With Huge Gifts to Birthright Israel, Wealthy Donors Influence American Jewish Identity

In a pre-pandemic world, a visitor to the Western Wall in Jerusalem would almost certainly encounter huge flocks of English-speaking college students, cups of coffee and Holy Bagel bagels clutched in one hand, smartphones for selfies in the other. Since its establishment in 1999, Birthright Israel has sent over 750,000 college-age and twenty-something Jews on 10-day, all-expenses-paid journeys to Israel. In 2018 alone, the program raised nearly $100 million.

Birthright is often celebrated as a crowning achievement of Jewish philanthropists’ generosity and communal dedication. But to view it in those terms alone is to neglect the political, economic and cultural structures in which American Jewish philanthropy operates, what I call in my research “the American Jewish philanthropic complex.”

Birthright’s financing and its mission operated in tandem to craft Jewish identity as a basic right (a birthright) but one impossible to hold without a gift granted by a small set of very wealthy donors who exercised power over the terms of Jewish identity. By accepting these gifts, American Jews consented to their terms, surrendering what for many was a different birthright, that of democratic citizenship, to the capitalist logic that overwhelmed American Jewish philanthropy and American philanthropy more generally by the end of the 20th century.

The Origins of Birthright

American Jews began to travel on organized youth tours to Israel almost immediately after the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948. However, whereas religious or politically ideological institutions had sponsored most of those tours, the founders of Birthright imagined a trip suitable for every young American Jew.

According to ethnographer Shaul Kelner’s research, Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Yossi Beilin first floated the idea in a speech he delivered at a 1994 conference of American Jewish communal leaders. He suggested “every young Jew [should] receive a birthday card on his or her 17th birthday with a coupon for travel and accommodations in Israel during the next summer vacation.” A gift to every American Jew, the trip would unite American Jewry around its love of Israel.

A second story claimed that Birthright originated from an intimate conversation between two titans of American Jewish philanthropy. As the story goes, Michael Steinhardt, a successful hedge fund manager who established a large private family foundation (his second) in 1994, strolled through Jerusalem on a picturesque evening in 1997 with his friend and fellow Jewish philanthropist Charles Bronfman. As Steinhardt later recalled in his autobiography, he fantasized aloud about bringing every young American Jew to experience Israel. Before their walk was over, the two men had pledged $5 million each to build the program. (In 2019, Michael Steinhardt would deny accusations that he sexually propositioned women who were professionally reliant on his philanthropic support and would also be accused of making lewd and inappropriate remarks about their bodies, marital statuses and fertility.)

When it launched in 1999, Birthright had already amassed $210 million. The money represented the different threads of the program’s genesis, with some raised through Jewish communal public charities (called “federations”), some from the Israeli government, and the rest from private Jewish philanthropists.

In addition to the work of creating the travel tours, the founders of Birthright almost immediately created an infrastructure to measure its efficacy, defined in terms of its explicit goal to “strengthen Jewish identity.” Since the 1950s, when the majority of American Jews entered the middle class and very few new Jewish immigrants (with the exception of a small number of refugees from the Second World War) arrived in the United States, American Jewish philanthropic organizations had run into the problem of how to define their domestic purpose. They solved the problem by remaking their missions around the goal of Jewish identity. No longer as pressed to provide for the immediate material needs of American Jewry as they once had been, they turned toward cultural and educational activities to foster, as one Jewish social worker wrote in the 1950s, “positive Jewish identification.”

The Birthright Israel Foundation incorporated in 2001 as its own charitable organization with the capacity to absorb far larger gifts than almost any other Jewish nonprofit—representing a new horizon in Jewish-identity philanthropy. In 2005, Steinhardt gave $12 million to Brandeis University to establish the Steinhardt Social Research Institute. Although its researchers produced a range of studies to fulfill the institute’s mission “to provid[e] unbiased, high-quality data about contemporary Jewry,” Birthright was the institute’s core area of exploration. Responding to the prevalent anxiety among communal leaders, social researchers, and many prominent philanthropists that intermarriage was eroding Jewish identity, Steinhardt researchers compiled data to show that rates of intermarriage with non-Jews were measurably lower for participants than nonparticipants in Birthright. These data were highlighted in Birthright fundraising pitches, where potential donors learned that their investments in Birthright would yield the return of better or stronger Jewish identity, as measured by data about intermarriage, and also ritual observance, peer circles and support for Israel.

A Mega-Giver’s Influence

In 2007, Sheldon Adelson, a Boston-born Jewish man who built his fortune from casino development, donated a total of $30 million to Birthright through his private family foundation, enabling the program to expand its operations by tens of thousands of students annually. Few other Jewish organizations, aside from university programs and Israeli medical institutions (which were classified as Jewish organizations in most surveys of Jewish philanthropy) would have had the ability to absorb such a large gift. That same year, Forbes ranked Adelson the third-wealthiest person in the United States and sixth-wealthiest in the world, with a net worth of $26.5 billion.

Known for his support of Republican politicians and conservative causes in the United States and Israel, Adelson’s largest charitable expenditures were not to those political causes, but rather to Birthright. According to one review of its tax returns, the Adelson Family Foundation donated a total of $123 million to Birthright from its first large gift in 2007 through 2011, accounting for 40% of the total money raised by Birthright over the same period.

In its promotional material, Birthright persistently maintained that it did not have a political agenda. In this way, it conformed to the norms of American philanthropic life, which by tax law were bound by certain restrictions on political expression, and by practice often eschewed politics well beyond what was demanded according to the letter of the law. Over the 20th century, American Jewish philanthropic organizations had leaned into this apolitical posture as a way to position themselves as representative of a unified American Jewish public, secure their belonging in a civic landscape, and rebuff antisemitic allegations that their organizations were seeking to usurp state power.

The fact that one donor’s foundation bankrolled such a substantial portion of Birthright’s budget, however, raised questions in some observers’ minds about the relationship between Adelson’s conservative politics in the United States and Israel and the program’s stated remove from politics. Hoping to get ahead of the concerns, in 2014, the research team at the Steinhardt Institute set out to test whether rising criticism of Birthright’s “right-wing political bias” had basis in fact, and concluded that Birthright achieved its mission of strengthening Jewish identity and connection to Israel in a “politically neutral” way.

Yet empirical data could not stem the tide of rising criticism that Birthright was violating a central tenet of American Jewish philanthropy. Adelson was hardly the first Jewish philanthropist who wore his political loyalties on his sleeves. But even those who held visibly partisan views had made it their business to invoke, no matter how credibly, consensus and nonpartisanship in their philanthropic activities.

At a gathering in 2012 called Tribefest, an annual conference for Jewish young adults held that year in Adelson’s hometown, Las Vegas, the casino magnate flouted the long-established practice among Jewish philanthropists of acting as if a barrier separated their partisan politics from their Jewish communal interests. Entering a session in progress that had been organized as a debate between the executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition and the president of the National Jewish Democratic Council, Adelson interrupted the speakers and launched into a tirade against President Barack Obama. An anonymous source told a reporter that “the only reason Adelson was able to monopolize the conversation… was because he ‘owned the room,’ literally.”

Not only did Adelson’s actions and statements tug at the threads of the American Jewish philanthropic complex’s disavowal of a political agenda, but they also challenged the “big tent” conception of Jewish identity philanthropy that Birthright had attempted to advance. A group of college students posted photos of young Jews engaging in Jewish rituals and used the ironic hashtag #JewsNotFundedBySheldonAdelson, as if it were a triumph to light Shabbat candles or dance the hora without Adelson’s money.

In early September this year, a new travel program to Israel called RootOne emerged on the scene. Meant to complement Birthright, RootOne’s aim was “to strengthen participants’ Jewish identity and connections to Israel before they begin college.” While Birthright focused on the 18- to 32-year-old set, RootOne would turn attention to defraying the cost of “teen travel.” And in its funding model, RootOne appeared to begin where Birthright had landed: with the financing from a single wealthy and politically prominent donor.

Bernie Marcus, the cofounder of Home Depot with a net worth of $7.4 billion, and his wife Billi provided a $20 million grant through their family’s foundation to launch RootOne. In the lead-up to the 2016 election, Marcus (alongside Adelson) was one of Donald Trump’s largest donors, channeling $7 million to the candidate through a super PAC. An August report revealed that Marcus had given just a fraction of that amount to the president’s reelection campaign, though he directed millions of dollars to support Senate Republicans’ electoral bids.

Contentious Terrain

The relationship between transaction—a grant from a foundation to a nonprofit—and ideology is not always straightforward, but when a single philanthropist held such a significant share of an organization’s budget, it was difficult to disentangle one from the other. RootOne’s commitment to boosting teenagers’ connections to Israel before they entered college suggested its immersion in contentious campus politics. Pro-Israel groups that directed resources to spotlighting and fighting anti-Zionism on college campuses and building political support for a law to classify anti-Zionism as antisemitism often bemoaned the fact that Jewish students came to college with very little knowledge about or attachment to Israel.

Birthright and RootOne must be understood as part of the political machinery of American philanthropy and as products of American Jewish philanthropy’s effort to weave together identity, capital and political interests into a seamless whole.

By the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the American Jewish philanthropic complex had sanctioned a small group of phenomenally wealthy people to use their dollars to bestow a “birthright” on American Jews. But American Jews would do well to remember that they also have a political right, if not a birthright, to ask whether those private interests that speak in their name are truly representing their ideals. The question is not whether philanthropic organizations are political; they are. Rather, the proper question is whether the political power of philanthropy threatens to undermine the political will of the public it purports to serve.

Lila Corwin Berman is professor of history at Temple University, where she directs the Feinstein Center for American Jewish History, and is a fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania for the 2020-21 academic year. This essay draws on her most recent book, “The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex: The History of a Multibillion-Dollar Institution.”

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