The Push to Get More Big Donors to Give to Fight the Spread of Antisemitism

The rising tide of antisemitic violence in the United States has been startling.

In August 2017, hundreds of neo-Nazis and other white supremacists descended on Charlottesville, Va., marching through the streets with Tiki torches and chanting “Jews will not replace us.” Dozens of counterprotesters were severely injured, and one was killed when a white supremacist purposely rammed his car into a crowd.

A little more than a year later, an antisemitic gunman stormed morning services at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, killing 11 people and injuring others. Other attacks by offenders with antisemitic beliefs targeted Black people, Asian Americans, and Latinos as well as Jewish people.

According to the Anti-Defamation League, there were 3,697 antisemitic incidents of assault, harassment, and vandalism throughout the United States in 2022, a 36 percent increase from the previous year and the highest number of such incidents on record since the organization began tracking them 44 years ago.

Wealthy donors have stepped up with big gifts to organizations that seek to fight antisemitism, racism, and other types of hatred. Prominent among them is Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots football team, who started the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism in 2019. He has personally committed at least $25 million to the organization so far. Kraft says he was shocked into action by the hate-fueled violence.

“It started with Charlottesville and then the Tree of Life, and I’m thinking this is the United States in 2023 — how does this happen? The hate that is going on, I’ve never seen anything like this,” says Kraft, who is 82. “What’s going on in America today is similar to what went on in Nazi Germany in the ‘30s.”

DHHRM

The foundation aims to sharpen public understanding, especially among non-Jews, about what modern-day antisemitism looks like on social-media platforms and how people can fight it. The idea is that fighting antisemitism gets easier when more people see it as a problem that affects everyone because it undergirds all types of hatred, says Matthew Berger, the organization’s executive director.

To that end, the foundation created #StandUpToJewishHate, a national social-media campaign to raise awareness about antisemitism. It also created a cobalt-blue square emoji as a symbol of solidarity that individuals and organizations can use in their social media to show their support for Jewish people, in the same way the rainbow flag symbolizes support for LGBTQ+ people.

Berger and his team also track antisemitic conversations on social media. The team then informs partner organizations so they can speak out and counter the messages. The foundation sends out a weekly newsletter that analyzes antisemitic and racist communications on social media that week.

“We want to raise awareness that antisemitism is a problem,” Berger says, “so that when the community looks to address these issues through government intervention, looks to build alliances, all of that can be done in an easier and more connected way if there is a mutual recognition that antisemitism is a problem.”

A Threat to All

Kraft isn’t alone. Other boldface names have made big gifts to fight antisemitism in recent years.

A week after Charlottesville, James Murdoch, a son of Fox News and Wall Street Journal owner Rupert Murdoch, and James’s wife, Kathryn, announced a $1 million donation to the Anti-Defamation League. In 2019, former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg gave the league $2.5 million for anti-hate and anti-bias education programs. That same year, Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress and an heir to the Estée Lauder Company cosmetics fortune, gave $25 million to launch the Anti-Semitism Accountability Project to fight anti-Jewish bias in U.S. politics.

But nonprofit leaders who fight hate say it isn’t enough — and that philanthropy has yet to recognize the threat antisemitism poses to American democracy and society as a whole.

“Primarily, funding is going to Jewish organizations from Jewish funders, and the analysis tells us that actually this is a threat, and it’s a physical threat to people of all backgrounds,” says Shayna Triebwasser, who leads the Righteous Persons Foundation, a nonprofit that works to reduce antisemitism and racialized hate. She points to the antisemitic ties of the gunmen in the 2022 mass shooting at a Buffalo, N.Y., grocery store and this year’s attack at a Dallas-area mall. “The victims of those shootings, it’s not as if those were all Jewish bodies; they weren’t. We are not funding as if that’s the case.”

Amy Spitalnick, now CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, knows firsthand how challenging it can be to raise money to fight anti-Jewish hate.

In her previous job, she led the civil-rights group Integrity First for America, which filed a federal lawsuit, Sines v. Kessler, against the white supremacists and other groups responsible for the violence that erupted at the Charlottesville rally.

Both individual donors and foundations were slow to respond as she raised money for the lawsuit, even as acts of violence proliferated.

She says the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting spurred many Jewish people to acknowledge that the white-supremacist extremism in Charlottesville in 2017 and in a number of other instances might one day reach them directly. But, she says, it was still challenging to get people — Jews and non-Jews alike — to recognize the value of holding extremists accountable.

The turning point was the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

“This wasn’t just a few fringe neo-Nazis but something that was becoming increasingly embedded in our politics and in our culture,” Spitalnick says. “After January 6 was when I saw a number of funders and other supporters who were perhaps on the fence about supporting the Charlottesville lawsuit come back and say, ‘Actually, we’re in because we recognize that this is what we need to be doing right now.’”

Reasons for Hope

It remains unclear whether seeing such threats to democracy has made it easier for fundraisers and nonprofit leaders to make the case to big donors that they need to give more to combat the spread of antisemitism in the United States, says Eric Ward, an expert on authoritarian and extremist movements who has led several nonprofits’ efforts to preserve U.S. democracy.

In 2017, Ward wrote an influential essay, “Skin in the Game: How Antisemitism Animates White Nationalism,” that galvanized leaders at organizations working to fight antisemitism and helped them see more clearly the connections between antisemitism and racism and how they threaten U.S. democracy. He says the discussion about those connections is more robust than he’s seen in his more than 30 years of advocacy.

Eric K. Ward

“We are in a stronger place, but the case has not yet been made to the American public at the scale and depth the American public deserves,” Ward says. He says that antisemitism exists across the political spectrum and that it’s important to address it whenever it happens. That said, he argues it’s critical to keep in mind that far-right individuals, organizations, and some elected officials are intentionally fomenting antisemitism to attack American democracy. “That is the most significant threat in the fight against antisemitism; that’s easy to be lost in this moment.”

There is reason for hope, however. Some programs designed to stop the spread of antisemitism and other types of hatred are attracting donor support.

Mary Pat Higgins, who leads the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum, says her organization’s Upstander Partnership is winning support from local philanthropists, foundations, and corporations. The museum launched the pilot program two years ago to work with local school districts to provide teachers with resources, lessons, and activities that encourage young people to stand up to prejudice and hatred. The program also provides age-appropriate historical lessons and activities for the students. The content aligns with the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills requirements. In addition, the program includes visits to the museum and material that gets more complex as the students get older.

Higgins says the museum has so far received gifts totaling more than $350,000 from a couple of private foundations and two corporations in Texas that have pledged annual gifts to the program. She says she expects support to grow as the program expands to more schools in the coming years.

Triebwasser and Ward are somewhat hopeful, too. One reason is the U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism. Announced by the White House in May, it’s a federal effort to combat antisemitism through new public-awareness and education programs, hold social-media companies accountable for allowing the spread of antisemitic messages on their platforms, and better protect Jewish communities.

Triebwasser calls the move an important first step forward in encouraging the government and civic organizations to ramp up their efforts. But, she says, the national strategy will be successful only if it leads to additional steps by government, corporations, nonprofits, and others.

Ward says he never imagined an American president would be “courageous and insightful enough to move on this issue.” But he agrees the national strategy will need robust civil-society support to succeed.

Says Ward: “What I see is a strong coalition that could get to the work of beginning to speak to the American public and helping it understand where antisemitism resides and how we understand it.”