David Magerman, a computer scientist-turned-venture capitalist, was among the first to join the so-called “donor revolt” against elite American universities in the wake of the Oct. 7 terror attacks and the accompanying rise in anti-Israel protests and antisemitic incidents on college campuses in the United States.

Days after the Hamas attacks, Magerman, who decided to cut ties with his alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, over its decision to host the Palestine Writes Literature Festival, which featured speakers who regularly call for Israel’s destruction and have been accused of antisemitism, published an open letter addressed to the school’s leaders, accusing them of “support[ing] evil” with their silence about the massacres and calling on “self-respecting Jews, and all moral citizens of the world, [to] dissociate themselves from Penn.”

This week, he told eJewishPhilanthropy that he was taking the multimillion-dollar donation that he’d planned to give to Penn and giving it to Israeli colleges and universities instead, starting with a $1 million grant to the Jerusalem College of Technology to fund a preparatory program for English speakers to teach them Hebrew and integrate them into the private religious college’s full curriculum. 

In his interview with eJP, Magerman explained his rationale behind the move, particularly his view that U.S. Jews should turn away from American universities, particularly the Ivy League, and instead focus on sending their children to Israeli universities and turning those schools into top-tier institutions. 

The interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Judah Ari Gross: You were among the first donors post-Oct. 7 who publicly cut ties with Ivy League schools over their responses to the attacks and the protests on campus. Obviously the situation at the University of Pennsylvania preceded Oct. 7. What was the process that led you to move away from supporting Penn and then decide to shift away from American universities entirely and look instead to Israel and specifically, the Jerusalem College of Technology?

David Magerman: [Regarding Penn,] so my two sons went to Penn — one of them graduated, one of them is now transferring — in addition to my being an alum. I’d been reengaging with the university; I disengaged in the 2010s because I joined the board at Yeshiva University and had kind of pulled away from my work with Penn, but I’d reengaged when [my sons] started going there. 

I had learned that they had been reducing their acceptance rates of Orthodox students at Penn, and the community they were shrinking. And then, leading into the new school year, when they had this Palestine Writes Festival. Over the summer, they’d announced this festival, which was supposed to be a festival about Palestinian history, poetry and literature and so on, but if you looked at the list of people presenting and the panelists, it was like a who’s who of Hamas supporters and antisemites. 

I protested the events behind the scenes, and actually had made a decision and announced my decision to stop giving to Penn after the Palestine Writes Festival happened in September — before Oct. 7 — but I did it somewhat quietly. It wasn’t a movement at that point, it was just my personal decision not to support the school because [of] their reduction in acceptance of Orthodox Jews and the negative quality of life that my kids had experienced on campus as observant Jews. And then, obviously, going into the [university’s] response to Oct. 7, and the protests and the lack of defending the Jewish community was decisive for me and that’s when I made a public pronouncement about abandoning Penn and moving away from from any pledges I’d made and deciding not to give any more. 

I had been shifting my philanthropic focus away from America for a few years. For many years, I ran a foundation in America called the Kohelet Foundation that focused on Jewish education.

I scaled back that work, and maybe two years ago, I kind of rebooted the foundation to focus on Israel, trying to figure out how to help Anglo olim [English-speaking Jewish immigrants to Israel] integrate into Israeli society more, especially in the education world.

We renamed the foundation Tzemach David — you know, Kohelet was taken [Ed. note: This is a wry reference to the controversial Israeli think tank Kohelet Forum] — which is fine actually. It was nice to rebrand and think about, refocusing the foundation. We’d been working for over a year in schools in Israel when Oct. 7 happened. 

I was actually in Israel for Oct. 7, at my apartment in [the Jerusalem neighborhood of] Baka, celebrating Shemini Atzeret, when the attack happened. And when I came back to America and saw how bad things were, I booked a trip back to Israel, without a plan but looking to figure out how I could support the Jewish community — how to support Israel, but also support Americans and bring as many of them as I could to just to make a decision to make aliyah. 

Both of my sons had gone to gap-year programs in Israel but I decided to come back to America for college. And I saw the different entry points into making aliyah, whether it’s coming as a young adult or as a young family, but also as pre-college and college-age students. I was thinking about ways that I can have an impact on Israel with my philanthropy, how I could increase the likelihood that people would choose to make aliyah.

I’m not looking to support Israel as an exit strategy for America. I don’t think we should be trying to run away from or escape terrorists or violence [in America]. We should defend our right to be wherever we are. At the same time I think that our place is in Israel. Post-exile [from Israel], this is the first time that we have a viable option to go back to our Israel, and the State of Israel is an obvious solution, an obvious place for us to go where antisemitism is absent. 

I spent some time visiting all of the universities that I could find in a couple of trips and discovered that there were a couple of structural problems that were making it harder for American Jews to choose to go to college in Israel. One of them was the language barrier. 

What I learned from most of the colleges is that Americans are the only people in the world who can’t learn Hebrew. Immigrants from South America or from Europe somehow manage, but the ‘Anglos’ — they included the Brits in that equation — seem to be the most resistant. 

I identified that as a problem to address in the long term by looking at the Hebrew-language instruction in America, but short term, obviously, we have to deal with the situation on the ground. And a lot of the solutions that colleges were coming up with reactively were English-language programs, creating more siloed majors that you could study for three or four years in English. 

I am very much in favor of integrating into Israeli society as much as possible. So I was trying to find ways to support Israeli colleges in a way that leads to integrating students with the Hebrew language instruction. And I found JCT and a couple of other colleges that had an interest and a willingness to create programs that would support English speakers. 

I’m a religious Jew myself and I’m very much concerned about the unwelcoming and difficult environment that religious Jews face, not only on American secular college campuses where they face lifestyles that are not consistent with the lifestyle they want to lead, but also antisemitism and other kinds of structural problems, but even at secular Israeli colleges, there are similar problems

When I got to learn more about JCT, I was really just thrilled to see that there was a college campus that was supportive of Orthodox Jewish life, that had a dual curriculum with a beit midrash program, that separated genders, that was welcoming to the spectrum of Orthodox Jews, but also had an excellent education opportunity. The one impediment was the language.

So I met with the leadership of JCT a couple of times, and we agreed that Tzemach David would support and fund the development of a program that would create a mechina [preparatory] program to integrate English speakers. So it wouldn’t just be one major that you could study in English, but it would be the full spectrum of majors that they offer. 

JAG: And there wasn’t interest or an openness to that at Bar-Ilan University, which is a public university but still often caters to a religious population?

DM: So it’s a coed campus. I spoke to the leaders of the gap-year programs in Jerusalem and tried to understand, why is it that you don’t encourage more of your students to make aliyah, to stay in Israel, to join the army, to do national service and to go to college in Israel? You know they’re going to go to the University of Maryland or Binghamton in America, so why don’t you encourage them to go to Tel Aviv or Bar-Ilan? And they said, ‘Well, we certainly would support them if that was their decision, but these are coed colleges.’ And just from a rabbinic perspective, according to their obligations, according to Torah, they can’t openly advocate for their students to go to a coed college. But then when I got to know more about JCT, I said, ‘Well, what about JCT?’ They said, ‘Oh, 100%! We could totally recommend our students go to JCT. That’s totally kosher, totally within the hashkafa [worldview] of what we would advise our students.’

So I saw that the first tranche of my efforts to encourage gap-year students to stay in Israel would be to get involved with JCT and to find out what are the impediments to bringing in more American students. You know, not all problems can be solved with money, but some can. So I really wanted to find out what programs are being done, where if they had more money, they could accelerate the development of those programs. 

JAG: There’s something profound and humorous about the fact that the heads of religious gap-year programs can’t recommend something that they would consider to be preferable because it’s not ideal, which possibly results in a worse outcome from their point of view. Something along the lines of ‘Perfect is the enemy of the good.’

DM: Well, there’s this funny thing called Torah. Yeah, exactly. It does create some barriers. But I’m sure that, anecdotally, they would counsel them [to study at a secular university in Israel], but they can’t say it as a policy. 

JAG: And it’s funny that you mention the University of Maryland; I graduated from Maryland, which has an enormous Orthodox population and generally allows a certain Orthodox lifestyle, even if it is seen by the people at Yeshiva University as the place to go for a ‘wild weekend.’

DM: I was a big supporter of campus life at Penn and I’ve also been a big contributor to the [Orthodox Union’s Jewish Learning Initiative on Campus] program in America supporting Jewish life on other college campuses. However, I think that the facade of the vibrant Orthodox Jewish life [on campus] has been burst by Oct. 7. 

I think that the kids now know how unloved they are. [The universities] can’t sweep it back under the rug if they tried. I think now we all know how the administrations, how some of the faculty, how their fellow students really feel about Jews, especially outwardly practicing Jews and Zionist Jews. 

I think going to college these days is psychologically challenging. It’s very stressful. Add to that a layer of knowing you’re hated, knowing your people are denigrated, knowing that they’re willing to tolerate hate speech against you on these campuses. I think it’s almost unconscionable of parents to subject their children to these hostile environments. 

I became a kindof public figure in the anti-Penn movement post-Oct. 7; a lot of parents from my community and from others all around the country have been asking me where’s safe. And while there’s the University of Florida, there are schools in Texas, and other colleges in America that have shown themselves to be strong defenders of Jews on campus and defenders of Israel, it’s just obvious to me that the one place where you’re not going to get antisemitism is college in Israel. 

Even if you’re considering going to Yeshiva University, there are no encampments on the campus, but at the same time, you’re living in New York, you’re not immune to the antisemitism that’s present in the liberal New York environment. 

It’s just obvious to me that we should be encouraging our kids to go to college in Israel. The quality education is as good as at least the second-tier universities in America; in the case of the elite schools, if Jewish donors would take the resources we pour — irresponsibly now — into American colleges, if we took one-tenth of it and put it into Israeli colleges, I think the Israeli colleges would very quickly rise to a much higher level across the board in terms of the quality of their programs and the resources they offer. And oh, by the way, their kids can be living in the Holy Land and experience all the other things that Israel has to offer.

JAG: To push back on that a little on two fronts: One, we’re already starting to see the enrollment numbers for the coming year in Israel and in America, and from what I’ve seen there does not appear to be a major rise in American Jews opting to study at Israeli universities despite the issue of campus antisemitism being so prominent. As it is, people would rather graduate with $200,000 in student debt than come study here in Israel, even though there are some top-tier programs here. It just doesn’t draw people. So there’s a question of the efficacy of trying to encourage something that people just don’t seem to be that interested in. 

And two, given that not a lot of people are necessarily going to come over to Israel, if all of the Jewish donors and all of that influence comes away from Ivy League schools, that leaves those Jewish students who want to study there without somebody behind the scenes who can really fight for them.

DM: So a number of those points are really valid. 

But one thing that guides me is that like 80% of the Jews stayed in Egypt [after the exodus], and [Moses] didn’t leave behind an infrastructure system to support the Jews who stayed in Egypt. At some point we have to recognize that the Golden Age of Jews in America is over. And we need to shift our focus to those Jews who want to leave Egypt, cross the sea and come into Israel. We need to support that much more so than in the past. 

But in terms of the statistics you’re citing, that’s exactly why I’m doing what I’m doing. When a Jewish child is born, their parents immediately start figuring out ‘How are we going to get them into Harvard?’ We have this vision of the Ivy Leagues as being the ultimate standard and success for the education process, and I think that’s incredibly misguided. I was one of those parents: Two of my kids went to Penn. I’ve seen the error of my ways. 

The gap-year programs are very effective in creating this positive experience that [kids] realize why they should stay in Israel. But for so many of them, their parents refuse to allow them. They say, ‘We spent all the money getting your SAT prep and your applications, you got accepted, you’re going to Maryland, Penn, Princeton, Harvard, whatever. You’re going to that college, full stop.

JAG: As an aside, it warms my heart that you put Maryland, Penn, Princeton and Harvard in the same group.

DM: But I think that there’s a number of fronts we have to operate on. First of all, we have to present the colleges in Israel to parents. Actually this next week, we’re bringing 10 college guidance counselors from Jewish day schools in America to Israel as a pilot program to introduce them to colleges in Israel. We’re bringing them to nine different colleges, including JCT. These college guidance counselors know little to nothing about [universities in Israel], so how are the students and their parents going to be recommended to send their kids to Bar-Ilan or the Technion or JCT, if the guidance counselors who are the ones advising them don’t know anything about them? So that’s one step we’re taking. 

Ultimately, we need to get middle school parents to start thinking about Israeli college before they invest tens of thousands of dollars in their kids’ educations and summer programs just so they can have the resume to get into an Ivy League school. If they knew that they wanted to send their kids to an Israeli college, they could dispense with all that and give them the education that they need without all those shiny bells and whistles to focus their education on what they need to get into Israeli colleges. One thing I’ve heard from, let’s say, like Technion, I talked to them about getting American students into the school and they said, ‘The truth is, we’d love to have more Americans. But when they come here, they’re not prepared. They don’t know enough math and science to qualify to go to Technion, I think largely because the smartest STEM students, the kids who are most capable of math and science in America are forced to take AP History, AP Government, AP English. They take all of these advanced humanities classes, which are fine for their broader education, but they don’t leave enough room for them to do a deeper dive into the math and sciences that the Israeli students are able to do when they know they want to focus on those areas. 

If the goal was to get their kids into the Technion or JCT or Bar-Ilan, their high school experience would be tailored very differently. 

So I think this is a multi-year process. 

JAG: You mentioned that you met with several different universities. Are there any other universities that you’re in talks with about building a similar preparatory program going forward?

DM: We’re doing a million dollar grant over five years to JCT, and we’re looking to do similar programs with four other universities. I had originally had a multimillion dollar gift that was supposed to go to Penn, and I’ve decided to halt that gift. So instead of just saving the money, I decided to reinvest it in Israeli colleges. And so I’m looking to create these kinds of preparatory programs in five colleges in Israel, assuming they want it. 

I’m not looking to tell them what to do. I’m just looking for colleges that are interested in this. And so JCT said that this was something that they wanted to do. They were hoping to launch this kind of program and they were looking for funding for it. So if I can find other universities that have a similar mindset, I would support them as well. 

For me, personally, as a religious Jew, JCT is like the gold standard for me. I view JCT as the Yeshiva University of the world. Anyone in the world who wants this dual curriculum, gender-separated education that supports Orthodox life, should choose JCT. 

Obviously JCT is a technology-focused university. Obviously one thing that I’d love to see them do is broaden their curriculum beyond technology. But certainly in the areas that they offer classes in, and they offer degrees in, I think that the religious world should all consider JCT.