Think those hotshot hedge-fund jockeys prowl the city’s most exclusive clubs every night? Think again.

Eighty avowed capitalists gathered Tuesday night at the Center for Jewish History for an evening devoted to the History of Jewish Involvement in Business and Finance.

After cocktails in the center’s atrium, guests filed into the auditorium for remarks by a philanthropist and historian, the genealogically fortunate John Loeb Jr., whose ancestors include the Lehmans who founded Lehman Brothers and other prominent Jewish families named Loeb, Lewisohn, and Moses.

In his remarks, Mr. Loeb confessed, “Growing up, I couldn’t have cared less about my family history.”

Not only did no one in his family have a bar mitzvah, but his family celebrated Christmas and Easter.

“My parents were doing everything they could to turn me into a Wasp, or a Wash – the h for Hebrew,” he said.

At the Hotchkiss School, however, Mr. Loeb became very conscious of his Jewish identity. “The anti-Semitism I encountered there is seared into my memory,” Mr. Loeb said. In the fall of 1944, students at the Connecticut prep school were shown newsreels with scenes of Germany’s concentration camps. Some of his classmates cheered.

Thus began Mr. Loeb’s interest in his genealogy, which included the story of how two brothers from Bavaria, who built their fortune in cotton at Montgomery, Ala., founded Lehman Brothers.

But the evening’s topics expanded far beyond Mr. Loeb’s personal family history. A professor of Judaic studies, Robert Chazan, spoke about the genesis of Jewish money-lending. Financial historian Richard Sylla spoke about interest rates in the ancient world.

The purpose of the event was to interest the under-40 crowd in getting involved at the Center for Jewish History, a partnership of the American Jewish Historical Society, American Sephardi Federation, Leo Baeck Institute, Yeshiva University Museum, and Yivo Institute for Jewish Religion.

“Our purpose here is to interest a group like you to come and join the center,” one of the hosts of the event, Joseph Steinberg, said. Mr. Steinberg, is president of Leucadia National Corporation, as well as a member of the center’s board of directors. A member of the center’s board of overseers, William Ackman, the man behind Pershing Square Capital Management, was co-host of the event.

The center’s director, Peter Geffen, delivered the most compelling argument as to why this well-capitalized crowd should invest.

“Nowhere in the world is the tale of the Jewish diaspora more present than in this building,” Mr. Geffen said.

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Leaving a concert hall after a breathtaking performance is one of the loneliest moments in New York. Lucky, then, were the patrons of the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research leaving Carnegie Hall last week after Michael Tilson Thomas’s tour de force, “The Thomashefskys: Music and Memories of Life in the Yiddish Theater.” Rather than go lonely into the night, they took a short walk to the apartment of Mira Van Doren, where they waited their turn to congratulate the maestro personally.

It was a quiet party. The performance was still sinking in.

“It was absolutely breathtaking, a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” Warren Grover said.

“It was like listening to your father interpret your grandmother’s life,” Yury Gruzglin said.

“A great oral interpretation,” David Mercer added.

Conversation seemed almost trivial, so guests filled their plates with blintzes and cast their eyes over the elegant apartment’s vaulted ceiling and antiques. The moment Mr. Tilson Thomas arrived, however, the room became animated, as if all of Carnegie Hall were once again delivering a standing ovation.

It was fitting that Mr. Tilson Thomas take his private bows in the company of Yivo. He worked closely with Yivo’s musicologist, Chana Mlotek, to create the work, which honors his grandparents Borris and Bessie Thomashefsky, two stars of the Yiddish theater.

“Their story was not just about two Jewish immigrants in theater,” Mr. Tilson Thomas, music director of the San Francisco Symphony, said. “It was a social phenomenon about the transformation of a whole group of immigrants. And it was about Yiddishkeit.”

How did he feel about the show after its debut? “Even though it was long and exhausting, it didn’t begin to go into everything there is tell,” the conductor said.

The reception was one of many recent and upcoming events in celebration of Yivo’s 80th anniversary, which have raised more than $1 million. The organization, founded in Vilna but based in New York since 1940, has the largest Yiddish theater collection in the world, part of an archive of 23 million items housed at the Center for Jewish History.