GEORGE SOROS

                                                        

 

George Soros experienced ethnic, religious, and political intolerance first-hand.   Born in Hungary in 1930, he lived throughout the Nazi occupation in 1944-1945 which resulted in the massacre of over 500.000 Hungarian Jews.  His own Jewish family survived by securing false identity papers concealing their religion and helping others to do the same.

 

After the war, as communists took over the power in Hungary Soros left for London in 1947, working as a railway porter and a night-club waiter to supply his studies at the London School of Economics.  In 1956 he emigrated to the USA, entering the world of finance and investments, where he made his fortune.  In 1973, he launched his own hedge fund and became one of the most successful investors in the United States.

 

George Soros used his fortune to create the Open Society Foundation, a network of foundations, partners and projects in more than 120 countries.  Their names and works reflect the influence of Soros, thinking of the philosophy of Karl Popper, which Soros had met at the London School of Economics.  In his book “Open Society” and “Its Enemies” Popper argues that no philosophy or ideology is the final arbiter and that societies can only flourish when they are under Democratic Governance, freedom, and respect of individual rights an approach at the core of the Open Society Foundation.

 

Soros started his philanthropy in 1979, giving scholarships to black South Africans under apartheid.  In 1980, he helped promote ideas in communist Hungary by funding academic visits to the West and supporting fledgling independent cultural groups.  After the fall of the Belin Wall, he created a Central European University as a space to foster critical thinking, which at the time, was an alien concept for most Universities in the former communist block.

 

With the Cold War over, he gradually expanded his philanthropy to Africa, Asia, Latin America, and to the United States. Supporting a vast array of new efforts, he created more accountable, democratic societies.  He was one of the early prominent voices against drugs and supported Americas’ anti-drug movement.

 

In the early 2000s, he became a vocal backer against religious, political, and ethnic intolerance.    

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