Connect with us

RSS

Herb Kohl, former Jewish senator from Wisconsin and Milwaukee Bucks owner, dies at 88

(JTA) — Herb Kohl, the longtime Jewish senator from Wisconsin who loved his Milwaukee hometown so much he bought its basketball team to keep it there, has died at 88.

Kohl was known for his soft-spoken, unobtrusive approach as a philanthropist, a retail mogul and a senator, an outlook he said he learned from his Jewish immigrant parents.

Kohl died Wednesday after a short illness, his namesake foundation said.

Elected to the first of four terms in the Senate in 1988, he became an influential member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, where he was a must-meet for pro-Israel lobbyists advocating for defense assistance for Israel. He was a leader on advocacy for children and the elderly, chairing the Senate Aging committee and authoring bills that expanded funding for school lunches and mandated child-safety locks on guns.

“There was always one constituency that everyone in the office knew was more important to Herb than anyone else, and that was children,” Brad Fitch, a one time spokesman for Kohl, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in 2011, after Kohl said his fourth term would be his last. “He would say, ‘They don’t contribute to campaigns, they don’t have a lobbyist.’ ”

He was also a leader in the Jewish community, helming a campaign that raised millions for Israel in a relatively small community in an emergency campaign after the 1967 Six-Day War.

Yet he abjured attention until his middle age, buying the NBA Milwaukee Bucks franchise  in 1985, when he was 50, in order to keep them in the city, and then running for the Senate when he was 53.

“He loved sports, he loved Milwaukee and Wisconsin,” Bud Selig, the Jewish former Major League Baseball commissioner and a childhood friend of Kohl’s, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “I think his career is so really unusual in this day and age.”

Kohl was born and raised in Milwaukee. His parents, Max and Mary, had immigrated to Milwaukee from Poland and Russia, respectively, in the early 20th century. Max Kohl opened a grocery store before Herb was born; by the time he reached adulthood, Herb Kohl, one of four siblings, had helped build an extensive chain of grocery and department stores. Kohl left the management in 1979 of a company that now has over 1,000 stores nationwide. 

Kohl said his father instilled in his children a strong work ethic — Herb Kohl started work in the chain as a bag boy. He said he also learned from his father to keep his emotions in check.

“My father was a person who had a very strong control over his ego and his needs,” USA Today, in its obituary, quoted Kohl as once saying. “He was a very driven man, but he was not a person who had the need to belittle people or fight with people or reduce them. He learned to control those impulses, which we all have, I think. He was a very controlled, disciplined person, and he was very influential on me in that respect.”

In 2016, speaking to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Kohl said his father taught him to give back to a community that had welcomed them.

“My father once said, ‘Money is like manure. It’s not good unless you spread it around,’” he told the newspaper. “Maybe the day I die all the money will be gone. Whatever. I’ve had a productive life. A happy life. A healthy life. And I never forget it. I’m very grateful for all the good luck I’ve had in my lifetime.”

His Jewish expression was low-key but had significant effect. Kohl asked Ray Allen, a star player with the Bucks, to accompany him in 1998 on a tour of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and it changed the player forever. He was soon urging fellow players to join him on tours whenever they were in Washington to play the Wizards. Allen joined the museum’s council in 2016.

Kohl was for a period in the 1990s and 2000s part of an anomalous group of Jewish senators elected from northern midwestern states with small Jewish populations. Russ Feingold served as the junior Wisconsin senator from 1993-2011, and there was a rotation of Jewish senators in neighboring Minnesota in the same period.

Sen. Herb Kohl meets with then Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, May 12, 2010. (Office of Senator Herb Kohl)

In the Senate, the Democratic politician’s focus was on oversight and keeping spending within budgets. “I’m running as a businessman,” the Journal Sentinel quoted him as saying in its obituary. “I’m a person who hasn’t spent a nickel until he made a nickel.”

Kohl self-funded his campaigns so he wouldn’t be beholden to others, and he did not take kindly to the super-rich.

“The one thing I’ve never appreciated is when I meet people who are successful and some of them think it’s all about them, that they’re the ones who made the success and they deserve all the credit,” he told the Sentinel Journal in his 2016 interview. “Big egos. Dominating personalities. That’s a bad way to be. I don’t like people who are overweening in their self-esteem because they’re wrong and it doesn’t bode well for people around them. Too often, they’re also selfish and greedy. It’s a bad characteristic and I’ve always worked as hard as I can not to be suffused in that kind of thinking.”

President Joe Biden said his former Senate colleague, one of the richest men in Wisconsin, did not keep easy company with fellow multimillionaires.

“Throughout his career, Herb was unafraid to stand up to the business community that he’d come from, seeking to level the playing field for workers and make our economy more efficient and fair,” Biden said in a statement Thursday. 

His passion was Wisconsin, where he was familiar with the minutiae of its dairy farms, holding up the budget in 1999 for hours until he got through the state’s farmers’ desired dairy pricing reforms.

The best part of Kohl’s day was meeting constituents. Each day between 9 a.m. and 10 a.m. was coffee and muffins with Wisconsinites.

​​“Trying to drag Herb for a hearing away from those breakfasts was impossible,” Fitch said in 2011.

Kohl bought the Bucks in 1985 when it was rumored that their ailing owner was set to sell the team to buyers who would move the franchise. He dumped millions into the struggling team to keep it in Milwaukee, and when he sold it in 2014, he offered a discount in part to extract a promise that the new owners would keep the team in Wisconsin, and he pledged $100 million to build a new stadium to clinch the deal.

He also gave out $10 million to Bucks employees in bonuses.

“Every day I remind myself how fortunate I’ve been because so much of life is luck,” Kohl said told the Journal Sentinel in 2016. “I was born into a great family, had a great opportunity at Kohl’s, and on and on. I’ve had many, many great experiences and very few bad experiences. So what more can you ask for?”

Kohl, who never married, is survived by his siblings and their children. A nephew, Dan Kohl, helped found J Street, the liberal Jewish Middle East policy group, and ran for Congress unsuccessfully in 2018.


The post Herb Kohl, former Jewish senator from Wisconsin and Milwaukee Bucks owner, dies at 88 appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Continue Reading

RSS

After False Dawns, Gazans Hope Trump Will Force End to Two-Year-Old War

Palestinians walk past a residential building destroyed in previous Israeli strikes, after Hamas agreed to release hostages and accept some other terms in a US plan to end the war, in Nuseirat, central Gaza Strip October 4, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Mahmoud Issa

Exhausted Palestinians in Gaza clung to hopes on Saturday that US President Donald Trump would keep up pressure on Israel to end a two-year-old war that has killed tens of thousands and displaced the entire population of more than two million.

Hamas’ declaration that it was ready to hand over hostages and accept some terms of Trump’s plan to end the conflict while calling for more talks on several key issues was greeted with relief in the enclave, where most homes are now in ruins.

“It’s happy news, it saves those who are still alive,” said 32-year-old Saoud Qarneyta, reacting to Hamas’ response and Trump’s intervention. “This is enough. Houses have been damaged, everything has been damaged, what is left? Nothing.”

GAZAN RESIDENT HOPES ‘WE WILL BE DONE WITH WARS’

Ismail Zayda, 40, a father of three, displaced from a suburb in northern Gaza City where Israel launched a full-scale ground operation last month, said: “We want President Trump to keep pushing for an end to the war, if this chance is lost, it means that Gaza City will be destroyed by Israel and we might not survive.

“Enough, two years of bombardment, death and starvation. Enough,” he told Reuters on a social media chat.

“God willing this will be the last war. We will hopefully be done with the wars,” said 59-year-old Ali Ahmad, speaking in one of the tented camps where most Palestinians now live.

“We urge all sides not to backtrack. Every day of delay costs lives in Gaza, it is not just time wasted, lives get wasted too,” said Tamer Al-Burai, a Gaza City businessman displaced with members of his family in central Gaza Strip.

After two previous ceasefires — one near the start of the war and another earlier this year — lasted only a few weeks, he said; “I am very optimistic this time, maybe Trump’s seeking to be remembered as a man of peace, will bring us real peace this time.”

RESIDENT WORRIES THAT NETANYAHU WILL ‘SABOTAGE’ DEAL

Some voiced hopes of returning to their homes, but the Israeli military issued a fresh warning to Gazans on Saturday to stay out of Gaza City, describing it as a “dangerous combat zone.”

Gazans have faced previous false dawns during the past two years, when Trump and others declared at several points during on-off negotiations between Hamas, Israel and Arab and US mediators that a deal was close, only for war to rage on.

“Will it happen? Can we trust Trump? Maybe we trust Trump, but will Netanyahu abide this time? He has always sabotaged everything and continued the war. I hope he ends it now,” said Aya, 31, who was displaced with her family to Deir Al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip.

She added: “Maybe there is a chance the war ends at October 7, two years after it began.”

Continue Reading

RSS

Mass Rally in Rome on Fourth Day of Italy’s Pro-Palestinian Protests

A Pro-Palestinian demonstrator waves a Palestinian flag during a national protest for Gaza in Rome, Italy, October 4, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Claudia Greco

Large crowds assembled in central Rome on Saturday for the fourth straight day of protests in Italy since Israel intercepted an international flotilla trying to deliver aid to Gaza, and detained its activists.

People holding banners and Palestinian flags, chanting “Free Palestine” and other slogans, filed past the Colosseum, taking part in a march that organizers hoped would attract at least 1 million people.

“I’m here with a lot of other friends because I think it is important for us all to mobilize individually,” Francesco Galtieri, a 65-year-old musician from Rome, said. “If we don’t all mobilize, then nothing will change.”

Since Israel started blocking the flotilla late on Wednesday, protests have sprung up across Europe and in other parts of the world, but in Italy they have been a daily occurrence, in multiple cities.

On Friday, unions called a general strike in support of the flotilla, with demonstrations across the country that attracted more than 2 million, according to organizers. The interior ministry estimated attendance at around 400,000.

Italy’s right-wing government has been critical of the protests, with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni suggesting that people would skip work for Gaza just as an excuse for a longer weekend break.

On Saturday, Meloni blamed protesters for insulting graffiti that appeared on a statue of the late Pope John Paul II outside Rome’s main train station, where Pro-Palestinian groups have been holding a protest picket.

“They say they are taking to the streets for peace, but then they insult the memory of a man who was a true defender and builder of peace. A shameful act committed by people blinded by ideology,” she said in a statement.

Israel launched its Gaza offensive after Hamas terrorists staged a cross border attack on October 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 people hostage.

Continue Reading

RSS

Hamas Says It Agrees to Release All Israeli Hostages Under Trump Gaza Plan

Smoke rises during an Israeli military operation in Gaza City, as seen from the central Gaza Strip, October 2, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Dawoud Abu Alkas

Hamas said on Friday it had agreed to release all Israeli hostages, alive or dead, under the terms of US President Donald Trump’s Gaza proposal, and signaled readiness to immediately enter mediated negotiations to discuss the details.

Continue Reading

Copyright © 2017 - 2023 Jewish Post & News