Immediately after the Oct. 7 massacres in Israel, Jewish philanthropists poured money into more than 160 organizations claiming to fight antisemitism — but the problem was, according to a 2025 Jewish Funders Network’s study, the initiatives were often redundant and couldn’t prove they accomplished anything.

The study provided further evidence that the Jewish community’s efforts to combat antisemitism were not effective — a realization that has been leading many Jewish funders to pivot away from the field. Earlier this year, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens accentuated the need to shift funding away from combating antisemitism at February’s 46th annual State of World Jewry address, calling for the American Jewish community to dismantle the Anti-Defamation League and focus on education and instilling Jewish pride instead.

At the same time as many were pulling funding, a coalition of donors was doubling down on combating the world’s oldest hatred through innovative initiatives centered on building Jewish pride, supporting boycotted initiatives, cultivating cross-cultural partnerships and educating potential allies, instead of attacking antisemites who refused to listen.

Formed in 2024 — and first revealed in the most recent edition of Maimonides Fund’s Sapir quarterly journal— the Har Initiative mobilized nearly $75 million from 11 donors to support 15 grantees between 2024 and 2025. For most grantees, the funding was the largest gift ever received in their organizations’ history.

Co-chaired by Lindsey Spindle, president of the Samueli Foundation, and Fay Twersky, president of the Arthur Blank Family Foundation, the Har Initiative is not a pooled fund. Instead, donors choose from a portfolio of initiatives with the floor for participation set at a $10 million commitment that can be spread across grantees. Investments are for five years of unrestricted funding, allowing grantees room to pivot and take risks.

“Historically in Jewish philanthropy, people give in very short time frames and under a large set of restrictions,” Spindle told eJewishPhilanthropy. “In the private equity world, for example, when someone comes with a pitch deck to an investor around a new idea, oftentimes, they get five years of money and a lot of runway to figure out how to make a company work. If that’s how we know innovation works in the private sector, why wouldn’t we treat the same thing in the social sector when we have a problem that is this complicated and dynamic?”

The initiative is made up of 12 funders, including The Tepper Foundation, The Einhorn Collaborative, the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies and Maimonides Fund. Many partners are not typical Jewish philanthropic heavyweights. Funders come from across the U.S. with vast ideological differences, which is important, according to Spindle. “When we offer people a range of choices, it means that people have some agency. It’s really pluralism in action,” she said.

Prior to Oct. 7, the Samueli Foundation funded “broadly across a set of established, traditional Jewish organizations (like you’d spread peanut butter over a slice of bread),” Spindle wrote in her essay in Sapir. 

After the massacres and in the wake of the Gaza war, Broadcom Co-founder Henry Samueli, his wife, Susan, and Spindle “were stunned in the revelation of how deep and broad and entrenched and violent antisemitism had become,” Spindle said, “We felt like whatever we had been doing before was wholly insufficient, and we needed a new way to work to engage on these issues.”

With this realization, Spindle contacted her friend Twersky and Home Depot Co-founder Arthur Blank, who reached out to other funders. Everyone agreed that the moment called for “big ideas,” Spindle said. “Innovation, big thinking, risk taking and a willingness to try to work in ways that we haven’t worked together before.”

Members of the collective first met in November 2024 at a retreat center in the hills of Montana, leading to the initiative’s name — “har” meaning mountain in Hebrew. The name is also symbolic of the arduous task ahead of the donors.

Instead of screaming at people over antisemitism, the initiative combats the virus “though the lens of building — building new alliances, building healthier discourse on Israel, building safety in institutions — and we have a specific category that is also about Jewish thriving, but it has to have a specific relation to antisemitism,” Spindle said.

In order to create innovative change, funders need to take risks, Spindle said. “You have to be willing to lose some money or some social standing or friends, all of which I think almost every Jewish person I know has. But what people feel like they’re gaining through participation here [is] real community, people with shared values and interests.”

Post-Oct. 7, many funders invested based on a gut reaction, Mark Charendoff, the president of Maimonides Fund, told eJP, but there are initiatives that clearly make an impact on antisemitism, such as security at synagogues and researching the algorithm of how antisemitism spreads online.  

“There’s a difference between trying to convince antisemites to love us, which strikes me as not a particularly good use of money, versus educating people about the reality on the ground in Israel or of the Gaza war,” Charendoff said. 

A benefit of working in coalition with other funders is getting exposed to new initiatives, he said. “A lot of times you go into meetings, and you know everyone there really, really well… But when I walk into Har, it’s a lot of people that I don’t know… A lot of [other Har donors’] grantees are not our grantees, and that makes us smarter when we interact with people that we hadn’t had that chance to interact with up until now.”

It’s unrealistic for philanthropists to only fund proven initiatives that target antisemitism, William Foster, the managing director of The Bridgespan Group, which provides consulting to Har grantees, told eJP. Especially since antisemitism hadn’t been taken as seriously in the U.S. until the October 2018 mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh that left 11 worshippers dead.

“We’re in the first inning of trying to figure out what to do,” Foster said. “There’s very little that’s proven in the nonprofit sector, period, so the notion that in the first handful of years of taking contemporary antisemitism seriously, we would only fund proven things [is not realistic]… The notion that Jewish thriving has all kinds of proven [research], not so true.”

To document an initiative’s impact, The Bridgespan Group helps the grantees create a five-year plan, measuring if they reach their goals, which can pivot if needed, each year. Nearly, every grantee exceeded their targets in their inaugural years. There are also Har grantees that are focused specifically on researching strategies that work, including the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL) at American University.

“Our whole ethos is test, test, test,” Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a sociologist and professor at American University and the founding director of PERIL, told eJP.

PERIL creates 75-second videos that “pre-bunk” viewers for antisemitic conspiracy theories with “a tiny microdose of the propaganda, and then we have a 15-second counter narrative where you tell them this is why it isn’t true.”

The institute does large research trials on the videos’ impact. Their 2024-25 videos were shown to lead to a 12% reduction in antisemitism and a 24% increase in viewers’ willingness to speak up when they hear someone say something antisemitic.

“It’s like testing a medication,” Miller-Idriss said. “You have to make sure it works in a live trial before you send it out because a lot of people with good intentions design interventions that have the potential to backfire and make the problem worse.”

PERIL’s “pre-bunking” techniques have been incorporated in another Har-funded initiative, The Tell Institute, which was founded in 2024 and launched in 2025 by author Dara Horn to educate public school students about antisemitism.

The institute’s eight-lesson crash course teaches antisemitism as a lie told throughout history, not a bigotry similar to racism. The lie blames Jews for whatever a person holds dear.

“We are introducing students to pattern recognition,” Horn said. “In other words, it’s not don’t hate people, it’s how might you be being manipulated and how can you recognize that pattern when you encounter it?”

Support from the Har Institute has allowed Tell to expand beyond the 12 schools in which  the program was launched. Today, it is taught in over 40 public schools and in Hebrew schools because even Jewish students need a dose of the vaccine.

Har’s support was “a game changer for [the Jewish Book Council] and helping us launch Nu Reads,” Naomi Firestone-Teeter, CEO of JBC, told eJP. JBC’s bimonthly book club was launched in reaction to boycotts across the literary world, where Jewish authors have had appearances canceled and are listed on Zionist blacklists.

Within four months of launching in October 2025, Nu Reads had over 2,000 readers signed up to receive books by Jewish authors. Having the backing from a coalition of esteemed philanthropists gave the Nu Reads credibility, allowing the JBC to find additional funding for the initiative, Firestone-Teeter said.

Additional grantees include Center for Countering Digital Hate, Civitas, Fuente Latina, Or Initiative, Resetting the Table, Sixpoint, Facing History and Ourselves, Interfaith America, Project Shema, Repair the World, Tel Aviv Institute and Hillel Campus Partners, which supports universities that want to make changes to support Jewish students.

“Through our expansive work with universities both before and after Oct. 7, we recognized the deep structural challenges impeding effective responses to clear cases of antisemitism,” Adam Lehman, CEO of Hillel International, told eJP. “We realized that to break through these deeper structural issues, we need to go beyond antisemitism education by sharing best practices and reactive troubleshooting. We are also piloting longer-term engagements with university partners that encourage real change in areas such as student codes of conduct, campus safety and security measures, and cross-campus bridge-building initiatives.”

Not all grantees are Jewish. “It seems improbable to me that we are going to reduce antisemitism on our own,” Spindle said. “It seems way more likely that we’re going to reduce antisemitism when we’re building alliances with people who care about a society that is less hateful, less divided, less polarized… Our personal view is that innovations can come from all corners of the world.”

The next gathering of the partners will be held in October. Bret Stephens will be in attendance to speak with donors. Having Stephens present is important, Twersky told eJP, because “We’ve always had Jewish thriving as part of our pathway… We just don’t think it’s the only pathway. We both say, ‘OK, what you’re arguing makes sense, but we don’t think you have the only answer either.’”

At the event, Har will announce 11 new grantees receiving $120 million, another step on the long slog up the mountain.

Even though combating antisemitism may seem hopeless to some, “I am a pathologically positive person,” Spindle said. “If you are in the world of philanthropy, you believe that change is possible… Social change is generational work. We didn’t get to where we are overnight, and we’re not going to fix it in a day. This takes long-term, sustained investment in a very dynamic environment.”