The Art of The Betsy

1. The Betsy

Jonathan Plutzik was late to our first interview because he was switching dogs. With his wife, Lesley Goldwasser, Plutzik owns The Betsy Hotel on Ocean Drive in Miami Beach. The Betsy is an unusual hotel. Ocean Drive can be loud and showy; The Betsy is refined and discreet. The hotels on South Beach are mostly art deco; The Betsy has a portico-studded colonial style formally known as Florida-Georgian. Even more uncommonly, The Betsy feels like an arts foundation that happens to offer luxury rooms in a five-star setting—its art exhibits, which often specialize in emerging African artists, are a defining feature of Art Basel; it has hosted over 1,000 writers and other artists in its dedicated Writer’s Room; and it has supported a nearly uncountable number of arts organizations and initiatives in its 15 years of existence.

Then there’s the hospitality. A day or two before I spoke to Plutzik, an extended Israeli family had checked in. It was shortly before the first anniversary of Oct. 7; emotions were raw. The family had a boy of 3, and he had fallen in love with Rosa, one of the Plutzik-Goldwassers’ two retrievers, who are fixtures of the lobby. At the time we’d scheduled the interview, the concierge could see Plutzik crossing Ocean Drive from his home near the hotel with Betsy, the other retriever. The Israeli family was in the lobby, having breakfast. The concierge, Paul Drecq, intercepted Plutzik before he could come in; Plutzik turned around, and returned 10 minutes later with Rosa. The boy ran from the breakfast table and melted into a pile with the dog. Then he spoke his first words of English: “I love Rosa.” (Perhaps it won’t be a surprise that the night before, at the Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau’s annual award ceremony, The Betsy’s concierges had pulled off an unprecedented sweep, winning both the Lifetime Achievement Award—which went to Drecq, who has been with The Betsy for 13 years—and Concierge of the Year.)

But even this story misses an essential element of what makes The Betsy, and its owners, so singular. The Betsy is a Jewish hotel. Of course, it welcomes every traveler. But its connections to Jewish identity are profound and personal.

If you didn’t see the Israeli flag flying over the hotel after Oct. 7 last year, you might begin to notice it only slowly during your stay: the challahs served in the lobby on Fridays; the monthly Yiddish-speakers brunch that The Betsy hosted before COVID; the Jewish American and Holocaust Literature Symposium (JAHLIT), in its 14th year at The Betsy, which co-curates and underwrites the conference; the collaboration with Miami-Dade public schools on an ethics essay contest inspired by Elie Wiesel; the events supporting veterans of the Israel Defense Forces; the enormous proportion of Jewish artists in the Writer’s Room and on the hotel’s walls, which doubles as a gallery of international stature. (Of the 16 artists in this year’s Betsy exhibit for Art Basel, six are Jewish. They include the Israeli-born photographer Elinor Carucci, the American fashion photographer Lillian Bassman, and the French photographer Willy Ronis, known for his images of postwar Paris.)

“What Jonathan, Lesley, and Deborah”—Deborah Briggs, Plutzik’s sister, who facilitates many of the hotel’s cultural programs—“do for JAHLIT is unmatched anywhere in the literary world,” said Holli Levitsky, the conference director. (The most recent symposium convened Oct. 27-29.) Levitsky estimated the annual cost of the meeting spaces alone at $25,000—and then there are the subsidized hotel rooms, the conference supplies, the meals, and the amenities of the property. “Where do scholars get to stay at a Betsy-level hotel, receive Betsy-level hospitality, while talking about the things that they love?” she said. “And though they give us so much, their position always is: ‘What else can we do to help you?’ It’s a love fest. There’s nothing like it.”

2. Jonathan

Plutzik’s Jewishness is indivisible from his fealty to art: His father was Hyam Plutzik, a midcentury American lyric poet who was a three-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Also from the brevity of his father’s life: Hyam Plutzik died of cancer at 50. (There must be a language with a word for the younger Plutzik’s ambivalent fate: His mother is alive and well at 105. She was born in Ukraine two weeks before the signing of the Treaty of Versailles.) The Plutziks came from Belarus; grandfather Plutzik was a rabbinical leader with bad lungs, which chased him out of Brooklyn and into farm life in the Connecticut countryside. His son Hyam, whose photographs from the time show a barefoot boy in woods with more than a passing resemblance to the forests of Belarus, didn’t learn to speak English until public school.

Hyam Plutzik is the only poet to have won Yale’s poetry prize twice, but he dropped out of his doctoral program there because it was too rigid; they wouldn’t let him read anthropology. Humbled by a penurious life in journalism, Plutzik tried again, with the begrudging support of former mentors. (“Due allowance, whatever that may be, should be made for the fact that Mr. Plutzik is a Jew. I have never seen in him any of the unpleasant traits that are commonly attributed to men of his race.”) He was readmitted, but his rebellion wouldn’t leave him—he passed his orals, but never submitted his dissertation. Having volunteered for military service, he loaded Allied bombers heading off to the killing fields. “When the bombs were up in the plane’s belly,” he wrote on D-Day, “we fu[s]ed them and threaded the arming wire. It was such a routine task, yet to think that this was a load of death for the enemy.” It’s Hyam’s old writing desk in the Writer’s Room at The Betsy.

“My mother,” who emigrated from Ukraine when she was 2, “has always been a bit of a communist,” Plutzik said. “Money bad, creativity good.” But “the whole Jewish familial thing,” built around attendance of a small Reform synagogue in Rochester, New York, where Hyam ended up teaching at the university, “was very much a part of our being.” Only once Plutzik got to Brandeis did he understand the role of Jewish communal philanthropy: “It was eye-opening. Every building had a Jewish name on it.”

Adoring the father, the son went in a different direction. Plutzik oversaw the student businesses at Brandeis, parlaying his growing interest in finance into admission to Wharton. From there, his life was transformed by a series of older Jewish men who believed in mentorship, first among them Robert Greenberg, the Philadelphia city treasurer. “You open the dictionary to Jewish guy, you’ll see Bobby,” Plutzik said. “He was a mentor, a protector. He loved that I was the son of a poet. He taught me how to dress, how to talk about markets. Because he was the guy all these bankers were calling.”

From there, Plutzik went to First Boston. “First Boston was a distinctly non-Jewish firm,” he said. “But the second tier of leadership was not only meaningfully Jewish, it consisted of some of the most brilliant financial minds of our generation,” among them Bruce Wasserstein, an iconic figure in mergers and acquisitions; Larry Fink, now the founder and CEO of BlackRock; and the economist Al Wojnilower, known as Dr. Doom for his bearish but often accurate market predictions.

With their support, Plutzik began organizing a community of giving and study at First Boston. The beneficiary was often UJA-Federation. He went on to oversee significant chunks of the UJA’s giving. As First Boston was subsumed by Credit Suisse, he also had a front row to the stonewalling by Swiss banks of efforts to repatriate Jewish wartime deposits; the banks eventually settled with representatives of the global Jewish community for $1.25 billion. Plutzik was just short of 50 himself when he decided to retire as vice chairman, having spent 24 years at the firm. “There was something more to do,” he said.

3. Lesley

In the early 1930s, reading the writing on the wall, Lesley Goldwasser’s maternal great-uncles left Kovno, Lithuania, for South Africa. In 1939, they sent visas for their parents and siblings to join them. Only Lesley’s grandmother Jenny and her family made the journey. (Their parents were killed in the Kovno ghetto. Jenny’s sister Rakhil and her children survived thanks to a Judenrat member who imposed on Rakhil to trade her body for their safety.)

By the time Jenny’s family reached South Africa, it was no longer accepting Jews. So they tried another British colony: Zimbabwe. “Zimbabwe to South Africa is like Arkansas to New York,” Goldwasser said. “Zim was a backwater. It’s where you went when you couldn’t go anywhere else.” And yet, Lithuanian Jews had built a vibrant community there, in a copy of the one they lost: The synagogue in Bulawayo—Zimbabwe’s second city, where many of them had settled to conduct business, often in natural resources or textiles—was an exact replica of the one in Kovno. The first mayor of Bulawayo, in 1897, was Jewish. (Goldwasser’s father filled the post again many years later.)

“How wonderful it was to be a Jew in such a vibrant, joyous community,” she said. “My father called it ‘Bush Orthodox.’ Nearly everyone drove to services. The rabbi from Israel was a little unhappy. But that synagogue could hold 1,600 people. It overflowed on the High Holidays.” In Bulawayo, Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews prayed together.

As for many other white Zimbabweans of Goldwasser’s age, the closest person in her life was her Black caregiver, Francena Boas. In Bulawayo one day, they saw posters exhorting voters to vote in a referendum on Black self-rule. “What does it mean?” Goldwasser asked Boas. “Vote no is for the Europeans,” Boas said. “Vote yes is for the Africans.” For Goldwasser, the choice was clear. “‘Then I hate the Europeans,’ I told her,” she said. “I didn’t know that I was a ‘European.’ I only knew who the Africans were.” (Goldwasser’s daughter recently named her first child after Francena.)

It was an unequal comity, and it lost its balance when insurgents began to commit violence in pursuit of the power formally held by white settlers since the establishment of Rhodesia as a British colony in 1923. As a Jew from Poland, Goldwasser’s father, Jurick (né Jehuda), couldn’t see his way to violent suppression of the drive for self-rule. He refused to allow his sons to join the Rhodesian army of Prime Minister Ian Smith, and sent them to Australia and then the U.S. But his liberalism ended there—even though young Lesley worked summers at the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and also wanted to try her luck in America (women weren’t allowed on the trading floor in South Africa), his plan for her was to “get married and go where your husband wants to go,” she said. So she pursued a job program in Hong Kong, as far away as she could find. Her father got the message and agreed to send her to America.

I asked her why being a trader was so attractive. “It was gender-blind,” she said. “It’s just black or red. Either you make money, or you don’t.”

Like Plutzik, Goldwasser received her education in Jewish communal philanthropy from a legendary financial figure—in her case, Ace Greenberg at Bear Stearns. “At Bear, because of Ace, whether you were Jewish or not, you had to give 4% of gross income to charity,” Goldwasser said. “He didn’t care to whom, as long as you gave. It was almost a condition of employment. Not a lot of people knew that about Bear. Maybe that’s one of the reasons nobody helped us,” she said, referring to its collapse during the 2008 financial crisis.

She had started her career at First Boston. She and Plutzik met on one of his visits to the trading floor. Goldwasser was Plutzik’s introduction to the breadth of worldwide Jewry. “As an American Jew, I was very ignorant,” Plutzik said. “Lesley came from a very small community where if someone died, you called the chevra kadisha to wash the body. There was another guy walking around with a list of names to call for a minyan. It was the beginning of my understanding of the global Jewish diaspora.” They were married in Bulawayo by a rabbi from Israel.

4. Jonathan and Lesley and Miami Beach

Plutzik was taking courses in the Old Testament at the Jewish Theological Seminary when Miami Beach came calling—some friends wanted his advice on a real estate deal. “Miami Beach is not a town we had spent time in,” he said. “Our grandparents went to the Catskills.” He experienced an amplification of what he had seen in Zimbabwe. “All these incredible Latin American Jewish communities with deep connections to the places they came from,” he said. “In many ways, Miami and Miami Beach are the most diverse international communities in our country.”

On a stroll one day, he came upon the facade of The Betsy, in disrepair and bankruptcy, but its former grandeur apparent. It had been built in a patriotic spirit in 1942—it billeted soldiers during the war—and named for Betsy Ross, the legendary flag-maker. Unlike the art deco buildings around it, it had enormous windows and a spacious lobby. “It was so hospitable and inviting,” he said. “So, I just stood there and I watched who walked by. I saw all kinds of people in their 40s, 50s, 60s, starting new lives. And I thought: What could we create here? What if we created a place of art and music and sophistication? But not a vanity thing—the best artists in the world, the best music in the world. Could we do that? My mother still attaches a great deal of importance to these values.”

The restored and renovated Betsy reopened in 2009. In 2017, it added 70 rooms from the adjacent Carlton Hotel. Suddenly there were a lot of empty walls. Goldwasser’s son Zach, then 26, said that she should fill them with art. “I said, ‘I don’t have formal training,’” Goldwasser said. She set about educating herself. She took photography courses. She haunted exhibits. Once, at the MoMA exhibit of Aida Muluneh, an Ethiopian photographer, Goldwasser realized she knew the printer of Muluneh’s work from her days in Johannesburg. Around the same time, at the Yossi Milo Gallery in New York, she fell in love with the work of the photographer Sanlé Sory, from Burkina Faso. Here, she knew the gallerist. “The hotel is a hard sell as a gallery,” Goldwasser said. “I told my printer friend in Johannesburg to tell Aida that I had Sanlé Sory from Yossi. And I told Yossi that I had Aida. And so they both said yes. That was the beginning.”

Seven years later, Goldwasser has turned those walls into such a coveted exhibition venue, launching artists’ careers in her own right, that figures like James Snyder, head of the Jewish Museum in New York, reach out to her to suggest an exhibit—in this case, Elinor Carucci’s photographs of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s collars. Goldwasser has had a storied career in finance, and an equally distinguished follow-up as a curator, but she continues to speak of the evolution with marvel. “Can you imagine,” she said, “that the head of one of the most important cultural institutions in the country feels that a collection in his museum would be well-presented at a hotel?”

“They’ve turned the neighborhood into a cultural mecca,” the preservationist Ed Christin said of Plutzik and Goldwasser. He is the custodian of the archive of the street photographer Andy Sweet, who captured iconic images of Holocaust survivors in Miami Beach in the 1970s, which are now on permanent display at The Betsy. “It’s better than a gallery,” Christin said. “Every day, new guests from all over the world come to see it. It has really gotten Andy’s name known.” The Lithuanian National Museum of Art in Vilnius has just concluded an exhibit of more than 140 of Sweet’s images.

“There are a lot of people with money in this town,” Christin went on. “But how many of them sprinkle it around? A little bit of money can make a huge difference in the life of an artist. And it’s so unusual for such accomplished people to be so accessible. Jonathan is in the lobby every day.”

5. The Betsy

To be sure, The Betsy’s commitment is to arts and culture writ large. It created an annual festival to celebrate trans artists. It features monumental public art, such as a giant orb-shaped skybridge that projects video and may be—after the lifeguard stations and the bodies at work in the outdoor gyms—the most photographed thing in Miami Beach. There’s also a permanent steel poetry rail carved with the words of local wordsmiths. (“You think the world was shocked when Nixon resigned? / Wait ’til I whup / George Foreman’s behind.”—Muhammad Ali.)

The hotel has incubated new work by Miami New Drama, a nationally celebrated theater company that puts up bilingual shows at the Colony Theatre on Lincoln Road; was the original home of the O, Miami poetry festival; and now serves as the base of the Miami Beach Classical Music Festival. There’s live jazz in the lobby nine times a week. When the city of Miami Beach wants to conduct a tribute for Josephine Baker Day, it calls The Betsy for ideas. (The Miami jazz vocalist Nicole Yarling will perform Baker’s songs with the Jim Gasior Trio at The Betsy on the eve of Art Basel in late November.)

And the list extends far beyond arts and culture. In 2007, the Plutzik-Goldwasser Foundation, which predates The Betsy, created Zara’s Center, which provides schooling and educational resources to young people in Bulawayo, on a campus that is entirely off the grid. The family’s giving focus is global, multicultural, and dedicated especially to lifting up underserved communities—in the actual rather than ideological definition of that term. That makes the Plutzik-Goldwassers the proud inhabitants of a rapidly vanishing political space—fervent liberals who fervently support Israel.

I’ve been coming to The Betsy since 2017. As an ex-Soviet person who grew up feeling self-conscious about his Jewishness, I was always struck by Plutzik’s and Goldwasser’s open embrace of their identity in such a commercial setting. That openness has taken on a new dimension of risk since Oct. 7—or not. “Look, we love who you are,” Plutzik told me, speaking of his guests. “And we’re OK with who we are.” He mentioned a recent incognito visit by a “secret shopper” for the American Express Hotel Collection whose visit report included an appreciation for the hotel’s Jewish elements, especially the Friday night challah.

It goes the other way, too. At a recent poetry event, a kaffiyeh-wearing woman confronted Plutzik about the copy of Alan Dershowitz’s The Case Against BDS in her room. (Each of The Betsy’s 130 rooms has a library.) She was convinced the hotel had placed it there. “I said, ‘First of all, we’re not that good,’” Plutzik said. “And then, this is a place for dialogue. I’m not someone who won’t sit with somebody. But it’s also a place where we want Jews to feel protected and comfortable. We’re not a place where people get to come to abuse Jews.”

In a place where his ancestors had never stepped foot, Plutzik has found a paradise he didn’t know he was seeking. “Miami Beach is a safe place for Jews,” he said. “The mayors of both Miami Beach and Miami-Dade County are Jewish. I can reach out to the Miami Beach chief of police, who is African American, and he’ll put an extra cruiser outside when we have an event that is thematically Jewish. He also understands the uniqueness of our times.”

Plutzik, Goldwasser, and their son Zach now live in Miami Beach full time. Plutzik’s mother still lives in Rochester. Hyam Plutzik is buried in Montefiore Cemetery in Queens, 100 feet from Rebbe Menachem Schneerson. “It’s impossible to visit my father’s grave and, given the Rebbe’s proximity, not somehow feel the influence,” Plutzik said. “It’s the long connected Jewish arc.”