Felix D. Posen

The family lived in an Orthodox community in the Washington Heights neighbourhood of New York City. Posen graduated from Stuyvesant High School and received his bachelor of arts degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1948. He then returned to New York to work with a firm trading furs, leather goods, and essential oils. In 1952, Posen married Jane Levy, a native New Yorker. Not long after their wedding, Posen left to serve in the United States Army MASH (Mobile Army Surgical Hospital) unit during the Korean War.

On his return, Posen began a long and successful career in commodities trading that took him to Tokyo in 1962 and to London in 1968, where he settled in Kensington and lived happily with his family for 52 years. Inspired by his mother’s love for music, Posen regularly attended classical music festivals throughout the UK and Europe and annually sang in the Royal Albert Hall’s Messiah. After many years of working for others, in 1974 Posen co-founded a company that engaged in the trading of oil, metals, and minerals. Upon his retirement in 1992, and still to this day, the company, Glencore, is considered one of the largest in its field worldwide.

Posen’s relationship to his Jewish heritage shifted over the course of his life. Though raised within a strict Orthodox household, he began to question his religious upbringing, in part after meeting a cousin who survived both Auschwitz and one of the Nazis’ death marches. While in Japan, Posen and his wife hired a Japanese rabbi to instruct their three children in Hebrew. After settling in London, however, Posen had to confront the challenge of teaching their children what it meant to be Jewish, since he was no longer religious. Posen recalled, “There was nothing I could find for the growing secular portion of the community who barely counted as Jews.”

Posen then dedicated his life to studying and promoting the idea of Judaism not only as a religion but as a shared identity of history, culture, and community. This concept was novel at the time but, as in business, Posen was a dedicated learner as well as a risk taker. In the 1980s, he established the Posen Foundation to support the growth and adoption of pluralistic Jewish cultural education. After his retirement in 1992, he committed fully to the foundation’s work, playing a key role in establishing the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, where he was governor emeritus and honorary fellow. Posen also helped found the Center for the Study of Antisemitism at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, which houses the Felix Posen Bibliographic Project on Antisemitism. He also helped create two colleges in Israel: Alma Hebrew College in Tel Aviv and Meitar, the College of Pluralistic Judaism in Jerusalem. In 2001, Posen initiated educational programmes on secular Judaism at seven Israeli institutions of higher learning and was ultimately awarded both an honorary fellowship and honorary doctorates by the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the Tel Aviv University and Haifa University.

Felix Posen’s conception of Judaism as a culture was innovative and groundbreaking. Over the years, the Posen Foundation became a central player in the field of Israeli Judaism, supporting and directly running educational projects and initiatives that have had a wide impact on Israeli society as a whole. He fundamentally transformed the field of teacher training in Jewish studies in Israel. He challenged conservative Jewish notions and paved the way for Jews who identified themselves as secular to reclaim their Jewish identity and feel at home in the Jewish world.

Posen has also left a lasting impact on education more broadly. As he spent increasing time with scholars learning about the field of Jewish education, he observed that the stories most often taught and circulated in the 20th century represented only a small percentage of Jewish life and history. To address this significant gap, in 2000, the foundation initiated its flagship project, the Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, a comprehensive ten-volume anthology of original sources, art and texts translated into English, compiled by over 120 scholars worldwide. The aim of the project was to enable Jewish life to be taught holistically and include a multiplicity of voices, from a variety of religious and non-religious perspectives, political persuasions, and genders, using a plethora of media both written and visual. As of September 2025, eight of the 10 volumes have been published by Yale University Press, chronicling the richness of Jewish civilisation across generations, an enormous cultural legacy.

Posen’s pioneering leadership has been carried forward by his son, Daniel Posen, whose inclusive and pluralistic outlook has enabled him to significantly expand the Posen Foundation’s activities in Israel, broaden its educational programmes, and continue to secure substantial funding for numerous NGOs, colleges, and educational institutions across the country. In addition, Daniel Posen has helped bring the Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization into the digital age. The texts and images from the print series are now available as a free online resource.

In addition to his son, Daniel, Felix is survived by his wife of 73 years, Jane Levy Posen; his daughters Stephanie and Melissa; their spouses Jonathan Levi, Diana Posen Suess, and Larry Hirschhorn; his grandchildren Rebecca, Gabriel, and Mimi Levi, Avi and Elias Posen, Jessica, Joshua, and Benjamin Hirschhorn; their spouses and partners; and his great-grandson, Emilio Uribe Levi.

The Posen Family

Felix D Posen: born October 24, 1928. Died September 3, 2025