Today, philanthropist Harold Grinspoon celebrates his 97th birthday, making him one of the oldest active major philanthropists in the world. The title goes hand in hand with his well-earned designation as one of the major Jewish philanthropists of the last half-century. 

The project that cemented his reputation worldwide was and continues to be PJ Library. Notably, Harold came up with this project in 2005 at the age of 76.

Screenshot/Harold Grinspoon Foundation

Harold Grinspoon.

Harold learned that Dolly Parton created the Imagination Library to send books to urban, low-income families that did not normally have books in their homes. In the absence of ready access to books, parents weren’t reading to their children; as a result, the children were arriving in early education classes already behind in reading skills and the ability to use texts to learn on their own. Motivated by this information, Parton partnered with local authorities and departments of education until eventually 1-in-6 children in the United States were receiving Imagination Library books. 

Harold grasped the fact that many middle-class Jewish children were also deprived, in the sense that their homes were devoid of Jewish books. While it was more likely that their parents read to them, they still lacked literacy and reading skills specific to Jewish texts. He decided to adopt Parton’s library model to send Jewish books to homes, both to foster a loving reading relationship between children and their parents (and grandparents) and to create a strong bond to Jewish life and identity, even in homes of intermarriage or assimilation. 

Thus, PJ Library was born.  

To assure quality and Jewish content, the Harold Grinspoon Foundation had to take on creating a supply of high-caliber Jewish books, including recruiting authors and incentivizing writers and illustrators to create new and original Jewish books. Harold recruited local funding partners, and the program spread from America to the entire Jewish world. It now includes 40 countries across the globe and distributes books in seven languages. 

In Israel, Sifriyat Pyjama (“Pajama Library” in Hebrew) works in partnership with the Ministry of Education to distribute books through kindergartens, preschools and early childhood programs. Although the books are accessed in the classroom, they are taken home to be read in the family setting. Currently, over 350,000 children ages 1 to 8 receive seven to eight books yearly from Sifriyat Pyjama. 

A parallel program, Maktabat Al Fanoos (“Lantern Library” in Arabic) was established for the Arabic-speaking Arab, Druze and Bedouin communities; it reaches over 175,000 children with eight books a year. Rather than featuring Jewish content, the Arabic selections focus on social-emotional learning, humanist content and the rich cultural heritage of these communities. 

PJ Library currently distributes 670,000 books monthly around the world, 250,000 in North America alone, but the Harold Grinspoon Foundation is about much more than PJ Library. It offered local scholarships for Jewish camping and Israel travel, as well as for local youth activities, long before the American Jewish community discovered that these were the most effective programs for nurturing Jewish identity. It was also an initial partner in Birthright Israel when it offered universal free trips to Israel for Jewish youth aged 18 to 26. The foundation has also offered challenge grants to camps that have raised tens of millions of dollars to expand and upgrade physical living quality and Jewish content.

The Harold Grinspoon Foundation is a master of microgrants — for local community and family activities, such as Shabbat meals or shared-interest affinity groups, as well as programs on university campuses and Jewish outreach projects — and a master of partnership grants to communities, assuring that joint programs such as Life and Legacy are staffed. For decades, it has also offered generous financial underwriting to varied Jewish day schools. 

Since its inception, the foundation has given away more than $700 million, and it is still going strong. 

And here we come to Harold Grinspoon as a personal role model of what a Jewish philanthropist should be. In 2014, at the peak of his powers and accomplishments, Harold stepped down as leader of the foundation that bears his name to ensure that the work would be carried on into the next generation. Harold was able to do what few highly-driven entrepreneur philanthropists are able to do: curb his passion, vision and ego and serve as an advisor, an initiator, while enabling full autonomy and freedom of action to his daughter-in-law, Winnie Sandler Grinspoon, and the board. 

Another aspect in which Harold is a role model is that he is not only an underwriter of Jewish experiences but a participant in them as well. He and his wife Diane Trodeman attend Washington Institute for Near East Policy retreats and fact-finding missions to the Middle East. They explore chavurot and participate in special prayer groups over the High Holy Days.

If all this were not enough, Grinspoon also embodies a key religious message: to embrace life and experience it deeply. He is an avid attender at Boston Symphony Tanglewood Classical Music Series and enjoys the dance festival at Jacob’s Pillow in the Berkshires. He writes poetry and sculpts as well. Over 140 of his works of art are now on exhibit at The Mount in Lenox, Mass., and at Chesterwood and the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge. 

Amazingly, Harold is as curious and engaged in his 90s as he was in his 50s. Deeply concerned about Israel, this past year he concluded that there should be special investments in the Jewish state to rebuild life after the Oct. 7 massacre and three years of war and evacuations. As a result, the foundation committed $5 million to support the rebuilding efforts in Israel, the majority of which is being distributed across five kibbutzim.

What new project will he come up with at 98, or 100? As Kohelet teaches, “Sow your seed in the morning, but do not hold back from planting again in the evening; for you do not know which harvest will prosper, or if both will be good.” (11:10). This Jewish philanthropist chooses life and creativity every day in the evening of life. 

May he continue to do so ad meah v’esrim, until 120.

CORRECTIONS 7.28.26: The article has been updated to reflect the following:

• PJ Library currently distributes 670,000 books monthly worldwide, not 650,000, and 250,000 of these, not 220,000, are distributed in North America alone.
• The Harold Grinspoon Foundation is not the largest publisher of Jewish children’s books in the world — PJ Library doesn’t publish all the books it sends to subscribers — but PJ Library is the largest Jewish book program in the world, with over 70 million books sent since the program’s inception.
• The Harold Grinspoon Foundation committed a $5 million grant to support rebuilding efforts in Israel, and the majority of the funds will be distributed across five kibbutzim, not one.

A theologian and activist, Rabbi Yitz Greenberg is the senior scholar in residence at the Hadar Institute. Rabbi Greenberg is the creator of CLAL and the founding president of the Jewish Life Network/Steinhardt Foundation. He also served as executive director of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust, which conceptualized and proposed the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on the National Mall, and served as the museum’s chair from 2000-2002.