In May of 1958, Martin Luther King, Jr. addressed the American Jewish Congress (AJC) at the National Biennial Convention in Miami Beach. In the two years preceding the speech, white supremacists had bombed more than 40 Black homes and institutions. The Jewish community – except for a minority of McCarthy-tainted leftists – remained utterly silent. Until the late 1950s they embodied a middle way politik that sought to appease anti-communists fighting desegregation while nominally supporting anti-racists fighting white supremacy. Then in March 1958, white supremacists bombed the school-wing of Miami’s temple Beth El, enraging the community and exposing the hollowness of their middle-way. In King’s speech a few months later, he rebuked the “quasi-liberalism” which had “developed a high blood pressure of words and an anemia of deeds.” King chose not to out the quasi-liberals that evening. Instead he appealed to a common victimhood narrative, linking the fight against fascism abroad with the domestic struggle against racism. Maybe this was a mistake. More than a half century of liberalism and survivalist politics later, one wonders if our communal institutions are any less white, or any less anemic in deeds.
Today, many are just beginning to reckon with the explicit and implicit state violence against Black and brown bodies. If there is anything the COVID-19 pandemic has reinforced, it is that the health and economic toll of a global pandemic are not shared equally between white communities and communities of color, that America’s racial capitalism has produced a racialized class order, and that any sort of structural change to this system requires material reparations. For white Jews, it means taking responsibility for the white supremacy that has festered within Jewish communal life for far too long, obscured by our blue voting streak, elegant waxing on racial justice, and a handful of cherry-picked Jewish civil rights leaders that defied elders to commit acts of civil disobedience. The community transformation required of us will be challenging. However, reassessing how we aggregate and allocate community funds would be a meaningful place to start. Simply put, our local federations should support the broader local communities in which they are situated.
In April, seven Jewish foundations, in coordination with the Jewish Federations of North America, launched an $80-million relief fund for Jewish nonprofits in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, reinvigorating conversation on charitable giving in the Jewish world and its distribution priorities. Many young progressives have long rejected Jewish communal institutions, a casualty of our culture war over Israel. This fall, when the New Israel Fund launched their own donor advised fund (DAF) (a private philanthropic savings account managed by a public charity and privy to a host of tax deductions) it was seen as a welcome addition to the Jewish philanthropic landscape. It is an open secret that most federations maintain stringent red lines on DAF recommendations to Palestinian solidarity organizations. However, the biggest problem facing the Jewish philanthropic world today is not merely transparency or the steady trickle of tax-exempt dollars over the Green Line. Our communal institutions’ race and class problem strikes deeper than tacit support for Israeli occupation; it directly impacts the communities in which we’re embedded. The current pandemic impresses upon us the value of immediate relief, and reminds us that local needs are often paramount in a global crisis.
As historian Lila Corwin Berman has scrupulously documented, the idea of the charitable endowment in perpetuity has not always been a fixture of the American financial landscape. Following the 1969 Tax Reform Act, private foundations faced increased scrutiny and financial penalties. To help community foundations avoid increased taxes and payout minimums, the IRS allowed foundations to reclassify themselves as public charities. Jewish federations were among the first community foundations to apply for the public charity loophole. Private donors could then move their charitable funds under the auspices of federations to gain tax deductions and avoid payout minimums. By 2015, DAFs around the nation totaled $80 billion.
For every dollar in tax deduction, there is no guarantee that the dollar sitting in a DAF will be circulated quickly into the economy. According to the Congressional Research Service, more than 70 percent of DAF-sponsoring organizations (organizations that offer DAFs) paid out less than 5 percent of DAF funds per year, and more than half paid nothing. Still, by subsidizing these charitable gifts, the federal government has changed the way Americans think about generosity and what types of giving deserve our praise. Stocks and property put into a DAF circumvent capital gains taxes completely. In 2016, the nation’s top 0.5 percent of earners, meaning individuals making $1 million or more, represented half of all tax dollars deducted due to charitable gifts in New York State.
Our local federations should support the broader local communities in which they are situated. The receding social safety net and the resurgence of white nationalism has not only affected those in our own direct Jewish world, but also those in the broader communities in which we’re embedded as diaspora Jews. But more critically, and perhaps more difficult to acknowledge, is that the private wealth that built our community foundations is impossible to disentangle from the racial dynamics of capitalist class formation in America.
The first Jewish federated charities were created to respond to the influx of Jewish immigration at the turn of the century. Given their fundraising structure, they were destined for a more elitist bent than the eastern European landsmanshaftn (hometown societies) for mutual aid, recreation, and socialist politics. By the turn of the century the federation movement had established itself in Boston, Cincinnati, Baltimore, San Francisco, and Pittsburgh, among other cities. In New York, landsmanshaftn were eventually overtaken by wealthier German Jews uptown as part of the Kehillah, an institutional precursor to the Joint Distribution Committee and federations. But often federations’ community mandates were used to enforce a racially and economically myopic vision of Jewish identity. In 1913, at a National Conference of Jewish Charities meeting, the future vice president of the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies in New York, Maurice Hexter, lamented “the psychic and psychological difference” between the European and Levantine Jew. Similarly, the Kehillah, under the leadership of Judah Magnes, refused to assist Levantine Jews in creating their own communal organisation and Ladino newspaper.
These internal conflicts are part of our communal history, but are less coherent, and certainly less comfortable than the story of American Jewish political identity that white Ashkenazi Jews tell ourselves. As the Miami Jewish community’s response to white-supremacist violence illustrated in the 1950s, white Jews’ adoption of American liberalism and their upward mobility often came at a cost to Black-Jewish solidarity. But additionally, as anthropologist Karen Brodkin has argued, accepting a myth that “Jews pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps” without federal assistance through programs like the GI Bill damns us to a present where a generational racial wealth gap “seems to maintain itself ‘naturally,’ even after legal segregation ended.”
Eventually, many Jews left American cities for suburbs, often divesting community funds from public welfare projects like hospitals that were no longer serving the immediate Jewish community. As white Jews accumulated greater wealth, Hebrew schools and summer camps won out over organizations addressing urban poverty, and we employed new financial instruments to avoid taxes. The lost tax revenue came at a cost to the larger cities we lived in.
We are loathe to air these communal politics publicly; and rightly so, for fear of inciting antisemitic tropes or disparaging the real generosity of American Jews. We struggle to reconcile the Jew as both the oppressed and the oppressor: this prized and conflicted identity of the upper-middle-class Ashkenazi Jew, mired in contradictions and blind to its whiteness and privilege. But for the sake of our survival, both existentially and spiritually, we must.
There is no immediate fix for tax subsidies supporting wealth held in perpetuity inside DAFs, but in the short term we can focus on the mission and goals of the funds we hold as a community. Funds subsidized by the American taxpayer through charitable deductions should be democratized and reach individuals most hurt by our receding social safety net. Local community foundations can take up the mantle on their own if they choose to ratify new bylaws around transparency and in support of racial and economic justice.
To expand Jewish communal funds’ benefits beyond our own children and grandchildren and the 501(c)(3)s that serve them, we could start by reconciling the particularism and universalism of our tradition and covenant. Survival is sustained through community organizing and the coalitions we build within the broader community, not philanthropic silos. Instead of burying political differences under federations’ “apolitical” mandates and BDS litmus tests, we need to air these tensions in the open. If we are serious about racial and economic justice, we must center the voices of small local nonprofits, people of color, and the broader communities in which we are situated, and we must do so inside of our endowment meetings.
It is through these coalitions that we build localized support networks to protect each other when our government does not. Through these networks — practicing outside the shadow of mega-donors’ economic largesse — Americans learn to practice democracy. While we will not be able to solve the wealth inequality inherent to our philanthropic institutions overnight, we can start by thinking more intentionally about power and who gets to make decisions.
By painting our internal racism and classism as external issues for the national consciousness rather than our own, white Jews own up to neither. Reforming Jewish philanthropy begins with the acknowledgement that white Jews profit from systemic racism. Systemic racism undergirds the financial instruments that have allowed us to amass wealth at the cost of the communities in which we’re embedded. But it cannot end with this acknowledgement alone. To act requires more than over-wrought prosing on Jewish values and the political panaceas of tikkun olam. As the late Reform Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf said, the world is not the only thing that needs repair. So do we. And so do our institutions.
