More than a decade ago, she attended a talk on Martha’s Vineyard by civil rights activist Julian Bond, who spoke about Julius Rosenwald, the Jewish businessman and head of retailing giant Sears, Roebuck. Bond described how Rosenwald worked with Booker T. Washington to help fund nearly 5,000 schools for Black children across the Jim Crow South between 1917 and 1932.

“I’ve got to go make that film,” recalled Kempner. 

Kempner went on to write and produce the 2015 documentary “Rosenwald,” about the Illinois native she calls perhaps the greatest unsung philanthropist in American history.

A decade later, Rosenwald is unsung no more. A mix of federal legislation — initiated in part by Kempner’s film — museum exhibitions, digital archives, and grassroots preservation efforts is pushing Rosenwald’s legacy back into public view — and testing whether efforts to confront America’s unsavory history of racial discrimination can survive the administration efforts to erase Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion efforts at federal museums and monuments.

In February, Sen. Dick Durbin, the Illinois Democrat, introduced legislation to create a Rosenwald National Historic Park, backed by seven Democratic co-sponsors. The proposal would formally recognize Rosenwald and the sprawling network of schools that reshaped Black education in the segregated South.

The bill calls for a Chicago site that once included the Sears merchandising complex, as well as sites of schools in rural Maryland, South Carolina and Virginia. 

Its staunchest advocate has been Dorothy Canter, a National Parks Conservation Association volunteer who has pushed for a park since seeing Kempner’s film. “I didn’t know what to expect in September 2015 when my husband and I went to see a documentary about a man I had never heard of — Julius Rosenwald,” Canter recalled in an essay. “When it was over, I turned to my husband and said, ‘There needs to be a national park to honor him.’”

Canter is now president of the Julius Rosenwald & Rosenwald Schools National Historical Park Campaign.

Julius Rosenwald, inset, helped build nearly 5,000 schools in the segregated South, as seen in a map from the Julius Rosenwald Fund Archives. (Library of Congress; Fisk University, John Hope and Aurelia E. Franklin Library Special Collection, Julius Rosenwald Fund Archives)

But the bill’s future remains uncertain in a sharply divided Congress, where Republican support will be necessary to move it out of committee and ultimately to the president’s desk. 

In his first term, President Donald Trump signed legislation to assess the feasibility of establishing the park. But Durbin’s bill is landing as the administration has moved to take down slavery exhibits at the President’s House in Philadelphia; ordered the Smithsonian Institution to remove what it deems “divisive narratives”; removed the LGBT Pride flag (since restored) from the Stonewall National Monument in early February, and seeks to reinstall Confederate statues toppled in the wake of the George Floyd protests starting in 2020.  

Efforts to honor Rosenwald are coming at a time “when even the mildest celebration of diversity can be deemed an excess of the ‘woke’ left,” the Forward reported. 

Despite the anti-DEI climate, private initiatives to remember Rosenwald and the schools continue.

At Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, scholars and archivists have recently opened a major new window into Rosenwald’s legacy.

The university launched the Julius Rosenwald Fund Archive database in September 2025, creating a major digital portal for documents tied to the Rosenwald Fund’s work across the South. The collection includes letters, photographs, fellowship applications, and architectural records tied to the construction of thousands of the tidy, wooden schools. 

The archive significantly expands public access to one of the largest archival collections on Black education in the early 20th century.

“Fisk University has always shared in his interest for social justice, and we are fortunate to have in our library several Rosenwald-related collections that tell the story of the rural schools, library program, and bus services for the transportation of black children to and from school,” the university said in a release announcing the project. 

A celebration is scheduled for June 5, marking the completion of the digitization effort.

On the ground, preservationists are also racing to save what remains of the physical school buildings themselves. Many Rosenwald schools were closed, demolished, or repurposed following desegregation.

In South Carolina alone, where roughly 500 Rosenwald schools were built, only 44 of the structures survive. Nonprofits and state officials are renewing efforts to stabilize the surviving structures.

With $300,000 in state funding, groups including the WeGOJA Foundation and Conservation Voters of South Carolina have begun studying six extant schools, aiming to preserve and potentially reopen them as public history sites.

At the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., an exhibition titled “A Better Life for Their Children: Julius Rosenwald, Booker T. Washington, and the 4,978 Schools that Changed America” is on view through January 2027. It presents photographs and historical documentation of the school-building program, including work by photographer Andrew Feiler. Feiler wrote a 2021 book about the schools, also called “A Better Life for Their Children.”

Rosenwald was born in 1862 to German Jewish immigrants in Springfield, Illinois, across the street from Abraham Lincoln’s childhood home. His father was active in the local synagogue, and Rosenwald himself received a Jewish education that some scholars say instilled the idea of tzedakah as obligation rather than optional charity. 

Rosenwald Schools also served as community centers for adults. Above, the Pine Grove Rosenwald School, Columbia, South Carolina, c. 1936. (Richland County Recreation Commission)

As part-owner and later president of Sears, Roebuck and Company, he was a member of Chicago’s Reform Jewish elite, where figures such as Rabbi Emil G. Hirsch influenced his thinking about civic responsibility. At the same time, his Jewishness also shaped his response to segregation. Rosenwald wrote that “the horrors that are due to race prejudice come home to the Jew more forcefully than to others of the white race.”

In his new memoir “Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries,” journalist and New Orleans native Nicholas Lemann writes about prosperous German Jewish families like his own, including Rosenwald’s. While “their positions on racial matters were a long way short of what would be acceptable today,” writes Lemann, German Jewish families in early 20th-century America “were among the very few prominent and established white people who publicly supported Black causes.” 

(Lemann’s grandfather, Montefiore Lemann, and Rosenwald’s son-in-law, Edgar Stern, were among the founders of Dillard University, a historically Black school in New Orleans.) 

In 1912, Washington, the principal of Tuskegee Institute, approached Rosenwald with an idea to build schools for Black children in the segregated South. Rosenwald, a Tuskegee trustee, shared Washington’s faith in the power of self-help, and insisted on building schools with matching funds contributed by local Black families and their allies. 

The Julius Rosenwald Fund (which, by design, spent down 16 years after Rosenwald’s death in 1932) awarded fellowships to Black artists and scholars, including Marian Anderson, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Julian Bond’s father, the educator and social scientist Horace Mann Bond.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation, which in 2002 joined with grassroots activists, local officials and preservationists to help raise awareness of the schools, hailed the Rosenwald schools as “the most important initiative to advance Black education in the early 20th century.”

Feiler also calls the schools program one of the earliest collaborations between Black and Jewish leaders in what would later be known as the civil rights movement.

“It helps establish the foundation of education and leadership that helps make the civil rights movement happen,” said Feiler, during the opening of a temporary exhibit about Rosenwald mounted last year at the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum. “And yet this remains hidden history, and its scope and sweep is largely unknown.” 

Kempner, who has screened her film for Black and Jewish audiences, thinks the current commemorative efforts are long overdue. 

“It’s a great story of solidarity between the groups and a great American story,” she said Tuesday. “He was so modest and he didn’t want his name on anything, but I’m thrilled there’s so much attention coming to him.” 

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Gitzin, 44, was named acting CEO of the New Israel Fund in December, as its longtime CEO, Daniel Sokatch, begins a year-long sabbatical. Gitzin takes over at an organization that funds progressive Jewish and Arab organizations in Israel that are often at odds with the Israeli government. As a result, it has been vilified by Israel’s right and their allies in the United States as dangerously radical, even traitorous.

And yet today, as Israel is led by its most right-wing government ever and anti-Zionism is growing on the American left, NIF finds itself in a different, if no less precarious, position: defending a space in the Jewish mainstream that is fiercely critical of Israeli policy while affirming a version of Zionism that aligns with democratic equality. 

“NIF was always in the forefront when it came to the liberal progressive ideas that were later on absorbed by the mainstream,” said Gitzin, the first Israeli to lead the organization, in a Zoom interview. “We are not there to be the mainstream. We’re there to push the mainstream, but in order to push the mainstream, you need to be in touch with the mainstream and not give up on it, which is a very, very fine line.”

That position leaves NIF open to criticism from both sides. To some on the American left, Zionism of any stripe is incompatible with democracy and human rights for Palestinians and other minorities. In many parts of the Jewish center, NIF’s grantees reveal political and social ills in Israel they’d rather not see, and definitely do not want broadcast to the rest of an already hostile world. 

Yet Gitzin argues that NIF reflects where many American Jews actually are: horrified by Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, devastated by the destruction in Gaza, and alienated by a discourse that demands total allegiance to one narrative or another.

“We’re there to push the mainstream, but in order to push the mainstream, you need to be in touch with the mainstream,” said Mickey Gitzin, the interim CEO of the New Israel Fund. (Yanai Yechiel)

“People want to act in ways that fit with their values,” he said. “I think that we have a very powerful story to tell, that the story of Israel is being able to care about the state of Israel and fight for it and care about the notion of equality for Jews and Palestinians.”

Born in Israel to immigrants from the former Soviet Union, Gitzin grew up in Azor, a working-class development town. His first rebellion, he said, was against the politics of his right-leaning parents. His political awakening came late, sharpened by his service as an intelligence officer in the Israel Defense Forces, where he worked on Palestinian affairs during the Camp David negotiations and the Second Intifada.

That “allowed me to understand the complexity of the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians, the role that Israel plays, and the missed opportunities all through the way,” he said.

Later, as a Jewish Agency emissary in South Bend, Indiana, Gitzin encountered an American Jewish world that unsettled his assumptions about liberal politics and Jewish observance, which among many secular Israelis are often seen as incompatible. “I was able to jump between the communities happily, something that I’ve never been able to do in Israel,” he said.

Returning to Israel, he founded an organization focused on religious freedom that later became an NIF grantee. Gitzin had found his institutional home. Eight years ago he became executive director of NIF’s Israel office — years that coincided with some of the fiercest attacks the organization had ever faced.

Though more intense, those attacks were not new. Since the 1980s, NIF has been accused by critics of undermining Israel by funding human rights groups that promoted anti-Israel positions. In 2010, the right-wing organization Im Tirtzu said NIF grantees were helping hostile groups abroad build their case against the Jewish state. Those grantees included B’Tselem, a human rights group, who said they merely reported human rights violations and left others to draw their own conclusions. 

NIF responded at the time that politically charged groups like B’Tselem represent only a fraction of their grantees. It pointed to other grantees, including the Association for Civil Rights, the pro-democracy group Mehazkim, the civil-society coalition Citizens HQ and the Israel Religious Action Center, a public policy arm of the Reform movement.

More recently, the criticism came not just from right-wing NGOs but from the prime minister’s office. In 2018, Netanyahu blamed NIF for thwarting his plan to deport African asylum seekers. That same year, he accused NIF of weakening Israel by opposing the nation-state law that prioritized Jewish national identity over equal citizenship for non-Jewish Israelis.

“I think it was very confusing for the organization,” said Gitzin. “We’re do-gooders, and all of a sudden we found ourselves in such an attack.”

The organization’s response, he said, was to retool and stop ducking each individual attack or trying to convince critics that NIF’s mission was as a non-ideological supporter of “civil society” or “social justice.”

Instead, NIF has clarified that it stands for democracy, peace, building Palestinian civil society, Jewish-Arab partnership and protecting human rights. Other issues, like economic justice and religious pluralism, are less of a priority now, said Gitzin, who described the process as “being pushed out of the closet.” 

“As someone who came out of the closet, personally, as a gay person, I know it’s really, really difficult to be pushed out of the closet,” he said. “And then when you’re out it’s the most powerful feeling that you can know.”

A physician volunteering for the mobile medical clinic run by NIF-grantee Physicians for Human Rights-Israel treats Palestinian patients in the West Bank. (Mati Milstein for NIF)

As a result of this clarity, he said, their support in Israel grew. Donations from within Israel also surged after Netanyahu’s attacks, Gitzin said, as liberal Israelis came to see NIF as part of a broader struggle to defend democratic institutions.

According to NIF, since 2023 — and especially in the aftermath of Oct. 7 — NIF’s donor base has increased by more than 7,000, from roughly 14,000 donors to more than 21,000 through 2024. Its annual budget in 2025 was $28.5 million, a figure that does not include additional funds it stewards through donor-advised gifts and family foundations. 

In 2025, NIF distributed more than $12.8 million in core grants to 97 grantees, and spent an additional $3.7 million on strategic capacity-building and issue advocacy in Israel.

NIF employs 112 staff members, with 42 based in the United States and 70 in Israel.

Gitzin boasts that NIF was one of the first organizations to respond to the Oct. 7 attacks, finding hotels for people who were evacuated from Ofakim and other villages. NIF also raised more than $3 million for a humanitarian campaign to aid Gazan civilians.

In Israel, NIF has expanded its work in the West Bank, funding not only legal advocacy but “protective presence,” supporting Israelis and Palestinians who show up as observers and demonstrators at Palestinian communities threatened  by settler violence. Gitzin describes the campaign to push Palestinians out of Area C, the fully Israeli-controlled territory in the West Bank, as systematic and state-enabled. 

“These are not mistakes,” he said. “It’s a policy.”

He worries about the tens of thousands of Israelis who have left the country since Oct. 7, suspecting many are the kind of liberal democrats who agree with NIF’s agenda. And he warns about the rise of what he and others call “Kahanism,” a hyper-nationalist Zionism associated with the late Meir Kahane, the American rabbi who at one time was shunned even by the Israeli right for being too radical. 

Such Kahane acolytes as the far-right senior ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, Gitzin said, make it increasingly obvious that “the attack against Israel and democracy comes from the settlement enterprise and ultra-nationalist settlers,” alongside “populist leadership like Netanyahu” and forces that “can’t live with the notion of equality.”

Asked whether liberal Zionism still has a future in Israel, Gitzin argued that the political landscape is shifting in ways that create new — if limited — opportunities. While the traditional left remains a small minority, he said, “the definition of what’s left or not left is changing,” especially since Oct. 7 and, before then, the government’s judicial overhaul proposal that triggered massive pro-democracy demonstrations.    

“There is a  space to influence, where more people are searching for answers. There’s definitely a growing camp of people who are not pleased with the current government and who identify as liberal democrats,” he said. “Our job is to reach out to them and try to bring them closer to where I sit.”

Liberal Zionists, he acknowledged, “will never be a majority.” But drawing a lesson from their ideological opponents, he noted that settlers were never a majority, yet learned how to exert their influence. That, he said, is a model for Jews and Arabs who believe Israel needs “a different vision than the one represented by this government.” 

NIF-grantee Tzedek Centers participates in a citizens’ rights fair in the southern Israeli development town of Ofakim in October 2025. (Mati Milstein for NIF)

Reinforcing that vision in the United States means building bridges and setting boundaries. Gitzin said NIF staff and grantees include Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel, Zionists and non-Zionists. In the Israeli context, “non-Zionist” means those who do not actively support or advocate for a Jewish state, but also do not actively seek the end of Israel. NIF has several red lines: It will not support groups that advocate violence, racism or affiliation with the movement to boycott, divest from or sanction Israel, or BDS. In addition, “we don’t support those who actively oppose the notion of a homeland of the Jewish people,” he said.

“We are a space in which Zionist and non-Zionists can live together and work together, as long as we share ideas like equality, partnership, peace-seeking and so on,” he said. Outside of that space are those, on both the right and the left, who offer “from the river to the sea” solutions of exclusive Jewish or exclusive Palestinian domination in Israel proper, Gaza and the West Bank.  

As interim CEO, Gitzin is still finding his footing in a new country and a new role. But he brings with him a sensibility shaped by Israel’s contradictions — and by the conviction that walking away, whether from Zionism or from liberal democracy, is not an option.

“Israel is giving me, personally, with my family story, an opportunity that no other country would have ever given me. I’m not throwing it away,” he said. “Despite my extreme criticism of current policies, I’m not willing to give it away. It’s too dear to my heart.”

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In a year that saw their fortunes take a hit amid declines in the stock market, America’s 25 “most generous givers” donated a collective $27 billion, up from $20 billion in 2021, for a lifetime total of $196 billion, according to Forbes. They included 12 billionaires with Jewish backgrounds — a dramatic overrepresentation when compared to the proportion of Jews in the overall U.S. population.

The Jews on the list include financier George Soros, who gave away at least $300 million to racial justice and humanitarian work in Ukraine and other causes;  businessman and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg with $1.7 billion in donations to charter schools, clean energy, and fighting heart disease; and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whose charity donated more than $900 million, with much of the money going to fund research into artificial intelligence and genomics at universities. 

One thing that stands out about these Jewish philanthropists is that almost none focuses giving on the Jewish community. Only Lynn and Stacy Schusterman of the Tulsa oil dynasty, who are paired together on the list, are prominent donors to Jewish causes. 

To be sure, many, if not all of the others have given at least small amounts to Jewish charities. In 2021, for example, Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, announced $1.3 million in gifts to 11 Jewish groups; last year they distributed more than $900 million in total, according to Forbes. Meanwhile, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and his wife, Connie, have donated at least $1 million to the Jewish National Fund; they gave away more than $800 million last year. And Michael Dell, the founder of the Dell computing company, donated the land for a Jewish community center in his home of Austin, Texas, and supported a recent renovation.

But only the Schustermans, who donated $370 million last year, have prioritized Jewish giving with hundreds of millions of dollars over their decades of involvement in the Jewish communal world.

It’s hard to make comparisons to the past and say whether Jews at the apex of philanthropy ever tended to focus on Jewish causes because the level of wealth today is almost unprecedented, according to Andrés Spokoiny, the president and CEO of the Jewish Funders Network. 

“Historically, individuals, except for during the Gilded Age, perhaps, didn’t amass these types of fortunes, and there weren’t many Jews at this economic caliber,” Spokoiny said. 

As to why many of the philanthropists don’t dedicate themselves to the Jewish community, Spokoiny offered three explanations. One is, simply, assimilation. “They don’t necessarily have a strong Jewish upbringing or Jewishness does not play a major role in their lives, and in that way they are not different from the rest of us,” Spokoiny said.

Another reason is that, given their immense resources, some prefer to tackle massive global issues such as climate change or pandemics. And lastly, Spokoiny said, some philanthropists think that being associated with Jewish causes might not fit with their political aspirations or personal brand. 

Mark Charendoff, who ran the Jewish Funders Network before Spokoiny, is now president of the Maimonides Fund, which has emerged as a major Jewish charity in recent years. He echoed some of the same explanations as Spokoiny. He also said that in past generations, wealthy Jews who wished to enter philanthropy didn’t always have the option of donating outside the Jewish community. 

“Universities, hospitals, symphonies weren’t always excited about having Jewish donors, particularly active ones,” Charendoff said. “Now you would be hard-pressed to find a not-for-profit that isn’t eager for Jewish representation.”

Successful fundraising by Jewish recipients in what Charendoff calls the “more competitive landscape” of today will require long-term investments in fostering Jewish identity, he said. 

“If we want the biggest philanthropists to give more Jewishly then we need to invest more in Jewish education and engagement for all Jews,” he said. 

Here are the philanthropists with Jewish roots who made Forbes’ “America’s Most Generous Givers” list. 

1. George Soros: +$300 million in 2022
2. Michael Bloomberg: +$1.7 billion
3. Jim & Marilyn Simons: +$1.9 billion
4. Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: +$900 million
5. Edythe Broad & family: +$340 million
6. Steve & Connie Ballmer: +$800 million
7. Sergey Brin: Newcomer to the list
8. Lynn & Stacy Schusterman: +$370 million
9. Michael & Susan Dell: +$177 million
10. Donald Bren: +$470 million
11. Dustin Moskovitz & Cari Tuna: +$670 million
12. George Kaiser: +$120 million

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(JTA) — The University of Washington has put its five-year-old Israel Studies Program on hold after a major donor, angry about a professor’s criticism of Israel, took her money back.

Becky Benaroya, a prominent Seattle philanthropist, gave $5 million in 2016 to create the program. But after a professor who held the Jack and Rebecca Benaroya Endowed Chair in Israel Studies was among hundreds of Jewish studies and Israel studies professors to sign a widely circulated statement criticizing Israel last year, Benaroya became concerned about what was happening in the program she had funded.

She requested months of meetings with the professor, Liora Halperin, and university officials to discuss her views on the program’s direction. Those meetings — which also included a representative of the pro-Israel advocacy group StandWithUs, according to a person familiar with them — culminated in the university returning the entire endowment to Benaroya earlier this year.

“Based upon the direction the program had taken, my mom didn’t want her name connected with it,” Larry Benaroya, Becky Benaroya’s son and the current CEO of the family real-estate firm The Benaroya Company, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in an email.

As a result, the university stripped Halperin of her chair position and halted programming related to Israel studies — moves that Halperin told JTA will have consequences both on campus and well beyond it.

“In making the nearly unprecedented choice to return the endowment money — in the absence of any contractual obligation to do so — UW has dealt an immediate blow to the students who have come to rely on the resources of the program, limited our opportunities to bring innovative academic programming, and sent a broader chilling message about the potential material consequences of engaging in principled political speech,” she said.

The turmoil was first reported by The Cholent, an independent newsletter about Jewish Seattle. It is sending shockwaves across academia, where the freedom to comment on political issues without fear of professional retaliation is a hallmark value.

“We should not be imposing litmus tests on who is and is not virtuous enough to receive an endowed chair at a university,” David Myers, a professor of Jewish history at the University of California, Los Angeles, told JTA. “I think any defender of the university system and the right of free speech has to be deeply concerned about it.”

Unlike Halperin and some of her colleagues, Myers did not sign the 2021 “statement on Israel/Palestine” that kicked off the turmoil at the University of Washington. That letter, published amid a deadly conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, condemned Israeli actions against Palestinians and stated that “the Zionist movement … was and is still shaped by settler colonial paradigms.”

But he said one needn’t agree with Halperin’s personal positions on Israel to be alarmed by the consequences she is facing at her university and fearful about the future of academic dialogue about the region. He started an open letter to support Halperin, who was his student, and close to 500 professors have signed on this week — many, he said, who don’t share her views.

“I see this as the next front in the battle to adopt and fortify a conformist American Jewish view on Israel,” Myers said.

The University of Washington already had a vaunted Jewish studies program in 2016, when Benaroya made her gift. Its first professor was Deborah Lipstadt, currently nominated to become the U.S. State Department’s antisemitism monitor. Now, the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies has 27 faculty members as well as one of the world’s most celebrated collections of Sephardic and Ladino-language artifacts.

But Benaroya, a Sephardic Jewish philanthropist in Seattle and widow of real-estate developer and venture capitalist Jack Benaroya, wanted to see more teaching about Israel. Her $5 million donation to the Stroum Center created an endowed chair, part-time assistant and research funds “with the intention of putting forth scholarship on the history and contributions of the modern State of Israel.”

The endowment language instructs the program “to promote the study of Israel through multiple disciplinary perspectives” and “to integrate the study of Israel into a global context, highlighting the comparative and international relevance of Israel in the Middle East and beyond.”

Halperin told JTA that she was proud of the Israel Studies Program’s work over the last five years and that she believed that “no one who has attended the many programs I planned or got to know the students whom the funds supported could in good faith claim that I failed to uphold the endowment’s stated mission.” 

But she also said there were “donor expectations that were not and could not legally have been stated in the endowment agreement” that became apparent. It became clear, she said, that the the holder of the Benaroya chair was expected to refrain from making “certain political statements” and to “accept the proposition that study of ‘modern Israel’ is incompatible with the concurrent study of ‘Israel/Palestine.'”

That phrase — ”Israel/Palestine” — is present in many of Halperin’s course descriptions and, according to The Cholent, has long been a flashpoint for tension between the vocally pro-Israel contingent of donors who spearheaded the Stroum Center’s recent expansion and the faculty who have been hired as a result. 

Another major donor, Sonny Gorasht, told The Cholent that he had strongly objected to seeing the term “Israel/Palestine” in university brochures, and voiced his displeasure directly to the Stroum Center’s director, Noam Pianko. “I called Noam, and I said I’ve never heard of Israel referred to as Israel-slash-Palestine,” he said. “What the hell are you talking about, having truth in education?”

Gorasht and his daughter, Jamie Merriman-Cohen, told The Cholent that their efforts to create the Israel Studies Program in 2016 to rival its acclaimed Sephardic Studies Program were conceived as a way to counter what they believed was rising anti-Israel sentiment on college campuses, including at the University of Washington.

“There came a time when the university was inviting rabid anti-Israel, BDS, rabid antisemitic people to come speak. The community was up in arms about it. They looked to the Jewish studies program to stop that,” Gorasht told The Cholent. “Of course, it’s a place where people have a right to speak, so we had a sense that, sure, academic freedom, people have a right to speak, but you can’t present one side of the story.”

Both Gorash and Merriman-Cohen have also chaired an advisory board that organizes community input into the university’s Jewish studies program. In that role, Merriman-Cohen wrote a letter recommending that the university hire Halperin, a historian whose work focuses on pre-state Israel, in 2017. 

But after the 2021 Israel letter, Merriman-Cohen wrote a new letter to the university’s president recommending that Halperin’s tenured position be “reconsidered.” She also requested that Pianko, who had not signed the letter but had supported Halperin during her initial hiring process, no longer be the Stroum Center’s director. 

Merriman-Cohen told The Cholent that she now believes the hiring of Halperin was rushed and that she had been pressured into writing her initial recommendation. Halperin’s partner, Sasha Senderovich, is also a professor affiliated with the Stroum Center and also signed the 2021 Israel letter; other UW signatories included Susan Glenn, Devin Naar and Noga Rotem.

“The University of Washington has been very supportive of the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies and my leadership during my 11-year tenure as Director,” Pianko told JTA in a statement. “My appointment is not now, nor has it ever been in jeopardy.”

University spokesperson Victor Balta told JTA in a statement that, “Informed through her research area of expertise, the faculty member supported by the endowment expressed views that were not shared by Mrs. Benaroya. Our mission as a university demands that our scholars have the freedom to pursue their scholarship where it leads them. After several months of good faith conversations between the faculty member, UW leadership and the donor, Mrs. Benaroya requested that her gift be returned and we agreed this was the best path forward.”

The statement added that the school “is committing to provide $20,000 each year for the next three years as research/discretionary funding to support Prof. Halperin’s work,” and that UW would continue to be in conversation with Stroum Center faculty “on next steps to realize the mission of the program.”

According to The Cholent, Benaroya is redirecting her gift to StandWithUs, a pro-Israel advocacy group that organizes on college campuses and elsewhere. A person familiar with the meetings between Benaroya and university officials told JTA that Randy Kessler, executive director of StandWithUs’s Seattle office, had been present.

StandWithUs confirmed that it had played a role in Benaroya’s discussions with UW, but would not comment to JTA on the status of the donation.

“Mrs. Benaroya contacted StandWithUs after learning her endowment was no longer fulfilling the intent of her gift,” Roz Rothstein, the organization’s CEO and co-founder, told JTA in an email. “We helped her engage with the university to address her concerns but the parties were not able to reach an agreement.” 

Rothstein said that, “as anti-Israel and antisemitic activism rises on college campuses,” StandWithUs regularly engages with university donors “concerned about the use of their gifts,” and that the group outlines “the steps donors can take to ensure their generosity is being respected and used for programs consistent with the understandings they had reached with universities.” 

A recent op-ed penned by the director of StandWithUs’s legal department advises would-be university donors to insert language into their endowments requiring that they only be used to fund pro-Israel speech and scholarship – and ensure that donors have “continuing oversight of their gifts”.

Halperin, who is currently teaching a course billed as a “survey of significant scholarly texts on Israel and Palestine during the 19th-21st centuries,” says she hopes her experience can be a turning point for her field and for universities where Israel is a political lightning rod.

“I would encourage my fellow academics and engaged members of the community to speak out in defense of academic freedom, particularly but not only when it comes to Israel/Palestine,” she told JTA. “I also call on communities sympathetic to a more inclusive vision of Israel Studies and Israel/Palestine Studies and committed to the principle of academic freedom to show their support for university departments, centers, and colleagues engaging in such work.”

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Scott and her husband Dan Jewett announced Tuesday that they were distributing new funds to 286 different organizations, bringing  Scott’s total charitable giving since July 2020 to $8.5 billion.

The latest grants include Scott’s first to Jewish groups. The three Jewish grantees are Maryland-based HIAS, which advocates for and gives aid to immigrants and refugees; Repair the World, a community service and social justice organization based in New York; and Afrika Tikkun, an aid organization founded by the chief rabbi of South Africa after the end of apartheid there. 

“Because community-centered service is such a powerful catalyst and multiplier, we spent the first quarter of 2021 identifying and evaluating equity-oriented non-profit teams working in areas that have been neglected,” Scott said in her announcement about the grants. “We chose to make relatively large gifts to the [organizations], both to enable their work, and as a signal of trust and encouragement, to them and to others.”

Scott didn’t spell out why she gave any particular group or how much each had received. 

Repair the World released a statement announcing a $7 million “unrestricted” gift from Scott that will help get more young people involved in community service and advocacy on humanitarian and civic issues. 

“Mackenzie Scott and Dan Jewett’s generosity and vision validates the investments of Repair’s generous funders, and their gift is a clear challenge and invitation to do even more: more service, more partnerships, and more investments to elevate and expand service in American Jewish life,” said Cindy Greenberg, president and CEO of Repair the World.

Meanwhile, HIAS announced it had received “a transformational grant” from Scott.

“HIAS has been broadening our programmatic, advocacy and geographic reach to help people find safety, welcome and opportunity wherever they are,” said Mark Hetfield, president and CEO of HIAS. “With this investment, HIAS will accelerate our work to build the platform we need to respond to refugee emergencies wherever they arise and whenever we can help.”

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But when the pandemic started, her thinking shifted to what was closer to home, and in some cases to what was happening right in her own city.

“I’d much rather get some hospital people PPE, so people can live,” she said from her home in Los Angeles, where hospitals are again filling to capacity and another lockdown has been put into place. “It’s sort of like life or death became more important.”

Greer, a philanthropist and investor, isn’t alone in shifting her giving. According to a recent report by the Jewish Funders Network, a majority of Jewish donors are rethinking their strategies in response to the pandemic, loosening application requirements for grants and increasingly giving unrestricted gifts that can be used for any purpose rather than for specific projects or new programs.

“We’ve been talking about this for years but when the pandemic hit, people really adopted wholeheartedly this more flexible way of giving,” said Andres Spokoiny, president and CEO of the Jewish Funders Network.

The changes to philanthropic giving have perhaps never happened as fast as they have during the pandemic, now in its 10th month, nor is it easy to recall a time in living memory when need has escalated so quickly — though unlike in past crises, a booming stock market means donors are in a better position to give. Not only are the strains on medical resources stronger than ever, but the economic fallout from the pandemic and its accompanying lockdowns has created an unprecedented need for social services like food and housing assistance. That has led some donors to shift their giving and prioritize social services over flashier causes.

The Jewish Funders Network survey found that the 30% of its members, which include over 500 private donors or foundations that give more than $25,000 per year “in the name of Jewish values,” public charities giving more than $100,000, foundations outside the U.S. and giving circles donating more than $50,000, reported awarding $409 million just in emergency grants. In a typical year, the organization estimates that its membership gives $1.6 billion in total.

More than three-quarters of the group’s survey respondents said they had increased their giving in response to the pandemic, and more than half of the respondents had broadened their giving to include new causes, with some of the new areas including support for basic necessities like food and shelter. More than half allowed for previously granted funds to be used for other needs and a like number also provided support for general operating costs.

Jewish federations and locally focused foundations have also increased their giving during the pandemic. The Jewish Community Foundation of Los Angeles has disbursed $14 million in COVID response grants this year. UJA-Federation of New York has disbursed approximately $64 million in COVID-related aid on top of its regular grants of $133 million. (The New York federation is a funder of 70 Faces Media, JTA’s parent company.)

Eric Goldstein, CEO of UJA-Federation, said the pandemic had served as a reminder to donors of what was most important.

“Philanthropic people often pursue the shiny object, the new thing,” Goldstein said. “I think in times like this it reminds you how critically important it is to support the abiding institutions that are critical to the well-being of our community going forward.”

UJA-Federation’s board authorized five extra rounds of grants this year on top of its total budget of approximately $195 million. Most of the extra grants went to social service agencies providing food, shelter and mental health services, as well as to Jewish community centers that were forced to close due to the pandemic.

Goldstein said the skyrocketing demands on social service agencies, which are partially funded by government aid but still require philanthropic support, had triggered an increased awareness of the importance of social services and of the extent of poverty within the Jewish community.

“It’s a critical reminder of how urgent the less glamorous social service needs are,” Goldstein said.

UJA-Federation dipped into its endowment to cover the cost of some of its emergency grants this year, just like it did during the Great Depression when it nearly depleted its funds while aiding the unemployed. But during the pandemic, UJA-Federation saw an increase in donations, in part because the stock market has been rallying, leaving donors feeling confident and able to maintain their usual gifts, if not increase them.

And even as funders shifted their focus to critical services like food assistance and mental health services or ensuring hospitals have adequate PPE, some say it’s still important to support cultural institutions and projects having to do with Jewish life.

The dilemma of whether it is right to give to the arts or to other causes when people are going hungry “is a very old dilemma, it’s not a pandemic dilemma,” Spokoiny said.

He believes there are enough resources to support all of the causes and that cultural projects and Jewish life initiatives should not be neglected because there are more basic needs still going unmet.

“It becomes a very difficult conversation,” he acknowledged. “I tend to think that community building and welfare needs are complementary. Engaged communities give more to charity, so how do you create engaged community? With things that are not social services.”

And even if it’s important to support cultural institutions for their own sake, the welfare of those institutions affects the welfare of the people who work for them.

Greer started supporting a local performing arts center after her daily drives past the darkened theater made her think about how many people were dependent on the center for their livelihoods.

“At the beginning I thought about it just on that level, it doesn’t matter if we go to the theater, people need food,” Greer said. “And then when I started understanding, wait, there are 300 people and they have families and they provide for their families and all of a sudden you’ve got a thousand people who aren’t going to have food because the theater is dark.”

When it comes to thinking about a post-pandemic future, Spokoiny said, those institutions are going to be critically important. He likened the period after mass vaccination against the coronavirus to the Reformation period that followed the Black Death in the Middle Ages. He said he wants Jewish organizations to be in a position to offer spiritual direction to Jews once the pandemic allows some normal life to resume.

“There is always a spiritual search after a pandemic,” Spokoiny said. “And if we don’t invest enough in that stuff, we won’t be able to provide an avenue for Jews to engage in that.”

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Historically, philanthropic endeavors have bolstered public life and fostered democratic reform in myriad ways, from helping to enact protections for vulnerable populations to establishing research, educational and cultural institutions. Just think of the thousands of public libraries that would not exist absent Andrew Carnegie’s philanthropic largesse.

Yet American history also supplies us with examples of philanthropy undermining democracy by eroding its processes and procedures. For example, historian Nancy MacLean has carefully tracked the ways that the Koch brothers’ philanthropic gifts have influenced judicial appointments and opinions, operating well outside of public view. 

My historical research shows that over the past 50 years, American Jewish philanthropy has steadily moved against the grain of democratic values and practices. In this way, it resembles the larger field of American philanthropy, and the even larger field of U.S. political and economic life in the final decades of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century. 

The two most important trends in American Jewish philanthropy over the last half century are its embrace of endowment building and dependence on the wealth of a very few. Both trends have made American Jewish philanthropy reliant on policies and structures of inequality. Even as they work to circulate economic capital to nonprofits and grantees, Jewish philanthropic institutions pursue strategies that not only rely on wealth concentration but also perpetuate and naturalize that concentration. 

Well before today, we should have been asking whether American Jewish philanthropy, instead of eroding American democracy, could help rebuild it. Now that question is unavoidable. If American Jewish philanthropic leaders embrace a new set of norms and knowledge oriented around the project of democracy, perhaps they can forge a new course that will strengthen democratic values and practices. 

What would that mean?

Replacing the norms of venture capital and investment strategies with  practices of democratic participation, for one. Participatory grantmaking, a method to empower the people affected by philanthropic decisions by giving them a voice in philanthropic solutions and capital distribution, would offer one way to guide philanthropy toward democracy. Its practices pull power away from a wealthy elite and take seriously the fact, enshrined in tax policy, that the American public is the biggest single shareholder in all philanthropic wealth.

If American Jewish philanthropy is serious about not just providing a lifeline to existing institutions but making sure its work supports our community’s greatest needs, those with power would do well to invite others into their process starting now. 

Second, Jewish philanthropic institutions could invest in new forms of knowledge in the interest of revitalizing democracy. Norms are enforced by knowledge, and a thriving democracy depends on an educated public that has access to multiple sources and perspectives with which to critically assess its institutions.

Unfortunately, in the case of Jewish philanthropy, much like American philanthropy more generally, its knowledge base has tended to be driven by practical and applied questions, such as whether a program is achieving desired ends. Often it has used knowledge production as a feedback loop to reinforce and not scrutinize its own norms.

Jewish philanthropy could lead the way toward critical and reflective interrogation, but only by encouraging basic research and scholarship about it. To do so, its institutions, including private family foundations, would open their historical archives to scholars, and its leaders would practice radical transparency, accepting that they should value the light of inquiry over the allure of control. 

In both these ways, Jewish philanthropy may be able to help invigorate a robust and informed civic sector essential to democracy instead of continuing to participate in a set of trends that have steadily traded democracy in favor of wealth and power concentrations.

Of course, American Jewish philanthropy operates in a political and economic landscape structured by the American state, which includes the elected and non-elected bodies that make policy. Even if it reformed itself to align with democratic values and practices, American Jewish philanthropy cannot help heal a broken democracy without taking seriously its role — as a fundamentally political creature — in shaping that democracy. This may mean lobbying for policy reform and deciding to oppose tax policies that may appear beneficial to philanthropic capital growth but in substance eviscerate democracy and the public good.

The problems of inequality — accelerated and amplified by the pandemic — threaten the fundamental nature of democracy. With those problems so painfully apparent, Jewish philanthropy has an imperative to steer its course toward the democratic values and practices essential for a healthier America for all. 

This piece is a part of our series of Visions for the Post-Pandemic Jewish Future — click here to read the other stories in this series. Use #JewishFuture to share your own ideas on social media. If you’d like to submit an essay for consideration, email opinion@jta.org with “Visions Project Submission” in the subject line.

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The gift from the estate of Rosaline and Marcia Cohn announced Tuesday by the university will establish the Jacob and Rosaline Cohn Endowed Scholarship and Fellowship Fund, providing assistance to undergraduate and graduate students.

Rosaline and Jacob Cohn, and their daughter Marcia, did not hold any formal connection to the university, but the family had given to Brandeis for decades, beginning with a $100 gift in 1956 from Rosaline and Jacob.

“Like many generous philanthropic families,” Brandeis President Ron Liebowitz said, “the Cohns were inspired by the very idea of Brandeis, a university founded by the Jewish community to be open to all students of talent, reflecting the Jewish values of reverence for academic excellence and dedication to using one’s talents to improve the world.”

Jacob Cohn, who immigrated from Lithuania, established the Continental Coffee Co. in Chicago in 1915. He died in 1968. Rosaline Cohn died in 2010 at 97. Marcia Cohn died in 2015.

Daphne Greenberg, who graduated from Brandeis in 1984, received a Cohn scholarship and now is a distinguished university professor. She was hopeful about the continued support from the Cohn family.

“I used to worry that 18-year-olds today would not be as fortunate as I was,” she said in a statement. “But with this gift from the Cohn family, students like me will continue to be given an opportunity.”

Yearly tuition and other expenses at the school cost about 68,000, according to collegedata.com.

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But since Nov. 8, Election Day, the family has been talking about another set of issues — refugees, voting rights and civic engagement. Like so many other things, its giving has been shaken by the Donald Trump administration.

“When it’s time to step up, we have to step up,” said Marcella Kanfer Rolnick, the founding director of the Lippman Kanfer Foundation for Living Torah. “We’re grappling with how much we step up fast, where the urgency requires us to act quickly.”

Trump’s election has pushed the Lippman Kanfer family and other Jewish mega-donors to refocus their giving on domestic causes that reach beyond the Jewish community. The donors, some of whom had already funded liberal causes, cite the country’s political divides, the president’s policies targeting minorities and a proposed federal budget that reduces funding for social services and the arts. But Trump’s support for school choice could also aid funders supporting Jewish day school.

“I don’t think private foundations can make up for draconian social service cuts in the federal budget,” said Susie Gelman, who chairs the center-left Israel Policy Forum and whose family funds programs for Jews in their 20s and 30s. “But I think funders can be strategic and smart, and form partnerships and try to address some of the issues now under threat.”

Discussions of Trump’s election and its fallout have coursed through the Jewish Funders Network International Conference here this week. Several sessions dealt with bridging political divides and promoting civil conversation. Others addressed a perceived spike in anti-Semitism and the increasing need for security at Jewish institutions. On Tuesday, a session on government funding and American Jewry forecast that deep cuts in federal domestic spending could spell trouble for Jewish social service groups.

The funders network’s focus on civil discourse grew during the election campaign. The group, which serves as a resource and hub for Jewish donors and foundations, issued guidelines in August for how philanthropists should conduct themselves. The principles included “Consider and honor diverse viewpoints” and “Fund positive change, not hostility.”

“Funders themselves sometimes use their power from their funding to force ideological positions,” said the network’s president, Andres Spokoiny. “Funders can [instead] fund organizations and people that strengthen civil discourse, that create spaces for dialogue and conversation.”

Rather than make up for lost federal funding, some donors plan to focus on advocacy to prevent government budget cuts. The Nathan Cummings Foundation, which already funds a number of liberal groups — including some Jewish ones — hopes to encourage minority advocacy groups to unite around a common advocacy agenda.

“Philanthropy can’t replace the NEA,” said the foundation’s president, Sharon Alpert, referring to the National Endowment for the Arts. “What philanthropy has always been poised at is creating partnerships with government that demonstrate how important government action and programs are to our lives. We need to engage even more deeply in making that case.”

Mark Reisbaum, who donates to Jewish and LGBT arts initiatives in Northern California’s Bay Area, said he and other donors he knows now plan to donate to politicians who support arts funding.

Marcella Kanfer Rolnick, founding director of the Lippman Kanfer Foundation for Living Torah, says her family is discussing ways to increase its giving to domestic issues. (Courtesy of Kanfer Rolnick)

“For many funders, the political and public sector environment over the last decade was supportive and inclusive of their vision, so they didn’t feel the need to operate in that sphere,” he said. “In the current environment, they realize they can’t only fund the arts directly. They also have to try to influence the political sector.”

Spokoiny noted that Trump’s policies may also serve Jewish interests, given Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’ support for tuition vouchers for private schools. Jewish leaders have long fretted about rising tuition making Jewish day school prohibitively expensive.

“There could be some positive things in terms of funding,” he said. “Day school funding could receive a boost from a government that believes in school choice.”

Even Jewish programs with no political dimension have made adjustments in the Trump era. PJ Library, a program that sends Jewish books to children, has posted guidelines on its Facebook page helping parents broach the topics of anti-Semitism and hate with their children.

“We’re terribly saddened that children’s lives are being disrupted and that parents have to face this issue and be prepared for their children’s questions,” said Winnie Sandler Grinspoon, president of the Harold Grinspoon Foundation, which funds the program, referring to the some 150 Jewish community centers and other institutions that have been hit with bomb threats since the start of this year. “But if we’re a trusted source in engaging around parents’ topics, this is a topic we have to address.”

Combating Trump’s agenda may be a boon for organizations seeking to engage younger philanthropists. Michael Littenberg-Brown, 35, president of the Council of Young Jewish Presidents, a consortium of young donors, said his generation is more attracted to groups that provide a Jewish entry point to addressing global injustice, like HIAS, which advocates for refugees, or the Anti-Defamation League, which fights anti-Semitism.

“The burden is to use this moment to help create the space for young funders,” he said. “Young people see themselves as global citizens, and that becomes a very important identity to them in addition to their Jewish identity.”

Donors said that even with the shift to broader issues, parochial Jewish causes may not suffer. Reisbaum said that some of his fellow philanthropists have committed to donating more, corresponding to the spike in the stock market since Trump’s election.

“For some people, that’s tainted money,” he said. “If I have these ill-gotten gains, I want to do more with them.”

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Music lovers would have found the deep, uneven sound revolting, but the Nordic instrument is plenty melodic in inspiring Vikings’ partisans.

The team’s owner, Mark Wilf, 54, offered a Jewish take on the gigantic horn.

“When we first bought the team, a rabbi in St. Paul said, ‘You realize that the horns on the helmet are shofars.’ I kind of chuckle about that sometimes,” Wilf, sitting 50 feet from the newly installed horn, said in an interview with JTA 24 hours before the stadium’s dedication recently.

“It’s something the fans bond around: The Vikings are coming! There’s something – I don’t want to say sacred, but really special — about a football game-day experience.”

Wilf would know. He and his brother Zygi, 66, along with several other relatives, bought the National Football League franchise in 2005 and attend all the games, home and away. The brothers fly in from New Jersey, where they run the family’s real estate business.

And as kids, they attended New York Giants’ games with their father, Joseph, a Holocaust survivor from Poland — as is their mother, Elizabeth, who is in her late 80s. Less than two weeks after the stadium’s dedication, Joseph Wilf, a founder of one of the country’s largest real estate development companies and a major philanthropist, died at 91.

The opening of U.S. Bank Stadium on the site of the Vikings’ former home, the Metrodome, heralds a new era that Wilf hopes will include an NFL championship — a title that has eluded the organization since its founding in 1961.

Led by running back Adrian Peterson and quarterback Teddy Bridgewater, Minnesota won the NFC North division last season and reached the playoffs. The Vikings open the 2016 campaign with a road game before making their regular season debut in the new digs on Sept. 18 against the Green Bay Packers, a division foe.

The ribbon-cutting ceremony in July capped the owners’ prolonged effort to build a new stadium, a process that included contentious negotiations with the state’s governors and legislature. The owners eventually agreed to pay approximately half the construction costs.

“It’s been a long road to get here,” Wilf acknowledged, rattling off some key partners in the project. “There were a host of challenges to get through this, starting with the legislative process. It’s very gratifying to see the final product, and I can’t wait to see the excitement of our fans.”

The massive building is an architectural amalgam. Some of the exterior is darkly foreboding and some airily welcoming, with sections angling out sharply toward the streets and conjuring ships. Indoors, one side of the field and stands is bathed in sunlight thanks to a transparent roof, while the other is shaded. Behind one end zone, five enormous doors up to 90 feet high can hydraulically pivot to bring the outside in. The 66,000 seats are all purple.

Besides the stadium, the Vikings are building a new practice facility in suburban Eagan.

Many analysts had pegged Minnesota for another divisional crown until Bridgewater went down with a knee injury that will sideline him for the season.

Wilf is a hands-on owner, said the team’s general manager, Rick Spielman, noting they speak almost daily. The Wilfs have “never not given us the resources” needed to compete, Spielman said, and “give you the flexibility to do your job.”

“If you’re recommending a view and make a decision based on what you think is best, they support it 100 percent,” he said. “They trust in the people in the specific roles we all have in this organization.”

Wilf recalled the Giants games he attended long ago, when his father’s construction clients included former players.

The outings, he said, “got us exposed to football early on,” and also to maintaining perspective considering their parents’ difficult past.

“My dad, considering what he went through, always had an optimistic bent on things, so whenever we’d be heartbroken as kids about the Giants losing a game, he’d say, ‘Things could be worse – you could be the owners.’”

The football outings, which included a trip to Southern California to watch the Giants’ Super Bowl XXI victory in 1987, were “our family bonding experience,” he said. “Those types of things were special. Now our kids come to the games. It’s a family experience.”

Much of Wilf’s philanthropic energy goes toward assisting Holocaust survivors.

William Daroff, director of the Jewish Federations of North America’s Washington office, credited Wilf with helping to raise $30 million since early 2015 to benefit the organization’s National Holocaust Survivors Initiative, which assists some of the approximately 25 percent of the 120,000 survivors in the United States who live in poverty.

JFNA’s president, Jerry Silverman, said Wilf followed up personally to assure that a fellow philanthropist’s Holocaust-survivor relative received improved medical care.

“These people should live out their lives with dignity,” said Wilf, who recalled the many survivors among his parents’ circle of friends in Hillside, New Jersey.

In Minneapolis, the clan established the Wilf Family Center at the University of Minnesota Masonic Children’s Hospital. The institution is meaningful, too, to Vikings center John Sullivan, who said his brother Bob once received key medical treatment at another pediatric hospital.

“We have a very common, shared interest,” said Sullivan, who with his wife, Ariel, contributes to the Minnesota institution. “I have a whole lot of respect for [the Wilfs’] philanthropic endeavors.”

The next day, Elizabeth Wilf looked on from a lunch-laden table set atop the field as Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton and other dignitaries spoke. Her sons sandwiched the governor, each grasping a golden scissor to cut a purple ribbon running the stage’s length of about 30 yards. With the ribbon sliced, confetti floated like a sweetly thrown touch pass.

The event was “a great personal milestone for our family, in addition to a great milestone for the community,” Wilf said. “We’re very proud that we have a new home here for the Vikings and that the Vikings have a stability and a future for generations to come.”

(The Minnesota Vikings sponsored the visit to Minneapolis of several journalists, including Hillel Kuttler. Mark Wilf is a member of the Executive Committee of the Board of Directors of 70 Faces Media, JTA’s parent organization.)

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Rechnitz paid $52,100 for the autographed patch on eBay, pledging the proceeds to charity. He donated the money from his winning bid to the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center; it will be used to purchase medical equipment.

On Tuesday, a spokesman for Rechnitz identified him as the buyer. Rechnitz, who operates a chain of California nursing homes, has pledged to re-auction the name patch and donate those proceeds to the Tel Aviv hospital as well.

“Everyone must learn from Yarden how to use their skills to help people in need,” Rechnitz said in a statement.

Rechnitz has gained publicity for other colorful philanthropic acts. In January, he bought 18,000 Powerball lottery tickets for his employees, and one of his workers was briefly duped into believing she had won. Last November, he bought $50 dinners for 400 U.S. soldiers while they were on a stopover in Shannon, Ireland.

Gerbi won her medal in the women’s 63 kg weight class at the Rio games last month.

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The grants announced this week benefit youth, teens and young adults in the United States.

Grants include up to $3.2 million for a rabbinic fellowship focusing on innovation and “emergent Jewish communities”; up to $1.5 million for Sefaria, a website offering free online access to hundreds of Hebrew and Aramaic texts, English translations and commentaries, and up to $487,500 for a pilot program developing academic workshops at Israeli universities for faculty and senior administrators of American universities.

Other beneficiaries include Mechon Hadar, a pluralistic yeshiva in New York City; the Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life in Jackson, Mississippi; Yeshivat Chovevei Torah Rabbinical School, a liberal Orthodox seminary in New York City, and the BBYO nondenominational youth group.

“The Foundation is deeply grateful to partner with these innovative grantees committed to Jewish learning,” Al Levitt, president of the Jim Joseph Foundation, said in a statement Tuesday.

Since making its first grants 10 years ago, the foundation has awarded nearly $400 million.

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Rafi Rone will manage grants to help low-income and vulnerable adults in Israel, in addition to grants supporting Jewish communal causes, the Baltimore-based foundation announced Wednesday.

The foundation distributed about $200 million to an array of Jewish and Israeli causes over the past three years (including grants to JTA).

Before joining the Weinberg Foundation, Rone was vice president of Jewish and Israel initiatives at the Joseph and Harvey Meyerhoff Family Charitable Funds in Baltimore.

Rone also served a volunteer term on the Governor’s Commission on Middle Eastern American Affairs, and has extensive experience working in the Jewish philanthropic world.

“Rafi brings more than 20 years of experience in community relations and community development to this new position at the foundation,” Rachel Garbow Monroe, the Weinberg Foundation’s president and CEO, said in a news release. “He is a highly regarded professional who has worked with dozens of Jewish organizations and managed millions of dollars in grants to the Jewish community locally and in Israel.”

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Horn, a real estate magnate, and his wife, Susy, are the first Brazilians to join the Giving Pledge, an effort started in 2010 by philanthropists Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett to encourage more of the world’s affluent to give away at least half of their wealth to charitable causes.

The donation was announced Tuesday in the Brazilian newspaper Folha de S. Paulo.

Horn, founder of the home builder Cyrela, is an Orthodox Jew and a low-profile businessman whose name has been on the list of Forbes billionaires since 2006. His fortune is estimated at $1.3 billion.

In his letter signing on to the Giving Pledge, Horn said he was inspired by the example of his father, who donated his entire fortune to tzedakah. He said secular and religious education will be the priorities of his giving.

“As human beings, we will carry nothing with us to the other world — the only things we shall take are the good deeds that we accomplish in this world,” Horn told the audience at the recent Brazilian Philanthropists Forum edition in Sao Paulo. “Doing what’s good is a great investment. That’s so obvious, I don’t understand how people can’t get it.”

Born in Aleppo, Syria, Horn arrived in Brazil when he was 11. He reportedly works 16 hours a day but respects Shabbat — Cyrela does not close any deals from Friday afternoon through Saturday evening.

Horn founded Cyrela Brazil Realty in 1978 and built it into the largest publicly traded developer of high-end residential buildings in Brazil, with activities across South America.

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Organizations are busy crafting special campaigns, creating new online giving portals and planning fundraisers for the holiday, which began in 2012 on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving as a kind of counterweight to the consumerism of the holiday shopping season.

Anyone in the nonprofit sector can already anticipate what their email inbox and social media feeds will look like on Tuesday: solicitation after solicitation from dozens if not hundreds of nonprofits.

There’s nothing wrong with fundraising. And there’s certainly nothing wrong with encouraging giving. That’s what drives us every day in our roles leading Natan, a major giving circle in New York, and Amplifier: The Jewish Giving Circle Movement, Natan’s field-building arm.

But giving is also what’s keeping us up at night. We’re worried that something important is getting lost in this giving extravaganza – namely, the very people who are central to its success: the givers.

A recent Chicago Community Trust report shows that donors aren’t giving to the causes they care about, partly because they don’t know how to access the information they need about the issues and organizations they might support. Couple that finding with other reports showing that substantial numbers of donors don’t trust nonprofits or understand the philanthropic and nonprofit sectors very much, and then ask yourself: What is this onslaught of appeals actually accomplishing?

Campaigns like #GivingTuesday may well succeed in bringing in one-off donations, but they prevent sustained giving or deeper support over time. Donors are still left questioning exactly what organizations actually do and how their money is helping.

We need to flip the thinking about giving on its head. We need to focus on building the supply side of the giving equation, and not just on strengthening the capacity of organizations to demand. We need to focus on the giver.

At Natan and Amplifier, together with the dozens of partners we work with inside and outside the Jewish philanthropic sector, we’re seeking to build an ecosystem of empowered philanthropy: inspired, educated and engaged givers.

To accomplish this, we’ve focused on giving circles and the incredible value we think they can deliver. A giving circle is a group of people who pool their charitable donations and decide together how to give them away. It’s a simple yet infinitely customizable model that puts the giver in the driver’s seat. In a giving circle, members determine the values that guide their giving, discover areas that address the change they want to make in the world, and engage in deep discussions about organizations doing the work they believe in.

Giving collectively with friends, family or neighbors adds additional layers of meaning and fun to the experience and enables giving circle members to leverage each other’s money, wisdom, experience and perspectives to make a much greater impact than they might have made alone.

In the end, giving circle members emerge with a deeper knowledge of the causes they care about and the organizations addressing those causes. As research has shown, this leads giving circle members to give more dollars, give more strategically and develop a deeper sense of civic responsibility.

At Natan, we’ve engaged over 200 members in our giving circle and have given away nearly $11 million to more than 180 nonprofits, social entrepreneurs and social businesses. After seeing the transformative impact that Natan was having on its members and grantees over the years, and after hearing identical stories of impact from other giving circles (including venture philanthropy funds, women’s foundations and teen foundations both inside and outside the Jewish community), we created Amplifier to connect giving circles inspired by Jewish values to one another and provide resources that enable anyone to create their own giving circle.

What kinds of transformations happen to people in giving circles? People become enthusiastic about giving regularly and adopt the practice of giving on a regular basis. Time and again, we’ve seen giving circle members become so passionate about organizations they discover during a giving circle’s grant-making process that they join those organizations as volunteer leaders and board members. When you give someone the opportunity to actualize their vision through giving, they become active agents of change in their communities – not passive, one-time donors.

This #GivingTuesday, we need to put the needs and goals of givers first. Foundations and nonprofits alike can be major players in helping to build a broad culture of empowered philanthropy. Invest in building this culture, and the donations will follow. The world’s leaders and change-makers – and ultimately the people our organizations support – depend on it.

(Felicia Herman has been executive director of The Natan Fund since 2005. Joelle Asaro Berman is responsible for overseeing the Amplifier program, a global network of giving circles and Natan’s field-building arm.)

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The Jewish federation said it raised the money from nearly 53,000 donors in the fiscal year that ended June 30. Of the $207.8 million raised, $150.8 million came through its annual campaign, while $33.9 million was through planned giving and endowments, and $23.1 million was raised for capital projects and special initiatives.

The new total was $21.8 higher than the previous fiscal year for the largest Jewish federation in the world.

“Over the past year, our community proved its resolve to support those in need — whether displaced persons in Ukraine, children in Sderot [in southern Israel], or agencies in New York that required our assistance and expertise,” the federation’s CEO, Eric Goldstein, said in a news release issued Monday by the organization. “Our community response underscores the vital, unique role UJA-Federation plays as a global safety net, protecting vulnerable populations and providing significant resources to address the most pressing needs, both in crisis and every day.”

Goldstein joined UJA-Federation last July.

UJA-Federation, which works with almost 100 beneficiary agencies and supports causes both locally and overseas, claims to be the world’s largest local philanthropy.

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This has been, without a doubt, a tremendous boon for Jewish life. Super-donors are facilitating the expansion of the Jewish enterprise. With their largesse, more young people are going to Israel, more kids are receiving scholarships for camp, more dollars are flowing to the Jewish state and more seniors are aging with dignity.

But there is a downside to this funding windfall: These donors are essentially setting the agenda of the Jewish world, and no one but them has a say in it. In some communities, a single contributor provides more funding than the rest of the Jewish community combined.

“This is a group of people with remarkable power,” Mark Charendoff, then president of the Jewish Funders Network, said in 2007, when the shift in power first became apparent. “There is virtually no accountability for how they exercise it. They can either be thoughtful or not. They can be strategic or ego driven. No matter what they decide, they have an impact.”

With all the power these donors wield in dictating the direction of Jewish life, don’t they, at the very least, have an obligation to be in an active dialogue with the larger Jewish community about how they might best use their funds? After all, while the donors may foot the bill, everyone else has to live in the world they’ve constructed.

To be sure, the impact of mega-givers is not an entirely new phenomenon. There have always been wealthy, generous people in the Jewish community who have played an outsized role in setting the communal agenda.

But the emerging class has much deeper pockets than the previous generation of givers, is contributing a much higher percentage of the annual budgets of Jewish organizations and, consistent with generational trends in philanthropy, demands a much bigger role in determining how its funds will be used.

An older generation of donors tended to give to big institutions, which they counted on to make good use of their funds. Less trustful of institutions and more keen on making a direct impact, this generation of funders tends to tailor its giving to particular areas of interest and expects an active role in molding the projects it funds.

That’s all well and good as long as the desire of the donor matches the collective priorities of a community. But in some cases the inclinations of donors have essentially become the de facto strategies of the organizations and communities that they fund. When a donor responsible for half the budget of an institution favors a certain program or service, rarely is that Jewish organization in a position to argue.

If the donor is interested in elevating a certain kind of Jewish identity program or in promoting a certain view of Israel or in building a new museum rather than, say, a new school, that donor can often singlehandedly dictate the community’s agenda. Invariably, when a large donor makes a major investment in an area of activity, that investment attracts other dollars and corrals the energy of the entire community. A community that might not have otherwise chosen to build a new museum might all of a sudden find itself completely immersed in a large-scale project, just because one donor thought it was a good idea.

It’s high time the Jewish philanthropic world adopted a new ethic of accountability. I don’t mean accountability in a legal sense. Donors can legally invest in whatever philanthropic purposes they choose. Rather, the big donors should open up the decision-making process and invite the community into the discussion about how they might best use their money.

Just as corporations hold an annual meeting with their stockholders who vote on the direction of the company, mega-donors should treat the larger Jewish community as stakeholders in their communal giving enterprise and factor in their aspirations and priorities. Mega-givers should hold their own annual meetings of stakeholders — the Jewish community — and open the floor for conversation. They should also be transparent in how they use their funds and issue annual reports of their giving.

Such input and transparency would not undercut donors’ ability to make decisions about how they use their money. It’s theirs to spend. It would, however, help the donors stay in sync with the people they are serving, and give the larger Jewish community confidence that it’s part of the process of determining the Jewish future.

As Voltaire said more than two centuries ago, “With great power comes great responsibility.” It’s time for mega-givers to exercise greater responsibility in how they help the Jewish community grow.

Jay Ruderman is president of the Ruderman Family Foundation. Follow him on Twitter @jayruderman

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The gifts for the free 10-day educational trips to Israel for Jewish young adults were announced recently.

The latest donation to the Birthright Israel Foundation from Dr. Miriam and Sheldon Adelson’s Adelson Family Foundation adds to the $140 million it has already given Birthright. The Adelsons are the largest individual donors to Birthright. The new donation includes a $20 million challenge grant.

The Azrieli Foundation announced a five-year, $5 million gift to Birthright Israel Foundation of Canada to be used to support and expand offerings of Birthright trips for eligible Canadians, as well as sponsor trips for individuals with developmental and/or physical disabilities. Like the Adelson gift, the Azrieli one includes a matching gift, or challenge grant, component.

Since 2000, approximately 350,000 Jews aged 18 to 26 from over 62 countries have gone on Birthright trips. In addition, 65,000 Israelis have participated in Birthright’s Mifgash program, which brings together Israelis and Diaspora Jews.

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The gift from George Krupp, chief executive of Berkshire Property Advisors, and his wife, Liz, will go to the Jewish Community Day School, Gann Academy, Maimonides School, the Rashi School and the Solomon Schechter Day School of Greater Boston, according to a news release last week from Combined Jewish Philanthropies, Boston’s Jewish federation.

The Krupps, who have previously donated to day schools, will give $500,000 for every $1 million raised by the schools. The donation is meant for the schools to raise endowment funds for long-term tuition support for families whose income falls in the middle tier.

“Day schools are critical to developing the next generation of Jewish leaders, but high tuition costs are making this choice inaccessible to many families,” George Krupp said in the news release. “Without building robust endowments today, our Boston Jewish day schools will not have the resources to be sustainable and affordable in the future. Our hope is that this challenge gift will be a catalyst to gain substantial financial support from the community.”

Especially significant, Jill Goldenberg, a senior strategy manager for endowment and legacy with the Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Education, or PEJE, told JTA, is that the donation will allow the schools to focus on long-term sustainability.

“It means that a school is ensuring that the grandchildren of current kindergartners will have a school to go to,” she said.

All of the schools are part of PEJE’s national Generations Program, funded by the Avi Chai Foundation, which provides leadership training in raising endowment funds. In the last three years, 30 day schools across the country have raised nearly $36 million in the program, Goldenberg said.

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Hassenfeld, of Palm Beach, Fla., died Friday. She was 93.

She served as the JDC chair from 1988 to 1992, representing the organization in the former Soviet Union, and overseeing significant Jewish outreach in Central and Eastern Europe. Hassenfeld also presided over significant JDC operations in Africa.

Hassenfeld led the Hassenfeld Foundation, which supported Jewish and non-Jewish causes around the world.

Her philanthropy was directed at the United Jewish Appeal, Brandeis University, the Jewish Agency for Israel and other Jewish and non-Jewish organizations.“Sylvia Hassenfeld was a remarkable woman who dedicated her life to improving the human condition by protecting the rights of all and promoting religious freedom,” Brandeis President Frederick Lawrence said.

Hassenfeld’s Jewish activism was inspired by the family involvement of her husband, Merrill, the chairman of the Hasbro company before his death in 1980, in the religious and Jewish communal life of Providence, R.I. She would go on to lead the Providence Jewish Federation.

She was a major force behind the Hassenfeld Children’s Hospital at New York University that is scheduled to open a new facility in 2017.

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