Five days into Israel’s conflict with Iran, scenes of destruction from direct ballistic missile hits in Tel Aviv and other metropolitan centers, and a climbing number of civilian casualties have sent shockwaves through the Israeli and Jewish communities.

As Diaspora funders look for ways to provide support, eJewishPhilanthropy’s Nira Dayanim spoke with Andrés Spokoiny, president and CEO of the Jewish Funders Network, about crisis funding “do”s and “don’t”s, the best channels through which to direct giving and takeaways from the aftermath of the Oct. 7 terror attacks.

Read the full article by Nira Dayanim in eJewish Philanthropy.

Twenty months ago, the State of Israel and Israeli civil society were caught off guard and unprepared by the surprise Hamas invasion of Oct. 7 in the Gaza-border areas. Now, as Iranian missiles strike Israeli cities in the center of the country, local authorities, nonprofits and philanthropic organizations are far more capable, having already put systems into place to confront such emergencies.

The “rainy-day scenario” they had envisioned was now here. “The systems are pretty prepared, and also, I think, in terms of the resilience of the community as a whole, we’re just more prepared. We’re not freaking out from every alarm,” Sigal Yaniv Feller, executive director of the Israel office of the Jewish Funders Network, told eJewishPhilanthropy.

Read the full article by Judith Sudilovsky in eJewish Philanthropy

It shouldn’t be so hard to believe there are still Jews in our community who need support. It’s our responsibility to bring light to the story. Numbers and data matter. Stories we tell matter more.

I’ve stood outside Elat Market more times than I can count — grabbing cucumbers, beef for stew or just soaking in the pre-Shabbat buzz. But this time was different. It was late at night, and I was slowly driving down the alley behind the market as a volunteer for the 2025 Los Angeles Homeless Count.

Read the full article by Rachel Sumekh in the Jewish Journal

Volunteers are clamoring for opportunities to help after devastating fires struck the L.A. area during the past week, said Tzivia Schwartz Getzug, West Coast director of the Jewish Funders Network, in a phone interview on Sunday. Schwartz Getzug talked about the importance of supporting local organizations, immediate versus longer-term needs she anticipates the Jewish community will encounter and concern about the fire’s possible resurgence. (As of Sunday evening, the fires has reportedly killed 24 people, burned 40,000 acres and destroyed 12,000 structures in Los Angeles County, including synagogues and homes in the Jewish community.)

Read the full article by Nira Dayanim in eJewish Philanthropy.

As a member of two diasporas — Iranian and Jewish — I live with a romanticized nostalgia for the past and a desperate desire to know what my future holds. Iranian Jews lived in Iran for nearly 2,700 years, our traditions blending and evolving within the country’s rich cultural fabric. Now, almost 50 years into our American experiment forced on us by the Islamic Revolution, what happens next in our story?

In an attempt to influence the answer, my friend and food writer Tannaz Sassooni and I pitched Reboot Studios (the production arm of Reboot, the Jewish arts and culture organization founded by Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw’s Righteous Persons Foundation and the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies) on a new idea called Erev Yalda. The project fuses Hanukkah with Shab-e Yalda, the Iranian winter solstice tradition that predates even Judaism. With Reboot’s support, we began weaving the two together and bridging a gap I’ve felt for years.

Read the full article by Rachel Sumekh in eJewish Philanthropy.

Jews who have experienced economic vulnerability come from all denominations, ages, family backgrounds, geographical locations, sexual preferences and races, but one thing that does on the whole characterize them is weaker relationships with fellow Jews and the Jewish community, according to a new study conducted by Tulane University and Rosov Consulting.

Those who self-identified as financially insecure or unstable were more likely to not have a college degree, to be single parents, to struggle with health challenges, to identify as either Orthodox or as secular/cultural Jews. They are also more likely to be LGBTQ or Sephardi/Mizrachi. But “no group is immune,” according to the study, “On the Edge: Voices of Economic Vulnerability in U.S. Jewish Communities,” which was published this week.

Read the full article by Judah Ari Gross in eJewish Philanthropy.

The philanthropic world recently lost one of its greats, Joel L. Fleishman. He served as president of the Atlantic Philanthropic Services Company, the American arm of the Atlantic Philanthropies, and was a masterful scholar at Duke University and a mentor to literally hundreds of people.

Joel’s teachings reverberate across the philanthropic world. He elevated my own vision as a foundation professional and offered a strong defense of the foundation model — but only when it was done right. For Joel, that meant taking bold, strategic risks that create a road map for successfully addressing major challenges in a foundation’s area of interest.

Read the full article by Yossi Prager in the Chronicle of Philanthropy.

There was a time, not long ago, when societies built their stories around heroes. Now, the victim has dislodged the hero as the center of society’s focus of admiration and desire. We dreamed of being heroes, now we yearn to be considered victims.

Heroes and victims are very different. The hero sacrifices herself for the common good. She goes ‘out of herself’ and towards the other. The victim, however, withdraws into herself. The hero was rewarded by society for her merits, the victim for her suffering, real or imaginary. The culture that values heroes places demands of greatness on the hero, but the victim culture frees the victim from any demands. It gives the victims promissory notes that never expire and that can never be paid in full.

Read the full article by Andres Spokoiny in Fathom.

If you’re an American Jew right now, the easiest thing to be is afraid.

What’s happening in Israel — including, just this week, a missile strike by Iran, and one of the deadliest terror attacks in years — is terrifying. Social media is an antisemitic cesspool. The Republican candidate for president has made it known that if he loses, it’s the Jews’ fault. On campuses and in progressive spaces, it’s increasingly easy to see that those looking for a villain are, more and more, blaming the Jews.

The communal impulse is to circle the wagons and go all-in on fighting antisemitism. That’s understandable, but is it enough? What if we responded to the enormous challenges we faced this past year not just by obsessing over our survival, but also by finding new ways to ensure that we thrive?

Read the full article by L. Rob Eshman in The Forward.

We live in a time of extra­or­di­nary choice. Today, the hyper-empow­ered indi­vid­ual is free to choose from among end­less pos­si­bil­i­ties in her pri­vate, pro­fes­sion­al, social, and com­mu­nal life. And in mak­ing her choic­es, this empow­ered indi­vid­ual explores and ques­tions the cul­tur­al and reli­gious insti­tu­tions and orga­ni­za­tions that seek her affil­i­a­tion. Do they address her inter­ests? Will she be an active par­tic­i­pant in their pro­gram? Do they hold mean­ing for her?

Pres­i­dent and CEO of the Jew­ish Fun­ders Net­work and a vet­er­an of Jew­ish orga­ni­za­tion­al life, Andrés Spokoiny is deeply con­cerned about the chal­lenge that cul­tur­al and reli­gious insti­tu­tions face today and about the future of Jew­ish com­mu­nal life. Its insti­tu­tions were con­struct­ed for peo­ple whose view of them­selves and the world is dif­fer­ent from that of today’s empow­ered indi­vid­ual. These are insti­tu­tions for peo­ple who were brought up in car­riages in which they faced their par­ents, who made order in their lives. Today, chil­dren grow up in strollers that face for­ward, with the world ahead of them and the choice of where to look. How do we cre­ate com­mu­nal orga­ni­za­tions that can encom­pass so many viewpoints?

Read the full article by Maron L. Waxman in Jewish Book Council.

Contemporary philosopher Diego Maradona once had an interaction with a journalist during which he blurted, “Shut up, you don’t exist, muppet!” That phrase, “no existis,” pronounced with an s instead of an x to imitate the great man’s shantytown accent, became a classic Maradona-ism and was an archetypical example of his rough but endearing manners.

But Maradona, misunderstood as always, wasn’t being intentionally offensive. He was simply referring to a deep philosophical and scientific truth.

Read the full article by Andrés Spokoiny in eJewish Philanthropy.

The Jewish Funders Network (JFN) has long sought to be an open, welcoming place for Jewish funders who hold a range of political viewpoints and levels of religiosity, from Orthodox members to those who never go to synagogue. Founded in 1990 and based in New York City, JFN is the top funder affinity group in the world of Jewish giving. Each of the more than 3,000 members from 15 countries gives at least $25,000 a year toward a number of charitable causes, ranging from poverty in the Jewish community to the arts and climate change. In 2008, JFN established an Israeli branch, JFN Israel, to connect and support Israel-based funders, many of whom were new to the kind of wealth that facilitates philanthropy, largely due to tech.

As Rabbi Rebecca Sirbu, the executive vice president of JFN, told me last year, JFN is not a religious or political organization, nor does it recommend specific grantees or positions. “Our members are anyone who gives within the Jewish world or wants to be giving through a Jewish lens. I think they connect with us because they understand that giving back is a Jewish value,” she said.

Read the full article by Wendy Paris in Inside Philanthropy.

Back in May, The New York Times reported on a list of “pro-Israel/Zionist writers” circulating through the literary world along with a call to boycott their work: “Titled ‘Is Your Fav Author a Zionist?,’ it reads like a cross between ‘Tiger Beat’ and ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.’”

Canadian writer Emily St. John Mandel appears prominently in the list; that’s reason enough to buy her books, but it helps that they tend to be both literary masterpieces and page-turners. Prompted by the boycott, I defiantly decided to read Station Eleven, one of St. John Mandel’s most famous novels and now also a TV show. The book is part of the post-apocalyptic dystopia genre, imagining a world where civilization has collapsed and survivors struggle to survive. Mandel’s writing reflects her love for her characters, and the result is a deeply human book in which the apocalypse is just a setting for profound and highly relatable human drama.

Read the full article by Andrés Spokoiny in eJewish Philanthropy.

The American War of Independence didn’t create an American People, and the storming of the Bastille didn’t create the French Nation. In both cases, it was the establishment of a sort of contract among people, groups or states — the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, respectively — which served as the basis for their shared existence into a people or a nation.

Those foundational moments were inspired by Enlightenment thinkers like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau, who put forth the idea that a society is established by means of an agreement among individuals — not the supposed divine right of kings, but the consent of the governed expressed in a “social contract.”

Read the full article by Andrés Spokoiny in eJewish Philanthropy.

In the Kuzari, one of the great Jewish philosophical treatises of the Middle Ages, Rabbi Judah Halevi depicts a fictional dialogue between the king of the Khazars and a rabbi. The rabbi points out that Jews are peace-loving and that they don’t kill like others. We can imagine the wink of the Khazar when he says, “This might be so if your humility were voluntary, but it is involuntary, and if you had power you would slay.” Ouch, responds the rabbi. Or more precisely, “Thou hast touched our weak spot, O King of the Khazars.” (Kuzari 115).

Judah Halevi understands that there’s nothing intrinsically more moral about Jews. It was our tribulations that made us uniquely nonviolent, and absent those, we may well revert to being like any other people and “slay” just like them. Yet, while aware of that reality, Judah Halevi didn’t oppose the reestablishment of Jewish sovereignty. Rather, the opposite: There’s a proto-Zionism in Halevi that led him to emigrate to Jerusalem. In his native Spain he had experienced the vulnerability of living at the whims of both Muslim and Christian rulers. He saw powerlessness as an unmitigated tragedy, and he illustrated as a moral failing the attempt to disguise that powerlessness as a virtue.

Read the full article by Andres Spokoiny in Tablet.

Columbia used to be a university. I now see it as the burial ground of many foundational concepts of the contemporary American Jewish experience.

Here you go again, I hear you saying, exaggerating, dramatizing, catastrophizing. After all, aren’t we talking about a few hundred students and a few radical professors doing something that most Americans ignore or deride?

True, the “protests” aren’t representative of America, and probably not of most Columbia students; but they are what Argentinian psychoanalyst Enrique Pichon-Rivière calls a “social emergent.” According to Pichon-Riviere, the emergent is the proverbial tip of the iceberg. Just as  mental illness in a family member is, in many cases, an expression of troubled family dynamics, in group dynamics a member being disruptive may be the sign of something emergent in the group at large.

Read the full article by Andres Spokoiny in eJP.

Most recent conversations in the philanthropic community are about Israel and antisemitism. Lost in these discussions is a positive and significant philanthropic opportunity arising from Oct. 7: responding to a new hunger among American Jews for participating in Jewish communal life and learning more about their Jewish heritage.

The data is overwhelming. Prizmah: The Center for Jewish Day Schools surveyed 110 schools and reported that 4 in 10 day schools have received enrollment inquiries from public school or independent school families since Oct. 7. NCSY, which offers Jewish learning clubs at public and private independent schools, experienced a significant increase in participation in their clubs as well as requests to open 70 new clubs for next year. NCSY Director Rabbi Micah Greenland also mentioned to me that more students are publicly identifying as Jewish by wearing Jewish stars or tzitzit.

Read the full article by Yossi Prager in eJP.

Probably the greatest challenge that leaders face today is how to act decisively in times of radical uncertainty. How do we cut through the deep fog of unknowns and not become paralyzed by the unpredictability of our world?

On Oct. 7, the unthinkable happened. Since then, we have been in a new world of lost bearings and open-ended questions. And yet, the circumstances demanded, and continue to require, decisive action. 

When disaster hit, Israeli civil society, the philanthropic sector and the nonprofit ecosystem rose to the challenge, taking the lead and working tirelessly to meet the urgent needs as they arose. The extent of the destruction, however, is unlike anything Israel has faced in its 75 years of existence. Recovery and rebuilding are going to require substantial resources and coordinated efforts. 

Read the full article by Andres Spokoiny & Bar Pereg in eJP.

From eJewish Philanthropy (NOVEMBER 14, 2023)

I was brought up in the universalist tradition of Judaism. I believe that all human beings have the same intrinsic value and the same Divine dignity, and I believe that tikkun olam is the most important mitzvah Jews can do. At the same time, I don’t feel guilty for being more attuned to the suffering of my own, to be more affected by what happens to Israel than to other countries.

And that’s not wrong.

Solidarity works in concentric circles or not at all. Without caring for your own, you can’t care for others. You may believe you do, but you don’t. Caring for your family helps you learn about caring in general. You care about your children, then about your friends, then about your tribe, then about your people and then about the world. It doesn’t work the other way around.

Philanthropy sometimes falls into that trap.

Read the full article by Andres Spokoiny in eJP.

With many nonprofits dependent on the end-of-the-year gifts that allow donors to claim tax benefits, should they go ahead with their own fundraising appeals and perhaps attach their “asks” to the current crisis?

“What irks me particularly is an emergency campaign now when they’re not related to the crisis,” said Andres Spokoiny, the president and CEO of the Jewish Funders Network, speaking generally. “If you’re a school that is not affected by the crisis, just tell the truth that despite the crisis, you need to continue operating, and that having a strong community means that institutions and organizations like yours need to be strong and healthy.”

Spokoiny, whose organization’s “How You Can Help” Israel page lists “trusted agencies and nonprofits,” has been recommending to the private foundations and philanthropists under his organization’s umbrella that they give “above and beyond,” supporting their traditional grantees as well as the emergency campaigns for Israel. “Otherwise,” he said, “you’re robbing Peter to pay Paul.”

Read the full article by Andrew Silow-Carroll in JTA.

Nearly 120 people representing 75 funders gathered here this week to talk about funding the Jewish future, particularly the future of Israel, at the Jewish Funders Network West convening.

The gathering, held at L.A.’s Luxe Sunset Hotel, included practical sessions from the  University of Pennsylvania’s Center for High Impact Philanthropy (CHIP), but most attendees were singularly focused on Israel, with an emphasis on how philanthropy could help during wartime and into the new postwar reality.

Read the full article by Esther D. Kustanowitz in the eJewish Philanthropy.

Nearly two weeks since the Hamas massacre in Israel, we have begun to grasp the scale of the barbarity. The number of people I know — or in some tragic cases, knew — who were murdered or kidnapped has grown longer by the day.

One was an 80-year-old woman who was burned alive in her house. When the terrorists caught her hiding inside her bomb shelter, she was on a video call with her 82-year-old sister, who saw and heard everything. But apparently forcing the sister to watch live wasn’t enough, so the terrorists posted pictures of her dead body on her Facebook page for the world to see.

Read the full op-ed by Andrés Spokoiny in the Chronicle of Philanthropy.

“You know, there are moments in this life — and I mean this literally — when the pure, unadulterated evil is unleashed on this world. The people of Israel lived through one such moment this weekend.  The bloody hands of the terrorist organization Hamas — a group whose stated purpose for being is to kill Jews.  This was an act of sheer evil.”– President Biden, Oct. 10, 2023

On Saturday Oct. 7, I woke up to several alerts on my phone. It took only a minute for the horror of the situation to start to sink in. Women raped. Babies murdered in their cribs. Seniors burned alive in their homes. More than one hundred people were kidnapped at gunpoint. Sheer terror.

My organization, the Jewish Funders Network (JFN), connects over 2,500 members who fund through a Jewish lens, even when their funding is both Jewish and secular. We have an office in Israel, eight staff, and close to 500 members there. Our members lead the philanthropic sector in many areas, from Arab-Israeli coexistence to climate change; from education to democracy. They are left and right, religious and secular, Arabs and Jews. Today, they are all united in grief and shock.

Read the full op-ed by Rabbi Rebecca W. Sirbu in the Center for Effective Philanthropy.

Every day, when we think that nothing else could shock us, we discover more and more the depravity of our enemy. The Jewish Funders Network community has been personally affected, from loss of family members, to deaths and injury among members of our teen philanthropy program, to the kidnapping of partners in our work. This tragedy has touched — and continues touching — everybody.

And yet, even as Israel mourns, its resolve and determination grow. The army and civil society are rising up to this unprecedented challenge. None of us has any doubt that Israel will prevail; but the road ahead may be long and arduous. 

The needs on the ground are many, and what Jewish Funders Network members are doing to meet those needs gives me hope. Many of us are asking ourselves how we can help, and JFN is assisting funders and donors across the world, members of JFN or not, with answers. In that spirit, I want to share with the broader community some general principles of disaster relief that apply for this crisis, plus some specific needs that are emerging in real time:

• Read the full op-ed by Andres Spokoiny in eJewish Philanthropy.