In eJewishPhilanthropy’s exclusive opinion column The 501(C) Suite, leading foundation executives share what they are working on and thinking about with the wider philanthropic field. 

“Patriotism and this feeling alone … animate[s] the vast throng, and cheers after cheers rose in the air as the flags were unfurled and the chimes sounded joyfully proclaiming our independence…. Oh! Thankful ought we to be both as a nation and as a religious body that we are allowed to think and act as we wish!”

When a young Jewish woman named Amelia Allen penned these words in her diary after attending America’s 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, she captured something profound about the American Jewish experience. Seeing no contradiction between being Jewish and being American, Amelia’s identity was rooted in Jewish values and practices and expressed through American civic and democratic participation. 

Amelia and her family were deeply embedded in the network of benevolent societies, fraternal organizations and cultural institutions that defined 19th-century American Jewish life. Amelia’s grandmother, Anna Marks Allen, was a member of the Philadelphia Female Hebrew Benevolent Society (founded in 1819) and president of the Philadelphia Jewish Foster Home and Orphan Asylum (1855), as well as a founder of the Hebrew Sunday school (1838) where her daughter-in-law, Miriam Arnold, and granddaughter, Amelia, would later teach. 

Between 1819 and 1876, Jews in nearly every American city that had a Jewish presence incorporated more than 500 philanthropic, cultural and educational institutions. These charitable organizations were laboratories of identity, where Jews practiced both democracy and distinctiveness and claimed citizenship in both the American and Jewish polities. This May, as we observe Jewish American Heritage Month amid unprecedented challenges to both Jewish safety and security and America’s democratic institutions, these associations offer a powerful framework for understanding our current moment. 

The Jewish associational boom didn’t occur in isolation but reflected a distinctly American pattern. When Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States in the 1830s, he marveled at Americans’ propensity to form voluntary associations for every conceivable purpose, declaring it one of our democracy’s defining features. Jews embraced this trend with remarkable enthusiasm, creating their own parallel associational universe. Their mutual aid societies, orphanages, fraternal lodges, literary associations, Sunday schools and hospitals represented both practical responses to Jewish community needs and a profound reimagining of Jewish practice through American democratic forms. 

This creative adaptation transformed Jewish communal life.  When Jewish benevolent societies drafted by-laws requiring democratic governance, they fulfilled both American democratic norms and the Talmudic principle that charity be distributed by multiple trustees. Through annual organizational meetings with formal votes for slates of officers and membership dues, they created modern versions of the traditional kahal. The obligation to care for the sick resulted in Jewish hospitals with medical boards and kosher food while the duty to educate children took shape in Sunday schools drawing upon Protestant models to teach Jewish content. Jewish orphanages required their matrons to recite the bedtime Shema with their charges, even going so far as to fire one who married outside the faith. Democratic practices — board meetings, committee reports, parliamentary debate and elections — acquired near-sacred status as Jews discovered these practices could express Jewish values in an American idiom. 

The pendulum of American Jewish philanthropy has swung dramatically since then. For much of the last 50 years, confident that the democracy Jews had embraced and modeled had made particularism unnecessary, even parochial, Jewish giving tilted increasingly toward universal causes, diverging from its 19th-century roots when Jewish philanthropy was by Jews, for Jews, and centered on communal self-sufficiency. Today, Jewish foundations and individual donors command billions in assets and tackle global challenges from climate change and medical research to poverty and educational inequality. This universalist orientation represents the fulfillment of a certain American Jewish dream: to be so secure in our belonging that we can direct our resources outward.  

But the events of Oct. 7 and their aftermath have shaken that confidence. Across the Jewish world, we are rediscovering our particularity. We’ve seen secular Jews return to synagogue, young professionals choose to work and volunteer for Jewish organizations and funders redirect their giving toward Jewish education, security and solidarity with Israel. These aren’t signs of parochialism. They are signs of reckoning.

The surge of Jewish interest we’re experiencing, paired with the rise in antisemitism emanating from both the right and left of the political spectrum and dangerous attacks on American democratic norms, have forced us to revisit old questions: What does Jewish belonging mean in America? How do we protect our community without retreating from our commitment to the national common good? How do we honor both universal values and targeted commitments? 

At the Russell Berrie Foundation these aren’t theoretical debates. They shape real decisions: when to pause our funding to institutions that fail to address antisemitism; how to sustain our commitment to bridge-building despite our disillusionment with allies who failed to respect Jewish dignity and safety; whether lessons from our efforts to address polarization and bolster a democracy under threat in Israel can inform our U.S. grantmaking.

Jewish American Heritage Month invites us to remember that our philanthropic traditions have served both particular and universal purposes, and that American democracy and Jewish distinctiveness have been mutually reinforcing, not opposing, forces. A healthy democracy demands that all people — Jews included — be free to fully and safely participate in its institutions and practices. The alarming rise in campus antisemitism shouldn’t require choosing between supporting Jewish self-defense and upholding democratic principles. Instead, it demands what our ancestors perfected nearly 200 years ago: adapting democratic tools — free speech, institutional governance, civic organizing — to protect Jewish life while strengthening democratic practice.

The question for Jewish philanthropy today isn’t whether to choose between universal and particular commitments, but how to honor both. Like the ancient rabbis who insisted on multiple forms of inquiry to reach truth, we need philanthropic approaches that embrace complexity rather than oversimplify it. In a moment when both Jewish security and democratic norms feel fragile, our giving must recognize that the health of American democracy and the security of Jewish life are inseparable goals.

I see our work at the Russell Berrie Foundation, and that of Jewish philanthropy more broadly, as part of this legacy. To care for the Jewish people is not to neglect the world. And to care for the world is not to forget our own. Jewish values compel us to hold both truths. Our giving must reflect that as we live out the dual promise that Amelia Allen captured so beautifully nearly 150 years ago — that we may think and act as we wish, as Jews and as Americans.

Idana Goldberg is the CEO of the Russell Berrie Foundation.