October 24, 2013 – The American Numismatic Society will honor Marian Scheuer Sofaer and the Honorable Abraham D. Sofaer with the Trustees’ Award, thanking these two members, supporters, benefactors and donors for their decades-long commitment. The celebration will take place on January 9, 2014, at the Annual Dinner Gala at The Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City.
Marian Scheuer Sofaer and the Honorable Abraham D. Sofaer. Photograph: Laurie Cameron.
The Sofaers have been closely involved with the American Numismatic Society (ANS) for more than four decades, as members, as generous supporters, and most recently, as the donors of their collection of coins from the ancient Mideast, which they split between the ANS and the Israel Museum. The Abraham and Marian Sofaer Collection was painstakingly assembled over a 30 year period. It contains 5,000 coins and related objects, starting from the Persian period in the 5th and 4th centuries B.C. through the Crusader Kingdom in the 13th century A.D. After the Sofaers funded more than a decade of research, the ANS published in 2013 a two-volume illustrated book of the collection, “Coins of the Holy Land”, creating a standard reference for archaeologists, historians, and numismatists for many years to come.
Past Gala Honorees of the Trustees’ Award include such notable numismatists as Mr. Harlan J. Berk, Mr. Ira Goldberg, Mr. Larry Goldberg, Mr. Victor England, Jr., Mr. Harvey Stack, Mr. Donald G. Patrick, Mr. Q. David Bowers, Mr. Chester L. Krause, and Mr. Roger S. Siboni.
Marian Scheuer Sofaer is CEO, General Counsel and co-founder of Federal Arbitration, Inc., an organization providing high quality arbitration and mediation of civil disputes. Her legal career includes appointments as a New York State Assistant Attorney General in the Litigation Bureau from 1976 to 1980, and as a New York City Assistant Corporation Counsel in the Affirmative Litigation Bureau from 1982 to 1985. Later she represented families whose property in former East Germany had been confiscated by the Nazis. She has also served as a judge pro tem in the Santa Clara Family Court in San Jose, California.
Mrs. Sofaer is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College and Columbia Law School. She co-produced the award-winning documentary “Poumy”, a film about a young woman’s role in the French Resistance during World War II. She was the project director for a historical exhibition in the synagogue in Chendamangalam, India, and is part of a group advising Kerala conservationists on the synagogue restoration in Parur.
Abraham D. Sofaer’s achievements go far beyond the numismatic. He has had a distinguished career as a judge, lawyer, and scholar, and he presently serves as the George P. Shultz Distinguished Scholar and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. Mr. Sofaer’s work focuses on the power over war within the U.S. government and on issues related to international law, terrorism, diplomacy, and national security. His most recent book is “Taking on Iran: Strength, Diplomacy, and the Iranian Threat” (Hoover Institution Press, 2013).
Mr. Sofaer is a graduate of Yeshiva University and New York University School of Law. He served as law clerk to Judge J. Skelly Wright and Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., of the U.S. Supreme Court, after which he worked as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in New York under Robert M. Morgenthau. He taught at Columbia Law School from 1969 to 1979, and served as a U.S. District Judge in the Southern District of New York from 1979 until 1985. As Legal Advisor to the U.S. Department of State, he resolved matters ranging from the dispute between Egypt and Israel over Taba, to the claim against Iraq for its attack on the USS Stark, and the claims against Chile for the assassination of Orlando Letelier. In recognition, he received in 1989 the Distinguished Service Award, the highest State Department award given to a non–civil servant. Following his service in the State Department, he practiced law at Hughes, Hubbard and Reed until 1994, when he joined the Hoover Institution. He is also a founding trustee of the National Museum of Jazz in Harlem and a member of the board of the Koret Foundation.
Each year the Gala raises critical revenue for the ANS, through ticket sales, program advertisements, and the proceeds from a live auction. These funds are used to further the Society’s mission of supporting research and education in numismatics. This year the evening will include a performance by a rising star of the jazz world, trumpeter and composer Dominick Farinacci, and his band. “Dominick Farinacci,” wrote Nate Chinen in The New York Times, “has the prepossessing charm and lyrical instinct of a jazz-pop star.”
For more information, please visit the ANS website.