Thomas Kaplan

Thomas Kaplan: Trivia

• Kaplan's passion for Dutch art began in childhood when he saw a painting by Rembrandt at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
• He and his wife, Dafna, began collecting Dutch Golden Age art in 2003 and have since amassed a collection of over 250 paintings and drawings.
• The Leiden Collection is named after the Dutch town of Leiden, where Rembrandt and Gerrit Dou were born.
• Kaplan's "mantra" for investing is to "go for the great assets that give you tremendous underlying leverage to your theme... but only in jurisdictions that will allow you to keep the fruits of the leverage."
• Analysts refer to his highlighting the importance of jurisdictional risks in the mining industry as the "Kaplan Doctrine."
• Kaplan is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and belongs to the International Council of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University.
• He co-founded Justice for Kurds (JFK) in 2018 with French philosopher and activist Bernard-Henri Lévy, an advocacy group that seeks to educate and raise public awareness about the Kurdish cause in the U.S. and globally.
• Kaplan served as president (2009–2012) and chairman of the board of directors (2012–2015) of the 92nd Street Y, a prominent Jewish community and cultural center in New York City.
• He helped fund the creation of Albertine, a bookshop housed in the historic Payne Whitney House of the French Embassy on Fifth Avenue in New York City.
• Kaplan became the chairman of the International Alliance for the Protection of Heritage in Conflict Areas (ALIPH) in 2017, a Geneva-based foundation dedicated to the implementation of preventive, emergency response, and restoration programs for cultural property in danger of destruction, damage, or looting.
• He is the executive chairman of Panthera Corporation, a charity he and his wife co-founded with Alan Rabinowitz in 2006, which is devoted to preserving big cats and their ecosystems.
• Kaplan helped establish a felid conservation program at Oxford University in collaboration with David MacDonald.
• He founded the Orianne Society, focused on the conservation of the eastern indigo snake and its habitat, the last remaining long-leaf pine forests of the Southeastern United States.
• Kaplan launched the Indian Ocean Tortoise Alliance (IOTA), a Seychelles-based initiative dedicated to the conservation of the Aldabra tortoise and its rewilding in the other countries where it previously existed.