Today marks exactly one hundred years since Lewis Glucksman was born in New York and began a journey that would eventually see him become one of Ireland’s most significant patrons. Though he arrived on these shores without ancestral ties, his profound love for the people and culture of Ireland left a legacy that still resonates in classrooms and galleries today.

Recently, my phone pinged with a message from a friend, the principal of a school in Cork that participates in the Delivering Equality of Opportunity in Schools program. He excitedly shared news of his school’s receipt of a Niamh Sharkey art piece from the Glucksman Art Library scheme, run from Cork’s celebrated Glucksman gallery on the beautiful campus of University College Cork. I pushed him on why the arrival of this art piece was eliciting such enthusiasm. He gushed that now his pupils and their caregivers, who had hardly registered the existence of an art gallery close by, are talking about art, and that faculty can now teach art without relying solely on one-dimensional images on the whiteboard. For passionate and committed pedagogues like this Cork principal, tools such as those provided by The Glucksman are educational gold. 

The update prompted me to reflect on the legacy of Lewis L. (Lew) Glucksman, the gallery's patron. In the 1990s and 2000s, Lew’s munificence towards Ireland was exceeded only by that of his friend and fellow American businessman Chuck Feeney. With his charismatic wife, Loretta Brennan Glucksman, Lew set a high bar of American philanthropy on the island. Thousands of schoolchildren, university students, researchers, art enthusiasts, and wider communities continue to engage today with resources that made possible by a man who spent years accumulating wealth, only to expend much energy dispersing it.  

Born exactly a century today on December 22, 1925, in New York, Glucksman was the grandchild of Jewish immigrants, who became a titan on Wall Street. He died in his County Cork home in 2006, having spent his final years here, safe in the knowledge that his penchant for giving would be continued by the love of his life, Loretta. The reverberations of Lew’s affinity for Ireland are still widely felt and are worthy of reflection in this season of giving, of Hanukkah, and of Christmas- in the centenary of his birth. 

Lew made gifts to places outside University College Cork, including the University of Limerick, Trinity College Dublin, the Royal Irish Academy of Music, the National Gallery of Ireland, the Abbey and Gate theatres, and the Wexford Opera Festival. In 1993, an innovative center at New York University, Glucksman Ireland House, was inaugurated. 

Next year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the most impactful philanthropic initiative Ireland has ever seen, now known as the Ireland Funds. It should come as no surprise that this game-changing exercise originated in the United States, the land of modern philanthropy par excellence. Nor should it come as a surprise that most of those individuals involved in this philanthropy have had strong family links to Ireland. But not all those who have given to Ireland have also been tethered to the island ancestrally. There is a lesson for us all in that. 

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 While Glucksman wasn’t Irish, or even Irish American, there were signs of Ireland coming into focus early on. A stint in the Navy during World War II led him here on shore leave and instilled a life-long passion for both nautical activities and Irish literature. Decades later, following a stratospheric career as a gifted trader and partner at Lehman Brothers, Lew fell in love with Loretta – she the grandchild of four Irish immigrants. It was Lew who brought Loretta to Ireland for the first time and in 1987 they initiated a multi-decade relationship with the country, north and south. Such was his love of the place that Lew eventually moved to Ireland. Loretta still credits Lew’s Irish sojourn with extending his life after his cancer diagnosis in 2000– he was given six months, but lived for six years. 

I have found myself dipping into historical records to get at the texture of Lew’s early life. These sources reflect the fact that his formative years were concentrated by the presence of other New Yorkers of Jewish ancestry, but something in the 1930 US census returns caught my eye. There, amongst all the Glucksman names for his household on Walton Street, was a name that stuck out, Sally Higgins. A twenty-five-year-old Irish immigrant ‘maid’, Sally was just a year in the United States and was recorded in her first US census with the Glucksmans in 1930.  People of Jewish and Irish descent were brought together in America. 

I like to think that Sally was another signal of what lay ahead for the young Lew in terms of his future connection to Ireland.  I imagine her reading him Irish stories and talking to him about the beautiful, if impoverished, fledgling state she had left. The balance of probability would suggest that when she emigrated in 1929, she did so from Cobh, mere miles from where Lew took his final breath in 2006. Sally would never know what this little boy under her care in New York would do for Ireland– a man historian Joe Lee once described as "a man of the boat, and a man of the Bourse, then, but above all, a man of the book".

* Miriam Nyhan Grey, PhD is a historian who teaches at MIC (Limerick).