in the region and perhaps the world. Today, the country is home to more than 100 carbon-trading firms and a robust regulatory framework for how companies can use credits. In the spring of 2023, as the UAE was in the midst of developing Alterra and Singapore was crafting its taxonomy for Asia, the U.S. was immersed in a fight over whether fund managers can legally take climate change into account in their decisionmaking. Then and now, the mainstream U.S. conversation at the intersection of climate and finance is vastly different from the same conversations happening around the world. As other countries innovate, the U.S. government is at best caught in a defensive posture and at worst pulling back. During the Biden years, the Federal Reserve dipped its toes into the Network for Greening the Financial System before promptly pulling out after Donald Trump's election, and the U.S. federal government has abandoned any efforts to craft financial-disclosure rules around climate. To be clear, big U.S. financial firms with operations outside the U.S. will need to comply with this growing segment of climate regulation; the rules will just be drafted somewhere else. It may not worry Wall Street just yet. While cities like London and Singapore have developed global finance hubs, today there's no question that the U.S. is the epicenter. The country has the deepest capital markets and the world's reserve currency. It houses the biggest and most influential global financial firms. And, yet, as sustainable finance grows, its influence has the potential to eat away at the U.S. position. That road will be long and windy as every place faces its own unique challenges. In the U.K., politicians need to explain to voters why the government is spending so much time on sustainable finance in the midst of other challenges. Indeed, some efforts to bolster sustainable finance have stalled or been dropped entirely, presumably with those political questions in mind. In Abu Dhabi, leaders must confront the skepticism in many corners about the ability of a big oil-producing country to deliver on climate. And Singapore faces the consistent challenge that comes from existing in the shadow of China—which also has designs on developing a sustainable-finance sector. Those questions will eventually be resolved, and a new paradigm will emerge. The winners won't just capture economic opportunity; they will help determine whether the world has the financial infrastructure to avoid the worst effects of climate change. This story is supported by a partnership with Outrider Foundation and Journalism Funding Partners. TIME is solely responsible for the content .
