Philanthropists Mike Leven and Amy Holtz believe the Jewish people need help and that $600 billion is a fair estimate of what it will take to “secure a Jewish future.” That’s how much they hope their Jewish Future Pledge will raise in the coming years. But for all the Jewish families celebrating Hanukkah this week, is this really the kind of gift we should be giving future generations?
Introduced this past spring, the Jewish Future Pledge extracts a promise from its signatories that they will devote at least half of the charitable funds in their estate plan to support “the Jewish people and/or the State of Israel.” According to the founders’ rough calculations, as the oldest generation of wealthy American Jews dies, those who stood on the winning side of an ever-growing economic divide will transfer many trillions of dollars to the next generation and allocate more than $1 trillion to charity. Committing half of that to Jewish causes would guarantee a capital-rich Jewish future.
About 200 Jews have already signed the pledge, including several well-known billionaire philanthropists — Home Depot’s co-founder Bernie Marcus, Seagram’s magnate Charles Bronfman, and the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation, whose fortune was built on oil and natural gas extraction.
In the historical sweep of 20th-century philanthropy, the Jewish Future Pledge is just the latest proof that accumulation has triumphed over circulation of philanthropic dollars. With the advent of tools such as donor-advised funds, which now hold $121.42 billion, the wealthy today have multiple ways to designate their dollars as philanthropic without actually spending them on philanthropic causes.
What is wrong with reserving money for future philanthropic spending? After all, most of us teach our children to save their money. But in a time of large-scale economic scarcity, the consequences could be dire if philanthropic dollars, parading as public dollars, never actually make their way to the public.
The problem isn’t only about tax revenue lost to philanthropic accumulation — it’s about the distribution of power. The public, after all, has almost no control over philanthropic money held in reserve. That means the public loses twice: in the revenue available to be spent on societal needs and in having a voice in how that money is allocated.
With remarkable frankness, the Jewish Future Pledge acknowledges that at least some philanthropists understand how they can leverage this inequality to maintain control, even long after they are gone. For example, an older woman who signed the pledge observed that she has lost confidence in the next generation of American Jews to support Israel or the Jewish values she holds dear. As if addressing those errant young Jews, she explained, “We made the money. This is how you have to spend it. You don’t have endless options. If you want to save the whales, save the Jewish whales.”
Similarly, in an article published over the summer, Leven, the pledge’s co-founder, recollected that when he was setting up donor-advised funds to bequeath to his children, his wife asked him, “How do you know they are going to spend it Jewishly?” He admitted that he did not, so he stipulated in his estate plan that 75 percent of those funds had to be spent “Jewishly.” Thus, the kernel of the idea was born: to persuade others to share Leven’s mistrust in the future and to do something about it.
Strategically playing on these poles of control and insecurity is the focus of a “Jewish Values Tool Kit,” created by Morgan Stanley GIFT, a charitable arm of the financial-services firm, which has joined forces with the Jewish Future Pledge. The firm offers Jewish clients a range of investment tools, such as donor-advised funds, in which to park their pledge money. It also provides a 20-page brochure that blurs pithy Talmudic verses, transliterated Hebrew words, and a famous Jewish medieval code for charitable giving with bolded dollar figures enumerating the unparalleled heft of Jewish philanthropy. Yet those same pages quote Anne Frank and two Holocaust survivors — Elie Wiesel and Viktor Frankl.
The message packs a double punch: It appeals to wealthy Jews seeking “greater control” over their philanthropic dollars while acknowledging the insecurity of a people whose history is littered with existential trauma.
‘Leave Your Mark’
Wealthy American Jews are hardly alone in seeking control and security through philanthropy. The web of conservative think tanks that have steadily packed courts with right-leaning judges or financed right-wing media outlets illustrates the control philanthropy can buy, especially when it’s fueled by fears of powerlessness.
The Jewish Future Pledge is remarkable only because it is so transparent about the fear and capital resources driving it. Its tagline, fittingly, is “Leave Your Mark.” This open bid to buy control over the future should compel us to ask critical questions about philanthropic accumulation and its claims on the future.
How far into the future can a philanthropist possibly imagine what will be good for society? The stated purpose of philanthropy — and the rationale for its tax exemption — is the advancement of the public good. But the public good is not static. Philanthropy that seeks to define the future by imposing ideals from the past has the potential to immortalize racist, sexist, environmentally destructive, and unjust practices.
Needs of the Future
A healthy democracy (and a healthy Jewish community) requires trust in the future. If history is a guide, we know that future generations will not conform to our ideals or values. That may be scary, but it is far more frightening to auction the future to today’s highest bidders who cannot possibly imagine what the future may require.
In 1929, Julius Rosenwald, the Jewish philanthropist and part owner of Sears, Roebuck and Company, castigated fellow philanthropists who sought to use their money as a “pulmotor operated by a dead hand.” Better, he suggested, to live with the humble awareness “that the needs of the future can safely be left to be met by the generations of the future.”
Almost a century later, thanks to decades of historical transformations, we have a wide array of tax-sheltered philanthropic vehicles, our choice of financial-services firms with lucrative charitable arms, and a Jewish Future Pledge with its eyes on $600 billion, all intent on storing capital to make the future in the image of the past.
And yet these hopes for eternal control through philanthropic billions and bombast cannot even meet our own moment. We have no answer for our children who ask when school will return to normal. We don’t know when the millions of furloughed and unemployed workers will go back to work, or when the daily death and infection rate from Covid-19 will reverse its course, or when treatments, as well as vaccines, will be equally accessible to all.
Our present crises call to mind Rosenwald’s instructions and suggest that our responsibility to the future is about how we act in the present. Do we cling to our power, using wealth and capital control as our tools? Or do we seek to release that power, tending to the world as it is with faith that the future will do the same? The answer given by the Jewish Future Pledge is a cynical one, no more hopeful for the future than it is for our present.
A different kind of Jewish Future Pledge would have us all pledge to protect democracy. In the world of philanthropy, this would mean placing time limits on perpetual funds and demanding that philanthropic circulation far outpace accumulation. No matter how wealthy or how insecure donors may be, they should not be able to use their dollars to command the future.
