The Miracle of Jewish Pandemic Giving

This is the third in a series of articles on the impact of the pandemic on different sectors of American Jewish life. Earlier ones may be found here and here.

Extolled some 65 years ago by Fortune as the “miracle of Jewish giving,” Jewish philanthropy has come under withering criticism from certain quarters more recently. The reasons are manifold but at heart critics contend that Jewish giving simply is too—Jewish. To cite a few examples: a prominent authority on international development went so far as to urge Jewish charities to drop “their local and parochial concerns . . . [and] recast such activities in a global effort” to alleviate all human poverty. Another critic did not shrink from asking whether “in subsidizing trips to Israel and funding Jewish day schools, are Jewish philanthropists retreating into a narrow tribalism?”

During the past year, a similar line of attack has focused on a new project named the Jewish Future Pledge because it asks those who sign up to “devote at least half of the charitable funds in their estate plan to support ‘the Jewish people and/or the state of Israel.’” This would be awful, according to one of the attackers, because it “would guarantee a capital-rich Jewish future,” enable those who earned large sums of dollars to dominate the future by virtue of “their wealth and capital control,” and add to the “accumulation” of Jewish money when it could better be put to immediate use.