Columbia University SIPA’s LS Power, Segal Foundation And Pro-IDF Connection (Conclusion)

Sharing an office with the Segal family-owned LS Power for-profit utility/energy industry firm, on the 35th floor of a building located at 1700 Broadway in Manhattan, the Mike and Sofia Segal Foundation was initially called the Segal Family Foundation when it was established by Mikhail “Mike” and Sofia Segal. And, according to its Form 990 financial filings, between 2010 and 2012 this foundation gave 2 “charitable grants”, totaling $120,000, to The Birthright Israel Foundation.

Then, between 2013 and 2018, the Mike and Sofia Segal Foundation gave 5 “charitable grants”, totaling over $2.1 million, to The Jewish Agency for Israel. In addition, between 2016 and 2019, the same foundation gave 3 “charitable grants”, to the pro-IDF World Jewish Congress.

And between 2021 and 2024, the Mike and Segal Foundation gave over $1.5 million in “charitable grants” to Columbia University, primarily to fund Columbia’s Center on Global Energy Policy — prior to Columbia SIPA’s July 2026 announcement that the same foundation will now also be helping to fund an undergraduate degree program at SIPA during the 2026–2027 academic year.

Besides being, along with Sofia Segal, a trustee of his Mike and Sofia Segal Foundation, Columbia SIPA Donor Segal has also sat next to a former Barnard College trustee, Merryl Tisch, on the board of trustees of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a pro-IDF think-tank, in this decade. And between 2015 and 2024, Columbia SIPA Donor Segal’s foundation gave 10 “charitable grants”, totaling over $1.8 million, to help fund the Washington Institute for Near East Policy; while former Barnard College Trustee Tisch’s James and Merryl Tisch Foundation (which gave at least 6 grants, totaling $460,000, to Barnard College, between 2001 and 2016) gave at least 9 grants, totaling over $270,000, to the same pro-IDF think-tank.

Most Columbia University and Barnard College undergraduates in 2026 are still opposed to the U.S. government-armed IDF’s post-October 7, 2023 genocidal war on Palestinian civilians in Gaza, the IDF’s post-2023 war on civilians in Lebanon and the post-2025 U.S. and Israel war machine attacks on Iran (which all violate the UN Charter, international law and the Nuremberg Accords). Yet, according to a press release, titled “Washington Institute Present Scholar-Statesman Award to General Michael E. Kurilla and Honors Philanthropists Mike and Sofia Segal”, which was posted on the Washington Institute for Near East Policy website on Nov. 26, 2025:

“Retired General Michael `Erik’ Kurilla — who, as commander of U.S. Central Command, led 2 years of multi-front operations across the Middle East…was honored with the Scholar-Statesman Award at The Washington Institute’s annual gala in New York City…

“…General Kurilla was recognized for his…leadership during one of the most challenging periods in the region’s history, which included unprecedented U.S.-Israel defense cooperation during wartime as well as the first-ever U.S. bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities (Operation Midnight Hammer).

“During the gala, the Institute also paid tribute to Mike and Sofia Segal, longtime supporters of the organization…

“`Mike and Sofia Segal are pillars of The Washington Institute,’ said Robert Satloff, Segal Executive Director…”

In addition, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy’s “Tisch Distinguished Fellow” (named in recognition of former Barnard College Trustee Merryl Tisch and her husband) is Michael Herzog, a retired IDF Brigadier general, who also was the Israeli government’s Ambassador to the United States between 2021 and 2025. And the brother of former Israeli Ambassador to the USA Herzog, Israeli President Isaac Herzog, was also given a “Scholar-Statesman Award” in November 2024 by the Washington Institute for Near East Affairs that Columbia SIPA Donors Mike and Sofia Segal’s foundation helps fund.

Most of the money that Washington Institute for Near East Policy Trustee and Columbia SIPA Donor Mike Segal’s foundation has used to help fund pro-IDF institutions in the 21st-century was obtained by profiteering from the LS Power family business which Segal and his wife founded in 1990–-12 years after they migrated to the USA from the former Soviet Union in 1978 (during the same year that the IDF killed around 2,000 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians during its first invasion of South Lebanon up to the Litani River in March 1978).

As Naureen S. Malik noted in an article, titled “AI Boom Helps Score $12 Billion Deal for Little-Known LS Power,” that was posted on the EnergyNow.com website on May 15, 2025, in 2005 the for-profit Segal family’s company “began snapping up plants sold off by utilities or other electricity producers” and “launched its first private equity fund to fuel the shopping spree.” Then, in 2014 it “opened a New Jersey plant to take advantage of the boom in shale gas production” and also “started expanding into renewables as well.”

And, according to the same May 2025 article:

“LS bet on buying and building natural gas plants…Now utilities see gas-fired plants as essential to meeting a surge of electricity demand from new data centers. And LS’s gamble on gas…produced a $12 billion pay day.”

The “$12 billion pay day” which the Segal Foundation trustees’ LS Power announced in May 2025 resulted from LS Power arranging a business deal with one of the biggest U.S. energy power companies in the USA, NRG Energy Inc., in which NRG Energy acquired 18 of the gas-burning power plants LS Power then owned, in exchange for giving LS Power $6.4 billion in cash and an 11 percent share of the NRG Energy common stock ownership, whose then worth exceeded $2.8 billion.

Until its 2025 deal with NRG Energy was finalized in 2026, the Segal Foundation trustees’ LS Power was the parent company since 2017 of NYC’s largest fossil fuel-fired power plant, the Ravenswood Generating Station in Long Island City (which Con Edison had owned until 1999) that the Rise Light & Power [RISE] then-subsidiary of LS Power operated, which provides 20 percent of New York City’s electrical power needs. And in 2020 LS Power had “invested in EVgo, one of the largest public fast-charging platforms for electric vehicles with 1,000-plus fast charging stations in 66-plus metropolitan areas,” according to LS Power’s 2024 Annual Report.

Yet on Jan. 21, 2020, the then-Counsel for the City of New York, Kevin M. Lang, and the then-NYC Mayor’s Office of Sustainability Deputy Director for Infrastructure and Energy Policy, Susan DesRoches, had submitted a “Comment and Protest of the City of New York” to the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission which stated:

“…The City of New York (City’) submits…protest to the application…of LS Power Grid New York Corporation (LSPG’) for acceptance of…certain rate incentives (Application’)…The City protests the Application to the extent it seeks unjust and unreasonable rates…Applicant’s Proposed Return On Equity (ROE’) Appears To Be Excessive…LSPG is facing minimal risks…It does not need an ROE…The City…submits that Applicant has not properly taken interests of consumers into consideration…The Application makes no mention of the rate impacts that consumers will experience…The City…requests that the Commission reject Applicant’s proposed return on equity as unjust and unreasonable…”

And the Columbia SIPA undergraduate program that LS Power’s Owner’s foundation is funding will be headed by a former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the early 21st-century Bush-Cheney Administration and the current “Pritzker Chair” of the U.S. power elite’s Center for Strategic and International Studies [CSIS] think tank (whose board of trustees includes Billionaire Leon Cooperman — whose Leon and Toby Cooperman Family Foundation gave a $300,000 grant in 2024 to CSIS and a $10 million “charitable grant” to The Birthright Israel Foundation in 2026 — and whose CSIS board of trustees chair is Billionaire Thomas Pritzker), named Thomas J. Christensen. (end of article)