Good Friday morning!

Investor Leon Cooperman, the chairman and CEO of Omega Advisors, donated $100 million to the Saint Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston, N.J. The donation is believed to be the largest-ever gift to a hospital in the state.

“I am at the point in my life where I want my gifts to have real impact, and I could think of no better way to do that than to make this investment in health care in the community that has given so much to our family,” Cooperman, who has made more than 100 donations to the hospital, said in a statement.

The hospital will be renamed the Cooperman Barnabas Medical Center. A $25 million gift from Cooperman in 2014 previously funded the construction of the hospital’s Cooperman Family Pavilion.

SHOW AND TELL

At World Expo in Dubai, Israel embraces its burgeoning ties to the region

Courtesy

The World Expo, set to open its doors to the public in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, on Friday, will mark a series of firsts — the first time the global event has ever been hosted by an Arab country, the first time it has ever been held in the Middle East and the first time every participating country will have its own pavilion. Until recently, it may have seemed far-fetched that Israel, which until last year had no official ties with any country in the Gulf, would be a participant in this event. Israel, however, received an invitation to join the fair 18 months before it normalized relations with the UAE, Elazar Cohen, the commissioner-general of the Israeli pavilion, told Jewish Insider’s Tamara Zieve last week, ahead of his flight to Dubai where he will remain for the six-month duration of the Expo.

Warm reception: The invitation was part of a gradual and below-the-radar warming of relations between the two countries. “We appreciated and respected this invitation and it was a courageous step before the announcement of the bilateral relations,” said Cohen, a career diplomat who has worked for the Israeli Foreign Ministry for 30 years. He was referring to the Abraham Accords, the path-breaking agreement signed between Israel, the UAE and Bahrain. Israel accepted the invitation and Cohen and his team have since been traveling between Israel and the UAE in preparation for the event. “We were accepted warmly, with open arms and open hearts,” he said.

A soft-power opportunity: For Israel, the Expo provides an historic opportunity to build on its relations with the UAE, as well as others from the region and around the world. Cohen sees the fair as his team’s contribution to the Abraham Accords, signed on the White House lawn on Sept. 15, 2020. The pavilion’s activities will cover a span of fields including the economy, culture, science, medicine, technology and engineering, via events, meetings, think-tanks, concerts, press conferences and Ted Talks. Israel also plans to hold at least three separate events with the UAE and the U.S. to explore trilateral collaborations in energy, clean-tech and medicine, with the participation of companies and ministers from the three countries.

Diversity and inclusion: Each of the 192 countries participating in the Expo will hold its own national day celebrations, and Israel will use its day, on Nov. 9, which is expected to be attended by high-level Israeli officials, to present examples of diversity and inclusivity in its society. The day’s events will include performances by: the Shalva Band, made up of musicians with various disabilities; the Jerusalem East and West Orchestra, a multicultural orchestra consisting of Christian, Muslim and Jewish musicians from all over the country and from all sectors that make up Israeli society; and Firqat Alnoor, an orchestra comprised of Israeli Jewish, Arab, Christian, Muslim and Druze musicians who play classical Middle Eastern music.

Read the full story here.

CHECKING THE TEXT

New NCJW campaign aims to educate community about Jewish law and abortion

Paul Weaver/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

The National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW) is mounting a new education and advocacy campaign, 73Forward, in response to diminishing access to abortion and the possibility that it might again become illegal, NCJW CEO Sheila Katz told eJewishPhilanthropy’s Helen Chernikoff. The campaign’s name is a reference to Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that struck down Texas laws criminalizing abortion on the grounds that it violated a woman’s right to privacy. The landmark 7-2 ruling established that a woman’s right to have an abortion was protected by the Constitution.

Another conversation: “The last time the Jewish community really had a conversation about abortion was back in the ’70s,” Katz said, noting that Jewish organizations including NCJW helped lead the movement that culminated in the Roe v. Wade ruling. “That conversation hasn’t really changed, so education is a key part of this campaign.” Founded in 1893 as a volunteer organization, NCJW’s original mission was helping Jewish immigrants with education, employment and healthcare. Today, its 200,000 members focus on advocacy and education as well as community service. Its top three priorities are abortion and contraception access, voting rights and judicial nominations. It had a budget of about $3 million in 2020, according to its most recent tax filing.

A supportive role: This abortion rights campaign will be different, Katz said. NCJW plans to play more of a supporting role to organizations serving low-income women of color whose access to abortion is being most sharply restricted by new state laws and Supreme Court rulings. “That’s the shift in the fight in the Jewish community as a whole,” she said. The campaign aims to help educate both the Jewish community and the general public about medical abortion, by which a woman takes pills to terminate a pregnancy. NCJW also plans to lobby the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to loosen restrictions on medical abortion, which NCJW says aren’t medically necessary. “There’s been a lot of medical advances since we last talked about abortion as a community,” Katz said. “Medical abortion could change the game.”

Read the full story here.

The National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW) is mounting a new education and advocacy campaign, 73Forward, in response to diminishing access to abortion and the possibility that it might again become illegal, NCJW CEO Sheila Katz told eJewishPhilanthropy’s Helen Chernikoff. The campaign’s name is a reference to Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that struck down Texas laws criminalizing abortion on the grounds that it violated a woman’s right to privacy. The landmark 7-2 ruling established that a woman’s right to have an abortion was protected by the Constitution.

Another conversation: “The last time the Jewish community really had a conversation about abortion was back in the ’70s,” Katz said, noting that Jewish organizations including NCJW helped lead the movement that culminated in the Roe v. Wade ruling. “That conversation hasn’t really changed, so education is a key part of this campaign.” Founded in 1893 as a volunteer organization, NCJW’s original mission was helping Jewish immigrants with education, employment and healthcare. Today, its 200,000 members focus on advocacy and education as well as community service. Its top three priorities are abortion and contraception access, voting rights and judicial nominations. It had a budget of about $3 million in 2020, according to its most recent tax filing.

A supportive role: This abortion rights campaign will be different, Katz said. NCJW plans to play more of a supporting role to organizations serving low-income women of color whose access to abortion is being most sharply restricted by new state laws and Supreme Court rulings. “That’s the shift in the fight in the Jewish community as a whole,” she said. The campaign aims to help educate both the Jewish community and the general public about medical abortion, by which a woman takes pills to terminate a pregnancy. NCJW also plans to lobby the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to loosen restrictions on medical abortion, which NCJW says aren’t medically necessary. “There’s been a lot of medical advances since we last talked about abortion as a community,” Katz said. “Medical abortion could change the game.”

Read the full story here.

UNIVERSITIES MUST ACT

The hard facts about campus antisemitism — and what we can do to stop it

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“As more students return to campus, colleges are thinking hard about how to keep them safe. But health should not be their only consideration. Ninety-five percent of current students and recent graduates feel antisemitism is a problem on their campus. When universities plan their transition into a new phase of the pandemic, administrators also need to introspect about how to reverse this frightening trend and make campuses more welcoming for Jewish students,” writes Avi D. Gordon, executive director of Alums for Campus Fairness, in an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy.

Not just a campus problem: “Antisemitism hardly confines itself to college campuses. Although Jews represent just 2 percent of Americans, they suffered 58 percent of religiously motivated hate crimes in 2020, according to FBI statistics cited by The Jerusalem Post. That makes Jews the third-largest target of hate crimes out of all American minorities. But campus antisemitism is particularly damaging, because college is where the new generation of politicians, activists and influencers form their ideas. In this way, campus antisemitism not only reflects the general climate, but forecasts the attitude of future American leaders.”

Identifying the problem: “Alums for Campus Fairness, where I serve as executive director, combats campus antisemitism in its various forms across the country… We conducted our recent survey to expose the hard statistics so we could ascertain the scope of campus antisemitism. The results not only confirmed that antisemitism taints campuses across the country; it made us even more concerned. We surveyed more than 500 students and recent graduates, from public and private schools across the country. Almost every one of them deemed antisemitism a problem — not just on campuses in general, but on their own campuses.”

Survey says: “The survey demonstrated that antisemitism pervades every level of the campus community. Offenses most commonly came from fellow students: nearly 80% of respondents had experienced or heard firsthand about another student making antisemitic comments in person. But students take their cues from their professors. More than half of survey respondents had received or heard firsthand about offensive or threatening comments from faculty or university employees.”

Read the full piece here.

Worthy Reads

Bigger Picture: “Give where you live,” has become a mantra in philanthropy for good reason, but the merits of an approach based on local knowledge shouldn’t eclipse the reality that it can also perpetuate inequality due to racial and socioeconomic segregation in housing, points out Davey M. Kim in the Chronicle of Philanthropy. What’s more, most issues are too complicated to be tackled on a purely local level, Kim adds: “Giving strategies should acknowledge that affluent and high-poverty locales are not two separate entities, but rather parts of the same system.” [ChroniclePhilanthropy]

Only Connect: With help from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott VolunteerMatch, a nonprofit in Oakland, Calif., is working to build digital infrastructure to help the country’s 1.8 million nonprofits connect with more than 300 potential volunteers, reports Bradley Wong in a post on Independent Sector’s website. Scott’s unrestricted gift was the largest the group had received since its founding in 1998. “I can get a bag of Doritos for same-day delivery, because we have built digital platforms that have transformed our commercial lives,” said Greg Baldwin, VolunteerMatch’s CEO. “What we have not built are the digital platforms to transform our civic and public lives.” [IndependentSector]

New Partner: In a post on the Center for Effective Philanthropy’s website, Bryan O’Connor and Meg Taft write that a surge in pandemic-related financial contributions triggered a collective epiphany by their organization, Good Shepherd Food Bank in Maine, about the moral value of their investments, in addition to their work. The food bank chose a new investment manager and educated itself on how to use environmental, social and governance (ESG) tools to screen out companies whose business practices undermine the group’s mission, but they maintain a “healthy skepticism” about how ESG scores can be manipulated, O’Connor and Taft write. [CenterEffectivePhilanthropy]

Pic of the Day

HELEN CHERNIKOFF

Post-holiday cleanup begins across the street from 770 Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, home to the global Chabad-Lubavitch movement.