Annual UJA-Fed Dinner Honors Aryeh B. Bourkoff

Last night, UJA-Federation held their annual Wall Street Dinner, virtually, and honored Kindred Media and LionTree Founder and CEO Aryeh B. Bourkoff with the Alan C. Greenberg Young Leadership Award, as well as honoring Marc J. Rowan with the Gustave L. Levy Award.

We wanted to share Aryeh’s speech with you, as we believe the optimistic tone is what we need as we move into 2021. Congratulations to Marc, UJA-Federation, and of course, Aryeh. — Kindred Media.

Good evening,

It is a wonderful honor for me to address you tonight. Ace Greenberg is a giant of our industry, and to be blessed with an award in his name is truly humbling. I am the child of immigrants from North Africa and Eastern Europe and I came to Wall Street as an outsider in every sense.

Fresh out of school in California, one of my first interviews was at HSBC, and when asked what the acronym stood for, I honestly had no clue. My next question was how many stocks make up the Dow Jones Industrial Average? (You can look up the answer after my speech).

I’d like to be able to tell you I was in the ballpark, but I’m worried someone here might have been my interviewer. I’ve since learned that stat and picked up one or two other things along the way.

My parents are academics who love to learn and instilled in me that curiosity is not a luxury: it is a moral necessity. I went to both Jewish day school and public school in inner city Baltimore and learned quickly that knowing who you are and curiosity about other people go hand in hand.

I remember telling my mother that I would be going into finance, and that her skepticism was only overcome because I saw it as a way to catalyze aspiration into reality. My father’s father Eliezer, who we all called Abba, on the other hand, worked in the shmatta business. His grandson working at Smith Barney was his version of the American Dream. Their voices inspire me to work not just on transactions but on transformations.

I owe my family everything: my grandparents, my parents, my wonderful wife Elana, and my children Olivia, Sarah, Evan, and Asher. They are my strength and my purpose.

Many legends have taught and inspired me: Alan Ginsberg, Jim Zelter, Glenn August, Leon Wagner, Bryan Weadock, Mitch Julis, Art Penn and Robert Wolf to name just a few. Their wisdom is encoded in LionTree’s DNA.

My gratitude includes all of you as well — thank you for your presence and support. I wish we could be sitting with each other, but these months have taught us that though physically we might be geographically limited, our hearts and minds are unbounded.

I am so grateful to UJA and my fellow honoree Marc Rowan for making this evening happen, as well as to my incredible Event Chairs and Committee. Thank you to my dear friend Lloyd Blankfein, who chairs the Wall Street Division. Without him, I would not be here tonight.

I had the privilege of introducing Dr. John Malone when he was honored at UJA’s Leadership Awards dinner in 2016. It remains one of my proudest moments.

I’ve always felt that I grew up within UJA. I remember my first meeting with UJA in my office at UBS like it was yesterday. I was the unusual sort of banker who’s involvement began in the Entertainment division, and it is a true honor to come back to the Wall Street Division now in this way and to be able to help support all of the vital work UJA is doing to heal the sick, lend a hand, and repair what is broken.

Crisis does not create character: it reveals it. It is, therefore, no surprise to me that UJA has allocated more than $55 million in response to the pandemic — feeding families, helping people find employment, sustaining the Jewish community’s core institutions, providing dignified Jewish burials, and so much more.

This is a time to be reminded of the mountains we can move alone and those we can only move together. We lost one of the most eloquent teachers of this truth last month with the passing of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, former Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom.

Just two months ago, UJA’s CEO Eric Goldstein led a fascinating conversation with Rabbi Sacks. In the talk, Rabbi Sacks shared one of his core lessons on leadership. He said: “good leaders create followers. Great leaders create more leaders.”

That is what I see looking at all of you. We build together, and we build each other. At LionTree, I am privileged to feel that our focus on advising, connecting, and investing is part of that building. As I told my firm this past spring, we must make ourselves essential to the work of tikkun olam, repairing the world.

My friends, this has been a year where everything has changed. We have been tested. The message is clear: our responsibility is to live for the future, not dwell in the past.

We gather at a moment of paradox: hope for a vaccine coexists with worry over another Covid spike. Optimism does not require averting our gaze: it demands looking closer and seeing even farther. We need to go forward to extraordinary, not back to normal. Let us take not only what we can carry, but what will carry us. The rest: injustice, stagnation, the rancor of the status quo- we leave behind.

Just a few weeks ago, I visited the Arabian Peninsula in the wake of the Abraham Accords, experiencing how an ancient civilization and a young country embraces the future. I saw fruit in a market in Dubai that was grown in Israel: sometimes, progress looks like a grapefruit. And sometimes it looks like the Prime Minister of Israel visiting Saudi Arabia and meeting with its Crown Prince. The world becomes smaller when our horizons become larger. Peace and profits can unlock politics and paradoxes, tilting possibility on its axis.

This spirit needs to be applied here at home as well. If we listen to both Wall Street and Main Street, both the markets and mass movements, then we can rebuild a society that focuses on what unites us as opposed to what divides us.

It is easy to be consumed by the news, rather than consuming it in a way that keeps us trained on the future. We have passed through an election where the American people split its vote. Perhaps gridlock is just the flipside of harmony and the collision of blue and red waves will leave us with ground we can share.

There is a Latin phrase that I think we all need to internalize: audi alteram partem. It means “listen to the other side.” Hear voices different than your own. To find a center, we need to journey to the edges. To build a network, we need to familiarize ourselves with its furthest points, where dissent and maybe even anger live. And to develop a culture, we need to touch the counterculture: the ideas, trends, and perspectives that cut against the Establishment today and will be the Establishment of the future.

These are lofty aspirations. How do we do make them realities? I want to share some wisdom from my grandmother Leeza, my nonna. She was born in Benghazi, Libya, in a different time and place. But she always told her children and grandchildren to “live life where you are” as they moved to America to build new futures. It sounds simple, but I believe it is our most profound guidepost. My own path through the financial, media, and tech industries has been lit up by an evolving and deepening community.

Waiting for the world to change or lamenting how it has changed is a recipe for regret and nostalgia. Deleting what we don’t need is the secret to knowing what we do. Constraint mandates creativity.

I am speaking to you from New York, the place where my career began and whose future remains to be written. It will require commitment and investment of every kind. The strategies that got us here and the rules we played by might not be the ones that allows us to take the next step. Collective effort built from a range of perspectives, from Wall Street to Main Street, from billionaires to protestors, will propel us into the future.We all need to rediscover the grey area, the challenging terrain where we grow together.

At LionTree, the digital economy is our constantly shifting home field. As media and tech have become how we experience so much of the world, we need to ask if they reflect the best of us. We are being connected, informed, misinformed, and monetized all at once. Where we are is not just where we sit. It is the videos we watch and the posts we like and the audio we hear and the games we play. Media is our climate, and its transformations affect us all.

Sometimes we cross the bridge to the future, and sometimes we ourselves are the bridge. Our success is tied to the grace with which we handle succession. Leaving a mark is an act of loyalty to the future. Passing the torch is essential for keeping it lit.

As the rabbis reminded us two millennia ago, time is short and there is much to do. Let’s get to work using our spotlight as a searchlight for the challenges to come.

Thank you to the UJA and all of you. May the coming year be one of healing and reinvention. Good night.

Aryeh B. Bourkoff — 11/30/2020