In the two-and-a-half years since J Street launched, under the banner of “pro-Israel, pro-peace,” two competing narratives have emerged about the group. One is that by channeling the energy of the anti-war, anti-Bush Jewish left into the cause of Middle East peace, using grassroots organizing tactics borrowed from the playbook developed by MoveOn.org and put to good use by the Obama campaign, Ben-Ami and company have given voice to the inchoate frustration of many American Jews with the impasse between the Israelis and the Palestinians and their frustration with hawkish pro-Israel organizations, namely AIPAC, which was so famously expressed earlier this year in an essay by Peter Beinart of the New America Foundation. The opposing view is that J Street is a front for Democratic political operatives aligned with Obama, and potentially to his left on foreign policy, who hope to exploit the naive sympathies of liberal Jews for the political purpose of undermining the existing Washington consensus on Israel, thereby weakening AIPAC and other Jewish groups whose power depends in part on the perception that they speak on behalf of American Jewry.

Both versions are, to a greater or lesser degree, true. Last month, using an unredacted tax return that appeared on a public website, the Washington Times reported that J Street receives funding from the billionaire investor and social activist George Soros, a longtime critic of Israel, Zionism, and the American Jewish establishment. Though insiders had already assumed as much, the controversial revelation showed that Soros and his family gave J Street $245,000 in fiscal year 2008 as the first installment of a three-year, $750,000 commitment. Critics pounced on Ben-Ami, accusing him of repeatedly lying in interviews about Soros’ involvement, and intentionally obfuscating on the group’s website, which in a section titled “Myths and Facts about J Street” denies claims that Soros was a founder or “primary funder” of the group. “J Street’s Executive Director has stated many times that he would in fact be very pleased to have funding from Mr. Soros and the offer remains open to him to be a funder should he wish to support the effort,” the website said. In an update posted after the scandal erupted, the organization reiterated that Soros did not found J Street—though his senior Washington adviser, Morton Halperin, a senior State Department official in the Clinton Administration and a longtime critic of Israeli policy, was deeply involved in J Street’s inception and continues to serve as one of three members of the lobby’s executive committee.

Yet it remains the case that Ben-Ami has managed, in a remarkably short time, to build something unprecedented in the decades-long history of leftwing American Jewish activism: an organization with the capacity to raise millions of dollars to win political support for ideas about Israel and the peace process that are frequently at odds with the positions articulated by organs of the Jewish establishment. Whatever one thinks of J Street’s policies—which, among other things, include support for East Jerusalem becoming the capital of a future Palestinian state and firm opposition to new construction in the settlements until negotiations are complete—the group has succeeded in provoking a tremendous amount of debate about the political and emotional relationships of American Jews to Israel. “They have built up this thing, which is just this side of miraculous,” said Mark Pelavin, associate director of the Reform movement’s Religious Action Center.

Ben-Ami and the other progenitors of J Street stepped into the political vacuum left by the perennial inability of established leftwing groups—Americans for Peace Now, the Israel Policy Forum, Brit Tzedek v’Shalom, Ameinu, and a long list of long-defunct predecessors—to transcend policy disagreements, clashing egos, tiny budgets, and, according to many veteran activists, a general unwillingness to pick public fights with other Jewish groups. “I tried over the years to get the left to coalesce, and you’d be better off herding cats,” said Charney Bromberg, the former director of Meretz USA, the American branch of the leftwing movement also represented by an Israeli political party of the same name. “We were being totally outgunned by the right, and we consoled ourselves with the idea that we were in the right.” Now, Bromberg went on, “J Street has totally eclipsed the other organizations combined.”

The result is that Ben-Ami is now the de facto leader of the American Jewish left, and his counterparts at other organizations working on peace-related issues feel compelled to support him. “J Street has to succeed, and it has to grow,” said one member of the “peace camp” in Washington. “Now that it exists, we can’t afford to let it fail, because that would be seen as the failure of the left.”

***

J Street’s supporters are quick to point out that despite its meteoric rise, which was helped along by a generous 2009 profile in the New York Times Magazine, its budget is still just a fraction of the $60 million AIPAC attracted in the fiscal year 2008, the most recent for which documents are available—about $5 million this year across all operations, according to Ben-Ami, including a $500,000 grant from Jeff Skoll, a former eBay executive, who has partnered with Soros on recent initiatives in the Middle East. It’s harder for J Street to claim the role of scrappy David to AIPAC’s financial Goliath in light of Soros’ financial commitment, anchored by Halperin’s active role in the group. “He’s not in the office every day, poring over stuff,” Ben-Ami told me last week, in the last of a series of conversations this summer and fall, of his relationship with Halperin. “Basically we email, definitely every day.”

Indeed, according to Ben-Ami, the germ of the J Street idea sprouted in discussions with Halperin during the 2004 presidential election, when both men worked on Howard Dean’s campaign. “From day one I’d been talking to him,” Ben-Ami said. “He was almost the first person I talked to about this.” The vision that emerged from those conversations, and in other conversations with the marketing strategist David Fenton, the former Rolling Stone PR man and social activist for whose firm Ben-Ami worked after the campaign, bore obvious hallmarks of lessons learned from Dean’s run. The most important was the decision to abandon the humble fundraising attitudes of the left. “It’s a self-defeating world outlook that says, ‘We’re some poor minority backwater that will never raise money,’ ” Ben-Ami told me earlier this year. “We said, $10, $20, $30 million. You’ve got to have ambition.”

Ben-Ami set out asking for $1 million from initial donors—at around the same time that Benjamin Netanyahu was trolling the ranks of wealthy American Jews for contributions to his 2007 election campaign for the Likud leadership. Netanyahu’s target list, published last week by the Israeli paper Yedioth Ahronoth, included pillars of established Jewish groups like AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents: Sheldon Adelson, Haim Saban, Ronald Lauder, Ira Rennert, James Tisch, Leslie Wexner, and Mortimer Zuckerman. The hidden contributors revealed on J Street’s tax return show that Ben-Ami tapped instead into a parallel establishment with a great deal of influence both in Democratic politics and Jewish life. J Street received $25,000 from S. Daniel Abraham, the billionaire founder of Slim-Fast who is a longtime Clinton supporter and advocate for Middle East peace; $75,000 from Alan Sagner, a real-estate developer and former head of New York’s Port Authority whose daughter, Deborah, herself a progressive political activist, is on J Street’s board; and $25,000 from Robert Arnow, a major contributor to New York’s Federation who also helped found the Jewish Week. “I’ve been a radical all my life, somewhat, and I was imbued with the idea of another organization challenging the policies,” Arnow, now 86, explained in a phone interview. “I still have faith—I’ll give them a year or two and then we’ll see.”

J Street’s tax filing also included a $25,000 donation from Martin Bunzl, a Rutgers philosophy professor with long involvement in the political side of the peace movement, and $10,000 from Alan Solomont, a former Democratic National Committee finance chair who was a board member of the Israel Policy Forum during the Clinton years and is now the U.S. ambassador to Spain. There was also a $5,000 contribution from Hollywood heavyweights Phil Rosenthal, the producer of Everybody Loves Raymond, and his wife, Monica. And there was Elaine Attias, a feisty 86-year-old Democratic activist from Beverly Hills whose parents, Edward and Anna Mitchell, were such active and early donors to Israel that they became, according to the Los Angeles Times, the first Americans to have a square named in their honor in Jerusalem. “I’ve been involved with the Israeli situation for a long time,” Attias explained to me. “J Street was an opportunity to voice our concerns and express our support for the kind of Israel we want it to be.”

Continue reading: Breira, Clinton, and the J in J Street. Or view as a single page.

• Israeli-American billionaire Haim Saban is trying to get Oliver Stone’s forthcoming ten-part Howard Zinn adaptation off the air. [Jewish Journal]

• Conservative by any other name? Arnold Eisen, the Jewish Theological Seminary’s chancellor, said the movement was “open” to changing its name, most likely to Masorti, or “traditional,” which is what it’s called in Israel. [Forward/JTA]

• Jason Diamond pens a moving (seriously!) tribute to his number-one childhood shiksa crush, who just so happens to be getting married this weekend. [Jewcy]

• Some detective work appears to show that, specifically, it is Amar’e Stoudemire’s maternal grandmother who is the Jewish one. Which, of course, would make him the Jewish one as well. [Just ASC]

• Speaking of which: He clarifies, “I think I might have some Hebrew Roots.” Oh, Amar’e, don’t let us down now. [@Amareisreal]

But now that The Washington Post Company has put the venerable magazine on the auction block, it is closer to Saban’s grasp. And if Saban owned one of America’s two main newsweeklies, that would be significant political news.

For the great reveal of Bruck’s piece is that despite all the canny business deals that have turned Saban into a self-made multi-billionaire (credit, among other things, the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers), “He is most proud of his role as political power broker.” And his political power-brokering has a focus: “I’m a one-issue guy,” he says, “and my issue is Israel.”

Or, as an Israeli television interviewer once told him, “You really are our rich uncle in America, and we can rely on you.”

Though a staunch Democrat (and massive Democratic contributor), he more specifically is a diehard backer (and close personal friend) of the Clintons. As a corollary, he has been unshy about expressing his displeasure with the Obama administration, particularly vis-à-vis its comparatively tough line on Israel. Even earlier this week, he said on Israeli television, “They are leftists, really left leftists, so far to the left there’s not much space left between them and the wall.”

You really should read the whole New Yorker profile. But, after the jump, some choice bits that help capture this important (and, maybe, soon-to-be even more important) man’s relationships with his two countries:

On the origins of his love for Israel:

Saban’s father had been a sales clerk in a small toy shop in Alexandria [Egypt]. One day, Saban says, he was doing his homework by an open window of the family’s apartment. An Egyptian soldier across the way suddenly pointed his gun at him, and called out, “You, Jew! You, Jew! Bam bam!” In 1956, after the Suez Crisis, the Egyptian President, Gamal Abdel Nasser, effectively ordered Jews to leave the country.

On his role in the 2000 Camp David talks:

As Saban has said, “I’m a one-issue guy, and my issue is Israel.” When Bill Clinton was President and Ehud Barak was Israel’s Prime Minister, Saban, who was close to both men, says that occasionally he provided a back channel for communications. In July of 2000, shortly before the start of the Camp David negotiations, Israel’s planned two-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar sale of an airborne radar system to China—furiously opposed by many at the Pentagon and in Congress—threatened to derail congressional support for a peace deal. Saban said, “I just called Ehud and told him, ‘In the middle of this peace thing, it’s impossible for Israel to do things that are perceived in the U.S. as against the interests of the U.S. I understand the financial aspect, I understand that it may not be really a security concern for the U.S.—it doesn’t matter. There’s a much bigger picture here, and you really should seriously consider.’ ” Barak suspended the sale. “How much impact my call had, I have no idea,” Saban added. During Camp David, he continued, “I was involved, but only on the periphery. If Barak could not say some things to Clinton to his face, he would ask me to convey a message, and vice versa.” At one point during the negotiations, Clinton, accompanied by his national-security adviser, Sandy Berger, had to go to Japan. “When they came back, I spoke to Sandy Berger, and gave him my two cents about dealing with issues. ‘Is that really super-important?’ ‘Well, why can’t Arafat give up on that?’ ” He laughed. “The usual!”

On Clinton and Obama:

“Obama was asked the same question Hillary was asked—‘If Iran nukes Israel, what would be your reaction?’ Hillary said, ‘We will obliterate them.’ We . . . will . . . obliterate . . . them. Four words, it’s simple to understand. Obama said only three words. He would ‘take appropriate action.’ I don’t know what that means. A rogue state that is supporting killing our men and women in Iraq; that is a supporter of Hezbollah, which killed more Americans than any other terrorist organization; that is a supporter of Hamas, which shot twelve thousand rockets at Israel—that rogue state nukes a member of the United Nations, and we’re going to ‘take appropriate action’!”

… Saban called Hillary’s defeat “my biggest loss—and not only mine. I’ll leave it at that.”

… Saban said that the Administration “may want to consider the fact that their relationship with their Israeli wife is more valuable than their newfound relationship with their Arab mistresses.

Saban Eying Newsweek [Los Angeles Business Journal]
The Influencer [The New Yorker]
Saban Blasts Obama Admin. ‘Leftists’ [Ben Smith]
Related: Morphed [Tablet Magazine]

It’s an interesting idea—a Jewish half-ownership in the Arabic news network. Saban’s spokeswoman declined to comment one way or the other. But we’re a bit skeptical: If a huge media deal were in the offing, what are the odds that the story would be broken not by any of the media reporters who cover Saban and the TV business—either here and in the Emirates—but instead by an Egyptian site we’ve never heard of? (And one which, if our Google Translator steers us right, only launched last year, and looks more the Huffington Post than Wall Street Journal.) Plus, if Al Jazeera is losing money, as the story claims, is it really likely that the Qatari emir would turn to an Israeli billionaire for help? And why would Saban—the world’s 261st-richest person, according to Forbes, but also, as the single largest donor to the Democratic Party, an extremely politically astute individual—want to invite the kinds of headaches that would be involved in taking on this particularly thorny, supposedly cash-strapped overseas enterprise? After all, if he wants another television channel he could just, like, buy out Al Gore over at Current or something.

Report: Saban wants to buy al-Jazeera [Ynet]
Related: Morphed [Tablet]

If books could make peace, everyone in the Middle East would have been singing “Kumbaya” around a campfire for years now. Still, one can hope that the vast and ever expanding range of publications on the subject of Israelis and Palestinians might convince a few of the militaristically minded participants in the conflict to put down their rifles and pick up a pair of reading glasses. Avi Shlaim’s Israel and Palestine: Reflections, Revisions, Refutations (Verso, September), for example, may inflame more than it conciliates—the Oxford don has called Zionism “the real enemy of the Jews,” and spoken up in support of sloppy anti-Zionist polemicist Norman G. Finkelstein—but at least Shlaim perpetrates only figural violence.

• • •

Not so the acts considered by Ami Pedahzur and Arie Perliger in Jewish Terrorism in Israel (Columbia, October), which range from assassinations of Roman leaders in the first century C.E. to protests against the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005. Specialists in the study of security trained at the University of Haifa, Pedahzur and Perliger cast a wide net, and conducted many interviews, in a bid to understand why some Jews have chosen violence as the means to achieve their goals. The authors suggest that religion in and of itself does not produce terrorism, but that “it takes a major threat to the community of believers or to its most sacred values to radicalize its members.”

The Israeli Black Panthers—named in homage to the African-American group after a visit to Israel by activist Angela Davis—never quite radicalized to the extent their American namesakes did. Protesting for the civil rights of Mizrahis, Jewish immigrants from Arab lands, these Panterim Skhorim burned Golda Meir in effigy in the early 1970s and stole rich people’s milk, but they quickly turned to electoral rather than brutal methods. Sami Shalom Chetrit, a Morocco-born Israeli poet and scholar, praises the Panthers and other groups with similar goals in a survey of Mizrahi activism, titled Intra-Jewish Conflict in Israel: White Jews, Black Jews (Routledge, October).

What can Israel—or any country—do about its legacy of internal conflict? Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi takes up this question in Yitzhak Rabin’s Assassination and the Dilemmas of Commemoration (SUNY, August). Pedhazur and Perliger discuss Yigal Amir’s assassination of Rabin in 1995, of course, but Vinitzky-Seroussi—a sociologist at the Hebrew University whose last book interpreted the bizarre ritual of the American high-school class reunion—concerns herself not with the murder itself but with Israeli society’s responses, examining all the memorials and monuments, speeches and songs that mourned, or capitalized on, Rabin’s death.

• • •

One thing Israelis have mostly managed to agree on, lately, is the proper way to pronounce Hebrew. The language revivalists who transformed Hebrew into a modern spoken language called their new accent Sephardic (though it was only partly based on the speech of Sephardic Jews)—but at first, in the late 19th and early 20th century, most poets wouldn’t write stanzas to fit the new pronunciation. Miryam Segal’s A New Sound in Hebrew Poetry: Poetics, Politics, Accent (Indiana, September) describes how this gradually changed, and how the new accent turn into the standard for everyone except for some Yiddishists, Hasids, and of course all those few well-intentioned Hebrew school alumni who speak Hebrew with New Jersey or Long Island accents.

If it weren’t for the accent developed by Israeli poets, the rhymes in Ami Rubinger’s Hatul gadol, hatul katan—a popular Israeli children’s book published in 2004—might not roll off the tongue quite so comfortably as they do for this kid . But now that Rubinger’s picturebook has been translated into English, by Ray Baitner, as Big Cat, Small Cat (Abbeville Kids, August), even those with no Hebrew accent at all can enjoy it. Note that while Rubinger’s illustrations may delight your 2- to 5-year-old, he is more than just a children’s author; his other titles including Sefer ha’ziyunim hagadol, or, as it’s called in English, The Big Fucking Book, which is exactly what it sounds like.

If you’d rather stick to something kid-friendly—or if all the conflict in the Middle East just makes you want to curl up and go to sleep for a while—When I First Held You: A Lullaby from Israel (Kar-Ben, September), by veteran Israeli children’s author Mirik Snir and her daughter, Eleyor, a designer of children’s clothes, will sweetly fit the bill.

• • •

Troubled as it is, Israel holds no patent on Middle Eastern tensions. It doesn’t even lead the field. A new publication of the Saban Center for Middle Eastern Policy—a part of the Brookings Institution bankrolled by, yes, Haim Saban, the Mighty Morphin Power Broker—suggest no fewer than nine possible approaches the United States might take in its relations with Iran. While laying out these possibilities, the book, Which Path to Persia? Options for a New American Strategy Toward Iran (Brookings Institution, September) proposes that all of them pose risks—and, oh, yeah, Israel’s fate hangs in the balance.

Then there’s Iraq. The pressing question is not exactly when the U.S. military should leave; it’s how that can possibly be accomplished without inciting more violence, fomenting more terrorism, and inflicting more suffering on Iraqi civilians and U.S. soldiers. In Getting Out: Historical Perspectives on Leaving Iraq (Penn, September), Michael Walzer, Nicolaus Mills, and a team of contributors propose that answers should be sought both in previous cases of military departure—including the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza—and in ethical considerations about the consequences of withdrawal.

• • •

For readers who prefer conflicts on a scale a little more intimate than the geopolitical, two new novels present tenuously Jewish women looking out for others’ children. In Julie Buxbaum’s After You (Dial, September), Ellie Lerner cares for her dead friend’s 8-year-old daughter, Sophie. Though Buxbaum comes from “a tribe of New York Jews,” and though she gives her heroine a first boyfriend named Stuart Tannenbaum, the closest Ellie herself comes to acknowledging Jewish ethnicity is admitting to Sophie, “Books are almost a religion for me.”

Meanwhile, Tassie Keltjin, the college student heroine of Lorrie Moore’s widely praised A Gate at the Stairs (Knopf, September), whose Jewish mother married a Lutheran, calls herself a “quasi Jew” and takes a job as a nanny. Even she can’t escape heated talk about the Promised Land, though. Eavesdropping on the “transracial, biracial, multiracial” “support group” for whose members she babysits, Tassie hears someone recall the famed vegetarian “I. B. Singer speak[ing] of the holocaust of chickens.” A series of punning riffs on animal rights and the Holocaust follow, leading to one of the group’s Jewish participants proclaiming, more than a little tongue-in-cheek, “That’s why we got Israel, baby. We’re not chicken anymore.”

Most Americans pay their income taxes as fair consideration for the privileges citizenship confers. Defendant Haim Saban is not one of them. Despite being one of the richest men in the world, Haim Saban, believing he is above the law, has spent decades trying to avoid paying taxes on the many billions of dollars in income he has received.

The moves on to:

Just as Saban hates paying taxes (while using his political donations to demand special treatment and personal favors), Saban likes to steal even more…. Defendants’ attorneys also bragged about special influence over and collusion with prosecuting attorneys for the Western District of Washington in facilitating the prosecutorial charging, arrest and bail decisions of the federal prosecutors concerning criminal charges brought against Krane, all in the hope of depriving Plaintiffs of the fee deservedly earned for Krane’s instrumental role in putting together the Plan.

This theft of another person’s labor conforms to a lifelong pattern of Saban’s. Plaintiffs are informed and believe and based thereon allege that Saban has made hundreds of millions of dollars stealing from recording artists, illicitly claiming authorship of songs to which he likely can’t even read the music, and built his multi-billion dollar fortune through forgery, perjury and fraud. Now, to protect himself and hide his secrets, including secrets that implicate major foreign policy in this country and prominent foreign public officials, Saban seeks to scapegoat Krane.

Through a spokesperson, Saban—who claimed Krane duped him, and wound up paying $250 million in back taxes after a 2006 Senate investigation—dismissed the claims as “frivolous,” and “a transparent attempt to distract from Mr. Saban’s right to recover the money stolen from him by Mr. Krane.” Probably so. But still fun!

Haim Saban is Sued Over Tax Shelter [NYT]
Indicted Lawyer Slaps Haim Saban With Sensational Civil Suit [American Lawyer]
Related:
Morphed: Cheryl Saban’s journey from beach bunny to philanthropist [Tablet]
Krane v. Saban [PDF]

Saban is nonetheless less well-known than her husband, who as the Democratic Party’s largest single donor has the ear of both Clintons, along with Israeli president Shimon Peres and, until his stroke, former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon. (He and his wife are also friendly with Rep. Jane Harman, who was captured on federal wiretaps, leaked in April, apparently offering to intervene in a federal investigation of AIPAC in return for lobbyists’ help getting Haim Saban to back her bid for chairmanship of the House intelligence committee. “I felt so bad for Jane,” Saban said. “Obviously if there was something there they would have gone for the jugular, but there wasn’t.”)

Haim Saban is usually portrayed as the macher in the family—“I have zero interest in being big. Biggest, I have an interest,” he told Portfolio last fall—but his wife says she was the first of the two to get into the world of big-time philanthropy, in the early 1990s. Now, at 58, she’s stepping into the limelight as an advocate for women, setting aside $10 million to establish a Women’s Self-Worth Foundation that will underwrite micro-financing programs and other initiatives targeted at women in the U.S. and in Israel. Saban, who recently earned her doctorate in psychology, has also written a companion book—her eighth—called What is Your Self-Worth? A Woman’s Guide to Validation, the proceeds of which will go to the foundation.

She was in New York last month for appearances on The View and The Early Show, where she talked about being raped as a teenager and struggling to support her children as a single mother after her first two marriages ended in divorce—details she has been loath to share until now. “I think that telling my personal story helps [women] relate to me, you know?” Saban, dressed in a chic leather jacket and jeans and wearing her trademark peace-sign necklace, told Tablet, in a wide-ranging interview about her personal story. (Her husband declined to be interviewed.)

Saban grew up in San Diego, where her father worked for the telephone company. The family didn’t have much extra money; Cheryl worked as a telephone solicitor and waitressed at a barbecue-pit restaurant, and spent summers as a lifeguard at a Navy training center.

The summer before she started college, at San Diego State, Saban was raped by someone she knew. Afterward, she said, she felt “muzzled”—afraid of criticism and judgment. (Two decades later, in 1997, she refashioned the episode into a thriller that made it onto the Los Angeles Times bestseller list.) Saban got back together with her first boyfriend, got married, and had two daughters. They moved to San Francisco and then to Los Angeles, where Saban began modeling; the marriage unraveled, but Saban soon met her second husband, a music promoter, and soon she had her own music career, recording under the name Flower. A UPI reporter writing about her first album in 1978 compared her to Raquel Welch; a year later, Playboy included her in a pictorial titled “Disco Queens.” But when that marriage fell apart, she found herself struggling to afford health care for her girls on the money she made as a secretary. “It was complicated,” she said. “I wanted to be on my own but it wasn’t that easy to do.”

In 1986, she answered a job ad Haim Saban placed in The Hollywood Reporter. Born in Egypt, and raised in Israel, he moved as a young man to France, where he made his first fortune selling recordings of television theme music; by the early 1980s, he was in Los Angeles, where he licensed music for children’s cartoons. When Cheryl, then 35, appeared in his office, he was in his early forties and still a bachelor; he drove a Rolls-Royce with the license plate RSKTKR1 and was, his wife said, “a magnet.” They began dating, but broke up after a few months, not because they didn’t get along—“I fell in love immediately,” Saban said—but instead because he wanted to have a family, and Cheryl, who had had a hysterectomy, could no longer have children. Haim, she said, wasted no time getting back out into the dating game—even though she was still his assistant. But soon the two were going out for lunch again, and for New Year’s, Haim invited her to Acapulco; within a year, they were married.

Saban kept working for her husband the first year after their wedding, and then opened a designer children’s clothing store in Beverly Hills, which closed in 1991. Meantime, the pair had two children through a surrogate; their son, Ness, born in 1988, was the eighth surrogate-born baby in the world. (The name is Hebrew for miracle.) Their one deal before marrying, Saban said, was that their children would be raised Jewish—Cheryl, who was raised Lutheran, never converted—and while they always put up a Christmas tree, the family celebrates Shabbat weekly. “I didn’t feel I needed to do any of those kinds of changes to be able to embrace the religion,” she explained. When they went to the rabbi who married them, she added, “I was like, ‘Think of me as a Christian who believes in Judaism.’”

While running her store, Saban joined the board of the Westside Children’s Center, where she pledged $250,000 to fund foster-parenting programs—“which, back in the day, was a lot for us!” she says now. But in the years that followed, as Haim Saban built the Fox Family Channel on the back of Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, the children’s television juggernaut he imported from Japan, they became a political power couple, first hosting meet-and-greets for Israeli politicians organized through the consulate, and then, increasingly, events for Democratic politicians, including Bill Clinton. Last year, the pair were avid supporters of Hillary Clinton; Haim reportedly toyed with throwing his support to Republican candidate John McCain after Barack Obama became the Democratic candidate, but ultimately backed down, at his wife’s urging. “He doesn’t intimidate me,” she said. “We don’t intimidate each other.”

And then her iPhone rang. She lit up; it was her husband, whom, after two decades of marriage, she still refers to as her “lover” in Facebook updates. “Hi, baby!” she purred in response, and turned away to have a private chat.