The most expensive protest in American Jewish history may turn out to be our own. 

Since Oct. 7, 2023, Jewish donors have pulled hundreds of millions of dollars from elite universities. The impulse is completely understandable; it’s also, I’d argue, exactly wrong. In focusing on the most visible battleground, we risk missing the larger war. As Rebecca Dinar, executive director of the Samson Charitable Fund, recently argued in eJewishPhilanthropy (“Whoever shapes the frameworks shapes the future of Jewish life,” May 10), academic frameworks and the ideas they produce don’t stay in classrooms or on campuses. They move into courtrooms where they become law and policy that influence every part of society. Knowledge legitimized within academic systems also becomes congressional resolutions, media bias, K-12 curricula and the content feeding large language models (LLMs) that will inform how future generations understand the world. Ceding the academy is not a protest. It is a surrender of the intellectual infrastructure that shapes the world we live in today and tomorrow. 

Screenshot/cjc[dot]georgetown[dot]edu

The Center for Jewish Civilization at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

Anger is not a strategy — and neither is silence

The donors who walked away weren’t wrong to be angry, but the visible effect of their decisions — the empty seat, the withdrawn check — has become a signal to others that withdrawal is the right response to institutional failure when it may not be; and the stakes of getting that wrong are too high to leave unexamined. As Dinar argues, academia is the “intellectual infrastructure that determines how ideas, and ultimately outcomes, take shape.”

Marc Rowan had given $50 million to Penn’s Wharton School. Leon Cooperman had given over $50 million to Columbia. The Russell Berrie Foundation had given nearly $90 million to Columbia over three decades. These were rational acts of protest, and in some cases they worked: Penn’s president and board chair both resigned. Columbia’s leadership changed. But without a constructive strategy to follow the protest, donor pressure inspired broader political campaigns that alienated the very faculty whose support any real reform requires. This abandonment also relinquished the breeding ground of knowledge and ideas to those more interested in ideology than in balanced, serious, scholarly inquiry. Donors are right to hold these institutions accountable. But how we do it matters.

Some will argue that these institutions are too far gone, that the culture is too entrenched to change. The evidence says otherwise. These institutions may respond to pressure, but they respond more readily to funding. Applied strategically, academic funding can shape intellectual frameworks. To those who would frame conditions-based giving as undue influence: Every endowed chair in every university reflects a donor’s judgment about what knowledge is worth pursuing. We are not asking universities to adopt a conclusion, but to evaluate and teach the evidence. It’s not only a Jewish interest. It’s an academic one. 

Others will argue that universities are becoming irrelevant anyway, that AI will render the traditional campus obsolete. The opposite may be true. The AI systems people will use to understand the world are trained on the corpus of existing scholarship. If that corpus is thin, skewed or ideologically captured on a subject as consequential as Israel and the Middle East, the tools built on it will be, too. Endowing rigorous, peer-reviewed Israel studies scholarship not only educates the students in the room today. It shapes the intellectual foundation that future AI will learn from. Getting the scholarship right now is not a rearguard action against irrelevance. It is an investment in how knowledge about this region will be understood for generations. It is, in the language of serious philanthropy, upstream investment, the kind that produces influence rather than just activity. 

This is not abstract. The foreign correspondent who frames Israeli military operations without historical context was educated at one of these universities. The State Department analyst who briefs the next Secretary of State on Palestinian statehood learned their frameworks there, too. The K-12 curriculum that teaches your grandchildren about the Middle East was written by scholars trained in these same departments; and the AI tools they will consult when they want to understand the region will have learned from the academic work those departments produced.

Serious stakeholders don’t leave the table. So what do we do instead? 

We stop treating our philanthropy as an emotional response to institutional failure and start treating it as the most powerful tool we have to fix it. The leverage is real: 2% of university donors provide 89% of all philanthropic giving to American higher education, $78 billion in fiscal year 2025 alone, according to the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. A significant portion of that 2% is Jewish. 

We are not supplicants. We are stakeholders. And stakeholders don’t walk out of the boardroom. They use their seat at the table. 

How you give matters as much as how much you give

I want to use my own university as an example — not to single it out, but because I know it well enough to be specific, and because I believe in it enough to say this publicly. 

I have two kids at Georgetown. I’m an alum. I’m building its first Jewish alumni affinity group. We give strategically, through our family’s donor-advised fund at our local Jewish federation, directed specifically to Georgetown’s Center for Jewish Civilization, because their practice is to bring genuinely diverse perspectives into real conversation. As the CJC grows, more scholarly output becomes possible — not just for students in their classrooms, but for the policymakers, curriculum writers and legal scholars who rely on peer-reviewed literature to do their work. 

Securing your seat at the table means more than writing a check. It means giving strategically, with clear conditions, to efforts that are already doing the work. Dinar makes the critical distinction that funding institutions is not the same as shaping the intellectual frameworks those institutions produce. She’s right. An unrestricted gift is a blank check. A restricted gift, with endowment language specifying purpose, eligibility criteria, monitoring and reversion clauses, is an entirely different instrument. In one documented case reported by legal advocates at StandWithUs in eJewishPhilanthropy, a donor endowed a professorship in Jewish and Israeli studies only to discover the appointed professor publicly supported boycotts of Israel. Enforceable contract language meant the university was persuaded to act. Without it, there

would have been no recourse. Your Jewish federation’s donor-advised fund exists precisely for this. Use it. 

Engagement matters as much as endowment. In addition to our restricted gift to the CJC, we are in active dialogue with its faculty, leadership and university administration, building relationships from a foundation of shared commitment to the institution’s own stated values. We are building Georgetown’s first Jewish affinity group for exactly this reason: to bring more informed voices to the table, make Jewish concerns visible and ensure that collaborative efforts have real partners inside the institution. This work cannot be imposed from outside. It requires faculty, researchers and students who want to build the scholarship that is currently missing. Our job is to find them, support them and get out of their way. 

What if the infrastructure isn’t there? Sometimes the answer is to build it. In 2025, Jan Koum, the Ukrainian-born Jewish immigrant who co-founded WhatsApp, endowed a permanent Israel Studies Program at Stanford with a $41 million gift. It lives inside the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, not a Jewish studies silo. It is multidisciplinary, covering Israeli contributions to technology, environmental science and business alongside history and politics. It brings visiting Israeli professors across fields. And making it permanent was a recommendation of Stanford’s own antisemitism task force. The university wanted this. Koum made it possible. 

Some tables are better than others

Not every university deserves the same confidence, and the right institutions to support are not necessarily the most famous ones. Watch for signals that a university is genuinely trying to get this right: consistent enforcement of campus policies when Jewish students face harassment; programming that reflects real viewpoint diversity, not just stated commitments to it; tenure processes that don’t systematically exclude faculty with minority perspectives; and a willingness to invite Israeli scholars and diplomats into the same rooms as other voices. These signals exist at large state universities, small liberal arts colleges and community institutions as well as at elite research universities. The throughline isn’t prestige. It’s integrity. 

What is worth fighting for? Some ideas: Endowed chairs in Israel studies housed in mainstream foreign policy departments, not on the margins of campus life. Visiting Israeli faculty across disciplines. And robust support for Jewish campus life like Hillel and Chabad, so Jewish students have the identity foundation to engage without feeling like their existence is the subject of debate. Certainly, efforts like Khoum’s may be possible for only a minority of donors and large foundations. But depending on the infrastructure, targeted philanthropy can still be impactful. The current price tag for a single endowed chair typically ranges from $4 to $8 million, while grants for visiting faculty or specific scholarly endeavors may be far less and potentially within the reach of a group of coordinated donors. 

Universities are not lost causes. They are institutions with extraordinary missions they are currently failing to live up to. That gap is not a reason to leave. It is the reason to lean in and precisely the leverage point donors, parents and alumni have always had and too rarely used effectively. The founding values of American higher education — free inquiry, the courage to sit with uncomfortable ideas, the pursuit of truth over consensus — are, when you trace them, deeply Jewish values. We helped build these institutions. Now we need to hold them to their promise. 

Sabrina Braham is a Georgetown University alumna, parent of two current Georgetown students and the founder of Georgetown’s first Jewish alumni affinity group.