Mortimer Zuckerman

Origins and early life

Mortimer Benjamin Zuckerman was born in Montreal on 4 June 1937 to Abraham and Esther Zuckerman, who ran a tobacco and candy business, and he grew up in Outremont in an Orthodox Jewish family; his grandfather was an Orthodox rabbi.

Work and career

He entered McGill University at sixteen, took a first-class degree there in 1957 and a law degree in 1961, then earned an MBA with distinction at the Wharton School in 1961 and a master of laws at Harvard in 1962. He taught city and regional planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and at Yale, and spent seven years at the Boston real estate firm Cabot, Cabot & Forbes, rising to chief financial officer. In 1970, at thirty-two, he struck out on his own and co-founded Boston Properties with Edward Linde; the firm completed 599 Lexington Avenue, its first New York tower, in 1986, and later built Times Square Tower, finished in 2002.

Boston Properties went public in June 1997 and, under the name BXP, owns office buildings in Boston, New York, San Francisco, Washington and other American cities. He also became a publisher: he owned The Atlantic from 1980 to 1999, bought US News & World Report in 1984 and became its editor-in-chief, and owned the New York Daily News from 1993 to 2017. He chaired the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations from June 2001 to May 2003, and he served as president of the America-Israel Friendship League and as chairman of the Soviet Jewish Zionist Forum.

In 2006 he pledged $100 million to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center for a new research centre named after him, and in 2012 he gave $200 million to endow Columbia University's Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute. In 2016 he gave $100 million to create the Zuckerman STEM Leadership Program, which brings young scientists to Israeli universities and ties them to their American counterparts.