‘The end of an era’: Clintons, Katzenberg, Pelosi pay tribute to Edie Wasserman

By Danielle Berrin
Published on October 17, 2011

Crooners celebrate Canuckia’s Cohen and a first for our very own Greenberg

By Keren Engelberg
Published on February 22, 2007

Picks and Clicks

Eulogies:Lew Wasserman

By Michael Aushenker
Published on June 6, 2002

Lew Wasserman, philanthropist, former chairman and chief executive of Music Corporation of America (MCA) and one of the last old-time movie moguls, died June 3 from complications of a stroke. He was 89.

Wasserman was born March 22, 1913, in Cleveland, Ohio, to Russian immigrant parents, Isaac and Minnie, proprietors of a struggling restaurant. In 1936, the same year that Carl Laemmle lost control of Universal Studios, a 22-year-old Wasserman, with only a high school education, began at the bottom at MCA's Cleveland office, a talent agency with a celebrity roster that included Benny Goodman and Frank Sinatra. Wasserman worked his way up the corporate ladder and, a decade later, on Dec. 16, 1946, became MCA's president.

Deaths in the Family

By Rob Eshman
Published on August 9, 2001

Whenever one of our writers or contributors -- or I myself -- use the term "Jewish community," I think of Lew Wasserman. An interviewer once asked the former MCA chairman and power broker about the Jewish community here. Wasserman shot back: "I don't know of a Jewish community. It is nonexistent."