The Big Givers Are Still Jewish, but Their Big Gifts May Not Be

In the early 1970s, when Jews contributed more than $1 billion per year to philanthropy, two-thirds of the total went to Jewish causes.

Today, annual Jewish contributions to all charities have risen to $3.5 billion. But as older givers are supplanted by their younger, more secularly oriented counterparts, the share of contributions going to Jewish causes has dropped to around 50 percent of the total, according to Dr. Barry Kosmin, a New York sociologist.

“The Jewish philanthropic dollar seems to be increasingly secularized,” Kosmin said last week. Or, as a fellow sociologist put it, Jews who once gave with their “kishkes” (guts) and hearts are now giving with their heads.

Social scientists, community leaders and professional fund-raisers donated two days last week to discussing the changing nature of Jewish philanthropy.

The conference, “Jewish Philanthropy in Contemporary America,” was co-sponsored by the City University of New York, the Institute for the Study of Modern Jewish Life at City College and the North American Jewish Data Bank, a joint project of the CUNY Graduate School and the Council of Jewish Federations.

Presenters outlined a number of challenges to Jewish fund-raisers, including the increasing role women are playing in raising and donating funds, changes in the tax laws and reappraisals of Israel’s influence on Jewish communal identity.

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There was also discussion of philanthropies representing new, sophisticated constituencies, including the New Israel Fund and the Jewish Fund for Justice. Both bypass such centralized philanthropic channels as the United Jewish Appeal to fund specific projects or organizations in Israel and other countries.

Kosmin, who is director of the Jewish Data Bank, and Dr. Paul Ritterband, director of the Center for Jewish Studies at CUNY, co-chaired the conference. Both agreed in presentations and interviews that of all these changes, however, the most significant remains the growing secularization and acculturation of the American Jewish community.

Kosmin described the traditional Jewishly oriented philanthropist as someone born in the 1920s who remembers the Depression, World War II, the old Jewish neighborhood and the sound of Yiddish.

But with each succeeding generation, said Ritterband, the probability of giving to a Jewish cause and the relative size of the contribution both shrink.

A Jew born in the 1940s, for instance, may be as likely to belong to the board of a major American ballet company or orchestra as he or she would that of a Jewish community center or national defense organization.

“If fund-raisers continue to play the same old game, they’re going to go straight down the tubes,” said Ritterband.

Still, Ritterband insisted that the conference was not about raising money, but understanding a people.

Said the sociologist, whose department has more social scientists dealing with Jewish life than any university outside of Israel, “What you put your money into is a telling indicator of where you stand.”