Well, it is highly tenuous but here goes. The national finance chair of President-Elect Obama's campaign was Penny Pritzker, of the Chicago philanthropic family associated among other things with Hyatt hotels. Penny's first cousin is Thomas Pritzker and it is was Tom's wife Margot, a Jewish studies enthusiast - she has an MA in the subject - who secured family sponsorship for a new translation of the Zohar, the central text of medieval Kabbalah. So far four volumes of the Pritzker edition of the Zohar out of a scheduled 12 have appeared, translated with a commentary by the scholar Daniel Matt. You can read Margot's foreword and an excerpt from the introduction by Arthur Green to this mammoth project online.
