Since October 7, American Jews have sprung into action to support their fellow Jews in Israel. Institutions big and small have sought ways to help.

Have those efforts succeeded? Have American Jews efffectively brought their considerable resources to bear in ways that actually helped the Jewish state? And as the war changed, how did they rethink their role?

Those are just some of the questions that the historian Jack Wertheimer analyzes in his feature essay this month. In a live conversation on November 21, Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver spoke with Wertheimer,  the journalist Armin Rosen, and the head of the Jewish Funders Network, Andres Spokoiny, each of whom examine the contributions of American Jews from a very different angle.

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Jonathan Silver:

Over the past number of years, there’s been an awful lot of discussion about how different American Jews are from Israelis. Most American Jews are not traditional in their religious observance. A great many Israelis, even among the non-Orthodox, are more traditional in their religious observance. Young Israelis tend to the political right. Young American Jews tend to the political left. Israeli families are growing. American birth rates are contracting. Israeli culture confers honor on military service and heroism in battle. American Jewish culture does not make martial virtue very much of a priority. On political questions, cultural questions, and much else, we seem to be drifting in such different directions that commentators are asking if these two communities still have anything in common.

One might easily conclude that Americans and Israelis are simply two peoples shaped by two different realities. In some very large and abstract sense that may be true, but you wouldn’t know it on October 8th, 2023. When observant American Jews switched on their phones after Shmini Atseret, most of the major Jewish organizations in the United States had already scrambled to activate giving campaigns to support Israelis reeling from the Hamas attacks the day before.

The American Jewish community sprang into action to lend spiritual support and material support to their siblings and cousins and friends, and fellow Jews whom they’d never met, but with whom they felt—and continue to feel—connected by some ancient filaments that were horribly pulled taut on that day. That initial campaign of support took place before the anti-Semitic protests and marches and histrionics began here in the United States. Our task today is to take a preliminary look over this past year of Jewish communal activism, and ask a simple question: were the Jewish communal institutions of the United States up to the task?

In this month’s November essay, Professor Jack Wertheimer, one of the deans of American Jewish history, a longtime professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and the author of some of the most penetrating studies of contemporary American Jewish life. His essay is the first attempt at a comprehensive accounting of what American Jews gave, and what their institutions may have learned. We’re also joined by Andres Spokoiny, president and CEO of the Jewish Funders Network, and Armin Rosen of Tablet, one of the great prose portraitists of our time.

I’d like to start by asking Jack to restate, very briefly, the main arguments of your essay, and most importantly, how you went about gathering the information that allowed you to draw these conclusions.

Jack Wertheimer:

Thank you, Jon, for having published the article and for organizing this session. I’m delighted that Andres and Armin have joined us.

I write about aspects of contemporary American Jewish life, and there has been much discussion about what significance October 7, and what’s happened since, has for American Jewish life. Many felt that this was an inflection point. And that sparked my curiosity to try to connect the dots, because there were many developments over the course of the year since October 7, 2023, and I wanted to try to understand how organized American Jewry responded since then?

There have been many articles in the Jewish and more general press that have tried to capture one aspect or another of what’s happened, and they have been helpful to me. But I also engaged in a process of interviewing, primarily over this past summer, over 55 professionals working for a range of Jewish not-for-profit organizations, and some funders as well, to try to learn firsthand their impressions of what is happening.

I want to underscore that point about impressions. We have, at this point, relatively few data, especially when it comes to dollars, for example. But the lack of data applies elsewhere as well. So instead I based many of my conclusions on the collective wisdom that I was able to draw upon from these various interviews.

It seems to me that American Jewish life was confronted with a series of challenges. Jon began with one of them in his introductory comments, and that had to do with how American Jews are responding to the crisis in Israel—more specifically, the war, and eventually wars, that Israel was fighting? And as was pointed out already, that Shabbat of October 7, Jewish federations across the country already posted information about how Jews and others could give in support of a new Israel emergency campaign that was launched on that very day.

But the crisis very quickly became a domestic one as well, in the sense that American Jews were confronted with an upsurge of anti-Israel hostility that manifested in various quarters. We tend to focus on campuses, but we know that many other sites became locales for anti-Israel activities. There were marches on America’s streets that often deteriorated into mob violence, blocking access to airports, and so forth. And it wasn’t only at universities that students suffered; we now know that children as young as kindergarten kids have been exposed to virulent anti-Israel charges that they have no way of defending against. Jews have been affected by this, including at their places of employment, and the privacy of their intimate relationships even.

I tried to get some sense—if only an impressionistic one—of how all this affected the lives of a great many Jews. I should add that I am not arguing that all Jews were affected by these developments. For some Jews, both what was going on in Israel and the experiences of their coreligionists were more distant sorts of event. Perhaps they read about how other Jews were exposed to hostility. But for many Jews it was very personal. It was personal in the sense that their own children and grandchildren were affected. It was personal in a sense that some of their favorite news outlets insisted on publishing the most vicious lies about Israel. And when they were proven to be lies, those various outlets were quite modest in the way in which they backtracked, if they backtracked at all. And Jews aced hostility in the workplace in some cases as well.

This rise of anti-Israelism, and the surge of anti-Semitism associated with it, was a second challenge that American Jews have faced. But there’s also a third area that I want to mention, and that I paid attention to in the article. That was captured by a study that appeared in March of this year, by the Jewish Federations of North America, which found what they described as a surge of renewed interest on the part of Jews in connecting with Jewish life in various ways. And what was especially striking in that study was that Jews who were the least engaged with Jewish life claimed that they were newly interested. Interested in what? That varied, of course. In some cases, interested in giving. There were people who came out of the woodwork to give to the Israel emergency campaign and often to other Jewish organizations, especially those involved with combating anti-Semitism.

And there were other ways as well, in which this surge manifested itself. Various kinds of meetings online and in-person attracted far more people than before October 7. For a short period of time, more people came to synagogues. That seems to have petered out, although we don’t have any data yet, at least that I’m aware of. There were also other ways in which Jews expressed an interest in simply connecting with other Jews—feeling somewhat besieged, and therefore wanting to be together with other Jews. And the challenge then was how would various Jewish organizations respond to that?

Last of all, I’ll mention one further challenge: how to combat this virulent anti-Israelism, which often was expressed as anti-Semitism. There we find that quite interesting surge of grassroots activities which continue to the present day. Parents, especially mothers of students who are on college and university campuses, have gotten together and exchanged information. There’s an organization called Mothers against Campus Anti-Semitism, which has over 60,000 members, for example. But also there are all kinds of local groups, parents of kids enrolled in a particular private school, for instance, or parents living in a particular neighborhood who want to exchange information with each other because they had concerns. And some participants in these groups became activists in the sense of trying to confront school administrators and city-council members.

There were over a hundred city councils in this country that passed resolutions hostile to Israel, as if they had nothing else to do, no other business to take care of. And so there were various groups that were involved in combating that. And then there is also an infrastructure of what used to be called defense organizations or Jewish community-relations organizations. And they also were involved in those activities. And at times, as I point out, there was some tension between these newer groups and the established ones, because they differed in the methods that they felt would best address those challenges.

Jonathan Silver:

There are, as you say, different modalities of engagement, and giving money is one of them, although it’s not the only one. But I want to focus on that for a moment because that was the most immediate thing that, aside from prayer, was easy for American Jews to do immediately. And the infrastructure was created instantly, it seems, or at least these institutions were so prepared that they were ready at a moment’s notice to roll out websites accepting donations and to send out emails soliciting them. I want to ask, before we get to domestic anti-Semitism, about the first hours and days after the initial attacks, where there seemed to be a great deal of sympathy for Israel. Do you understand how the Jewish communal institutions conceptualized the challenge in front of them at that moment? What did they think they were raising money for? What did they think that their purpose was at that time?

Jack Wertheimer:

The primary institutions that have been involved in these kinds of efforts are the federations of Jewish philanthropy, which have a long history of raising money and then channeling it to overseas needs—and specifically to Israel, because they have partners in Israel. And in addition to that there are many “friends of” organizations, as they’re called: friends of Israeli hospitals, for example, and  of universities and medical centers of various types. So the conception that they had was that this is yet another wartime crisis similar to what occurred in 1948, 1967, or 1973: we have to rally, we have to send funds to Israel to enable Israel to address a variety of needs, some of them having to do with the provision of supplies to soldiers. I’m not talking about weaponry now, but night-vision gear for example, and the proper clothing and boots that the soldiers would need.

From what I understand, a fair amount of that was not needed in Israel. There are lots of photographs of people who were traveling to Israel with huge duffel bags filled with supplies. And to my understanding—and I may be mistaken about this—most of those supplies were really not needed in Israel. But the idea was to try to help these Jewish soldiers, which for the most part after all were young men and women, nineteen, twenty, or twenty-one years old. When you read about the terrible loss of life and limb that Israeli soldiers have suffered, that also pulls the heartstrings of Jews.

But to return to your question, I think that the primary issue initially was thought to be, “What are we going to do for Israel?” And I don’t think that the primary thinking was, “Wait a minute, we’re facing, or we will be facing, crises here at home as well.” And that feeling only began to surface in the days and months afterwards.

Jonathan Silver:

You note that six months after October 7 alone, the federation system raised some $830 million.

Jack Wertheimer:

Correct. Just for Israel—not counting other giving.

Jonathan Silver:

One can ask, maybe we should use the $830 million to buy night-vision goggles, and maybe we should do other things with it. And I’m curious about what the thinking was at the time about the needs that they were trying to meet?

Jack Wertheimer:

I don’t have a great answer to that question. I think that they were not primarily concerned with supplying the night-vision goggles, but with providing aid to the Jews, the many Israelis who were affected. Different figures are given, but roughly 100,000 Jews were displaced from areas close to Gaza and also in the north near the Lebanese border. There was a need to help settle them, or resettle them, in different parts of Israel, and provide them with what they needed. And also the donor organizations wanted to ensure that the soldiers would be properly fed and get the proper supplies that they do need. The thinking had much to do with thinking about the neediest in Israel, not only the soldiers, but also others who were affected by this war.

Jonathan Silver:

Many of those soldiers left businesses that they run and left jobs that they run. And one can imagine the full scale of economic dislocation, which I don’t really think has been dimensioned fully yet. But obviously there was a tremendous need to sustain the whole ecology of businesses, and nonprofits, and schools, and all the things that all those men and women used to do when they weren’t serving in the reserves.

Jack Wertheimer:

And especially the agricultural sector. This happened at harvest time, but the harvesting was primarily handled by volunteers. There were American Jews who went there as volunteers to pick crops and the like.

Jonathan Silver:

Let’s now move to the explosion of anti-Semitism. I think that what I learned most from your essay was the forthright nature in which the representatives of Jewish communal institutions told you that they had invested a huge amount in building up relationships with non-Jewish neighbors, and other non-Jewish institutions and communal organizations. And they had seen this in part as a way to build up insurance to prevent precisely what happened.

I’d like you to explain what you learned and what you heard from people who had invested their entire careers in that kind of interfaith and intercommunal dialogue, and this kind of pluralism. People who’d had such hope that that doing so would strengthen the Jews and make prevent this kind of widespread and virulent anti-Semitism, or at least make it less severe.?

Jack Wertheimer:

I should say that only some of those working in the so-called Jewish community-relations sphere were prepared to be candid about the failings that they perceived. I don’t want to generalize about what everybody felt, but certainly disappointment was very widespread. And there were articles that were written about this by rabbis and others. There was an article written, for example, by a prominent conservative rabbi in Chicago, relatively early on, who said, in paraphrase, “We marched with you when you were facing various types of crises. We were there for you. And now, in our time of need, you’re not here for us.”

And that was a sentiment that I think was quite widespread. Others in the field were prepared to be more self-critical and used the term naivete to describe what they felt that the field had displayed. Some said, for example, something along the lines of, “We thought that if we would just take some leaders of these various ethnic groups and religious groups to Israel, they would understand and they would be sympathetic to Israel. But they couldn’t and they didn’t withstand the pressures from their fellow travelers and from their non-Jewish allies.”

There’s been a great deal of disappointment about that. And my understanding is that there’s a rethinking process going on, and that the rethinking process involves both the Federation world, which is planning to become much more active in this regard, but also Jewish foundations and local Jewish community-relations organizations. A combination of different groups has come to recognize that whatever was done in the past isn’t working. Now the question is: where do we go from here? And one possible answer is that we look for different allies. Maybe we were looking in all the wrong places. And that does get into political questions. Jews have tended to align themselves with groups in the so-called social-justice realm. Those organizations tend to be on the left of the spectrum and the progressive side of things. And these various groups did not deliver for the Jews.

The complication—and I didn’t write about this because I’ve only learned about it since completing the article—is that various Jewish organizations are dependent upon some of these putative allies for funding on the local level. Some of the security money that has been coming in for the protection of synagogues and other Jewish buildings has been voted on by local city councils and so forth. Other money that comes to Jewish organizations that engage in non-sectarian activities comes from local and state governments. And the bind that these Jewish groups are in is that they fear that if they take too pugnacious a posture toward these groups, then they’re going to be shut out of these other funding opportunities, which are necessary for the functioning of some Jewish organizations.

Jonathan Silver:

Each point that you’ve made stimulates me to ask at least dozens more questions. But I want to ask you one more before I invite our guests to join us. In The New American Judaism, a book you wrote a few years ago that was published by Princeton University Press, you present one of the most interesting, subtle depictions of the denominational variety in American Jewish life and of the cultures inside of Orthodoxy and inside of reform and conservative, and beyond those major denominational groups. I want to see if we can overlay the denominations onto this last year, and ask if there are any clear patterns that emerge so that one could say, e.g., that the Orthodox tended to react in a certain way, Conservative Jewish institutions tended to react another way, and so on. Or in the face of this kind of crisis, were those denominational borders less meaningful?

Jack Wertheimer:

I would opt for the latter answer. Let me put it as follows. There was an important denominational boundary line and we also saw that in the last election: that is the divide between the Orthodox and the non-Orthodox. There were exceptions, but Orthodox Jews, on a whole variety of issues, have felt far less comfortable with the progressive left. To the contrary, they have felt more comfortable with Republicans on many issues, but not all. It gets complicated on the local level because Democrats are often seen as far more willing to provide social safety-net services that the Orthodox communities are eager to benefit from. So it’s a mixed picture even in the Orthodox world.

I don’t see vast differences among the Conservative, Reform and, Reconstructionist movements regarding how they responded to this crisis. And I’m not sure that they have responded yet. Indeed, that’s something that we should put on the table: I’m impatient and there’s reason to be impatient, because organizations move at a very slow pace. And that pertains both to how they respond to the surge of interest as well as to how they respond to the new political and ideological configurations. I haven’t seen a major shift taking place in the non-Orthodox world, in their positions, which is not to say that it won’t happen, but I don’t think it’s happened yet.

Jonathan Silver:

Andres, let me invite you into this conversation. You are cited in Jack’s essay. This is your profession and your world. I’m eager for your response and for your questions.

Andres Spokoiny:

First of all, thank you Jonathan, and thank you Jack for putting this together. Jack and I worked in the past on research projects, and I’m always a big fan of his work. I think that I agree 100-percent with many of the premises of Jack’s report. I run the Jewish Funders Network, which is a network of around 3,000 funders, foundations, and donors from around the world.

From my perspective, it seems that the overwhelming response, expressing solidarity through Jewish philanthropy, was unprecedented in a way—at least since the Yom Kippur War. My back-of-the-envelope calculation, and Jack you can correct me, is that basically we doubled or more than doubled—perhaps increased by 120 or 130 percent—what we send to Israel every year in response to the crisis and to the war. An interesting thought I had was this: your report is mostly focused on federations and communal philanthropy. My work is mainly focused on private philanthropy and foundations. Do you see a difference in response between federations and private philanthropists?

Jack Wertheimer:

The truth is, I don’t know the answer to your question. But what I think has to be added is my sense, from talking to people in the federation world, that they took in a considerable amount of money from the large funders. That’s the case for funders in your network who decided to channel their money through the federations—which again, have the contacts on the ground to ensure that the money would be used as quickly as possible. What I don’t know, and I don’t know who does know about this—maybe through your conversations you found something out about this—is the extent to which funders worked around that system and gave directly to some of these “friends of” organizations, or to other kinds of funds that may have been established in Israel to help directly, for example, displaced Israelis. So I’m throwing the question back to you.

Andres Spokoiny:

As you said very well, there are no perfect data and, for all sorts of structural reasons that we can discuss, it’s very hard to get actual data. But good, educated estimates say that probably $1.2 billion came from private philanthropy, on top of what was given to the Federation system, and it went to a very diverse array of institutions. I want to take one step back though. One of the things that we need to take into consideration is that in Israel, the feeling—not just the feeling, the reality—was that the government failed. It not only failed on October 7, but failed in the response that followed, at least in the first three weeks of the war.

There were some things that were done, like putting everybody in the Gaza envelope on buses and taking them to the Dead Sea or to Eilat. But not so in the north. In the north most people self-evacuated. And there was a feeling that philanthropy needed to come in and pick up the pieces, which was what it did. It wasn’t only that philanthropy stepped up, it was also that the role philanthropy played in the initial response to the crisis was critical. It literally saved the day.

When you talk about funders directly supporting individual nonprofits, not through the Federation system, the first example that comes to mind is IsraAid, which is a relief organization that works outside of Israel, and after October 7 deployed itself in Israel. IsraAid went to the Dead Sea area and set up a school system for the evacuees. That happened because individuals gave IsraAid the funds to do so.

Now, that’s the great story of philanthropy in Israel after October 7th. The not-so-great story is that there were the grassroots efforts you described previously, which were sometimes very productive and very useful, and sometimes very disruptive and problematic. And I think that that problem is going to stay with us for the next phase, which is something that you don’t talk about. I would like to see what your hunch about is about the long tail of this crisis, which is the reconstruction issue.

Jack Wertheimer:

First of all, we know that, to begin with, he money that the federations raised, has not all been channeled to Israel. They’re holding onto some of that money for the period of reconstruction. Some people are very unhappy about that, but the thinking is that, when these wars end, there will be a great need for funds for reconstruction work.

But I’d like to pose a follow-up question to you. I recall a piece that you wrote early on, I think it was an E-Jewish Philanthropy, in which you said something to the effect of: funders, it’s time for you at this moment to give until it hurts. My question is: did the funders give until it hurt? And the second piece of this is that we know perfectly well, and I alluded to this in my piece also, that while the dollar output on the part of American Jewish donors was, as you said, nearly as large or as large as what was given in 1973, the number of donors was much, much smaller compared to the number of donors who gave in 1973. Clearly those who gave gave much more now than they did in the past. And that leaves me wondering whether, in your view, the affiliates of the Jewish Funders Network in fact gave until it hurt, and how many of them did not give? Because that’s one of the questions I think is still unanswered.

Andres Spokoiny:

We surveyed our members, and we asked two questions. Did they give more, or did they give till it hurt? Those are two different questions. We surveyed our members. Eighty-six percent of them gave more during this crisis, which is a very good sign. Now, did anybody sell a house in the Hamptons to give more money to Israel? No. So there is still more to do, and I keep insisting to my network that this is the challenge of our generation. Our response to this crisis will define our generation, and whether history books are going to be proud of us depends on what each of us does according to what he or she is able. And that’s why I said we need to give, not till it hurts, but till it feels good—when you’re really changing something and giving all you can.

I don’t think it happened quite to that extent, but I’m positively surprised about the outpouring of solidarity, and its persistence. In that same survey, we asked how many of those funders are going to retain the new grants they started making because of the emergency. And the vast majority—I don’t recall the exact number, but it around 70 percent—intended to keep that extra level of funding. The other thing that is very surprising is the coming of age of Israeli philanthropy. Over the last couple of decades, the Jewish Funders Network, among others, has been working to incentivize Israeli philanthropy. And Israeli philanthropy and civil society stepped up in unprecedented ways. Take for instance the war rooms in which the aid was organized, which were all originally supported by Israeli high-tech money. Many of the civil-society organizations, interestingly enough, were linked to the anti-Netanyahu protests—Brother and Arms and other groups.

Jack Wertheimer:

Yes.

Andres Spokoiny:

In that sense, I’m actually concerned about something else: the extent to which, in the long term, funders are going to start saying, “Wait a second, aren’t we letting the Israeli government off the hook?” I’m starting to hear that concern. For example, we talk about the Israeli north. At JFN, there’s a group of funders that are investing heavily in supporting the north. And some of them are starting to say, “The government has the money. It chooses to give it to the yeshivah or to settlements. Not that they’re not deserving, but the government is making policy choices here and we are covering for them. And should we?”

Or take, as another example, the terrible toll on reservists who have been called on for service for months and months on end—and on their families. And one may say, “There is an easy solution for that problem, which is to enact the high-court decision to draft the Haredim. Do we have to keep supporting this?” These are the questions that are coming for philanthropy, and it is going to be tricky. It’s going to be tricky when it comes to combating anti-Semitism also. Philanthropy tries not to get involved in politics. But at some point, many questions become political. How are we going to tiptoe around those questions? I think it is going to be very, very tricky.

Jonathan Silver:

Jack, I’d like you to react to Andres’s question, which is a very good one. And after that, I’m going to invite Armin to join our conversation.

Jack Wertheimer:

One of my reactions, and one of the things that I’ve been thinking about, is that I have been skeptical that the outpouring of money to help Israel will continue at such a high level. So it was very interesting for me to hear from you, Andres, that the people affiliated with the Jewish Funders Network intend to do so. I also wonder, especially in light of what you said, the ideological issues that were festering before October 7. To what extent will the issues of judicial reform and the policies of the Netanyahu government, in some way, persuade people not to be so supportive of Israel? But the other aspect is concern about domestic Jewish life. To what extent will donors decide, instead of sending more money to Israel, that we need to pay more attention to anti-Semitism and other issues here, where we have problems of our own?

Andres Spokoiny:

There is yet another, different issue here regarding how we respond to anti-Semitism. The same way the Israeli government wasn’t prepared for the October 7th attack, we were not prepared for the outpouring of anti-Semitism. We expected it, but we didn’t expect it at this level. And there are different questions that the community will need to analyze, and part of that will involve self-criticism.

I reconsidered many, many of my alliances, some of them pretty publicly. But I think that the doctrine of allyship itself needs to be revised, and funders need to work on this. I don’t think Jews are going to stop being liberal or progressive, but I think that the way they express that is going to change a lot. I think that one of the things that we failed to understand is how deep the rot is in academia. And this is a generational question, that touches on very deep cultural issues. We were paying attention to campus anti-Semitism. At the last fifteen JFNA conferences, there were plenary sessions about campus anti-Semitism, but we didn’t understand how deep the rot is.

And we didn’t understand something else that I think funders will need to pay much, much more attention to, which is the role of foreign support. One of the sobering realizations is, as much money we put into fighting anti-Semitism, we are never going to be able to match the trillion of dollars that Qatar and China and Russia are putting into promoting anti-Semitism for their own reasons. And I think that there were two naivetes that went broken. One is the idea that if we stand up for progressive groups they will stand for us. That was a naive perception. But there was another naive perception, which came from the right: that if you give students good talking points about Israel, that’s going to be enough to turn the tide. That was also obviously wrong.

The last point I’m going to make is that another thing that failed was Jewish education, a problem Jack mentioned towards the end of his article. The problem wasn’t that we weren’t good at educating Jews, but that we weren’t good at creating a sense of internal solidarity within the Jewish people. For me, the big shock of seeing anti-Zionist Jews, wasn’t so much their positions, which of course are abhorrent, but the fact that they failed to feel solidarity with the rest of the Jewish people. And that for me is a failure of the community in terms of education. The surge of philanthropy and activism that we described should address this in the future.

Jonathan Silver:

Armin, how did you read the essay? I’m eager for your reactions and your questions.

Armin Rosen:

Thank you for having me. One thing that jumped out at me, we haven’t talked about yet, is the differences in experience during this whole period among different generations of American Jews. Probably one of the most shocking things that you mentioned is that 15 to 20 percent of Jewish adults had personally experienced anti-Semitism. But if you look at the younger generations, 60 or 70 percent of students on college campuses had experienced some kind of anti-Semitism. On the other side of the issue, there are polls showing that the younger people are, the more likely they are to harbor anti-Israel or anti-Semitic views. And as you mentioned, there is already the issue of a shrinking donor base for legacy Jewish organizations.

Is it possible that we’re looking at a future where you have young people who have experienced this period on a college campus, and don’t feel the legacy institutions did very much for them? Where do those people go in ten years? Are they going to be funding Chabad houses? Are they simply going to be completely checked out? Are new organizations, the nature of which we can’t picture right now, going to rise up in the place of the Federation system? I was hoping you could talk a bit about this. Obviously it’s useless, even irresponsible, to speculate in some respects, but where do you see things going in terms of this gap in the experience of people of different ages?

Jack Wertheimer:

I want to tackle this in a couple of different ways, because these are very important questions. I’ll start by saying that one of the deficiencies of the research so far, including the research done by the JFNA—which has been valuable in terms of the so-called surge—is that we know very little about the reverse phenomenon, meaning Jews who have decided to check out. Those who want nothing to do with Israel. Those who think, “What do we need this for in our lives? Why good is this Jewish thing?” We just don’t know the answer to that. We know about those who have expressed greater interest, but what about those who expressed reduced interest? There have been a series of these surveys that were conducted. One of them, which was quite preposterous, came up with a staggering number of Jews, young Jews, who claimed that Israel is an apartheid state.I think that that particular survey has been dismissed as simply poorly done and inaccurate.

But your key issue about the generational gaps is one that is not new since October 7th, but that’s been exacerbated by October 7. And frankly, I see this with my own students. I teach undergraduates at JTS, who go for a double degree: a BA from JTS and a BA or BS from Columbia or Barnard. And what I see is students who have said to me, “I identify as a progressive. My family is progressive, but I am not going to turn on Israel. I believe I’m a supporter of Israel. And as a result of that, I can’t tell you how many of my former friends no longer talk to me. They describe me as someone who is supportive of genocide.”

I did an exercise yesterday, it so happens, with one of my classes where I told them, “You serve on the board of a foundation, which can give away a million dollars this year. How would you divide that up? And to my amazement—and I hardly suggest that the students at JTS are representative—most of them were prepared to give 90 percent or 100 percent of their funding to Jewish causes, and ignore non-sectarian causes completely or almost completely.

Again, I’m not suggesting these are representative in any sense, but what they do reflect, I think, is that this generation, generation Z, has gone through a number of traumatic events and they are responding in very different ways. I suggest even a bipolar way. Some of them are becoming much more interested in what we could call parochial Jewish concerns, and some of them are gravitating to the universal side of the spectrum. And I think that is generational. I don’t think we see the same shift in opinion in surveys of older age cohorts, of millennials and baby boomers. Now, I haven’t covered all your questions, but I hope this is a smart.

Armin Rosen:

Another interesting tension that you identify in your essay is between these grassroots groups that are organizing their own campaigns over WhatsApp and legacy organizations that can’t do that by virtue of what they are. They can’t really go out with torches and pitchforks and lead a campaign to get specific people fired, the way that angry parents on a WhatsApp can. But again, looking ahead a few years, it’s entirely possible that people will feel as if the legacy institutions either were not equipped to deal with what’s going on right now, or otherwise completely abandoned them or just weren’t interested.

But it’s often the angry people on WhatsApp who actually got something done. But again, you can’t really expect a regional federation or a JCC or something similar to lead hard-nosed campaigns against specific alleged anti-Semites here and there. It’s just not what they exist for. But then there is a danger that somehow these legacy institutions are delegitimized in a way by anti-Semitism getting seemingly worse and worse, without them being able to do much to stop it—compared to the WhatsApp moms, for instance. How do you see that playing out?

Jack Wertheimer:

I see it differently than you on several scores. First, I don’t think the issue with the legacy organizations is that they feel they can’t be assertive. I think the issue is that, based upon their experience—especially on this issue—they feel that working behind the scenes, as opposed to a more in-the-face response, is more effective, especially when they are working, as they are, with various school administrators. They’re working with university presidents. They’re working with city-council members. They’re working with up-and-coming politicians. And their attitude is, “We want to try to educate them as much as we can. Expose them to Israel, bring them to Israel, but also educate them in other ways. And that is more effective than the in-your-face approach that the grassroots organizations prefer.” That having been said, and I make the point in the article, there are points of convergence between these groups.

And it’s not simply that they’re hostile toward each other. They differ in the method and tactics that they prefer to use, but sometimes they agree with each other’s tactics and they proceed accordingly. The other thing is that a lot of the work that’s being done now in terms of combating anti-Semitism is being done within the legal framework. They’re attempting to tackle some of these anti-Israel groups and anti-Semitic groups through the courts. And we have to see how that’s going to play out in the universities, for example, because there are a number of universities that have been sued. The other thing—and here I may be showing my age—is that the 2020s have demonstrated to a lot of Jews that many of these legacy organizations, which were dismissed especially by younger Jews in the early part of this century, have proven their worth.

The reason I focus on federations is because the federations had the contacts on the ground, and were able to rush the money where it was needed. And the defense organizations in fact are working with various groups, including college-age students and high-school students, trying to help them figure out a way of addressing what they’re facing in their schools. Some of these legacy organizations are benefiting from renewed interest, and they’re getting a second look. It’s the Jewish community-relations organizations in local communities that have been the hardest hit, I believe. And then there is an umbrella organization that used to exist, the Jewish Council on Public Affairs, which has gone off in a totally different direction, and I think is largely irrelevant in the current discussion. And that was not the case in the past.

Andres Spokoiny:

Can I add something to that, that I think goes to your question about the angry WhatsApp groups? I think that the players who were very important in getting the universities to take action weren’t so much angry WhatsApp groups or grassroots organizations, but major donors who were very vocal and who forced a reckoning in a way that neither the legacy nor the grassroots organizations could have. I think ultimately that Mark Rowan saying “I’m defunding Penn” had much more of an impact than any work that we’ve been doing for many years. That’s a factor I think, to consider going forward.

Jack Wertheimer:

I wonder about that. Given the billions that many of these institutions have, especially the Ivy League, how much do they really care about the Mark Rowans and the Ackmans? To what extent are they able to make up for it by raising money in the Middle East, and raising money from other people? It’s a question I don’t know the answer to.

Andres Spokoiny:

I don’t have the answer. Maybe Armin knows.

Armin Rosen:

I think a lot of it might depend on the political climate for the next few years, and how activist an undersecretary of education for civil rights (for instance) the incoming administration ends up appointing. A lot depends on political factors that might be either specific to the next couple of years, or perhaps the wind might start blowing in a very different direction on a lot of those things. It might actually become much harder for universities to raise money in the Middle East. To latch onto something you said a moment ago: you expanded the timeframe of this into the entire decade of the 2020s, and obviously the decade began with the last major institutional philanthropic shock to the system, which was the COVID pandemic, which I wrote quite a bit about for Tablet.

I was actually quite impressed in the early days of the pandemic by how active the federations were, how much money they raised, what they did to be able to backstop all of these communal institutions that would’ve otherwise gone bankrupt. At this point, the war after October 7 has gone on for something like twenty or thirty times longer than the Yom Kippur War. This is another very long crisis. And I’m curious how much the COVID experience came up in your work on this article? And was COIVD, as horrible as it was, actually a good test-run for what the whole infrastructure has had to do the past year?

Jack Wertheimer:

I think it was. I actually wrote a series of pieces for Mosaic on responses to COVID because I was very interested in that question at the time as well. And the conclusion that I drew—and you can accuse me of looking through rose-tinted glasses—that, if anything, federations and other legacy organizations really came into their own during COVID. They were responsive and that they were newly appreciated, especially by funders, but also by others who recognized that they were Johnny-on-the-spot.

They were able to act, as you just pointed out. Also, I somewhat melodramatically like to refer to the tumultuous 2020s. Because they have been that way between COVID and the surge of anti-Semitism which didn’t begin certainly on October 7. We can go back to the shootings in Pittsburgh in 2018. There’s been a history of this. And then there’s what happened in Israel on October 7, 2023. Putting this together, I see a continuum, or else a series of crises that a lot of these legacy organizations really have responded to, and they seem to be appreciated by funders—or at least by some funders.

Jonathan Silver:

Let me introduce some of the questions that are coming in from the audience as we near the end of our conversation. I’m combining a couple of different questions into one because they both draw on a feeling of disappointment in—and I might even go further and say anger at—the legacy institutions, whose naivete they blame for the unpreparedness of the American Jewish community. When confronting, not the security threat from Iran and its proxies, but the American crisis of domestic anti-Semitism, one dimension of the strategy has to involve working with allies. The second dimension has to do with the way Jewish institutions educate Jewish students, and how unprepared Jewish students seem to be to confront the realities that they found themselves in. These two questions express a sort of frustration and anger. And I wonder if you uncovered any of that as well, Jack?

Jack Wertheimer:

I certainly have. I’ve got a number of responses to it. One of them is that there’s a long history of Jews blaming organizations and institutions. “Oh, if only the synagogue would do X, Y, and Z, everything would be good.” That kind of thing. There’s a long history to that. And I wrote in my piece that I think the educational system has failed through the kinds of emphases that they place. And I mentioned specifically tikkun olam and the universal as opposed to the parochial. But that said, young people are not only influenced by their schools; they’re influenced by their parents and their extended families as well. And to hang all this on organizations is going a bit further than I am prepared to do. But the other aspect of this that we can’t avoid, and that touches upon what Armin spoke about a little while ago, is the political constellation in which we find ourselves, and the unwillingness of many Jews to see the left—I’m talking specifically about the so-called progressive left—as problematic.

There’s been a denial about what has occurred. And it’s true within many Jewish organizations. But these organizations are also responding to their members, who themselves see the villains as being on the right. And there are villains on the right. Ye they refuse to see the villains that are on the left. And there is a debate, and here I want to hearken back to something that Andres mentioned a little bit earlier, that’s going on in the Jewish world about how to respond to DEI on campuses and in corporate headquarters and so forth. The debate is between those who say, this is something that we have to learn to work with, and what we need to do is to make sure that Jews are included among the minorities, and that anti-Semitism is seen as something that also shouldn’t be tolerated. And on the other hand, you have other people who argue that we really can’t make our peace with DEI because fundamentally it’s discriminatory, and it’s especially discriminatory against Jews. And there’s an unwillingness to face up to that because Jews feel much more comfortable with those who are on the left. And those who are on the left are the ones who tend to promote these ideas—ideas that I believe, and some others believe, are inimical to Jewish life. But until we figure out a way of resolving this, the organizations are caught in the middle. And how are they going to respond then when they’re getting it from both sides?

Andres Spokoiny:

But there’s a fallacy here. I commented earlier on the naivete of believing that building relationships with allies, and progressive values, will protect us. But there’s another fallacy: the thinking that, if organizations had been more vocal and more right-wing, a more in your face, it would’ve been different. I think it’s another form of naivete. We don’t fully realize the extent to which anti-Semitism ebbs and flows of its own accord. This is actually the most unsettling thing for me: how limited the impact that Jews can have on anti-Semitism is. Basically anti-Semitism, over its history, had really nothing to do with the Jews. Nothing the Jews did or didn’t do changed anything. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t fight it. We should, but we need to be clear-eyed about what we can achieve and what we can’t.

And that’s why I join Jack, and Armin too, here in the sense that the legal battles are becoming more important. Because when you fight something in the courts, you don’t need to convince 2 billion users of TikTok, who have been poisoned by China and Qatar, that Jews are good. You just need to use the law which is much easier and much more effective than trying to do things which may have little impact. So I agree with you, Jack, that sometimes the critique of the legacy organizations is unfair, and the proposals that say, “Oh, if they only do that,” are just as useless as the strategies in place.

Jack Wertheimer:

Yes.

Jonathan Silver:

To what extent are you seeing disgust with elite universities translated into more money for Israel and domestic Israeli philanthropies?

Jack Wertheimer:

I don’t know the answer to that question. I know examples of it. We know that this fellow in Philadelphia, David Magerman, has pulled money out of a number of universities that he has supported here in the United States, and instead has given a million dollars to a series of universities in Israel in order to encourage American Jews to study at Israeli universities. So that is a specific example of pulling out from here and investing it there. But I would throw it back to Andres. I’m wondering whether you’ve come across Jewish funders who have specifically done that. Also, I want to just add one thing. It’s not only Israel: I know that there are funders who are less willing now to support non-sectarian causes, and prefer to give to what I’ll call Jewish parochial causes here in the United States.

Andres Spokoiny:

I observed that there is some shift of funding. It’s anecdotal. We don’t have data on that. Like David Magerman, Sylvan Adams used to be a big donor of McGill. Now he’s giving to Ben-Gurion University. But what I did see very, very actively is folks who are not stopping their funding of campuses, but are instead funding Jewish staff on campus. Just before this conversation, I was talking with a member of ours who was telling me about a program to bring Israeli academics to Israeli universities. As with DEI there are two schools of though. One says, let’s engage and let’s try to bring Israeli academics to the U.S., and have more engagement with American universities. And the other says, the universities are rotten beyond redemption. Let’s just abandon them. And who’s right? I don’t know. Maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle.

Jack Wertheimer:

Yes

Jonathan Silver:

One person asks, so far this discussion is focused on measuring and analyzing the American Jewish response, but in thinking about evaluating that response, shouldn’t we apply some judgment about how good, appropriate, and well-directed the responses were? Can you speak more about what’s actually come of all this generosity that has been given by American donors? How do you know if it’s been spent wisely or foolishly or well?

Jack Wertheimer:

My answer to that question is that it’s too early to tell. We’re a little bit more than a year out. Some of this money hasn’t even made its way yet to Israel because it’s being held back for the reconstruction process. But at this point, it’s premature to evaluate that. My colleagues may differ on that point.

Andres Spokoiny:

From my perspective, I think, for instance, the money that went to Israel at the beginning of the crisis was extremely useful and vital even. As for the money that is going to fight anti-Semitism: time will tell. I think that there are good things that are happening and we’ll see if they materialize into concrete results. One thing I would love to see is our community finally saying that it can’t be that the richest and most prosperous community in the history of the Jewish people cannot guarantee an affordable day-school option for Jewish children in America.

It’s unheard of. It’s the only community in the world where we simply cannot seem to figure out the issue of Jewish day school. I would love to see some answer come out of this. Time will tell. It might still. But I think the problem with philanthropy is that those are processes that demand a lot of time, and that have multiple causes. In other words, “Did anti-Semitism stop because we did something right? Or simply because it was a wave and the wave went away, and the mass hysteria moved somewhere else?” We probably will never know.

Armin Rosen:

I’ll just note very briefly that there’s a more abstract question of what Israelis were expecting out of American Jews in the midst of this crisis—beyond money, beyond donations. I have found just anecdotally that Israelis are quite shocked by the level of anti-Semitism here. They seem almost as concerned about kids on college campuses here as we are about them back in Israel. I’ve encountered occasional disappointment that American Jews haven’t done more to stand up for themselves. These are things that you hear every once in a while.

And I wonder if, in the long run, this crisis might not produce additional reasons for estrangement between American and Israeli Jews. Or if the process of helping Israel rebuild from the past year might draw us closer together, and alleviate whatever disappointment Israelis might have in what they perceive as our inability to stand up for them or for ourselves, which I’ve encountered from time to time over the past year.

Jonathan Silver:

I want to just close by putting this question to the three of you, and drawing on some of the things Armin said. This is something that Jack wrote about in the essay. If one were to juxtapose the established legacy institutions with the bubbling-up vitality and the less well-defined efforts to articulate some kind of Jewish energy, has the experience of the past year led you to think that one or the other is performing better? Has anything surprised you when you look at the last year through the lens of those two very different kinds of Jewish sensibilities?

Andres Spokoiny:

For me, I think I don’t these things in binary terms. I see them as two sides of the same coin. Legacy organizations by design are, and should be, conservative institutions because they have a fiduciary responsibility to a large number of donors. They are bureaucratic with good cause, in many cases, because they have processes. And grassroots organizations or independent philanthropy have fewer constraints, and they can operate faster and take risks. With every system, too much regulation will kill it. Too little regulation means chaos.

I think that the challenge for the Jewish community going forward is not that one approach was more successful than the other. It is that when we properly manage the balance properly between the type of help that federations can provide and the type of things that only grassroots organizations can do, and when they work together harmoniously, the results were best. When it was a tug of war between the two responses, we fared much, much less well. And this problem is not just related to the war. This is an issue that was there before the war because of the Zeitgeist of a more independent type of philanthropic field and so forth. I think that the degree to which we’re going to harmonize these two sides of the philanthropic landscape is going to determine the success of our philanthropic endeavors.

Jack Wertheimer:

I very much agree with what Andres has said. Both have been part of the American Jewish ecosystem now for roughly the past 25 or 30 years. The so-called startup sector developed particularly during the 1990s and early years of this century. Whether can still be called startups now that they’re 25, 30 years old is another story. But I do think that they can be, and often are, complementary, and we tend to overlook that many of these startups, in fact, have been funded by federations and continue to be as well.

But on the point of surprise or novelty, if you will, what should not go unnoted is that the startups in the past generally have been founded by a younger generation. I’m talking about college-age students and those in their twenties and thirties. What I find interesting, and also heartening, is the various startups that have been founded by parents—the mothers’ organizations and so on. Because now we have an older generation that’s also getting involved in grassroots activism. And that, from my point of view, is all to the good. And yes, there are tensions between these two sectors, but my sense is that they’re figuring out ways to navigate with each other, even though at times they do get in each other’s way.

Armin Rosen:

I will just quickly point to two things that really surprised me over the past year. First of all, there was the eye-popping amount of money that was raised very, very quickly in the days after October 7. It was incredibly heartening to see on October 11 or 12, if we can take our minds back to that time, just how much money I think JFNA alone had raised. I think it was about $350 million in five or six days—which again is something that no startup could have done. And just as a morale thing, I think was remarkable, for me at least, to see.

The other thing that surprised me is just how deep and enduring the sense of hurt and betrayal has been among a lot of Jews towards higher education, towards the sort of people whom they used to perceive as their mainstream partners politically, culturally, socially. That hasn’t gone away. It’s stuck with people to a far greater degree than I thought it would have. That sense of discomfort and, again, betrayal has not proven to be an ephemeral sort of thing, and I suspect is going to have a huge impact for years to come on all these issues in some way or another.

Jonathan Silver:

Armin, thank you for joining us. Jack, thank you for being here. Andres, thank you for joining us.