Gal Beckerman June 12, 2011

The Israeli paper Haaretz, reported yesterday that Leonid Nevzlin, whom I described last year as the Russian oligarch “who got away,” just purchased 20% of the company’s shares. Its value: 700 million shekels. This leaves the legendary Schocken family, owners of the paper since 1937, with a 60% stake (David Remnick recently had an illuminating profile of Amos Schocken), and the publishing company DuMont Schauberg of Cologne, Germany, with the last 20%.

It’s still too early to say what this means for the paper, but Nevzlin is a fascinating character who only barely escaped the fate of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, his onetime business partner, when he arrived in Israel in 2003. He has since remade himself into a Jewish philanthropist, bolstering projects that promote ” Jewish peoplehood,” an amorphous but currently trendy notion. His biggest project has been resuscitating Israel’s Diaspora Museum.

My immediate thought was that this offers proof that a left-wing exists among the Russian Jews of Israel. The popularity of Avigdor Lieberman and his party has allowed people to see this population as monolithically hard-right. For the influence-seeking Nevzlin to invest so much to (let’s be honest here) prop up what Israelis see as a leftist brand means that the paper and its editorial line must have sympathizers among the Russians. It’s also hard to imagine Schocken, not an easy man (see again Remnick’s portrait), joining with Nevzlin unless he felt some kind of political kinship with him.

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For more on Nevzlin’s colorful background, here’s my profile of him from last fall.

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