Haim Saban

Music career

Saban started his music career in 1966 as a bass player and manager with the rock band The Lions of Judah (Ha'arayot), which was named after the Lion of Judah in Jewish Scripture. Saban did not know how to play the bass but conditioned his work booking the band's performances on becoming their bassist. In 1969, Dave Watts from the British band The Tornados joined The Lions. That year, the band traveled to England, performed in night clubs in London and was signed up by Polydor Records. In July 1969, the band appeared on the BBC TV programme Colour Me Pop. The Lions recorded a single, "Our Love's A Growing Thing", but it was not released in the UK due to financial difficulties. The band returned to Israel and Saban focused on being a music promoter.

In Israel, Saban worked as a tour promoter but found himself deep in debt due to financial losses during the Yom Kippur War. He discovered a young Noam Kaniel and took him to Paris, where Saban produced a string of Kaniel's singles and albums. In 1978, Kaniel recorded the theme for Goldorak, the French-dubbed version of UFO Robot Grendizer, the first anime to be telecast in France. This led to Saban's involvement in American cartoon music.

After moving in 1983 to the United States, Haim Saban and partner Shuki Levy became known for soundtrack compositions for children's television programs of the 1980s. Although Levy and Saban composed for their own properties (such as Kidd Video and Maple Town), they scored for other production companies as well (such as Inspector Gadget, The Mysterious Cities of Gold, M.A.S.K., Dinosaucers, Dragon Quest, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, She-Ra: Princess of Power, and Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors).

In 1998, The Hollywood Reporter reported that he did not actually compose all the music (totalling 3,700 works in 2008) he is credited for; ten composers threatened to sue and Saban settled out of court.

Haim Saban was born in Alexandria, Egypt, to an Egyptian-Jewish family. In 1956, the Saban family immigrated to Israel, along with most of the Egyptian Jewish community. Saban was sent to a Youth Aliyah boarding school. Expelled for being a troublemaker, he enrolled in a night high school where the principal told him: "You're not cut out for academic studies; you're cut out for making money." He served as a soldier in the Israel Defense Forces.

Saban is married to Cheryl Lynn (Flor) Saban, with whom he has two children. He also has two stepchildren, Tifanie and Heidi Lenhart, an actress. He resides in Beverly Hills, California.

Fox Family

In 1996, News Corporation's Fox Children's Network and Haim Saban's Saban Entertainment merged to form Fox Kids Worldwide. Also in that year, the company purchased the C&D library from Jean Chalopin.

With the growing shift in children's television from over-the-air programming blocks to cable channels such as Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon, the combined entity (half-owned by Haim Saban himself) sought to launch a competitor that would carry programming from the popular Fox Kids lineup. Eying The Family Channel, News Corp. made an offer to purchase IFE through the Fox Kids Worldwide division in 1997.

On July 23, 2001, Saban announced that he and News Corporation would sell Fox Family Worldwide Inc for $5.3 billion to The Walt Disney Company. and on October 24, 2001, the sale was completed and the network was renamed ABC Family. Saban profited about $1.6 billion from this sale.

In 2007, Saban donated $14 million to complete the children's hospital at Soroka Medical Center.

Other donations

Saban Center for Middle East Policy

In 2002 Saban provided an initial grant of US$13 million and a pledge of additional funds to create the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, a foreign policy think tank based in Washington, D.C. The Saban Center is part of the larger Brookings Institution think tank. The Saban Center aims to provide policy makers in government with information and analysis regarding America's foreign policy in the Middle East. Saban recruited Martin Indyk to direct the center.

Saban National Political Leadership Training Seminar

Saban sponsors the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee's Saban National Political Leadership Training Seminar, a series of semiannual seminars in Washington to provide college student activists for three days of intensive pro-Israel advocacy training. The seminars provide up to 300 students from a hundred campuses with training in order to "prepare for challenges and opportunities on their campuses and [the students] left Washington prepared to mobilize for legislative and electoral impact during the next school year and into campaign '08." Among the prominent figures to have addressed the seminars are Senator Evan Bayh and Congressman Mark Kirk and academics David Makovsky, Robert Satloff and Dennis Ross.