Alan Slifka, Who Promoted Arab-Jewish Ties, Is Dead at 81 (Published 2011) (2024)

Alan B. Slifka, a New York investment manager who used his fortune to promote harmony among Israeli Arabs and Jews and to give the Big Apple Circus its start, died on Friday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 81 and also had a home in Manhattan.

The cause was cancer, his wife, Riva Ritvo-Slifka, said.

Mr. Slifka already had more than 30 years’ experience in the financial industry in 1981 when, with initial assets of $50 million, he started an investment management company bearing his name. Known today as Halcyon Asset Management, the company manages more than $10 billion.

Seven years after starting the company, Mr. Slifka visited friends in Israel and could not understand why so few of them were friendly with Arab-Israeli citizens.

“He toured Arab villages,” Ms. Ritvo-Slifka said, “and was troubled at the discrepancies in how they lived.”

“We can be viewed as a coexistence mutual fund,” Mr. Slifka once said.

An urge to give something to his hometown, New York, spurred Mr. Slifka to become the founding chairman of the Big Apple Circus in 1977. It was another way to satisfy his philanthropic inclination. The renowned one-ring circus, with its custom-made French tent in Damrosch Park at Lincoln Center, is a nonprofit organization that supports community programs, health institutions and charities. Mr. Slifka gave more than $10 million to the organization over the years.

As Paul Binder, the founder and artistic director of the Big Apple Circus, said in 1984: “Our first supporter, Alan Slifka, said he’d been wanting to give New York a gift, like a statue or something. Instead, he decided to give New York the Big Apple Circus.”

Mr. Slifka also donated more than $20 million to the Abraham Joshua Heschel School in Manhattan, and in 2003 gave $5 million to Brandeis University to create a master’s degree program in coexistence studies.

Mr. Slifka liked to joke that he had learned about coexistence before birth. Born in Manhattan on Oct. 13, 1929, Alan Bruce Slifka was the twin son of Joseph and Sylvia Slifka. His father owned textile and real estate businesses. Besides his wife and his twin sister, Barbara Slifka, he is survived by three sons, Michael, Randolph and David; two stepdaughters, Torrie and Skye Ritvo; a stepson, Max Ritvo; and three grandchildren.

After graduating from Yale in 1951, Mr. Slifka earned a master’s in business administration at Harvard in 1953. He then joined the financial firm L. F. Rothschild & Company, where he worked as a securities analyst for 32 years, rising to partner before leaving to start his own company.

Mr. Slifka found great satisfaction in the annual United Nations Night at the Big Apple Circus.

“People from completely different backgrounds and cultures sit around the ring and laugh at the same time, worry at the same time and applaud at the same time,” he said in a Harvard Business School profile in 2001. “The ambassador of Israel once told me, ‘I come to this event every year, and it gives me hope for the world.’”