Marc Rowan, who chairs UJA-Federation of New York’s board, said he has no regrets about leading the charge against the the leadership of his alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, over its handling of campus antisemitism, during an onstage interview with fellow investor David Rubenstein at the Economic Club in Washington, D.C., reports eJewishPhilanthropy’s Judah Ari Gross.

Fighting something else: Rowan said he was compelled to act after seeing that the university’s administration response to antisemitism was “completely misguided.” He said he was hopeful because he believes the antisemitism seen on campuses is driven by ignorance. “While we have an antisemitism problem, I don’t think we’re fighting antisemitism on these campuses. I think we’re fighting something else. We’re fighting anti-Americanism. We’re fighting anti-merit. We’re fighting anti-power. We’re fighting really for the soul of these institutions,” he said. “We went from being the envy of the world. Our academic institutions were the envy of the world. We produced academic excellence and amazing research and amazing students. And somehow we lost our way. That is not what we produce today.”

Mostly positive: Rowan said the responses to his activism have been mixed, but mostly positive from the wider public. “On the one hand, there clearly are members of the board of trustees who are unhappy that I went public. There are members of the faculty who are unhappy that I went public. But I got off an elevator at a hotel in Houston. And someone is looking at me and they’re saying, ‘Are you Mark Rowan?’ And I look at them because we live in a crazy world. I took a chance and said, ‘Yes.’ And all they did was hug me and say thank you. And that, by and large, is what’s happening,” he said. “Telling the truth feels great. You guys should all try it. It’s really good. It’s cleansing. It’s very clarifying. And I had no idea what the reaction was going to be from our employee base, from our partners, from our Middle Eastern partners and from others. And I have to be honest. The vast, vast majority of reaction has been incredibly positive.”

So much to do: Reflecting on the Jewish community’s response to the Oct. 7 terror attacks, Rowan said the ensuing rise in antisemitism has brought many people into the fold. “We are, in the U.S., in the Jewish community, going through a very interesting period of time. Anyone who was on the sidelines is no longer on the sidelines,” Rowan said during the nearly hour-long interview. “The normal budget of UJA is about $225 million a year. This year, they’ll raise $375 [million]. People are off the sidelines. The notion that we would ever see antisemitism in the United States of America is something that has hit people in the most visceral way, and they want to go and change it. The energy we’re seeing, the outpouring of support from people who heretofore had not been engaged in Jewish causes is actually one of the silver linings following Oct. 7, and it’ll be interesting to see how we, as people who are active in the philanthropic world, harness that energy, because there’s nothing but things to do right now.”

Read the full report here.

For Judith Schmeidler, a New Yorker in her 60s who has a visual impairment, the nonprofit JBI — founded as the Jewish Braille Institute in 1931 — has been “a very important part of life.” JBI’s services have helped her access large-print versions of Jewish books ranging from biographies of Abraham Joshua Heschel to writings on the weekly parsha. “Before I knew about JBI’s books, nothing was available, I couldn’t participate in a lot of things,” Schmeidler, who has limited eyesight due to Charles Bonnet syndrome, told eJewishPhilanthropy’s Haley Cohen.

Haggadot for all: JBI, a nonprofit serving individuals who are blind, have visual impairments or print disabilities, announced earlier this month that upon receiving a $200,000 two-year grant from the New York Community Trust (NYCT), it will be expanding its services to create custom accessible materials in Braille, audio and large-print formats to all New York City-based nonprofits — in most cases free of charge. Included in the updated offering will be a Haggadah campaign, which the organization said aims to get large-print, Braille or audio Haggadot to anyone who might need one at a Passover Seder.

Children’s books, too: Thompson told eJP that the grant will particularly aid Holocaust survivors who are losing their vision. JBI’s services also include children’s books — benefiting both visually impaired children and adults who are losing their eyesight but still want to read to their children and grandchildren. “This is just a launching pad for us,” she said, “we [plan] to increase accessibility around the country, not just New York.”

Read the full report here.

Students chanting, “Kill the Jews.” Students asking their Jewish classmates what “their number is,” referring to numbers tattooed on Jews during the Holocaust. Teacher-promoted walk-outs in support of Hamas. A second-grade teacher leading a classroom activity where children wrote: “Stop Bombing Babies” on sticky notes to display in the building. Those are some of the incidents endured by K-12 Jewish students in the Berkeley Unified School District that have sparked a Title VI complaint filed today with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, eJewishPhilanthropy’s Haley Cohen reports for Jewish Insider.

Willful inaction: The complaint, which was filed jointly by the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and the Anti-Defamation League, alleges that the district has failed to take action against “severe and persistent” bullying and harassment of Jewish students by peers and teachers since Oct. 7. It states that Berkeley administrators have ignored parent reports, including a letter signed by 1,370 Berkeley community members to the Berkeley superintendent and Board of Education, while knowingly allowing its public schools to become hostile environments for Jewish and Israeli students.

Read the full report here and sign up for Jewish Insider’s Daily Kickoff here.

“On Oct. 7, not one but two distinct Israeli forces simultaneously mobilized,” writes Ron Shor, head of the nonprofit management and leadership master’s program at the Rothberg International School of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy.

Rising to the occasion: “With the same urgency as the IDF call-up, Israeli civilians stepped up as if undertaking their own reserve duty. An army of individuals and organizations, volunteers and professionals, began responding to the newly emerging challenges the war caused for civilian life.”

Powerful pivots: “For the past 130-plus days, Israel’s nonprofit sector — already robust prior to Oct. 7 — has galvanized in a show of incredible resilience, innovation and efficiency, demonstrating yet another side of the Start-Up Nation. This astounding and lightning-fast response not only addressed pressing challenges but introduced a host of new initiatives… Demonstrating rapid responses that highlight exceptional management practices, any of these examples could serve as a valuable case study for social impact organizations worldwide.”

Read the full piece here.

“[D]espite widespread agreement on the need to combat antisemitism, many pundits, stakeholders, civil and human rights activists and Jewish American communal leaders are grappling with the seemingly simple question of ‘What is antisemitism?’” write David Schraub and Jonathan Jacoby of the Nexus Task Force in an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy.

An established standard: “The National Strategy [to Counter Antisemitism] drew on multiple sources for understanding what antisemitism is, including the [International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance] definition. The framers of the national strategy understood that support for the IHRA definition is widespread and well-entrenched amongst major Jewish stakeholders and civic and governmental bodies worldwide. As a ‘non-legally binding working definition,’ it has played an important role in training, educating and helping to identify instances of antisemitism… At the same time, the National Strategy’s framers also understood that the IHRA definition is too limiting to carry the weight of fighting antisemitism on its own, so they endorsed additional definitional resources — including the Nexus Document — to help sharpen and clarify the strategy’s application.”

Meeting a need: “One of the IHRA definition’s strengths, as the [Jewish Federations of North America] letter notes, is that it recognizes the importance of context. Each of the IHRA’s illustrative examples is a practice that the document says ‘could, taking into account the overall context,’ be antisemitic… This initial flagging of incidents of potential antisemitism is very important, but the IHRA does not provide any guidance beyond that regarding what sort of contextual elements point to a given incident being antisemitic or not. Nobody could look at the IHRA’s core definition — antisemitism loosely defined as ‘a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews’ — and feel confident they have all the contextual tools necessary to adjudge complex and complicated cases. This is one of the places where the Nexus definition adds value.”

Read the full piece here.