Ep 604: Influential Origins with Alan Mindel and guest Jake Blumencranz P1 on hmTv

Ep. 604 — Influential Origins with Alan Mindel
Guest: Jake Blumencranz — Part 1
hmTv at HMTC

In this episode of Influential Origins, host Alan Mindel sits down with Jake Blumencranz for a thoughtful conversation about family legacy, public service, education, identity, and leadership.

Jake shares the multigenerational story of his family’s business roots, beginning with Lafayette Metal and Glass and evolving into a nearly century-long legacy in the insurance industry through NFP, an Aon company. He reflects on the influence of his grandfather’s philanthropy, including his longtime role in helping shape Northwell Health, and his father’s commitment to public safety through the Nassau County Police Foundation.

The conversation also explores Jake’s own journey growing up in Jericho, Long Island, his experience as a student with dyslexia and dyscalculia, and how those early challenges shaped his advocacy for children with learning differences. Jake discusses his education at Rice University and the London School of Economics, where his studies in public policy, religion, real estate, urban planning, and economic development helped shape the way he views communities, policy, and social change.

Alan and Jake also reflect on the impact of COVID-19, the divisions it exposed, the challenges facing New York, and Jake’s path into public service. As a member of the New York State Assembly, Jake discusses the importance of bipartisan work, common-sense leadership, and finding ways to deliver meaningful policy results even in a highly partisan environment.

This first part of the conversation offers an insightful look into the origins of Jake Blumencranz’s values, leadership, and commitment to serving Long Island and New York State.

Transcript

Ep. 604 — Influential Origins with Alan Mindel
Guest: Jake Blumencranz — Part 1
hmTv at HMTC

[Opening Music]

Alan Mindel:
Welcome to Influential Origins with Alan Mindel. I have a phenomenal guest today, Jake Blumencranz. Jake, thank you so much for being on the show. We very much appreciate it.

Jake Blumencranz:
Alan, thank you for having me on. It’s a pleasure.

Alan Mindel:
Jake, you’ve led a remarkable and incredible life, and you come from a remarkable and incredible family. I can say that as a client of the firm your family is most associated with today, NFP, an Aon company.

But your story goes much deeper than that. I’d love for you to talk about your grandfather, who stepped into a business that started in 1929, and after graduating from Wharton, helped develop what became one of the great businesses here on Long Island.

Jake Blumencranz:
I appreciate you saying that. And I would say the story starts even before him, with his father.

The family was originally involved with a company called Lafayette Metal and Glass, one of the only still-lasting metal and glass businesses that had been on Lafayette Street at the time, going back to the late 1800s. His siblings were operating and selling metal and glass parts for automobiles and buildings.

My great-grandfather, who was not as inclined toward that business, started going around and selling insurance to individuals on the street and in the surrounding business area.

Coincidentally, that original metal and glass business still operates today. They have done glass work on projects ranging from One World Trade Center to Hudson Yards, to the metal and glass work at the Saks Fifth Avenue flagship, and many other projects. It shows the compounding legacy of that original business.

That being said, my great-grandfather entered the insurance business through that avenue. Eventually, his son, my grandfather, took over the business when my great-grandfather passed away while my grandfather was still in college, in his early twenties.

Given a difficult scenario, he faced that adversity, and like many in that greatest generation, he overcame it and created a fantastic business, a family legacy, and a fourth generation in the business. The firm he originally founded would be coming up on 100 years today, still in operation, with that milestone arriving in 2029.

It’s really amazing to be part of that living, breathing legacy he created so many years ago. I get to work with my grandfather every single day, and he will be the honoree coming up with this institution. I’m very excited to see that.

Alan Mindel:
He is an incredibly philanthropic person, in a very philanthropic family. Your grandfather, for those who don’t know, is one of the great philanthropists who helped make Northwell Health and North Shore Hospital what they are today. He has been guiding that institution on the board since 1980, which is now 46 years ago.

Jake Blumencranz:
Yes. At the time, North Shore was a small community hospital, a regional community-based health center, and now it has expanded into quite a network.

Alan Mindel:
I think it’s a $9 billion concern that helps people from Queens, to Long Island, and even down to Florida.

Jake Blumencranz:
And all the way upstate. It’s New York State’s largest employer now.

Alan Mindel:
It’s an incredible institution in its own right, and he has really been part of making it the institution it is today.

Then your father went into the business, and I didn’t know I shared something in common with him. He is also a Cardozo Law graduate. He also had a tremendous role in helping develop our police department and some of our security here on Long Island.

Jake Blumencranz:
Yes, the Nassau County Police Foundation.

Alan Mindel:
And luckily, we live in the safest county right now in America.

Jake Blumencranz:
Yes, and to no small effect because of the work the foundation has done to build the police academy.

Originally, when my father saw where the police were training at the time, in a former elementary school on the South Shore, he said something needed to be done. He, Commissioner Ryder, and many partners, including David Mack, were committed to seeing through the creation of what Nassau County needed: a state-of-the-art training facility.

That facility helps make sure recruits are trained correctly. It includes an intelligence center so law enforcement can better adapt to a changing world, changing technologies, and a changing crime atmosphere. It also helps de-silo those functions so they can operate together.

Alan Mindel:
Every cadet who goes through Nassau County comes here for a very specific reason: so they understand the responsibility of police, the power that needs to be understood, how the public perceives it, and their role in justice and social justice in the world.

Jake Blumencranz:
Not just that. I think it’s important to commend Commissioner Ryder and those who have been part of making intelligence-led policing strategy a priority in Nassau County.

That matters deeply to communities like the Jewish community. Within the training and intelligence center, they have a religious institution building that is multifunctional. It can act as a courthouse, and it can also be retrofitted to look and act like a mosque or a temple.

So instead of police getting training only in a classroom, they can step into what looks like a mosque and learn when and if they should take their shoes off upon entering. They can step into a shul and understand what to do, how to do it, and how to operate so they don’t create a more aggravated situation simply because they don’t know protocols, history, religion, or culture.

Those kinds of proactive policing tactics during training mean everything for saving lives, and they speak to why Nassau is such a safe community.

Alan Mindel:
It also speaks to the fact that Nassau County is larger than eight states, but people don’t always understand the sophistication. You don’t become the safest county accidentally. There is tremendous effort involved.

Pat Ryder has been an unbelievable police commissioner and has served an incredible role here.

So your father was involved in the business, and you grew up in Jericho, Long Island. I’d love for you to talk about that perspective, because you really are a Long Island kid.

Jake Blumencranz:
Yes, through and through. I grew up in Jericho, went to Jericho schools, and it was a fantastic school program.

I also grew up as a child with disabilities, and that has shaped how I’ve handled those topics on a legislative level. Understanding the needs of students who learn differently, who need alternative learning strategies, and understanding what the state can do more effectively in that area, has been invaluable for me.

Jericho was always a trailblazer in that space. The work we’ve done to help children with disabilities and advocate for them at the state level comes from my education and my time at Jericho, and from seeing a school that cared before it was common practice.

Alan Mindel:
Just to spend a little time on that, what was the disability, if you don’t mind speaking about it?

Jake Blumencranz:
I had several learning disabilities. I had dyslexia and dyscalculia.

I remember being in kindergarten, and my teacher, who I still talk to today, told me that I was in her first class and I was her first student with a disability. She had to hold my homework up to a mirror to be able to grade it.

Just because you have learning differences, or unique abilities, or whatever term you want to use, it doesn’t mean you can’t learn. It means you need different learning strategies.

Alan Mindel:
Well, you pretty much proved that yourself. You ended up going to what some would call the Ivy League of the South, Rice University.

That was an amazingly interesting choice, because growing up here and raising kids here, you find out which schools are popular around the country. Rice is an incredible school, but not a typical choice for many Long Island Jewish kids.

Jake Blumencranz:
No, it wasn’t. I personally wanted to be in the South. I loved the schools I saw there, whether it was Vanderbilt, Rice, or others.

I wanted to be in an ecosystem of people who were different from me. On Long Island, when people are looking at schools, or when their kids are looking at schools, they often look at the same four or five places, like Michigan.

Alan Mindel:
Yes, definitely one of them.

Jake Blumencranz:
I didn’t necessarily want to be in the Michigan world. I wanted to go somewhere where I would meet different people from different backgrounds and different parts of the country and the world.

I definitely feel like I got that at Rice. I loved being in Houston and in Texas. I loved my experience at Rice, the Baker Institute, and the work I was able to do there, even as a student. It was fantastic.

Alan Mindel:
It’s an extraordinary school. It has around 4,600 undergraduates. It’s small, with a very low student-to-faculty ratio. If you go there, you can have fun like at any American college, but it is a serious place.

Jake Blumencranz:
Yes, for sure. It is a rigorous institution.

Alan Mindel:
And you had a dual major. Tell us a little about the majors you chose.

Jake Blumencranz:
It was interesting, and I tell this to students all the time, whether they are interns or students asking for help with college: follow what you want to do, because you never know where you’re going to end up.

I had always had a curiosity about my own religion, my own Judaism, and my own faith. That question followed me into college.

I knew I wanted to study public policy, and I was majoring in public policy, but I also wanted another major, whether philosophy, religion, or history. I wanted to dive into a passion as well.

I started by taking introductory classes in virtually every humanity, and then I ended up in a religious studies class that completely captivated me. It helped me answer some questions about my own religion, but also about religion at large and the role it has played in society, public policy, and the norms and practices we have every day.

Getting in touch with my own faith, and also understanding what faith means to others, helped shape how I moved through the world from that point forward. I truly enjoyed both of my majors.

Alan Mindel:
How did that color your view of the world? Which religions did you study? Almost all of them, or was there a concentration?

Jake Blumencranz:
I studied a lot of new American religions, obviously Judaism, and many others, particularly how they played a role in society.

A lot of my thesis work at the end of school was related to real estate and how different markets throughout the United States were affected by immigrant religious groups, then tracking what their purchasing process looked like and where they settled after the first or second generation.

I looked at Vietnamese communities in the Houston region, Korean and Chinese populations in the New York region and San Francisco, and how those communities operated differently as real estate buyers.

I was really diving into housing markets, housing policy, the NGO space, and religion, and looking at how those things are interconnected.

For example, you can examine why someone who lived in Vietnam and moved here as a Christian statistically did better than someone who remained Buddhist. One answer was that much of the NGO money in Texas that helped people learn English and become part of society was run through Christian organizations. Those who converted or were already Christian had help, while others often entered traditional fishing villages, which reflected what they had known how to do in Vietnam, rather than being fully integrated.

Those dynamics shaped what those populations looked like two or three generations later.

Alan Mindel:
And the socioeconomics of what they were dealing with.

Jake Blumencranz:
Exactly. And here we are in New York, one of the most diverse cultures in the world, where people come from everywhere. Studying those patterns helped me understand the direction different communities might take based on their history.

In a place like Flushing, for example, you can look at first-generation versus second-generation home purchasers. Which group, when they achieved upward mobility through hard work, was more likely to move to Long Island or Manhattan? Which group was more likely to stay where their family was because they were in a multigenerational home?

You can see those patterns clearly when you look at some of the religious nuances of the first generation that came in. It was fascinating to see how those patterns played out. Flushing today is a very different place than it was even a decade ago.

Alan Mindel:
For sure. If you go back three or four decades, it’s incredible.

I spent a good part of my life growing up in Bayside, Queens, and I try to explain to people today that it almost seems magical. It was unbelievably diverse. People were open about how diverse they were, and yet also so integrated, because that was simply the way it was.

Everyone could be open about who they were, where they were from, what their family was like, and maybe people even felt comfortable joking about it. But there was a certain respect because everyone knew everybody.

Today, it almost feels like society has moved in the opposite direction. That same integration isn’t necessarily there, which is probably at the root of some of the problems we’re dealing with.

Jake Blumencranz:
Yes. It’s a different ecosystem, and different ecosystems have different outcomes. It’s worth examining.

That is part of the outside-the-box thinking that I credit an institution like Rice with helping me develop, and that continued in my postgraduate studies.

Alan Mindel:
So that has its own thread through it.

Jake Blumencranz:
It changes your lens. It changes the lens through which you look at how policies come to be, how they continue to exist, and where they came from.

A lot of policy today involves fixing people’s good ideas from the past. Look at people like Robert Moses. Some fantastic, truly monumental things were done by that man, and they changed and shaped the world we live in, especially here in Nassau County.

But some of those decisions also had ripple effects on socioeconomic groups and on how we travel. Every person who gets on a roadway in Nassau County may wonder, maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. Maybe driving was not supposed to be leisurely, but have utility. Maybe the trains could have been a little different.

Alan Mindel:
Maybe we should have cared more about public transportation here.

Jake Blumencranz:
Exactly. Those are the questions. In the policy world, it’s about understanding who made a good decision, who made a bad one, and how we can either rectify those decisions or avoid continuing down the same path of poor decisions over and over again.

Alan Mindel:
After enjoying your time in Houston, Texas, which is a very different world from Long Island, New York, you decided you wanted something as different from Texas as humanly possible. So you went to study at the London School of Economics.

Take me to that decision and what you learned there.

Jake Blumencranz:
At the time, I still wanted to go into the real estate space. Real estate can be incredibly fascinating and dynamic, and it was something I had always been interested in.

I was also interested in politics when I was at Rice. I ran the College Republicans at the time, and the election of 2016 was an interesting one. I disengaged somewhat from politics then and started to pursue more of a private-sector path instead of public policy, given everything happening in the country and the level of division.

So I went to the London School of Economics. It has one of the best programs in the world when it comes to real estate geography and urban planning. I studied local economic development, urban planning, and real estate there in the United Kingdom.

Alan Mindel:
At one of the world’s most renowned institutions for it.

Jake Blumencranz:
Yes, and it was a great place to study.

Just like Texas was an outside-the-box choice, studying at the London School of Economics gave me another lens. The way they look at how European policy affects housing and urban planning is very different from the New York lens or the Texas lens.

In Houston, there is no zoning. It is the city without zoning. London, on the other hand, is a city where zoning is everything.

It all comes back to what I tell students: if I look back at my educational trajectory, it is such a mixed experience. I studied the humanities, public policy, a master’s in science, and more technical components. All of it came together in a way that, when I ended up where God wanted me, or where I was meant to be, in the State Assembly, each one of those educational experiences became invaluable.

We led and fought a battle about zoning, regionalization, and how Long Island would be treated in the future. My background in urban planning played a massive role in allowing me to be a thought leader on that issue. My experience in religious studies and public policy also contributed. All of those experiences wove together to give me the best possible education for where I am today.

Alan Mindel:
So you came back and worked at NFP for a period of time, and you still do to this day.

Jake Blumencranz:
Yes, I do.

Alan Mindel:
How did you go from there to the Assembly?

Jake Blumencranz:
Around 2020, I was working at a real estate dealing firm, Time Equities. Then COVID happened, and the world went crazy.

I decided I might pursue more of a career in the family business, in the insurance space, after doing some soul-searching during that difficult time.

Part of that search made me look up and look around at the madness going on, if you think back to 2020.

Alan Mindel:
Society almost never came closer to falling apart.

Jake Blumencranz:
Yes. Collectively, we had not experienced that level of shared trauma at the same time.

Alan Mindel:
And dysfunction, in a lot of ways.

Jake Blumencranz:
And a lot of unknown.

Alan Mindel:
There was also an incredible divide between people who needed to work, not just for their own economic security, but because if they didn’t show up, people weren’t going to eat, society wasn’t going to function, hospitals weren’t going to stay open, groceries wouldn’t get stocked, gas wouldn’t get in cars.

For us in the hotel business, doctors wouldn’t have a place to stay. There were so many aspects of that. There was a dividing line between those who could work from home on a screen and those who had to be in the fire.

Jake Blumencranz:
On top of that, it segmented our workforce into what people considered “essential” and “non-essential.”

Alan Mindel:
And everyone thought they were essential.

Jake Blumencranz:
Everyone does. And everyone also realized how essential it was to go to work.

For many people, from a mental health standpoint, that moment was a reset button. It made them reassess their lives, their decisions, their families, where they wanted to be, whether they were happy or sad.

That moment meant a lot to a lot of people. Some handled it well, and some did not. Some changed for the better, some for the worse. But we saw society collectively on edge.

I felt it was not a time to sit on the sidelines. I decided to get more engaged. I was angry, upset, and shocked to see how my government was dealing with that crisis, and how everyday New Yorkers were stuck in a world where they didn’t have representatives fighting for them and what they needed.

That led me into the world of public policy.

Alan Mindel:
Education really stopped, and I think the people who were damaged the most were our kids.

I had the blessing of living and working in New York, but once things opened up a bit, I also had to work in a business in Florida. You could see the stark difference between how things were working here, or not working here, compared with how things were working there.

Jake Blumencranz:
It was stark.

Looking back at COVID, the way we view it now is not the same as what we saw in 2020. There is no doubt that we have to follow health professionals when they give advice and guidance, and I don’t regret many of the decisions made, especially at the beginning.

But when you look at the numbers in Florida and New York, it becomes a complicated conversation.

Alan Mindel:
Weather patterns probably helped or hurt things too.

Jake Blumencranz:
And we know more now about how the spread worked than we did at the time. Back then, we were dealing with unknowns, not what people assumed were knowns.

That being said, it definitely gave us a stark policy comparison, and that comparison continued to become evident across many topics when looking at New York and Florida.

Alan Mindel:
You went to the Assembly, and in the Assembly you had your topics. Some of those were issues where you shared views with people on the other side of the aisle and were able to accomplish things that affected everyone for the better.

Now every health professional has an EpiPen because of your work, essentially. We also talked about people who would come into your home and claim it as theirs.

Jake Blumencranz:
Yes.

Alan Mindel:
That’s a real policy difference between New York and other states, and we are still trying to improve it. You have had policies move through the Assembly that made a real difference.

Jake Blumencranz:
Here’s how I would put it.

I live in a world where I am part of a superminority in the Assembly. That is not an easy place to be. Passing a bill in Albany is already a difficult uphill battle if you are part of the majority. As a member of the minority caucus, the conversation becomes even more difficult.

Not only do you have to convince your own like-minded colleagues to support your legislation, you have to go to people who already default to thinking you’re wrong, convince them you’re right, convince them to get on board, and then get it done.

We were able to do that all four years I was in the Assembly. We managed to achieve some level of policy change through budget language, actual bill language, and even the removal of bill language.

It all comes down to how you can convince and work with people who you fundamentally disagree with. I think that is what people want in an effective legislator.

Can I hold the beliefs, the common knowledge, and the values I was elected with, while navigating a place that is fundamentally at odds with those things, and still come home with policy victories that help my communities? That is what makes an effective legislator.

The University of Virginia released a study that called me one of the most effective bipartisan legislators. That speaks to the work we have done and the work we have been able to achieve as a bipartisan, moderate, common-sense voice in one of the most partisan buildings in state politics.

Alan Mindel:
Famously partisan. And we live in a state with real challenges. There are states that are growing and states that are not, and we live in a state that is not.

Every state has its challenges, but I think in our next segment we’re going to talk about some of the challenges here, including challenges that affect the Jewish community and other communities, and what is making life more difficult — or, to be polite, a lot more difficult — here in New York.

With that, we’ll take our break, and we’ll come back and talk about those issues.

[End of Part 1]