Good Tuesday morning!

In today’s Your Daily Phil, we look at the impact of Jewish relief efforts in hurricane-lashed Florida and Puerto Rico, and feature op-eds by JFNA’s Shira Hutt on the upcoming General Assembly, and by SRE’s Elana Wien on working with nonprofit boards on safety issues. Also in this newsletter: Rabbi Harvey Belovski and Vicki Belovski, Manny Waks andPablo Eisenberg. We’ll start with a major development in the Adidas-Kanye West controversy.

Adidas has ended its partnership with Kanye West due to West’s repeated antisemitic statements, the company announced Tuesday morning.

The sportswear giant’s decision to terminate the partnership with West’s fashion label, Yeezy, which was worth $2 billion annually, came following a pressure campaign from the Anti-Defamation League and a growing list of celebrities. A petition to that effect from the U.K.’s Campaign Against Antisemitism garnered nearly 175,000 signatures.

Earlier this month, Adidas had placed the partnership with West, who goes by the name Ye, under review. The company said that it would lose roughly $250 million in 2022 net income alone due to the decision to end the partnership. Its stock has fallen 20% this month.

“Adidas does not tolerate antisemitism and any other sort of hate speech,” the company said in a statement. “Ye’s recent comments and actions have been unacceptable, hateful and dangerous, and they violate the company’s values of diversity and inclusion, mutual respect and fairness.”

West had also stirred controversy by wearing a “White Lives Matter” T-shirt at a Paris Fashion Week show, and had disparaged Adidas executives on social media. Last week, he said he could make antisemitic statements and Adidas “can’t drop me.”

Creative Artists Agency, the prominent talent agency, also dropped West, as did the studio MRC and other companies. After a neo-Nazi group praised West’s statements on banners above a Los Angeles freeway, a growing list of celebrities condemned antisemitism.

Adidas’ decision “illustrates that antisemitism is unacceptable and creates consequences,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement. “Without a doubt, Adidas has done the right thing by cutting ties with Ye after his vicious antisemitic rants.

In a statement referencing Adidas’ predecessor company, the Campaign Against Antisemitism said, “A company with a Nazi past must be at the forefront, not the rearguard, of fighting antisemitism. But better late than never. No company should profit from antisemitism.”

FOLLOW-UP

How Jewish aid groups helped Florida and Puerto Rico after the hurricanes

COURTESY OF HATZALAH

Just before Rosh Hashana began, psychotrauma therapist Gaby Hilkowitz Rurka left her home in Israel, headed for Puerto Rico as part of a United Hatzalah team providing an emergency response to Hurricane Fiona. One day when it started to pour, she recalls a young boy approached her and said, “This is exactly what makes me so scared and nervous. This reminds me of the hurricane,” Hilkowitz Rurka recalled to eJewishPhilanthropy’s Daniela Cohen.

Body and mind: When disaster response teams arrived in Puerto Rico and the west coast of Florida in September and October, shortly after Fiona and Hurricane Ian, respectively, made landfall, they were focused on meeting immediate needs — extricating those who were trapped and providing food, shelter and medical care. But during the little more than a week when its teams were in each location, Hatzalah, a nonprofit headquartered in Jerusalem, also attended to what it says is an important, if sometimes neglected, aspect of disaster relief: providing tools for people to cope mentally and emotionally in the aftermath of trauma.

Still helping: Local Jewish community leaders have continued relief efforts after the disaster response organizations have left, and are also caring for their neighbors’ mental health. Rabbi Yitzchok Minkowicz, director of Chabad Lubavitch of Southwest Florida in Fort Myers, which took a direct hit from Ian, told eJP that nearly a month after the Category 4 hurricane made landfall in Florida, he is focused on providing his community with moral support. Going door-to-door in his neighborhood, he said the devastation is tangible.

Read the full story here.

RESILIENCE

Fortifying our shared future at the General Assembly

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“The General Assembly, which is hosted by the Jewish Federations of North America, and will gather in Chicago at the end of this month after two years of virtual conferences, webinars and nonstop Zoom meetings, will be a testament to the remarkable resilience of our community. Since we last gathered, we have weathered massive threats that no one could have predicted — not just the pandemic, but the war in Ukraine and its impact on Jewish life across Europe and beyond, along with the perilous surge in antisemitism and anti-Zionism throughout the world,” writes Shira Hutt, executive vice president of the Jewish Federations of North America, in an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy.

The need to focus here at home: “Yet as much as we have been obliged to work collectively to relieve the suffering of both Jews and non-Jews abroad, including paving the way for tens of thousands of Jews to make aliyah from Ukraine, Russia and Ethiopia, we must not lose our focus on the equally important need to create flourishing Jewish communities here at home — communities that are healthy, safe, caring, welcoming and inclusive, educated and engaged and deeply involved in the broader society in which we live.”

Perpetual crisis: “Our communities should not need to be in a mode of perpetual crisis in order to get the resources and attention that they need to thrive. To get to that place, we must come together to learn, discuss, share ideas, innovate and set courses of action to fortify our community once again. That is what The General Assembly is all about.”

Read the full piece here.

SAFE COMMUNITIES

Together we can make more positive culture change this year. Here’s how.

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Now that we have entered the Jewish New Year of 5783, how can we support one another in creating workplaces and communal spaces that are safer, more respectful and more equitable than last year? What steps can we take to ensure workplaces and communal spaces are free from harassment and discrimination, where we can all thrive?” writes Elana Wien, executive director of SRE Network, in an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy.

The board and donor problem: “When we first launched SRE [Safety, Respect, Equity] Network in 2018, we heard from colleagues, ‘Well, you know where we really have an issue…? But we aren’t ready for it.’ What were organizational leaders not feeling ready for? Ensuring that the SRE policies, procedures and practices they were implementing among their staff teams were also addressing the behaviors and conduct of nonprofit board members and donors.”

Powerful stakeholders: “Nonprofit board members and donors are among the most powerful stakeholders in the nonprofit orbit. As organizational leaders, we place tremendous trust and value in the important role these stakeholders play to guide and support our mission-driven work and community priorities. And the best boards and funders understand that the key to their effectiveness is upholding the same community standards that we ask of our paid professionals.”

Read the full piece here.

Worthy Reads

Saving Democracy with Philanthropy: Funders who support democracy must dramatically step up their giving and widen their lens on “pointing American democracy in a brighter direction,” Mike Berkowitz and Rachel Kleinberg write in Inside Philanthropy. The authors share five strategies, including addressing the “status loss” that drives illiberalism on the right from those who “feel they are losing status in a zero-sum social hierarchy. Rural America needs particular focus. Solid working-class jobs and the dignity they bring have been decimated, while business owners feel bossed around by regulations unsuited to rural life, and many families are breaking under the opioid epidemic and endemic loneliness…Philanthropy has long treated these problems as economic issues to be solved by strategies like providing healthcare and child care. But these policies are often divisive in the communities they are intended to help, because the issue is not simple economics, but a sense of status that involves multiple identities. So philanthropy needs to think in terms of bolstering positive identities.” [InsidePhilanthropy]

Pic of the Day

Courtesy Jeanette Kuvin Oren

American Judaica artist Jeanette Kuvin Oren (second from left) unveils the “Hanukkah Forever” postage stamp last week at Temple Emanu El in Orange Village, Ohio. The stamp was created for the U.S. Postal Service based on one of Kuvin Oren’s art works.