The Leon Levy Foundation

Coming Soon: A Documentary Detailing Jewish Influence in the Garment Industry

Since the mid-19^th Century, when ready-to-wear clothing became standard fare, the garment industry has provided a living, a way of life, a lift into the middle class and sometimes fame and fortune for generations of Jewish manufacturers and designers. Pacific Street Films, with an underwriting grant from the Leon Levy Foundation, is producing a feature-length television documentary – “Dressing America" – to tell this marvelous story of entrepreneurship and enterprise. Among its subjects are early designers Hattie Carnegie and the business executives behind brand-name companies like Hickey-Freeman and Hart, Schaffner and Marx.

Two Major Greening Grants Go to New York City Institutions

With a $15 million gift to the New York Botanical Garden and a $10 million gift to Prospect Park in Brooklyn – both announced by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg on May 22 – the Leon Levy Foundation made the largest private donation in history to New York City’s parks and gardens. With the money, the Botanical Garden will create a new Native Plant Garden for the display and study of indigenous species; Prospect Park will use its grant to restore its 26-acre Lakeside Center to the original design of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux.

Restoring the Landscape at the Institute for Advanced Study

As one of the world’s leading centers for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry in science and in the humanities, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton has grown substantially in its 75 years of existence – and not always in an orderly way. Yet the Institute’s 800-acre campus was always meant to provide a beautiful, tranquil environment conducive to the original, even speculative thinking that is needed to advance knowledge and change the way the world is understood.

With a grant from the Leon Levy Foundation, the IAS has re-landscaped the entrance to Fuld Hall, the main building. A second phase of the Foundation’s grant will pay for the creation of a master plan to restore the campus to its original, historic appearance.

The Leon Levy Center for Biography, Graduate Center – CUNY

With a $3.7 million gift from the Foundation, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York is creating the Leon Levy Center for Biography -- a hub for writers, scholars, students and readers of the highly popular genre that is designed to bring fresh voices and innovative approaches to its practice. Guided by noted biographers Professors Nancy Milford, Executive Director, and David Nasaw, Faculty Co-Director, the Center will examine the practice and methodologies of biography with biographers working both inside and outside the academy in print, film, visual arts and new media, and will promote a discussion about its legitimacy as an academic pursuit.

Starting next September, the Center will be the home of four biography fellows -- chosen from a pool of 240 applicants -- and two dissertation fellows. They will participate in biweekly seminars led by Professor Milford. There will also be two graduate student fellows.

To encourage general interest in biography, the Leon Levy Center for Biography will also host an annual lecture by a celebrated biographer, a series of talks by working biographers and an annual conference for both scholars and the public.

Read the New York Times article

Archives Grantees Meet to Share Experiences

On Feb. 21, the Leon Levy Foundation convened archivists, librarians and other representatives from more than a dozen institutions supported through its Archives and Catalogues Program. The luncheon meeting was part of a series of occasional roundtable events the Foundation has used to explore ways it can aid grantees as a group, to create better partnerships with them and to guide its grant-making.

At this meeting, Barbara Haws, archivist of the New York Philharmonic, Christine Nelson, curator of Literary and Historic Manuscripts at the Morgan Library, and Marcia Tucker, social science and historical studies librarian at the Institute for Advanced Studies, made presentations about their projects and outlined some challenges they face in this age of digital scholarship. Dr. Haws, for example, asked whether institutions had procedures in place to capture “born-digital” material, such as email, Word documents and jPegs, in their archives. Several grantees spoke of grappling with deciding what exactly, of their archives, should be digitized and placed on the web. Some, including Dr. Haws, would like to digitize their entire archive – which at the NYPhil begins with documents from even before its founding in 1842. They fear that if it’s not on the web, it won’t be used. Nelson noted that some scholars are tapping into the Morgan’s online catalogue via WorldCat, an online tool that allows searches of the contents of 10,000 libraries worldwide.

The Foundation’s archives and catalogues program helps arts and humanities institutions care for and use the important contents of their archives and store rooms, with the ultimate goal of making them more available to historians, writers, film-makers, and other scholars. Among the others present at the roundtable were Michelle Elligott, archivist of the Museum of Modern Art, Robert Sink, chief archivist at the Center for Jewish History, and Sara Wolf, director of the Northeast Region Museum Services Center of the National Park Service.

Lower East Side Tenement Museum

Dedicated to telling the stories of the immigrants to America, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum will greatly expand its programs with the purchase of the tenement at 103 Orchard Street, which was made possible with a $1 million grant from the Foundation. The building, which will house an auditorium, performance space, visitor center, exhibition galleries and a museum shop, is to be named in honor of Sadie Samuelson Levy, the daughter of an immigrant cloak seller who came to the Lower East Side in 1869; she married Jerome Levy and bore him two sons, Leon and Jay Levy. The Sadie Samuelson Levy Immigrant Heritage Center complements the Tenement Museum’s landmark building at 97 Orchard Street, where visitors are led on tours recreating the lives of several immigrant families who have lived there.