Leonard S. Polonsky, a philanthropist who funded the arts and helped make significant historical artifacts and documents available to the public, including Sir Isaac Newton’s early papers and a letter from Christopher Columbus’s maiden voyageababkf, died on March 14 at his home in Manhattan. He was 97.
The cause was diastolic heart failure, his wife, Georgette Bennett, said.
Mr. Polonsky made his fortune in the financial services sector, when his company, Hansard Global, a successor to one he founded in 1970, went public on the London Stock Exchange in 2006, earning him a profit of 99 million pounds. But his philanthropy began earlier, in 1985, when he started the Polonsky Foundation, in an effort to support the arts.
Among its many beneficiaries was the Theatre for a New Audience in Brooklyn, where Mr. Polonsky was born. The theater,66jogo which specializes in preserving, performing and studying the works of Shakespeare, received a gift of $10 million in 2013, and its new venue was named the Polonsky Shakespeare Center.
In 2021, Mr. Polonsky made a $12 million donation to establish a new permanent exhibition at the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue. Library employees spent three years sifting through 56 million artifacts in storage to identify 250 or so of the most awe-inspiring.
The resulting display, known as “The Polonsky Exhibition of the New York Public Library’s Treasures,” resembles a gilded curio shop of priceless items — among them, George Washington’s copy of the Bill of Rights (with 12 amendments instead of 10); Thomas Jefferson’s annotated version of the Declaration of Independence; a Gutenberg Bible; an Andy Warhol painting of a Studio 54 ticket; and stuffed animals that inspired A.A. Milne’s “Winnie-the-Pooh.”
The idea for the exhibition — which, as of this month, had attracted some three million visitors — emerged from a 2016 meeting Mr. Polonsky had with Anthony W. Marx, the president and chief executive of the New York Public Library.
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Mr. Biden even held on to hope for the transformative peace deal for the Middle East that he thought was within grasp a year ago, believing it could survive even as the war between Hamas and Israel tore at its foundations.
But the truth is that Mr. Biden will speak at a time of deep uncertainty about the future of America’s role in the world, including the war in Ukraine, escalating conflicts in the Middle East and growing economic competition with China.
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