Mourning the Loss of a Legendary Fundraiser: A Reporter's Lament

Naomi levine and the author in new york, 2016. Photo credit: Sydney Petty

She was salty.

“What the fuck?” barked Naomi Levine when I called yet again to check facts after editors repeatedly questioned my 2015 article about her distinguished fundraising career. She was 92 then.

“My own mother said, ‘Don’t tell anyone you’re a fundraiser,’” Naomi told me when I visited her elegant apartment overlooking Washington Square, in the building where Eleanor Roosevelt once lived. After all, Naomi was a lawyer, a profession that her mother much preferred in describing her headstrong daughter. Naomi was also the first woman to lead the American Jewish Congress back in 1972, before she got into fundraising.

Naomi’s greatest legacy, however, at least to me, was her stint as chief fundraiser for New York University. That’s where she led a campaign that would reshape a then-struggling school into the top-tier institution it is today. It was one of the biggest fundraising campaigns in higher ed at the time, and according to her New York Times obituary, Naomi led efforts to raise more than $2 billion for NYU during her more than 20 years there.

“Nothing was ever left to chance,” she told me. “We rehearsed every word in every solicitation multiple times.”

I always came to visit Naomi bearing gifts, because that’s what you did with a person like her. Sometimes, it would be flowers; another time, I brought her a pizza from Otto, the now-shuttered restaurant across the park from Naomi’s apartment. It was in the before times: before the pandemic, before a sex scandal erased chef Mario Batali’s name from Otto, before I was fired from the job I had when we met.

I’d been thinking I should call Naomi, even if it was simply to ask her longtime assistant Bonnie how my old friend was doing. But then, on a hunch, I searched online and learned that Naomi passed away last month.

In my early visits, I’d take Naomi out. We always went to the same restaurant across the street from her building, a tiny, ground-floor place where everyone knew Naomi, or rather, Mrs. Levine, as she insisted on being called.

“We’ll be friends,” she said after we’d just met, when I was writing about her. “You can call me Naomi.” I never knew why she took a shine to me, but it was an honor I wore like a crown. On our frequent trips to New York, my husband was exasperated when I visited Naomi in Greenwich Village without him. I took my good friend Sydney to meet Naomi before Allen scored a visit. Unbelievably, it emerged in the conversation that Sydney knew some of the same people Naomi’s daughter had known in the 1970s.  

When I was interviewing her for my long-ago article, Naomi pointed to a black-and-white photograph in which she is talking with a group of men. “That tells you everything there is to know about fundraising,” she said. One man in the group of wealthy New Yorkers, she explained, had asked Naomi to speak to his daughter about her budding legal career, a favor that Naomi happily obliged. The father ended up leaving a huge gift to New York University, where Naomi ended her fundraising career. The lesson: Fundraising is all about relationships.

And Naomi had a lot of those. When I asked her for donors who could vouch for her fundraising career, Naomi steered me to Larry Silverstein, the billionaire developer who rebuilt the World Trade Center after the 2001 terrorist attacks.

“I never wanted to be rich, but I feel a little envious when I’m with Larry,” Naomi confided to me, adding that she’d saved little or nothing for retirement.

Whatever her resources, Naomi lived very well. She had the beautiful three- (or was it four?) bedroom apartment, her assistant Bonnie, a cook and, at times, a driver. She spent winters in Palm Beach, where she had another home. Naomi told me that her late husband had been concerned about her spending habits.

She invited me to dinner once, a simple meal served by her cook, while we watched “Jeopardy” on a small television in her dining room. I knew a couple of answers to host Alex Trebek’s questions, but Naomi knew many more. Afterward, she was telling me about some rude and noisy neighbors she’d once had. She paused and looked at me. “Why couldn’t I,” she asked, “have lived down the hall from a nice girl like you?”