Former Sheldon Adelson deputy is privately chairing Israeli government-backed advocacy group
Former Las Vegas Sands president Michael Leven has chaired board of trustees of advocacy group ISGAP since May, alongside managing director Sima Vaknin-Gill, the former chief censor of Israel.
Relative to his former boss, the late casino and resort magnate Sheldon Adelson, Michael A. Leven is not a household name. Prior to working under the billionaire Republican ‘megadonor’ Adelson as president of the Las Vegas Sands Corporation, Mr. Leven spent five years as the CEO of Holiday Inn Hotels & Resorts and, in 2020, penned a memoir entitled “Can’t Do It Yourself.” Mr. Leven was also a close associate of the late billionaire Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus, not only through their shared passion for pro-Israeli advocacy, but also through their leadership of the Georgia Aquarium.
The progressive magazine Jewish Currents in 2021 published an investigation revealing that Leven, through his family foundation, was one of the few known donors to the infamous pro-Israel ‘doxxing’ website Canary Mission, through a shell organization named Megamot Shalom by way of the Central Fund of Israel. The apparent target for the 2018 donation was the U.S.-based activist group Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), whose Philadelphia chapter was mass-arrested earlier this month for occupying the lobby of a major U.S. ammunition supplier for Israeli tanks. (A similar $75,000 donation in 2019 targeted both JVP and the related IfNotNow movement.)
But Mr. Leven’s most recent gig — which is being exclusively revealed here — is as chairman of the board of trustees of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, better known as ISGAP.
As frequently publicly recounted by ISGAP’s Canadian-born founder, Charles Asher Small, his organization’s flagship ‘Follow the Money’ campaign to expose billions of dollars in hidden Qatari funding of U.S. universities resulted from Yale’s 2011 decision to axe ISGAP’s predecessor organization, the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism (YIISA), roughly five years after its opening. (Deborah Lipstadt, who served as President Biden’s special envoy for monitoring and combating anti-semitism, defended Yale’s decision in a 2011 op-ed, noting that some of the presentations she observed at YIISA “were not scholarly in nature.”)
“I mistakenly came across this email — it’s a long story and I won’t bore you with it — but I discovered this large gift to Yale from the bin Mahfouz family, a Saudi businessman who’s a known terror financer,” stated Mr. Small in a January 23 meeting at Cambridge University’s Woolf Institute, referring to Sheikh Khalid bin Mahfouz. Apparently referring to the Clinton administration raining 13 Tomahawk cruise missiles on the El Shifa Pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan on August 20, 1998 after concluding without proof that it was “a chemical-weapons-related facility,” Mr. Small further stated that, “The Clinton administration blew up one of their chemical factories in the Sudan.”
Other than Texas A&M’s decision to close its Qatar campus following an extended pressure campaign from ISGAP, perhaps the high-water mark of the institute’s influence was the December 5, 2023 congressional grilling of three university presidents by U.S. Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY), whose nomination to become President Trump’s second-term Ambassador to the United Nations was withdrawn in March. As noted in an exclusive co-written by this author one year ago, ISGAP board of directors chair Natan Sharansky — a starkly anti-communist former Israeli interior minister — claimed credit on behalf of ISGAP for the widely viewed Congressional hearing at an April 7, 2024 talk at the Palm Beach Country Club in Florida.
Several days after the talk, ISGAP publicly thanked Mr. Leven and his wife, Andrea, for their support, marking one of the few instances in which ISGAP has publicly disclosed an affiliation with the former hotel and casino executive.
According to an investigation published by The Forward in 2020, ISGAP received $445,000 in undisclosed donations from the Israeli government in 2018, amounting to roughly 80% of its reported revenue for the year. A leaked document published by the Israeli investigative outlet Seventh Eye outlined the financial relationship being led by Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, which was then focused on combating the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement under the leadership of director general Sima Vaknin-Gill, a former chief censor of the Israeli government.
Vaknin-Gill was subsequently announced as ISGAP’s vice president of strategy and development on June 28, 2023 and was quietly promoted to managing director the next year.
Despite ISGAP currently spearheading a massive U.S. and Canadian lobbying campaign to blacklist Qatari funding for universities, as well as for the U.S. Congress to declare the Muslim Brotherhood a foreign terrorist organization, Mr. Small has previously argued that ISGAP’s academic role provides an exemption to foreign agent registration requirements.
Over the past year, ISGAP has advocated for its legislative priorities through U.S. Representatives including Randy Fine (R-FL), Don Bacon (R-NE), Daniel Goldman (D-NY), and Ritchie Torres (D-NY).
Beyond Mr. Leven’s role with ISGAP, his family foundation’s 2016 tax filings disclosed a $25,000 donation to the Israeli lawfare organization Shurat HaDin, which boasted at length of its close relationship with Israel’s foreign intelligence service, the Mossad, in the 2018 book ‘Harpoon,’ following exposure by the WikiLeaks ‘Cablegate’ release.
Both Shurat HaDin and ISGAP have campaigned for the U.S. Government to ban Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which has played a central role in U.S. university protests of Israel’s ongoing military occupation of Gaza.
Mr. Leven’s family foundation more recently, in 2023, disclosed donating $20,000 to the Israeli content moderation nonprofit CyberWell, which this publication previously forensically exposed as an offshoot of the private intelligence arm, Keshet David / Israel Cyber Shield / Innovative Collaboration Strategies, of the anti-BDS public-private partnership creative by Vaknin-Gill’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, Kela Shlomo / Concert / Voices of Israel.
ISGAP did not return a request for comment regarding when Michael Leven began his term as chairman of its board of trustees, nor did the organization answer a question regarding the names of other trustees.