Alexander Soros

Origins and early life

Alexander Soros was born in New York City on 27 October 1985, the elder son of the financier and philanthropist George Soros and of Susan Weber, and grew up in Katonah, north of the city. His father, born in Hungary in 1930, had been hidden as a child during the Holocaust, and in 1998 Alex became the first of George Soros's children to have a bar mitzvah. He graduated from New York University in 2009 and in 2018 earned a doctorate in history at the University of California, Berkeley, with a dissertation on Heine, Nietzsche and the politics of literature called Jewish Dionysus.

Work and career

In 2012 he set up the Alexander Soros Foundation, whose first gift, 250,000 dollars, went to the Jewish organisation Bend the Arc, and whose award for environmental and human rights activism went first, that same year, to the Liberian campaigner Silas Siakor. He also sits on the board of the Center for Jewish History in New York, and in 2017 he convened a meeting at Chatham House in London on rising antisemitism. In 2014 he contributed an essay to God, Faith and Identity from the Ashes, a collection of reflections by the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors.

He worked part-time at his father's Open Society Foundations from 2004 and full-time from 2015, and the board quietly elected him its chairman in December 2022, a handover that became public in June 2023. The foundations give about 1.5 billion dollars a year to human rights and democracy groups, and in May 2026 they committed 30 million dollars over three years to groups fighting antisemitism and anti-Muslim hatred. His Jewish identity is a lived one: he has no synagogue but keeps Passover and the High Holidays with his mother, and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency described him in 2023 as more vocal about his Judaism than his father. That year the Jerusalem Post placed him, with his father, among its fifty most influential Jews.