Good Friday morning!

The Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA) has raised $1.6 million from 23 local federations since May 12 for victims of Hamas bombing attacks in Ashdod, Ashkelon and other communities in the south, JFNA CEO Eric Fingerhut told eJewishPhilanthropy. The funds will provide psychological support for first responders and help the staff at absorption centers housing about 3,000 Ethiopian immigrants. Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire yesterday afternoon.

JewBelong, the outreach organization known for its use of humor, has awarded “Jewish Partisan Prizes” to 23 young influencers who are defending Israel on Instagram and other social media platforms, Archie Gottesman, JewBelong’s co-founder, told eJewishPhilanthropy.

The $360 prize is named for those who fought the Nazisduring World War II, and it’s meant to help its recipients feel supported at a time when they are engaging in online confrontation that makes them feel exhausted and angry. JewBelong will name another set of winners on May 27, after soliciting contributions to a prize fund from its 95,000-person mailing list.

The Jonathan D. Levine Philanthropic Fund has committed to give $1 million to Camp Ramah in the Berkshires for the construction of a leadership center named after Levine, a rabbi, former Ramah staff member and Ramah alum. The funds will support the construction of a new, two-story building that will provide both housing and meeting space.

The Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center hosted a ceremony honoring the 18 Ukranians still living who saved Jews during the Holocaust. Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmygal announced a lifetime monthly state stipend for the group in recognition of their heroism. 

HELPING HAND

How the ADL helped create The Asian American Foundation to track and combat hate crimes

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When The Asian American Foundation (TAAF) launched in early May, only about six weeks had passed since the Atlanta-area shooting that killed eight people, six of them Asian women. Chronologically, the two events happened close proximity to each other, but the work to create the foundation had actually started a year earlier, Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), told eJewishPhilanthropy.

Unique expertise: Greenblatt was involved in the foundation’s creation and is the only non-Asian member of its board. The ADL systems that track online hate and real-world hate crime had detected a spike in anti-Asian animus more than a year before the shooting, prompting ADL officials to reach out to allies in the Asian-American Pacific Islander (AAPI) community to share the information, Greenblatt said. “There are a lot of great AAPI organizations, and I suggested that they think about mobilizing specifically on this vector of how they could help fight rising hate,” Greenblatt said.    

Data and analysis: The ADL, founded in 1913 after the lynching of a Jewish businessman, today tracks antisemitic incidents — vandalism, harassment and assault — on a daily basis and posts them on its website, which also features a map providing statistics. The group does analysis, issues regular reports and works with law enforcement and government to provide training. A small group of individuals active in the AAPI community enlisted Greenblatt’s guidance in creating what became TAAF, which has named the tracking of hate incidents as one of its top three priorities. The other two are education and AAPI representation in media, the foundation’s president, Sonal Shah, told the Chronicle of Philanthropy in an interview.

Read the full article here.

INVESTING IN WOMEN

If you want to make a difference in the Jewish community, fund women

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“I had the very great honor to moderate the release of the 2020 Pew report on Jewish Americans and as such, was given an early look at the findings. I read my embargoed copy eagerly. I knew the four main points the researchers felt important,” writes Meredith Jacobs in an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy.

Funding assumptions: “As the CEO of a Jewish nonprofit, one thing was clear to me — after the release, Jewish funding would be focused on revitalizing synagogues, lifting JEDI-B, bridging political divides, and combating antisemitism and hate. This is what happened after 2013 — funding supported reaching out to interfaith couples and creating a sense of belonging for the non-Jewish spouse, and to creatively engage young people in Jewish life. And it seems to have worked. According to the 2020 report, more children of interfaith marriages identify as Jewish; engagement in Jewish life (albeit away from traditional synagogue practice) seems to be up. The ‘rise of the nones’ seems to be contained.”

Missing investment: “But, as the CEO of a Jewish nonprofit focused on building a world in which women and girls might thrive — a world where women can live free of violence, where they have access to long-term economic security, where their workplaces are safe and equitable, and where a woman is just as likely as a man to be lifted to a position of leadership — I knew something else. No one would come away from this report thinking it a priority to fund women’s issues.”

Read the full piece here.

PEW TOO

Pew’s limited view

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In an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy, Dr. John Ruskay writes: “Hearing that the 2020 Pew study on American Jewry would be released [last] week, memories surfaced from 2011. Back then, as CEO of UJA Federation of New York, we released the findings from UJA-Federations 2011 New York Jewish community study. Widely praised … the lead headlines in both the general and Jewish media focussed on the alarming growth of poverty among the large ultra Orthdox/Haredi communities in New York.”

What UJAFed-NY missed: “Shortly after the New York study was made public, an experienced Orthodox leader whispered in my ear: ‘Your study correctly captured the extensive poverty in the Haredi community; what it missed was the substantial wealth which supports the extensive day school and hesed programs enabling the haredi community to continue to grow, while facing multiple challenges.’ That sage comment came to mind as I reviewed Pew 2020.”

What Pew and others miss: “But what Pew and other community studies fail to capture, just like the wealth in the NY haredi community, is the amazing creativity and renewal also underway in the non-Orthodox/liberal Jewish communities of North America. … Today, while intermarriage rates remain high and the percentage of American Jews who donate to Federations and affiliate with the Reform and Conservative synagogue denominations have declined — and Pew captures this — Jewish life beyond the Orthodox is also bustling with energy and creativity.”

Read the full piece here.

Worthy Reads

New Development: In the Chronicle of Philanthropy, Eden Stiffman profiles C. Nathan Harris, who leads fundraising for the Oregon Food Bank and has an unconventional way of measuring success — by relationships with supporters and other qualitative measures in addition to financial goals. Harris maintains that this new concept of development will better serve both the cause — by deepening donors’ engagement with it — and his colleagues: “If we’re managing staff to financial outcomes, that results in a profession that is less diverse, that is hostile to women, and that generates burnout. The nonprofit sector is sort of committing itself to a cycle of underperformance.” [ChroniclePhilanthropy]

Hidden Costs: The Fiscal Justice Credit Rating Agency, a new bond rating firm, is working to quantify the cost of social injustice to cities and states and sell the resulting ratings to investors, write Shruti Singh and Saijel Kishan in Bloomberg. There is precedent for such problems as police brutality diminishing a municipality’s creditworthiness — Ferguson, Mo.’s credit rating fell after police killed an unarmed 18-year-old man in 2014 — but usually, such incidents don’t hurt bond ratings, Singh and Saijel point out. The new agency insists that its research will reveal that injustice is expensive: “These issues add up. They have a cumulative effect that increases the risk and volatility for bondholders and residents,” said Ryan Bowers, a co-founder of the firm. [Bloomberg]

Making The Grade: Cara Altimus spotlights Michael Bloomberg’s $150 million gift to Johns Hopkins University to provide funding for PhD students from minority-serving institutions in a blog post on PhilanTopic. Altimus estimates that Bloomberg’s gift could double the number of Black and Latino sciences students in the school’s graduate programs. Longer-term change outside Johns Hopkins will require a cultural shift, she argues, because research has shown that such students systematically struggle to find both mentors and support for their research priorities. “We hope this investment will set the stage for other funders, philanthropic and public, to support scholars of color at every stage of their scientific careers. All funders must take a deep, critical look at their priorities, vetting processes, and advisory protocols.” [PhilanTopic]

Concentration Of Wealth: Conservative leader J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis and a potential candidate for U.S. Senate in Ohio, called for the elimination of tax breaks for nonprofits and foundations at a conference on “woke capital” hosted by the Claremont Institute Center for the American Way of Life in Washington, D.C., earlier this week, report the editors of the Giving Review. Vance called out the Ford Foundation, with $14 billion dollars in assets under management, and Harvard University, with $120 billion, as examples of “social justice hedge funds” whose disproportionate cultural power is fueled by their special tax status. “The decision to give those foundations and those organizations special privileges is a decision made by public policy,” Vance said. “It was made by man, and we can undo it.” [PhilanthropyDaily]

KKL-JNF

KKL–JNF, in coordination with the Israeli Ministry of Defense, is acquiring about 100 new, modern, portable bomb shelters — each capable of protecting dozens of citizens.