Understanding American Jewish Philanthropy
By: Sam Bahour
Tags: Jewish, Palestine, Book Review, Israel, Philanthropy

Understanding American Jewish Philanthropy

Throughout history, the American Jewish community has had a lot to be rightfully proud of. Their dedication to Jewish communal life, their commitment to education, their organizing and lobbying skills, and their sustained investment in Jewish-focused media outlets, are just a few. Much of the individual and institutional successes across a myriad of domains can be attributed to what seems to outsiders as an abundance of funds, at times thought to be retrieved from a bottomless pit.

If you are like me, you are always seeking funding support for one project or another. In my case, very rarely are the projects my own. Fundraising is hard work, regardless of its purpose. Fundraise long enough and you start to learn that it is an industry, like most other domains, but very few people have the wherewithal and persistence to dig deep into the black box of how the mechanics of fundraising developed and exists in today’s world. Professor and Author Lila Corwin Berman clearly does not fit that description. She just released a book titled, The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex: The History of a Multibillion-Dollar Institution, which is a fascinating read.

The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex

By Lila Corwin Berman

Princeton University Press, 2020, 280 pp, $42.00

I picked up this book with four distinct interests in mind. First, as an American citizen, I genuinely want to understand how this relatively small Jewish minority in the US came to wield so much financial power, particularly as it relates to the realm of politics. Second, as a Palestinian living under Israeli military occupation, I continually seek to educate myself on why and how the American Jewish community blindly supports the worst that Israel has to offer, such as the internationally-condemned and blatantly illegal settlement enterprise, just to name one. Third, as someone active in civil society who has a role in both grant-making organizations, such as the Open Society Foundations, as well as in efforts that require significant fundraising, such as Just Vision’s new “Untitled Free Speech” documentary, I’m always seeking how this funding industry works. Lastly, I want to be able to successfully find funds to support the worthy projects currently on my desk.

Enter the complex

Have you ever heard of the late American Jewish lawyer Norman Sugarman? Me neither, until now. Attorney Sugarman was thirty-five years old when he served as an assistant commissioner for the Bureau of Internal Revenue (its name before renaming to the Internal Revenue Service). He testified regularly in front of Congress on tax law and was pivotal in laying the foundation for America’s non-profit financial underpinnings, not to mention his particular focus and support to the Jewish community’s financial machines.

In The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex, Professor Berman takes a deep — and brave — dive into the inner financial workings of the American Jewish community role in contributing to the entire American philanthropy industry. As Professor of History at Temple University, Berman holds the Murray Friedman Chair of American Jewish History and directs the Feinstein Center for American Jewish History.

The author starts with a bold assertion that “Associational life or what some in more modern parlance may call “civil society,” far from a natural outgrowth of democracy and capitalism, cannot be understood apart from the state.” The book dissects this notion from after the First World War and walks the reader through the milestones, debates, and various stakeholders’ agendas as the United States crafted and modified what it would permit in terms of private capital being employed for the public good. Nothing here was straightforward or innocent of narrow agendas, like everything in public life.

The titles of the book’s eight chapters and conclusion give the roadmap that Professor Berman uses to make a compelling argument: Associations, Regulations, Property, Taxation, Politics, Finance and Identity, The Market, The Complex, and Reform. Many, if not all, of these elements of philanthropy, are blind to the operatives in the field, those knocking on doors, and making the fundraising calls. However, as Berman summarizes, “Through tax reform, cuts to social welfare spending, and policies to deregulate and subsidize the financial industry, the American government steadily put the public good in the hands of private entities that controlled and benefited from the market economy.” Sound like a message from President Trump? Well, it could very well be given the American Jewish involvement in the Republican Party, in particular, Nixon’s and Reagan’s administrations. The book touches on the internal American Jewish partisan politics in some depth.

One of the many fascinating dilemmas the book portrays is the American Jewish organizations debating how best to build their resources to serve the public good — raise funds and disburse as soon as possible or raise funds to disburse some and leverage some for the accumulation of wealth to sustain future efforts. This was, and I assume in the times of a global pandemic like we are facing today still is, an issue of debate.

The punch line of the book, all the more relevant as we reel at the end of Trump’s first term, was the notion that “The spectacular growth of philanthropic institutions over these years could be interpreted as proving the felicitous coexistence of capitalism with democracy, as an ever-wider array of Americans divested themselves of their private earnings for the public good. However, that same growth could threaten a democratic process, as private entities took hold of their capital power to serve the public as they saw fit.”