Your Daily Phil: Jewish philanthropists make big bet on climate change
Good Thursday morning. Happy Tu B’Shvat!
In today’s edition of Your Daily Phil, we examine a new study looking at philanthropy’s role in combating climate change and the launch of a new Jewish philanthropic environmental initiative. We also report on the closure of the Gender Equity in Hiring Project. We feature an opinion piece by Elisa Deener-Agus exploring the idea of “post-traumatic growth” at the individual and communal levels in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks, and one by Stacie Cherner about the need to move forward from the simplistic labels we’ve used to categorize members of the Jewish community. Also in this newsletter: Ariel Beery, Sherri Ketai and Robert Beren.
What We’re Watching
The BBYO International Convention kicks off today in Denver, with nearly 3,500 teens from 50 countries and more than 1,000 adult guests and speakers set to participate in the five-day event. If you’re there, say hello to eJewishPhilanthropy‘s Nira Dayanim!
What You Should Know
Philanthropy, despite its limitations, can play a “unique and critical role to play” in the fight against climate change, able to provide the funding necessary to make a project attractive for investors or to absorb losses to make it viable, according to a new study published this week by the Milken Institute, reports eJewishPhilanthropy’s Judah Ari Gross.
The 54-page report considers the role of philanthropy in the multitrillion-dollar effort needed to make the “system-wide changes needed” to prevent further global warming. “Funding in the trillions far exceeds current philanthropic giving or the amount philanthropy alone could provide,” according to the report’s authors, Sara ElShafie and John Schellhase.
And yet, philanthropy has an edge over for-profit investment, they write. “In general, philanthropic capital is flexible, patient, risk-tolerant and mission-driven, and it can be deployed relatively quickly. These factors combined make philanthropy the right tool for catalyzing rapid change.” Read about a new Jewish philanthropic initiative to address climate change below.
ElShafie, senior associate in strategic philanthropy at the Milken Institute, and Schellhase, a director with Milken Institute Strategic Philanthropy, recommend that donors and foundations focus on “manageable” issues rather than overly broad and overwhelming topics like “climate,” and then set clear metrics for assessing success. However, they also note that many environmental projects are inherently long-term initiatives and require patience. “It can be difficult to make a measurable difference over a short period because natural systems are complicated and highly integrated. Still, patient and risk-tolerant philanthropic capital can lead to significant impact in a decade or less,” they write, citing a corporate environmental sustainability professional.
The Milken report also offers four areas that were found to be both “urgent and clearly underfunded”: deforestation, which accounts for approximately 11% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions; food systems, which collectively account for about one-third of emissions; oceans, which are under threat on multiple fronts, including fishing and pollution; and communications and outreach, which the authors said were critical for all climate and environmental action. Each of these, they say, is ripe for philanthropic action.
“Overall, it is increasingly clear that philanthropists can play a crucial role in reducing the barriers to addressing these challenges, scaling known solutions, and creating new opportunities in the process,” ElShafie and Schellhase write.
GREEN DAY
Stephen Bronfman, Michael Sonnenfeldt launch new Jewish Climate Trust with major philanthropic backers
A new “think-and-do-tank” and funder focused on combating climate change — the Jewish Climate Trust — launched on Thursday with backing from some of the most prominent North American Jewish philanthropists and kicked off its formation with two $3 million grants, one to the environmental nonprofit Adamah and the other to a consortium of Israeli environmental groups, reports eJewishPhilanthropy’s Judah Ari Gross. The Jewish Climate Trust is the brainchild of Stephen Bronfman, who has been involved in climate-related philanthropy for some three decades through the Canadian David Suzuki Foundation, where he is the vice chairman. Bronfman serves as co-chair of JCT alongside Michael Sonnenfeldt, an entrepreneur and philanthropist who has long focused on climate change and Israel advocacy. British Jewish environmental activist Nigel Savage will serve as the inaugural CEO.
New generation, new priorities: “I started to realize that a lot of the next generation of [philanthropic] leaders and people from the private sector are very interested in climate [change]. Maybe their parents weren’t interested, but they were and they didn’t know where to go. So I said, ‘Maybe I can play a leadership role here,’” Bronfman told eJP. Sonnenfeldt noted that the organization’s decision to include Israel in its work has made it more attractive to donors who may be wary of environmental groups, some of which have increasingly adopted anti-Israel stances. “We didn’t create the Jewish Climate Trust for that reason, but it turned out that many donors found it attractive because they felt less comfortable with other organizations that were becoming less hospitable or more anti-Israel. The clarity of our Jewish identity… is attractive to many,” he said.
Support team: In addition to Bronfman and Sonnenfeldt, its funders include: the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies; Marcia Riklis; Jeff Hart; Bronfman’s father, Charles; the Diane and Guilford Glazer Foundation; David Cogut; Dan and Sarah Rueven; and the Israeli environmental funding group PAI. For the Schustermans, whose family wealth originally comes from oil and gas drilling, their involvement in the Jewish Climate Trust represents their second known move to support environmental causes — the first being a $341,000 donation to Adamah in 2023.
TIME’S UP?
Gender Equity in Hiring Project to shutter its doors in June, citing lack of funding
In 2018, in the midst of the #MeToo and #Time’sUp movements, the Jewish Women’s Foundation of New York, now Elluminate, hosted an event that provided space for Jewish professionals to share their experiences with workplace gender abuse and sexual harassment. There was a glut of stories, said Sara Shapiro-Plevan, CEO of The Gender Equity in Hiring Project, but not yet a concrete plan to change the landscape, she recalled to eJewishPhilanthropy’s Nira Dayanim. So Shapiro-Plevan, along with two partners, started the Gender Equity in Hiring Project — an initiative to target gender bias in employment processes in Jewish organizational life. Originally designed to be a decade-long project, GEiHP will be shuttering its doors some three years early, with its work wrapping up at the end of June 2025. According to Shapiro-Plevan, the decision to close became clear over a year ago as the fiscally-sponsored project struggled to find funding to continue their work.
Gone but not forgotten: “The work GEiHP has accomplished has been invaluable to the field, from creating an open salaries spreadsheet, to coaching Jewish women to become self-advocates,” Rachel Gildiner, executive director of SRE Network, one of GEiHP’s funders, told eJP. “We are deeply grateful to Sara for championing this work forward, for lifting up women’s voices, and for modeling what feminist leadership looks like. We are confident the work of GEiHP will live on through the resources they have created, advocates trained, and partnerships formed, including with SRE.” The project will leave behind its newly designed website to ensure its resources remain available. including bibliographies, its Gender Equity at Work Blog and its “Open Salary Spreadsheet,” the latter two of which will continue to be updated.
POST-TRAUMATIC GROWTH
Transformation through trauma
“I am not a psychologist or an expert in trauma, but throughout my almost 20 years working in the Jewish community I’ve noticed a particular, recurring theme referenced as tying us together: ‘intergenerational collective Jewish trauma,’” writes Elisa Deener-Agus, chief of staff at the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington, in an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy. “As a people, even in times of security, we do not let ourselves forget these traumas; we revisit them during our holidays, when we pray, in our humor. It’s at the very essence of Jewish culture — with the result that it deeply affects our sense of self and relationship to safety. It impacts our trust, our faith and our understanding of who we are and our position in the world.”
You control your response: “Tal Becker addressed the trauma of Oct. 7 when he recently joined the Federation for a conversation with the Greater Washington Jewish community. While post-traumatic stress disorder is widely known, Becker introduced the idea of ‘post-traumatic growth,’ asking how a group can emerge from trauma stronger and more resilient… I do wonder whether the first step, at both the individual and community levels, is to start by simply being self-aware. When confronted with something — a news event, an interaction — that triggers a response, be aware. Pause and acknowledge. With that awareness, we open the possibility of a choice in how to respond. And with that pause, perhaps we will find new and surprising opportunities — as individuals and as an American Jewish collective.”
SYSTEM UPDATE
Klal Yisrael: Moving beyond binary descriptions
“When we acknowledge the spectrum of young people within our big, messy, aspirational audience of Klal Yisrael, we can tailor our strategies to meet the needs and preferences of various groups — with the knowledge that no single intervention will reach everyone,” writes Stacie Cherner, director of research and learning at the Jim Joseph Foundation, in an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy.
Present labels too simplistic: “Our professional community often refers to young Jews in North America as being connected vs. disconnected, engaged vs. unengaged, involved vs. uninvolved and so on. Communal professionals and stakeholders tend to utilize these simplistic categorizations to make sense of those who are ‘participants’ in Jewish life, and those who are not — who is in, and who is out. While this shorthand approach may serve us in some contexts, we run the risk of undermining our basic idea of Klal Yisrael (the Jewish People) by relying on hierarchical labels like these… Our team is adopting a shift to more nuanced language that builds on prior research and focuses on the many diverse and divergent ways Jewish people orient themselves to their Jewishness and to formal Jewish community.”
Worthy Reads
An Unnerving Prospect: Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin shares his reaction to the viral AI-generated video of Jewish celebrities wordlessly rebuking Ye for his recent social media assault on Jews in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “Seeing celebrities like Jerry Seinfeld and Mike Bloomberg channel my rage and give a middle finger to Kanye West after his most recent antisemitic spree, which included selling a swastika shirt the video riffed on, gave me hope and made me feel less alone at a scary time… But it wasn’t real. The video was made by an Israeli high-tech entrepreneur using AI… We are free to love it and share it, waving aside the fact that it is a fiction, but we do so at our own peril. The video is dangerous. It could easily play into the hands of antisemites, who will accuse Jews of falsifying public proclamations of support. Moreover, if AI could create a video that supports the Jews, it could just as easily create videos that defame the Jews, that offer fake video evidence of Israeli actions in the West Bank, as well as Jewish perfidy in other places. We would find ourselves embroiled in AI-induced blood libels.” [JTA]
Dare to Dream: In The Times of Israel, Ariel Beery writes that the value of President Donald Trump’s “Riviera of the Middle East” idea for the Gaza Strip isn’t in its morality or feasibility, but in its audacity. “[Jewish tradition] teaches us that the wise ‘learn from every person,’ and that even fools can speak prophecy… Because Trump was right that we cannot build a better future without first clearing the ruins of the past. Trump proved to us that if we do not put forward a new dream for how we will finally live in this region in peace, someone else will… What is my dream, you might ask? I believe we Israelis have no right to dream for the Palestinians. We have enough troubles of our own. My dream, therefore, inspired by Isaiah and the Zionist prophet-pioneers, is that Israel take up its calling as an Am Olam and become the World’s Campus: a global laboratory for humanity to engage in applied research and development to solve the problems facing humanity. To do so, Israel would have to stop defining itself against the Palestinians, focusing on an Our State Solution (who do we want to be and what will it require for us to get there) as opposed to the Two State Solution (who do we not want to be and how do we separate from the others who aren’t us). I believe by focusing ourselves on this old-new mission we can inspire our neighbors to join in the work side-by-side with us, but only after they’ve beaten their swords into plowshares.” [TOI]
Memories Reawakened: In Tablet, Izabella Tabarovsky reflects on the long-term impact of the USSR’s anti-Zionist propaganda on its neighbors after two Finnish universities recently canceled her scheduled talks on contemporary anti-Zionist discourse (one of which was supposed to be the keynote address at an international conference on antisemitism being hosted on campus). “It replayed some long-forgotten past experiences for me as well. For ex-Soviet Jews, the anti-Israel campaigns that have permeated university campuses in recent years serve as a stark reminder of what we endured under the USSR. Maxim Shrayer, a refusenik and professor at Boston College, recalls how in the 1970s and ’80s, all ‘expressions of Jewish pride and Jewish spiritual and intellectual self-awareness’ were dubbed ‘“Zionist” and targeted for public ostracism and vilification.’ Under the pretense of combatting Zionism, ‘brainwashed Soviet young people acted on their antisemitic urges. A non-Jewish teenager at my Soviet school tried to beat up a Jewish kid because “the Zionists have taken over the Golan Heights.”’ This lived experience taught us that while ‘anti-Zionism’ doesn’t have to be antisemitic in theory, it inevitably produces antisemitic outcomes in real life. In the wake of Oct. 7, Jews around the world are learning what we knew decades ago: Whether school bullies call us ‘kikes’ or ‘Zios,’ the outcome is the same.” [Tablet]
Word on the Street
Sherri Ketai of Detroit was selected to serve as the next chair of Jewish Federations of North America’s National Women’s Philanthropy group, succeeding Iris Kraemer, whose two-year term expires this summer; Ketai will start her position on July 1…
The University of Florida Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education has launched the Robert M. Beren Program on Jewish Classical Education, focusing on the intersection of Jewish, Western and American civilization in partnership with the Rosenthal-Levy Scholars program. The initiative is supported by a $15 million grant from the Robert M. Beren Family Foundation, Gary and Lee Rosenthal and Paul and Karen Levy…
The Schechter School of Long Island continues to honor its alumnus, fallen Israeli soldier Omer Neutra, who was killed in the Oct. 7 terror attacks; the school has since retired his basketball jersey number; dedicated a new scoreboard in his name; created the Omer Neutra Legacy Fund and Scholarship; and recently hosted a scribe who completed a Torah scroll in his memory…
President Donald Trump officially nominated former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee to be U.S. ambassador to Israel…
Darren Beattie, the interim undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs who came under fire for his far-right ties and associations with white supremacists, is expected to be replaced by attorney Sarah Rogers, whose nomination was announced by Trump on Tuesday…
A group of Israeli scholars, including three Nobel laureates, sent a letter to Trump saying they would nominate him for a Nobel Peace Prize if he helped to free the remaining 76 hostages in Gaza…
Ronald S. Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress and chairman of the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation, has been awarded the Polish Jan Karski Eagle Award by the Jan Karski Society, in recognition of his humanitarian service to others…
Rabbanit Hila Naur, the spiritual advisor for the Modern Orthodox Ohr Torah Stone’s Pava Hadas Army Program for religious female service, has officially been inducted into the Israel Defense Forces; she has until now visited participants on their military bases in a civilian capacity. Read eJP’s coverage about the program, which was recently given $1.5 million from Jeremy and Ann Pava…
The Wall Street Journal looks into how Kanye West purchased ad time in local markets during the Super Bowl to promote athletic wear on his Yeezy website, only for the site to change its inventory and sell a single white T-shirt with a swastika on it by air time…
Google removed Jewish American Heritage Month and International Holocaust Remembrance Day, as well as a number of other cultural observances and occasions, from its calendar platform…
UCLA suspended its chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine for vandalizing the home of UC Regent Jay Sures, who is Jewish…
The New York Times profiles Danielle R. Sassoon, the interim head of the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office and a graduate of New York’s Ramaz School who said she studied Talmud to prepare to practice law, as she confronts the Trump administration’s desire to drop corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams…
Katherine Archuleta, David Foster and Leslie Sidell have been named to the board of trustees of the Denver-based Rose Community Foundation…
Following the devastating wildfires in Los Angeles County in January, Jewish organizations across the city – including the Maman Nonprofit founded by Sara Raoof Jacobs, which had previously been shipping donations to Israel after Oct. 7 – have begun to offer free shopping and meals for fire victims…
Sender Cohen, an investor and managing partner of KH2 Capital, teamed up with Michael Eisenberg, co-founder of Tel Aviv-based venture capital firm Aleph, and Adam Fisher, a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners’ Tel Aviv office, to spearhead a campaign to raise $800 million to set up a commercial science and innovation research lab in Israel to combat the country’s brain drain…
Puck does a deep dive into the circumstances that led director Brett Ratner — who was accused of sexually assaulting multiple women — to helm Amazon’s upcoming documentary about Melania Trump, noting Ratner’s ties to Trump insiders Len Blavatnik and former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin…
Yehuda Lindenblatt, a Holocaust survivor and New York City’s oldest Hatzolah volunteer, died on Tuesday at 88…
Pic of the Day
Rabbi Brad Hirschfield, president of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, leads a discussion last week with Hispanic Christian leaders as they visited Israel on a trip organized by Eagles’ Wings — the group’s fifth “Pastors Solidarity Mission” since Oct. 7, 2023. The 30 participants came from Connecticut, Louisiana, California, Maryland, Florida, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Virginia, as well as Colombia, Panama and Puerto Rico.
“Hispanic Christians overwhelmingly support Israel, but many don’t have access to all of the facts,” Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference and an advisor to President Donald Trump, said in a statement. “This trip is about empowering our leaders with the truth, so they change the conversation, especially among younger people who are exposed to ages-old lies about the Jewish community. At a time when Israel is being demonized on college campuses and online, our leaders are now properly equipped to defend the Jewish people and the only functional democracy in the Middle East.”
Birthdays
Internet entrepreneur best known as the co-founder of Zynga, maker of online social games, Mark Pincus…
Rabbi and Talmudic scholar, also emeritus professor of economics at New York University, closely identified with the Austrian school of economic thought, Yisroel Mayer Kirzner… Israeli film and theatre actress, Dalia Friedland… Former chair of the Toronto-based Mackenzie Institute think tank, he was a North York and Toronto city councillor, Norman “Norm” Gardner… Professor at American Jewish University in Los Angeles and scholar of biblical literature and Semitic languages, Ziony Zevit… Newsletter editor specializing in U.S. intelligence, military and foreign policy issues, Jeff Stein… U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT)… Professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto, author of ‘I Did Not Know You Were Jewish’ and Other Things Not to Say, Ivan Kalmar… Former CEO of the Cleveland Browns and president of the Philadelphia Eagles, Joe Banner… Radio broadcaster for the New York Mets, Howard “Howie” Rose… Painter and photographer, Ron Agam… Ukrainian businessman, previously president of the United Jewish Community of Ukraine, Ihor Kolomoyskyi… Casting director, Amy Sobo… President and CEO of the congressionally chartered National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Jeffrey Rosen… Member of the Knesset for United Torah Judaism, Moshe Shimon Roth… A former chair of national women’s philanthropy of the Jewish Federations of North America, Rochelle “Shelly” Kupfer… Former senior speechwriter for Treasury secretaries Geithner and Lew during the Obama administration, Mark Cohen… Retired Israeli soccer player, he made 89 international appearances for Israel and won nine league championships, more than any other Israeli player, Alon Harazi… Founding partner of Drowos Wealth Management Group at Center Street Capital Advisors, Bryan M. Drowos… Publisher of Southern California’s Jewish Link, Dov Blauner... Investigative reporter at Reuters since 2018, following 12 years as a Wall Street Journal reporter, Mike Spector… Executive director of media relations for Columbia University, Samantha Slater… Principal at Aviv Recovery, Jonathan Neuman… Director of philanthropy at LPPE LLC, Daniel Sperling… Founder and owner at Miami’s Cadena Collective, Alejandra Aguirre…
