Speaker 0 00:00:02 Hi, everyone. Welcome to identity crisis. A show about a news and ideas from the Shalom Hartman Institute. I'm a mute occurred, sir, president of Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. We're recording today on Wednesday, October 28th, 2020, as part of the Hartman institutes two weeks symposium on Judaism, citizenship. I'm really excited tonight to be recording this episode of identity crisis. Not only together with all of you, but with our guests tonight, professor Laila Corwin Bermin is the Murray Friedman chair of American Jewish history at temple university, where she directs the Feinstein center for American Jewish history. But in particular professor Carmen Berman's new book, the American Jewish philanthropic complex just came out from Princeton university press. It is a book that was, I think, hotly awaited, not only in the field of American Jewish history, where you teach and work, but also in the Jewish community where philanthropy is just for reasons that you explore in the book.
Speaker 0 00:00:54 And then we'll unpack is not only a dominant new industry, but in many ways, uh, publicly and even privately really shaped so much of Jewish life and your book in doing this kind of deep history and makes some really powerful arguments. So really grateful that you're here as part of the launch of your book and to be in conversation with us here tonight and not just about this book itself, but also about the ways in which philanthropy it has to be part of an American civic conversation in ways that connect directly to our election and beyond. So, first of all, thanks for coming on board tonight. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. So let's jump in. I want to recap for you what I understood to be the main thesis of the book, and you can tell me I got it totally wrong, but I went through the main thesis.
Speaker 0 00:01:32 Then I want to jump into some of what I think are the big ideas that you were working through in this book. And as we talked about before, I really want this conversation to be not just about this book, even though the book is quite important, but about Jewish philanthropy more generally, and how we might think forward to this industry was shaped so much of Jewish life. So the theory of the book and the language of American Jewish philanthropic complex, which you identify early on is related to the notion that the semantically notion of military industrial complex is that philanthropy in America has been a means by which in theory, private interests are meant to be thought of as serving the public good. And that Jewish philanthropy grew in a way in influencing American public policy and constantly reaffirming its own interests. That is to say both on the financial side, Jewish philanthropy grew in terms of growing its own capital.
Speaker 0 00:02:22 And as a result, its own power, which is something I want to spend some time on a few tonight, but also politically in service of the interests of those who had this capital. And we might call sometimes communitarian in nature with those politics. And sometimes in places much more nakedly partisan, but it actually perpetuating its own objectives. And in doing so, where are you situated? This book is to argue that we have to start seeing America much more in Jewish institutions than we're likely to do. So there was you say early on in the book, I want to get away from the notion that we should just see American Jews as like diaspora and compare other diasporas. And in fact, we actually have to understand that the American Jewish community and its institutions are in many ways, exceptionalist in the American sense that they are deeply connected to the fabric of American life. And they have to be understood as benefiting from and contributing to the infrastructure of America. Did I get that right as like an overall first frame?
Speaker 1 00:03:20 That's awesome. It's so gratifying to write something and put it out there in the world and then hear somebody kind of narrate it back and not only get what I think I was doing, but get other things, nothing that was incorrect. The only part that I would just tweak or try to be in conversation with you a little bit about is that exceptionalism piece. So one of the things that started to strike me is certainly the way I was trained to do American Jewish history started with a fairly exceptionalist premise, right. Which was that there had never been anywhere that Jews could be so free and be so successful as the United States. And, you know, lots of historians, lots of American Jewish historians have sort of poked in and pulled it that in various ways. But it's been a kind of underlying premise of the field in so many ways.
Speaker 1 00:04:10 Ironically, I think part of the way that premise has worked is to make a lot of the mechanisms of the American state actually invisible, right? Because like the assumption was a here's this place that Jews came, they were immediately emancipated into citizenship. They gained all the rights that they could possibly want as individuals. And they were still allowed to have this kind of collective identity and be free, right. That American promise of freedom and somewhere in the midst of that kind of fealty to a very liberal exceptionalist, progressive narrative, I think we actually stopped looking at how the mechanisms of the American state affected use and also, and this is so relevant in my mind to the election coming up, how that American state has had a lot of illiberalism, even with a lot of pronounced liberalism. So those were some of the kinds of forces I was thinking about in terms of like positioning this in the field of American Jewish history and thinking a little bit more broadly of like, what does it mean to study American?
Speaker 0 00:05:13 Yeah. And I'll tell you what it was a little bit jarring at the beginning until I fully understood what you were doing to keep seeing the phrase the American state, because in some ways I think Americans don't talk that much about America as a state. We tend to talk about America as a nation. And we tend to talk about America as a constellation of States, but to really use the same framework of the state as its own apparatus that has its own interests. And that we as private citizens are contributing to the construction of that state was a little bit jarring. What I also kind of hear what you're saying, which would be a different project, separate from the topic of philanthropy and where I really identify with this project is for American Jews to start noticing that our behaviors in America are not merely quote unquote good diaspora.
Speaker 0 00:05:57 And I've been very frustrated over the years with the sense that many American Jews talk about Judaism in America as though it's an expression of diaspora, there's this type of diaspora and that type of diaspora, but like consider that there's very little original theology of place that pertains to American Jews in America, where actually America itself is one of the forces shaping who we are as we think of ourselves as an era, because we have a lot of history of American Jews, but a lot of our Judaism thinks of itself as basically diaspora Judaism. So it seems like you're pulling to the forefront to name really specifically how our growth and our institutions as a community are inseparable from those larger institutions of American life.
Speaker 1 00:06:40 Right. I think that's exactly right. And I think that that allows us to, or requires us to really grapple with narratives that we haven't always thought were really narratives of American jewelry or American Judaism. And I think we've seen that in all sorts of ways and discussions about racism and anti-racism, and you know, if Jews were not really in the United States until a certain period of time where they very few of them were involved in slavery or whatever it might be, to what extent does this have to be a struggle that American Jews are part of it, but a reframing of really thinking about how closely connected American Judaism is not just to a kind of vague notion of diaspora, but like to the very structures of the American state, I think, and this is not just a historians point of view. I think it's also very present minded. It requires us to have different sorts of conversations as well.
Speaker 0 00:07:35 Yeah. So we'll dive in a little bit deeper to how this plays out in the book. And I think one of the key turning points that you identify is I think it's in the 1940s and you'll tell me if I got the date right or wrong. I kind of pivot in the 1940s towards the accumulation of capital as being one of the primary objectives of Jewish philanthropy from basically being entities for the distribution of capital, we're going to collect money in order to be able to spread it around the community. Suddenly there's a kind of a pivot towards accumulation of capital. As I guess you still have the goal of putting that money back in the community. But the assumption that if I accumulate more capital, I can leverage it in different ways. I can be strategic in different ways. And all of that language by the way of capitalism has come into Jewish communal discourse in totally inseparable ways as I read this.
Speaker 0 00:08:23 And I said, yeah, this seems right. This is something strange about this, of the, kind of the idea of a massive rainy day fund, but there's no rain in sight. So you wind up just accumulating capital in these larger and larger philanthropic foundations. I want you to unpack for us. I know that you're a historian and you're not giving clear prescriptive guidance, but I want to dance on that line a little bit if we can, which is there has to be some measure of that kind of capital accumulation. That's actually very smart and necessary and important for funders to do both because you're the rainy day, but also because organizations also like to accumulate capital in the form of reserves and endowments so that they can actually do their work without having to be constantly obsessed with fundraising. So where do you think that this crossed over from being a good version of kind of healthy governance to something that's more dangerous or more problematic? Was it a historical moment or do you think has just the size and scope of where Jewish, philanthropic organizations became?
Speaker 1 00:09:22 I think it's tied into like the very basic shifts in political economy in the United States. So it's true that in the 1940s, you start to see some Jewish organizations thinking a little bit more about building endowments, right about holding capital in various ways. And it's not that they hadn't held endowments at all before, but especially, you know, the big kind of communal systems of American Jewish life, like the Federation system, many of them actually had disciplined themselves through their bylaws that they did not want bequests. They did not want to hold, you know, large reserve funds. They had policies limiting those. And the kind of philosophy behind that was that there were needs immediate needs that needed to be satisfied, material needs that needed to be satisfied. And that when somebody gave money and saw that their money was going out to do X, Y, or Z, they would give again the next year.
Speaker 1 00:10:18 Right. And that, that was in a sense how the community exercise some control over this process. And it was a kind of legitimated like a stamp of legitimacy that this was the system that worked in this way, starting in the 1940s, but really not developing until the fifties sixties. There is a beginning of a kind of culture shift and it's self-conscious right. And it has a number of different reasons. One of them is tied into the socioeconomic position of American Jews that they're starting to make their way into the middle-class. They're starting to have more money. There are fewer new immigrants who are coming in right aside from refugees, from world war II, which is a pretty small population. It's a pretty stable Jewish community. And so there's more affluence, right? There's more money. It's not clear what the needs are in the Jewish community that would necessarily need to be kind of fed with that same machinery.
Speaker 1 00:11:13 And I think also there's the trauma of the show of the Holocaust. That there's a sense of what can American Jews do to ensure some kind of survival, right? And that language, even of survival and of creating emergency funds. And I've kind of capitalizing a future and making sure that in perpetuity Jewishness will exist, starts to also be part of that shift, that kind of culture shift. And so there's this kind of push to say, maybe Jewish organizations should hold back more money. Maybe they have the ability to do that. And some really savvy tax lawyers who also understand that there are shifts happening in American financial policy and tax law and regulatory policy that is making this not just possible, but actually making this desirable if constructed properly. And these folks end up having to sell this really. And you know, some of the most interesting pieces of the book to research had to do with when these tax lawyers and certain folks, they got on board with the idea of endowment where like hitting the pavement, going out on the road to Jewish organizations saying you should create these specific kinds of funds.
Speaker 1 00:12:24 We'll tell you why they're good tax wise. We'll tell you how to sell them to your donors. There'll be good for them tax wise. And you should not feel like you have to spend them immediately. And at the same time, there's a rising discourse. So in 60 seventies of identity funding, right, which is also this kind of very future directed idea of what Jewish philanthropy should be doing. So all of these kinds of forces are coming together with these other shifts in American regulatory policy. And with these shifts, especially in the seventies and then the eighties that are changing how the tax code is working, right. And some of the preconditions for a really widening gap of inequality in the United States and putting more and more stock in private entities, having power to have control over their own capital, but also have control over public processes.
Speaker 1 00:13:17 And so all of these things sort of come together to make endowments. He really, really attractive, but I think that we also have to understand something that's lost in that. And in a sense, philanthropy kind of stands between this is going to be too simplistic, but it stands between democracy and capitalism. It stands between the public and the private and as philanthropy is American Jewish philanthropy and actually American philanthropy, more generally shades into this kind of mentality of accumulating capital of investing it in financial markets of growing it with as much subsidy from the state I E from tax deductions and exemptions as possible. It is really shading closer and closer to being a creature of capitalism and less so a creature of democracy. So if we're talking about how this system should be reformed, I think we first have to probably start with a kind of value proposition and that value proposition would be that democracy is important.
Speaker 1 00:14:15 It's significant for the health of our country, for the health of the Jews in the United States. It is something we want, we want a strong and robust democracy. And if we start with that value proposition, then I think we have to look really straight in the eye of philanthropy and ask how this tool that over the 20th century has really moved toward a kind of replication of, and reinforcement of capitalism. How can we be achieving ends or outcomes of democracy through it? And that would be, I think the way that I would at least start a conversation about rethinking when endowment is a reasonable thing and when it's really standing in the way of a robust democratic process.
Speaker 0 00:14:58 Great. So I love that sketch, as you said, even if it's simplistic, the idea that philanthropy stands between democracy and capitalism is I think is a very useful frame. As you were talking though, it strikes me that it also sits at if we're going to use less big institutions and more just core moral values. The whole question of accumulated capital sits at the intersection also between power and justice. I mean, I saw power running through this book. I'm sure you use the term, but even when you weren't using it explicitly, you could hear it, the book courses with a power analysis. I mean, that's fundamentally what this analysis of money and capital is all about. Now, again, power and justice are not opposite to one another because when can use one's power for the pursuit of justice, but I can also use one's power for my own self-aggrandizement.
Speaker 0 00:15:39 And certainly you have examples of that. Especially later in the book connected to philanthropy and the me too movement philanthropists who are kind of shaping or pushing the community's political agenda in ways that are totally idiosyncratic to their own interests. But the power question also happens on the kind of local individual level. So I've noticed for instance, like an individual donor who's accumulating wealth may decide that for the first 20 years of accumulating that wealth, they would rather park that money in a donor advised fund, as long as they can, because past a certain threshold, then there'll be able to buy the board seats that they ultimately want. Whereas if you basically took your Titicaca money each year and pushed it out, you would never be able to afford a position around the table. On the other hand, accumulated capital for organizations, a tenured faculty, or a good example are the only means by which a faculty member has the freedom, because they've already had that accumulated capital where they can actually have the freedom to operate, or in my own role in running an organization, if we don't build significant reserve funds for our organization, we are constantly selling.
Speaker 0 00:16:44 We're not necessarily doing the work that we should be doing. And we're also constantly subject to market forces in determining even the ethics of what we should be doing. We want rabbis for instance, and commune a leaders to feel that when there's a pressing moral issue, they can speak up and act on it without feeling that imminent risk that well, I better censor the speech because my big donors are in the room. So I think it's not just capitalism and democracy. In some ways the accumulation of wealth makes possible certain justice outcomes. So when might that be possible, what might be the mechanism by which we want to actually cultivate that version of accumulated wealth for the purpose of justice?
Speaker 1 00:17:22 I mean, you can take it back a few steps in a sense, right? And I think confront some more basic questions about wealth accumulation itself. So, you know, you're describing less the intermediary organizations that I was really focused on the foundations, the public charities that hold donor advised funds, the supporting organizations you're talking about, like the operating organizations that feel like they are in a kind of economic. That means that if they don't have the ability to accumulate and hold onto some capital, they're not going to be able to have power. I think that though, we need to think more generally about why is it the case that there are certain stores of incredible accumulated capital that give certain organizations, certain individuals, certain political positions, a huge amount of power. And, you know, it might be that sometimes they're operating to do justice, but ultimately is an economic system that allows for a huge amount of accumulation, the one that we want, right?
Speaker 1 00:18:25 So you could imagine organizations like, for example, huge universities, right? Like that have massive, massive endowments that are completely exempt from taxation. And that are spent out at a rate of no more than 5%, usually less than that. And even in the pandemic. And it was as if all the presidents of the Ivy league were writing from a script, they went through these sorts of contortions to explain why there's no such thing as increasing the percentage that you spend in an endowment, which of course, that's just bunk. In fact, you could imagine a world where our government and our public would say, okay, you want that freedom? You can buy it. If you want the ability to hold back more of your wealth to not distribute it out, then that's how our tax system works. You essentially buy that freedom. And initially the distinction between a private foundation and a public charity was exactly that a private foundation was buying more freedom, right?
Speaker 1 00:19:19 They had more regulation and they had to report more. Unfortunately it was structures like donor advised funds have really blurred that distinction, right? But you could imagine a world where if there's an operating organization that feels it's really important, like a university or like Hartman or whatever, to hold onto a huge endowment. I know that yours is not the billions that Harvard or Stanford have, right. That there would be in a sense, a way they tangibly they'd have to buy into a public process. And that would be through tax restructuring. It's not clear that this kind of innuendo there could be a threshold and whatever else, it's not clear that this kind of accumulation of wealth should come without some kind of price, right? Some kind of constant mechanism of distribution, especially when you're deemed to be a public charitable entity. And yet you're able to hold on to billions and billions of dollars with very little regulation of transparency. Why should that money be simply parked in that place without investing in a public process?
Speaker 0 00:20:25 So this is something that I've heard you say over the years, and you have convinced me, which is that if in fact, this huge accumulation of philanthropic dollars has been aided by a tax code. That ultimately means that like we, as taxpayers are basically subsidizing the growth of philanthropy, that this is a public good. And it has to be regulated much more as a public good than as like I'm an, an individual funder. I get to make whatever decisions I want to make. And I get to shape a community agenda accordingly. But I still struggle trying to figure out what is a more democratic ethos to grant making actually look like because even the things that are closer to that within the existing Jewish community, things like federations are actually basically large donor advised funds. At this point, most federations are basically donor advised funds.
Speaker 0 00:21:09 There's a huge amount of designated funding that major donors do in order to get a seat at the table of those federations, to the extent that there are community studies to figure out what our community needs. Oftentimes those are driven by certain ideological agendas that are not totally democratic. So short of tearing down the system, I don't think any of us are talking about doing maybe, maybe some more than others. What is a real democratic approach to grantmaking look like? And what are the ways in which you want to see the large foundations in the Jewish community embrace that ethos without having to feel as though the very fabric of what they exist to do in the world is about to be destroyed. Like, as we know, the likelihood of getting somebody to change their approach is much less when they feel all they have to do is basically lose their reason for being. So what does the democratic vision for philanthropy actually look like in a capitalist system? Basically,
Speaker 1 00:21:58 I think it starts, and this is going to be no surprise. I'm just preaching my profession. It starts with knowledge. It actually starts with more and more Americans being given the tools. And we can talk just about Jews in this context, if we want right to more and more people in the Jewish community, being given the tools to understand how the system works, understanding what it means that their children get books from PJ library. And where does the money come from that? And how are the decisions being made or what does it mean when there's a fund like Tikvah right, that funds all sorts of different initiatives in Israel and in the United States. And it's actually really difficult to know who funds Tikvah right? Most people probably don't even know how to go about looking at the nine 90 and trying to figure anything out.
Speaker 1 00:22:44 But even those of us who do know how to do that, hit a wall, right. There is really a wall of knowledge. And I'll share with you that when I was writing this book, you know, I'm a historian, I need archives, right? This is how I figure out whatever the stuff is. But if the story is, and it was very easy for me to get access to lots of Jewish Federation and organizational papers, it was wonderful. And I'm so appreciative of the archivists and the archives and everything. When it came to trying to figure out the world of private family foundations, which are a newer thing, right? So, you know, there were some that were established in the fifties, sixties, nanny, not until the late eighties, nineties, I hit a wall. I was able to get some of the papers from the crown foundation, thanks to a wonderful archivist who works there, who literally redacted out every single financial figure from pages and pages.
Speaker 1 00:23:35 Okay. Did not make this guy's day of documentation. So I was able to get that, but I called all sorts of other private foundations that had wonderful conversations with wonderful people, but to get anything like the archives that I'm used to working and was, was really near impossible. And it wasn't just that people were being cagey at all. Many of them, it hadn't even occurred to them to really think about what to do with their papers, except for a few that had sunset or were about to sunset. So I would say like the very, very first thing, if there's going to be any move toward a more democratic process is opening up the way people can know and understand how this works. And that's going to be hard because part of the whole system is about a certain level of obfuscation. And again, it doesn't mean people are nefarious or whatever.
Speaker 1 00:24:23 These are just like the rules of the game in a way you have to report certain things that ends up being your ceiling. Right? Very few philanthropic organizations decide that they want to report a lot more than they have to. And the thing about donor advised funds, which we've mentioned, and I'm not sure if everybody knows what they are, they're basically privately designated funds that are held in public charities, that by law belong to the public charity. So they belong to the Federation or whatever it might be, but take the advice of the person who holds it when it comes to allocation and they don't have to be allocated on any time basis. They can, you know, perpetually be there, but the tax exemption is received immediately. The tax deduction. If I hold a donor advised fund, I can decide, I want to give out, you know, to organizations and say, it's from the Laila Corwin Berman fund.
Speaker 1 00:25:12 Or I can just decide to say, it's from the Philadelphia community foundation or whatever. So there's all sorts of ways in which it's really difficult even to gain knowledge about the system. So I think like the first step is more transparency. And if we're talking about this outside of the context of big reform, it could just be Jewish philanthropists deciding that they're going to sign on to being much more transparent about how they do their giving. Right. We have these massive Jewish foundations, but it's so happens that many of them give a lot through donor advised funds. So you might know that one of these big foundations gives X, Y, and Z because they're very public about it, but you don't necessarily really know how to follow all of the ways that the money is being spent. And I think that hinders any kind of democratic process, there's a kind of darkness.
Speaker 1 00:26:04 So that's like the first thing that I would say I would also say then that there are ways to bring more democratic participation into how the money itself is being spent. The Ford foundation has done some really excellent work on participatory grant, making, engaging actual members of the communities that are sensibly being aided by the funding to make decisions about the funding to actually feel not just that they can come and perform a little bit or, you know, say what matters to them and then leave the room, but actually to become sometimes part of a board to actually have some control over the money and in the Jewish community, one way that this would manifest, I think would be to have to recognize a much broader diversity of constituents in a sense, right, that it's not pay to play and it's not have a particular identity.
Speaker 1 00:26:58 And don't step over a particular red line in order to be part of this conversation, right? If at the end of the day, this is somehow a civilizational Jewish peoplehood kind of project. This is a place actually where the rubber could hit the road. And you could say, these are all different members of a Jewish community, and they should all feel vested in this process on some level, this money is theirs, and we need to create structures through which they participate. And I'm happy to talk more about that. It's a complicated thing. It's sometimes ends up clashing with expertise, you know, just cause I'm a member of a community doesn't necessarily mean, I know what's best in certain kinds of situations. So there has to be a kind of balance, but it's really different. I think from what we're seeing now,
Speaker 0 00:27:47 I think a lack of balance is probably a good word for this because I think part of what happens, especially in the Jewish professional sector and it's a big industry working in the Jewish community is a big industry. It's some absurd percentage of the Jewish community works for or on behalf of the Jewish community. But there's a huge disparity between those who tend to be working on behalf of the Jewish community and the affiliation and even the ideological commitments of the majority of Jews. And so part of the anxiety about like real distribution of democratic decision-making across the Jewish community is that there's like a skin in the game gap where the donor class, including the professionals who are oftentimes the kind of guides or custodians of the funding for, let's say family members of a family foundation are positioned with totally different knowledge base and expertise than quote unquote, everybody else sometimes then the principles of the foundations themselves.
Speaker 0 00:28:38 But also there's always going to be some prescriptive element to this of, it's not just, we want to give the money to the Jewish community, to do with it. As we see fit leadership has to be some guidance of, we want to correct this problem in the Jewish community. We want to educate more people. We want to bring them closer to Torah, whatever terminology you want to use. And I think that too becomes the kind of obstacle towards the real democratization of grantmaking, right? That the more you do that, the more you take away agency from people with knowledge and with authority to be able to actually use that limited resource at their disposal, which happens to be a lot of money to actually make some change in that direction.
Speaker 1 00:29:13 Great. And then that was fundamentally why in American political theory, the idea of associations, which is like the elemental form of philanthropy was so important, right? It was like one way of fighting the tyranny of the majority, right? It was like one way of saying that there are situations where particular entities are going to have much more knowledge are going to be the right ones to suggest policy about something or to lead the way about a particular issue, whatever it might be to be a moral guide about something. And in fact, there's also part of like the idea of American pluralism. There's going to be like a competition of different ideas for how temperance should work or how women's suffered should be achieved or not achieved, or, you know, whatever the case might be. So I think that the idea of having expertise, right, and having some people who are taking like a particular kind of leadership in this sector, that's between the public, the private, that's not exactly democracy, but it's not exactly private enterprise is exactly the theory of the case. But if it becomes imbalanced, as I believe it really is deeply imbalanced, you get all the power, all the accumulation, all this sense of like a class who's able to call the shots and you get none of the sense that there is a public who is consenting to this system. It makes us all consent. It has our consent. And yet we have lost control of any ability to require anything in return for that consent. You know, and I think that that ends up really being the basic problem of it.
Speaker 0 00:30:49 One of the things that I struggled with around this is that the more that we start talking about engaging democratically with the critical mass of the Jews who are served or should be served by these philanthropic entities, that in many ways are our community money. I think that's kind of running through this and that's complicated for all sorts of reasons. Is that the same time over the past 50 years, we've seen a kind of deconsolidation of Jewish communal infrastructure or real breaking apart of consensus based institutions. You cover this in the book, there was a rise that was connected to this process. I kind of worried as I got to the end, how do you create that sense of collectivity without bringing back those very structures of consensus that many of us feel actually repressed open discourse on a whole bunch of important issues in the Jewish community. There are those who argue that like the breakdown of Jewish consensus around issues like Israel or American policy has actually been good for democratic culture in Jewish communities and Jewish institutions. So I feel like we're dancing on both sides of this, of when one hand we want her to create more democratic infrastructure in Jewish, communal life around money and priorities. On the other hand, it feels like doing so would wind up re-establishing consensus based systems that we've just finally kind of rid ourselves of. Does that make sense?
Speaker 1 00:32:08 Yeah. Although I don't know if I would go with you so far as to say that we've gotten rid of, I mean, you're calling them consensus based institutions in, maybe we've gotten rid of those, but I think in its place, we have a kind of power structure that in many ways has a kind of uniformity. And oftentimes it's not all that visible. I mean, there's something else I talk about as a sort of like deep politicized or a political way that philanthropic organizations operate, which can kind of their very deeply political nature. But part of, I think what the problem is, and again, like it's hard not to relate this to the election, is that when you get organizations that become very, very capital rich and are quite savvy about how they use that capital and how they use state subsidy, there can end up being a sort of consensus of dollars, right?
Speaker 1 00:32:59 A consensus of capital, whether or not a lot of people are on board or not, but that are able to push through certain kinds of agendas. I think on one level you're right. That there's been a kind of breaking apart of what might've been a more vital center type American Judaism, but I think especially politically, I'm not so sure that that's necessarily the case. And I think a lot of that, like if we look at some of the biggest funders in American Jewish life, the politics of those funders don't really align with the politics of the majority of American Jews. And what then do we do about that? You know, do we say, well, we wouldn't want consensus anyway, do we say maybe this doesn't quite make sense that we have these kinds of funders moving the community in this kind of direction when it doesn't really reflect certainly the political commitments of the community.
Speaker 0 00:33:52 Yeah. Although the, the counter argument that that donor would say is I know that the community doesn't share my values, but I think they're wrong. And I think that I actually have this tool at my disposal to help convince them that they're wrong. And that's kind of, if you want to call it a capitalist term, it's free market. If you want to call it a little less of a capitalist term, you know, called a marketplace of ideas, but I can actually use the influence tools that are at my disposal to have an impact. And part of what's so messy right now is, and you and I have debated this in the past, but anyone with a Twitter account can actually build a tremendous amount of capital requires no actual capital. So pardon me says, like, to make more sense of this, I have a lot of concerns about the funding of the democracy agenda in Israel to wit the kind of anti-democratic agenda racist, a lot of money in the American Jewish community by a whole bunch of people who are totally willing to say, of course, I'm allowed to have an opinion on what goes on in Israel because I'm supporting the state of Israel or I'm supporting certain institutions in the state of Israel.
Speaker 0 00:34:50 And then a whole bunch of people get skiddish about advocating for democracy, religious pluralism and human rights in Israel because they quote unquote don't live there. And my response for years has been start playing the same game. You know, if Irving Moscow it's can buy up all this territory and East Jerusalem and basically eliminate territorial contiguity for Palestinians, why does the agenda of democracy through organizations like new Israel fund? Why is it so small? Why are we talking about they're raising what $35 million a year from an American Jewish community that overwhelmingly believes into marketing human rights. And it's because of the progressive, so basically not playing the same game, the capitalist response to this is like, how do you make sure if this is the playing field that we're in, how do you make sure that it gets balanced out politically? So at least it isn't just hegemonic in one direction about the political consequences of this capitalism.
Speaker 1 00:35:39 So there's this like basic question. Why doesn't the left play that game as well? I think there's some pretty good answers, like the new Israel fund that actually, I don't know what's happening with it, but like maybe a year ago, you know, made some big announcement how they're starting this like progressive donor advise fund. And you know, this is like, they're, they're going to get into the game. And I think it doesn't just so happen. It's not coincidental that of those people who are like in the know enough to care about these things. People on the left are much more critical of the politics of donor advised funds, right. Are much more critical of the politics of deciding that you're going to warehouse a huge amount of capital. So you can Ram through a particular political agenda that you have. So, you know, I mean, there could be a point where, and I will say that I felt this way in 2016, after our current president was elected, I thought, Oh my goodness, like I've been writing this history that points out a lot of the problems of this stored capital, but like, maybe this is the moment.
Speaker 1 00:36:38 If the state is going to go in this authoritarian or fascist or wherever the hell is going direction, maybe it's so important that there's money that somehow depart from that process. So there are sometimes moments, right? When somebody with a progressive politics could see that it's important to have played this game maybe, but I just think that it's really no accident that folks who align with a more progressive agenda have been much more reluctant to think about accumulating capital as this kind of particular form of power. One of the organizations I talk about in the last chapter of the book, which tries to showcase like some different kinds of folks who are involved in reform to philanthropy is this organization called resource generation, which is really committed to the idea of decolonizing wealth and really thinking about how there should not be particular entities or people or groups who have more control or so much more controlled, vastly more control over wealth than others. I get it that that's not a super pragmatic way of thinking about things. And some of the folks I talked to who are involved in it, it's mainly young people. I think you age out of it when you're like 30 something, 35, they said, yeah, you know, our family wealth managers sort of laugh at us and they said, you'll get older. You'll understand. They don't want to hear that. They were like, this is a sick system and it's perpetuating a sickness and we don't want to play that.
Speaker 0 00:38:00 Yeah. I mean, a part of me is like when I watch Abigail Disney, for instance, push against the corporate policies of her family's corporation, I kind of still want her to have a lot of wealth because the minute that she doesn't, she's basically irrelevant in that conversation. The fact that she has, I don't know what her net worth is now 120, $150 million is not going hungry. The fact that she does gives her a certain measure of power, that absence of total remaking of this infrastructure, she just wouldn't have at her disposal.
Speaker 2 00:38:29 Hi, my name is Alana Stein, Hain, and I'm scholar and residence and director of faculty at the shell of North America. I want to tell you about a series of talks I'll be giving over the next few months called Tala from the balcony. Telmate from the balcony is an occasional series that exposes the big ideas, questions and issues, motivating rabbinic discussions. Our theme for this series will be beyond the limits of law, repairing the fabric of society throughout the pandemic. And especially during election season, it has become abundantly clear how much we as a society rely upon the unspoken norms of behavior and responsibility and how few of those norms are legally enforceable. I'll be delving into the ways the rabbis addressed the gap between what law can dictate and the role of character in shaping healthy society to register for one or more of the talks, go to our website, shell and hartman.org, and look in our Hartman at home calendar for Tom, from the balcony.
Speaker 0 00:39:27 One of the things I admire about the book, especially at the end Laila, you have three major areas of reform. As you said, the resource generation approach, moving away from accumulation, even though it's still strategic, right? I mean, there's still a theory of change that the folks who are using their philanthropy to really try to make change, and then you have the kind of transparency approach, which is use the example of Jay lens, an organization that has at least transparent about its politics. You know, you have a phrase throughout the book of de-politicize politics where it's very political, but it claims that it's not. So at least being transparent is another way forward. And then you have kind of the middle ground of being willing to push out more capital and change the conversation about this term ROI return on investments to acknowledge that there's more than just the money at play, but let me for my last question and kind of put you on a spot a little bit. If you could make two changes, maybe it has to be one, it could be big, or they could be small and the operating culture around Jewish philanthropy, what would they be?
Speaker 1 00:40:23 So you're telling me I can't rewrite the tax code,
Speaker 0 00:40:25 Let's assume for the purpose of this podcast that maybe it's not the tax. Got it.
Speaker 1 00:40:29 Well, okay. I think probably it would have something to do with, well, there's two possibilities. I have two contenders, right? One has to do with the composition of boards actually, which sounds boring, but boards end up being the entities that have power over decision-making for foundations and for a huge amount of wealth and especially foundations that have living donors tend to have totally disempowered boards, paper boards that maybe sign tax forms or whatever it might be. And I think that if there could be a shift in culture, that boards were really about engaging a diversity of whatever the mission of the institution might be. So not every institution would have to, you know, encompass the diversity of the whole, right. But whatever the mission was that there would be a commitment to finding people, to serve on the board who come from a diversity of perspectives.
Speaker 1 00:41:28 And that that board would be empowered that in fact, it would stop being that you had a Kurtzer foundation and it would have a different name. So it would be sort of pulled away from the individual. And at least it would be about the collective of some more voices. That's not that end all, but I think that that could be a kind of tangible reform that could make a really big difference. The other one I was going to say is signing on to a different kind of spending pledge, right. And really deciding that more of this money is going to circulate. It's been really mind boggling to me, you know, during the moment that we're in, how few institutions are deciding that now is the time to actually really open up the bank. Right. In fact, a lot of the response in the Jewish world has been that this is the time to hold, hold a tighter. Yeah. And I think that there could be a shift in that because it's happened before.
Speaker 0 00:42:20 Yeah. I'm totally with you on the first one, which is to really start reclassifying these foundations as really being public instruments and entities and kind of depersonalizing and from the funders, I'll add my own here, which I say with love to my friends and peers who work in this field. But I would also like to put in a time limit past the time, which if you work in the Jewish community on the funder side, you can't stay there your whole career because the power dynamics, oftentimes the map out from funders to the professionals, working on the funding side, towards the professionals who are in the service providing side. And I would love to see a kind of greater circulation between those sides of the business. Because I think if we're going to acknowledge that this is a business that is laced with power, we have to find ourselves in different places in that power scheme, if we're actually going to be serious about creating ethical norms.
Speaker 0 00:43:05 Well, thank you so much for listening to our show this week and special, thanks to Laila carbon bourbon for being our guest identity crisis is a product of the shell apartment Institute. It was produced this week by Devinsky Coleman and edited by Alex Dylan or managing producers. Dan Friedman with music provided by so-called to learn more about the shell apartment Institute, visit us online, Sholom hartman.org. We want to know what you think about the show you can rate and review us on iTunes to help more people find the show. You can also write to
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