In late October 2023, the Atlanta-based abortion fund Access Reproductive Care–Southeast (ARC–Southeast) published an open letter titled “Reproductive Justice Includes Palestinian Liberation.” Like many abortion funds—which channel money directly to abortion seekers who couldn’t otherwise afford the procedure—the organization views itself as engaged in a broader struggle for reproductive justice, a framework developed by Black feminists that emphasizes the right to “personal bodily autonomy,” including to “have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.” The staff was consumed by the horror of Israel’s assault on Gaza, which, then in its third week, was killing or injuring more than 400 children every day and had stranded up to 84,000 pregnant women without access to basic supplies. “Israel’s apartheid regime represents the restricting of bodily autonomy at the highest level possible,” they concluded in the letter, drawing parallels to the obstacles to health care faced by their own callers. Musa Springer, a spokesperson for ARC–Southeast, told me that the fund’s leaders had felt a “moral duty” to provide a pathway for others in the reproductive justice movement to proclaim their solidarity. Within a month, more than 50 reproductive justice organizations, including at least 20 other abortion funds, had signed on.
Founded by three Black clinic workers in 2015, ARC–Southeast operates across six southern states with some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country, helping its callers cover not just the bill from an out-of-state clinic but also the travel expenses involved in getting there. Of the more than 3,000 people it served last year, 82% identified as Black, and 87% were uninsured or on Medicaid. While the organization’s staffing budget is underwritten by a relatively stable base of small donors, much of the funding for abortion seekers comes from institutional givers, with one foundation in particular, the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, accounting for roughly a third of the $1 million that ARC–Southeast pledged for abortion assistance in 2023. Schusterman, founded by a Tulsa oil-and-gas magnate and his wife in 1987, had first backed ARC–Southeast with a $250,000 grant in 2020, followed by a $400,000 donation in 2021, tax records show. In 2022, the year the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Schusterman awarded the abortion fund nearly $1 million to be paid over three years, an important source of stability, with the final installment of the grant due in 2024, Springer told me.
ARC–Southeast had expected to reapply for more funding once that grant expired; the demand from abortion seekers was growing only more acute as more states imposed bans. But after the abortion fund published its Palestine solidarity letter last year, Schusterman moved to distance itself from its grantee. In the weeks following the letter’s release, the foundation informed ARC–Southeast that, rather than pay the third installment of the grant as normal, it would route it through a third-party donor-advised fund. The staff surmised that the change had been made “so that Schusterman’s name was not attached to funding us,” Springer told me. They had reason to worry: An employee at the foundation, whom Springer described as an “ally,” had warned them in an off-the-books meeting that the solidarity statement had put their funding in jeopardy. In late July, after the final installment, of $325,000, had arrived via the third-party fund, a Schusterman official told ARC–Southeast in an email that the payment amounted to a “tie-off/closing grant,” and that the foundation was “waiving any pending report requirements,” according to Springer, who read me the email. In philanthropy-speak, Schusterman was saying that it didn’t want to hear from ARC–Southeast again. (Roben Smolar, a spokesperson for Schusterman, disputed the idea that the philanthropy had cut ties with the abortion fund for political reasons, telling me in an emailed statement that the foundation “made the strategic decision long before October 2023 to shift away from funding individual funds to a long-term approach that will advance broad-scale access across the country,” and adding, “Our level of giving to abortion access has not changed—in fact, it has increased.” She declined to elaborate or answer further questions.)
“To remove funding from an abortion fund for political reasons is to directly impact some of the most marginalized individuals in our entire society.”
It was a striking turnabout by a foundation that had quickly become a top funder of abortion care in the United States as the revocation of Roe became an imminent possibility and then a reality with the Dobbs v. Jackson decision in June 2022. That year, Schusterman gave more than $3 million to local and national branches of Planned Parenthood and made six- or seven-figure grants to at least a dozen abortion funds and other reproductive justice organizations, including $1 million to the National Network of Abortion Funds (NNAF), the umbrella organization that provides local funds with financial and technical support. As of June 2024, Schusterman ranked among NNAF’s top five donors, according to a document distributed to member funds. But Schusterman is also guided by other considerations: “We’re a Zionist foundation,” Lisa Eisen, a Schusterman co-president, said on a podcast episode in 2021. “We don’t fund organizations that delegitimize Israel,” she added, describing this as a “red line.” As recently as 2020, Schusterman put this condition in black and white, requiring organizations receiving its grants to pledge not to “support, endorse, or engage in policies or activities that are anti-Semitic or that question Israel’s right to exist or the legitimacy of Israel as a secure, independent, democratic Jewish state,” according to grant agreements obtained by Jewish Currents. (Grant agreements from later years that I reviewed require a vaguer promise not to “promote or engage” in “antisemitism or the destruction of any state.”) A longtime funder of Hillel centers on college campuses, Schusterman has played a major role in opposing perceived anti-Israel sentiment in academia, including by establishing the Israel on Campus Coalition (ICC) with Hillel International in 2002. According to reporting by The Forward in 2018, the ICC has built a “sophisticated political intelligence operation” to monitor dissenting students and aggressively oppose Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) resolutions on campuses. (The ICC did not reply to Jewish Currents’s request for comment.)
After October 7th, a number of Schusterman’s grantees in the reproductive justice world, like ARC–Southeast, made or signed statements that tested the foundation’s “red line.” At a Zoom meeting for NNAF member funds in late June, Diana Parker-Kafka, the executive director of the Chicago-based Midwest Access Coalition—which signed ARC–Southeast’s letter and released its own detailed ceasefire statement on Instagram—noted that Schusterman had “made it clear that they’re specifically divesting from funds that make a solidarity statement.” Parker-Kafka asked NNAF officials about the organization’s own relationship with Schusterman. “I think it’s safe to say that we are misaligned,” Naimah Bilal, NNAF’s deputy director of development, said on the call, in a recording obtained by Jewish Currents. In late August, NNAF told its members in an email that its partnership with Schusterman had “sunsetted.” (A spokesperson for NNAF told me the two sides reached a “respectful and mutual” decision to end their relationship due to disagreements over whether broader reproductive justice advocacy has a place in abortion funds’ work.) For some funds, the loss of Schusterman and other donors could harm their ability to support abortion seekers even as the national context grows increasingly hostile to reproductive freedom. ARC–Southeast may have to reduce the amount it gives to callers as soon as mid-2025 if it can’t replace its Schusterman grant. “To remove funding from an abortion fund for political reasons is to directly impact some of the most marginalized individuals in our entire society,” Springer told me.
Donors’ break with abortion funds is just one example of a quiet crackdown currently underway inside the veiled world of American philanthropy. In conference rooms, Zoom meetings, and email inboxes, largely hidden from public view, funders who style themselves as champions of progressive values are conditioning their grants on support for—or, at least, silence about—Israel’s brutal campaign in Gaza, denying resources to organizations they had previously supported and praised. More than 40 interviews with people on either side of the grantmaker–grantee divide reveal a pattern of funding decisions that punish expressions of Palestinian solidarity, affecting social justice organizations that work on a range of domestic issues, from police violence and the prison system to environmental justice and the affordable housing crisis. For funders—including prominent Jewish family foundations like Schusterman—the enforcement of Israel-related guardrails lays bare the contradictions inherent in a philanthropic portfolio that pursues a progressive domestic agenda while promoting allegiance to the Jewish state. “These liberal Zionist foundations were not necessarily hiding their focus on Israel, and their support of Israel, as part of their philanthropic work,” before October 2023, said Rebecca Vilkomerson, a former executive director of the anti-Zionist organization Jewish Voice for Peace who now co-directs Funding Freedom, which organizes for Palestinian liberation within philanthropy. “It’s just that there was an apparent dividing line between the support for progressive causes—which is in line with the ‘liberal’ part of liberal Zionist—and the Zionist causes. And now they’re feeling forced to choose, and they’re choosing Zionist over liberal.”
The full scale of the cuts may be impossible to measure. Cody Edgerly, a program director at the Jewish Liberation Fund—which backs social-justice-focused Jewish groups, including explicitly anti-Zionist ones, that most Jewish funders won’t touch—told me in May that he and a network of other philanthropy staff and advisers had counted between $12 million and $14 million in cuts by private funders to groups that had spoken out in solidarity with Gaza. But he emphasized that the actual number was likely far higher (his estimate didn’t include any of the cuts to abortion funds, for example, which he wasn’t aware of until we spoke). In July, Edgerly told me he’d stopped keeping track, in part because funders had become more circumspect in their messaging, with grantees receiving vague explanations about a “strategic shift,” sometimes followed by an off-the-record message from a grant officer informing them that, as Edgerly put it, “it’s actually because someone on the board did not feel comfortable with their statement on Palestine.” Even without knowing the full scope of the crackdown, he maintained that we were in the middle of a “massive backsliding that is going to be damaging for at least the next five years of movement-building work.”
The crackdown amounts to a “massive backsliding that is going to be damaging for at least the next five years of movement-building work.”
Largely spared this wave of defunding are groups specifically led by or serving Palestinians, which “rarely received institutional grants to begin with,” according to Rana Elmir, the program director of the RISE Together Fund, a donor collaborative that supports Black, African, Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim, and South Asian organizations. Instead, she said, it is Black-led groups—many of which received new institutional funding amid the 2020 racial justice uprisings after the murder of George Floyd—that are now “getting hit the hardest.” Major funders, Elmir told me, are expressing “surprise that these groups would be working, in this moment, on Palestinian solidarity.” In the past year, “the majority of the organizations that have lost funding as a result of their solidarity with Palestinian liberation are BIPOC-led, youth-led, and/or based in the Global South,” according to an open letter published in May by a group of progressive Jews in philanthropy, including Edgerly and Vilkomerson. Deborah Sagner, a donor-activist who funds social justice movements, put it this way: “The reason there’s so much vulnerability is that groups are showing up for each other. It’s the best thing that can be happening, and the worst consequence.”
These groups may face even graver challenges under a second Trump administration. In an early sign of the hard-line tactics that may soon be deployed against civil society, the House of Representatives passed a bill in November that has been dubbed the “nonprofit killer” because it would empower the Treasury secretary to strip the tax-exempt status of any nonprofit deemed a “terrorist supporting organization.” To the incoming government, this category will likely include virtually the entire pro-Palestine movement, as the right-wing Heritage Foundation makes clear in “Project Esther,” a pro-Israel follow-up to its authoritarian “Project 2025” blueprint for a second Trump term. “The terrain is about to get a lot more difficult, in terms of what we are able to do and how we are able to organize,” said Loan Tran, the national director of Rising Majority, a coalition of social justice groups that was convened by the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) after Trump’s election in 2016. Yet movements have already been depleted by the relentless demands of the past year and the dwindling support of the donor class. “The same groups and the same frontline communities that have been taking a strong position on ending this genocide are now going to be expected to resist Trump for the next four years,” Tran told me, and the repression of their pro-Palestine politics stands as a potentially debilitating impediment to their efforts. “My question for institutions that haven’t considered Palestine to be relevant to them is: How far does the stripping of our democratic rights have to go?” they asked, warning: “What’s at stake around Palestine is at stake for all of us.”
Movements for social justice have long relied on the largesse of wealthy donors—who inevitably influence their priorities. When the NAACP won a Supreme Court victory in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, for example, a defining achievement of the civil rights movement, the group was building on years of desegregation litigation work paid for in large part by the American Fund for Public Service. Known as the Garland Fund, the foundation had been established by Charles Garland, who was descended from a vice president of the First National Bank of New York (now Citibank). When it first began giving to the NAACP in the early 1920s, the civil rights organization was devoted to a radical struggle against lynching and anti-Black mob violence, aware of the need “to protect Black lives before other rights were secured,” as the scholar Megan Ming Francis writes in a 2019 paper, “The Price of Civil Rights: Black Lives, White Funding, and Movement Capture.” Impatient to see more tangible results from the groups in its portfolio, however, the Garland Fund decided in 1929 to take control of its grantees’ campaigns. Before long, the mostly white board had devised its own vision for the NAACP, which, consistent with the foundation’s interest in education, prioritized school desegregation. (A proposal by the Garland Fund’s lone Black board member to continue supporting anti-lynching work was rejected.) Presented with this new plan as a condition of much-needed funding, the NAACP—in an example of what Francis calls “movement capture”—reluctantly complied. “There’s a long tradition of funders, sometimes intentionally, and other times not intentionally, trying to moderate radical movements,” Francis, a political science professor at the University of Washington, told me recently. Donors, she noted, “keep certain issues alive. And donors can bury other issues by just not funding them.”
In the current century, few issues have met with as much resistance from American donors as Palestine. In October 2003, the Ford Foundation faced a pressure campaign over its funding of two Palestinian organizations—the Palestinian NGO Network, a civil-society umbrella group, and the legal-advocacy organization Palestinian Society for the Protection of Human Rights and the Environment—that had been part of an effort to bring Israel’s human rights abuses to the attention of a 2001 United Nations conference on racism, including by calling Israel an “apartheid state.” In a series of articles, a reporter at the Jewish Telegraphic Agency accused Ford of supporting “anti-Zionist propaganda and blatant anti-Semitism”; in response, a group of lawmakers led by Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York called on Ford “to ensure that organizations engaged in the promotion of hate and/or violence, including those actively supporting anti-Semitism or the denial of the legitimacy of Israel’s existence, do not receive funding.” The foundation, then led by Susan Berresford, quickly yielded. It introduced a new provision to its grant agreements that echoed the language in Nadler’s press releases, requiring recipients of funding to pledge “that your organization will not promote or engage in violence, terrorism, bigotry or the destruction of any state, nor will it make sub-grants to any entity that engages in these activities.”
“Terrorism,” in the period after September 11th, 2001, became a word that “explained, and justified, everything,” as John V. Whitbeck, a lawyer who advised the Palestinian negotiating team during the Oslo period, wrote in 2004. Still, Ford’s new language provoked a backlash. After another powerful philanthropy, the Rockefeller Foundation, adopted similar grant agreement text on “terrorist activity,” nine universities took a collective stand in opposition, arguing that the two foundations’ overly broad provisions could “run up against the basic principle of protected speech on our campuses” and be used against film festivals or lectures. Several months later, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) pointedly rejected grants from Ford and Rockefeller, saying the new language “could have a chilling effect on civil liberties.” But these protests accomplished little, at least when it came to Ford. The universities accepted a “side letter” from the foundation that narrowed the applicability of the offending provision in an academic context yet allowed it to remain in the grant agreements. (“We decided, as a practical matter, that we could live with the language rather than forgo the grants,” Richard Saller, then the provost of the University of Chicago, told The Chronicle of Higher Education.) The ACLU—whose head, Anthony Romero, a former Ford Foundation executive, was said to have advised Ford on the grant agreement language before his organization went on to criticize it—soon resumed accepting Ford grants. (The ACLU did not respond to requests for comment.) For its part, Rockefeller changed its “terrorist activity” grant agreement language by 2006 to simply require US grantees to comply with federal anti-terrorism rules.
Yet the original Ford language, with its expansive approach, became philanthropic boilerplate: A similar line appears in grant agreements of the Wallace Foundation, which funds education programs, for example, as well as those of Schusterman, which, after initially including the language almost verbatim, has expanded the list of what organizations may not “promote or engage in” to include “antisemitism” and “racism” alongside “violence, terrorism, bigotry” and “the destruction of any state.” Today, many in the social justice world view the language as a dubious bequest from the war on terror that effectively institutionalizes Islamophobia. “We know foundations aren’t supporting violent organizations, so this language doesn’t actually solve a problem,” Rajasvini Bhansali, the executive director of the Solidaire Network, which funds social movements, told me. “It only serves to intimidate organizations from speaking out about Israel/Palestine, and to provide an escape route for funders to abandon organizations when they’re being targeted, instead of leveraging our power as a funder to stand by them.” Bhansali added, “Any language that targets Muslim-led organizations makes us all less safe, and it legitimizes the right-wing effort to criminalize and silence political dissent.”
Ford was at the center of another funder backlash over Palestine in 2016, this one falling on American groups. After the Movement for Black Lives released a sprawling, six-part policy platform that August that included a brief analysis of the US–Israel relationship stating that the US was “complicit in the genocide taking place against the Palestinian people,” the foundation pulled support from M4BL-associated organizations, prompting other funders to follow suit, according to three people with direct knowledge of the matter who insisted on anonymity for fear of harming sensitive relationships. (Ford declined to comment on the episode.) M4BL’s inclusion of Palestine in a section of its platform criticizing the US military-industrial complex was hardly surprising given the long history of solidarity between Palestinians and Black radicals, and the emotional bonds forged during the 2014 Ferguson uprising when Palestinian activists tweeted practical advice for dealing with tear gas. Yet the retreat by Ford—the third-largest American foundation by assets, according to Candid, and the single biggest devoted to social justice causes—shows the consequences that may await philanthropic-funded groups that tread beyond the bounds of mainstream political discourse. Wealthy philanthropists, in general, are “deeply invested in the status quo,” Karen Ferguson, a professor of urban studies and history at Simon Fraser University, who has studied the Ford Foundation’s efforts to “domesticate” the Black Power movement through grantmaking, told me. “This kind of funding is almost always about preserving the nation, and trying to paper over some really serious contradictions.”
Wealthy philanthropists, in general, are “deeply invested in the status quo.”
If philanthropists retreated from racial-justice organizers in 2016, they scrambled in the opposite direction four years later, amid the nationwide uprisings over anti-Black racism—only to replay the earlier retreat, this time at greater scale. Institutional funders are “historically the last people to understand where the cutting edge is,” said Vince Warren, the executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a left-wing legal advocacy group. In 2020 and 2021, as liberal institutions sought to prove their anti-racist credentials at a moment when inaction carried its own risk, M4BL and other groups found themselves flush with new funding from a roster of big-name donors—including the Ford Foundation. As Warren put it, philanthropists were embracing organizations that, in 2016, they had been “trying to keep funding from, because of that reference to genocide in Palestine.” In a single year, philanthropic funding for Black communities increased threefold, to $3.2 billion in 2020, according to an analysis by the watchdog group National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP). But many of the grants made in that period were short-term or funded through discretionary processes not designed to lead to the kind of multiyear relationships that allow organizations to thrive, movement sources told me. As soon as public attention shifted, the money began drying up: Between 2021 and 2022, while philanthropic funding was increasing overall, funding for Black communities declined 22%, to $2.5 billion, the NCRP analysis shows. The cuts since October 7th have compounded that damage. One high-ranking foundation officer, who insisted on anonymity, told me that, in many cases, liberal funders who backed Black-led groups in 2020 “never did the ideological work to get clear on whether they were okay with where folks sat.”
Over the past year, a commitment to Palestinian solidarity has united much of the social justice left, with each sector viewing the issue through its own particular lens. It is a racial justice struggle, a prison abolition struggle, an Indigenous sovereignty struggle, and a “land- and housing-justice struggle,” in the words of Dawn Phillips, the executive director of Right to the City Alliance (RTTC), an umbrella group that supports a national network of local housing-justice organizations. (Phillips told me that RTTC lost a potential new grant after the funder raised questions about its social media posts in support of a ceasefire and a liberated Palestine.) This means that groups working across a range of issue areas have seen their funding jeopardized—including both up-and-coming organizations and long-established sites of movement struggle.
The Highlander Research and Education Center—a 92-year-old movement-building center in East Tennessee that trained Rosa Parks before she was arrested in Montgomery—is one such group. In January 2024, its leadership was awaiting word on their application for a grant renewal from the Warner Music Group / Blavatnik Family Foundation Social Justice Fund (WMG/BFF SJF), whose previous $500,000 grant, paid over two years, had just expired. Formed during the racial justice uprisings of 2020 by the Soviet-born billionaire Leonard Blavatnik and the Warner Music Group (which Blavatnik controls), WMG/BFF SJF is a $100 million fund focused on “dismantling structural racism and advancing equity and justice for all people.” Highlander seemed a natural fit for the fund, which used the group’s logo, along with those of other grantees, in a July 2023 promotional video touting its support of Black-led organizations. But Blavatnik—who was said to be among the donors who suspended gifts to Harvard last year over concerns about antisemitism, and whose family foundation gave $4 million to the Birthright Israel Foundation between 2018 and 2022—seems not to have anticipated the way recipients’ politics might differ from his own. Highlander signed onto a ceasefire letter published by Rising Majority on October 14th, which stated that the US government’s “support for Israeli apartheid and genocide against Palestinians is a threat to all of our struggles for multi-racial democracy.” On January 18th, the organization finally received word from WMG/BFF SJF that the philanthropy was “unable to proceed with an additional investment at this time.” No explanation was given, but three people briefed on discussions between WMG/BFF SJF and grantees told me that the funder was penalizing expressions of Palestinian solidarity in multiple instances. (Representatives of the Warner Music Group and the Blavatnik Family Foundation did not respond to my requests for comment.)
That same week in January, Lola N’sangou, the executive director of Mass Liberation Arizona, which advocates for prison abolition and for the rights of incarcerated people, was called into a Zoom meeting with representatives of the Piper Fund, a progressive donor collaborative that had courted the Phoenix-based group in the wake of the 2020 protests. In late October 2023, Mass Liberation Arizona had published a statement on Israel/Palestine that read, “As abolitionists, we recognize the brutal apartheid regime of Israel and its US-backed occupation of Palestine for what it is: a prison that must be abolished.” The statement continued, “We do not condemn Gazan resistance,” and described the Hamas-led attack on October 7th as “a necessary step to secure Palestine’s freedom.” N’sangou told me that the group was trying to be clear-eyed about the fact that “you cannot expect an occupation to end by simply asking nicely.” But it received forceful pushback, including from an Arizona Democratic state representative with pro-Israel politics, Alma Hernandez, who called the statement “dangerous.” Some of the group’s funders, meanwhile, rescheduled conversations about grants for months in the future.
The Piper Fund had already offered Mass Liberation Arizona new funding. But in the January Zoom meeting, “they said, ‘We do not want to fund an organization that is comfortable with the killing of civilians and children,’” N’sangou told me. “I said, ‘Wait, what?’ I had a physical response. I was disgusted that someone had said that to me.” N’sangou pushed back, arguing that if the Piper Fund was insisting that the attack be condemned, “then you are condoning the killing of innocent civilians, because that’s been going on for a hundred years.” But the fund’s representatives held firm in their decision to drop Mass Liberation Arizona. They weren’t the only donor to do so, N’sangou said; others have simply gone silent, cutting off the group without explanation. Now, Mass Liberation Arizona—which brought in grants equivalent to four times its budget in 2020—is on track to run a deficit in 2024. Referring to donors who had walked away, N’sangou said, “I think that they just absolutely never did mean that Black lives matter. They were willing to use it for their political gain, and it makes me sick.” (Paul Di Donato, the president and CEO of the Piper Fund’s host organization, Proteus Fund, told me in an emailed statement that Proteus’s “commitment to advancing social justice in all its forms is unwavering,” while declining to comment on Mass Liberation Arizona specifically.)
Referring to donors who had walked away, N’sangou said, “I think that they just absolutely never did mean that Black lives matter. They were willing to use it for their political gain, and it makes me sick.”
Yet if Mass Liberation Arizona suffered for its pointed refusal to condemn the Hamas-led attack, a larger organization that did do so in its own Palestine-solidarity statement found itself stripped of funding anyway. After Gustavo Torres, the longtime executive director of the Maryland-based CASA, which serves and advocates for immigrant communities, wrote in early November 2023 that he and his organization “join in condemning the outrageous attack by Hamas in Israel” but “strongly support the [Palestinian] struggle for decolonization,” he was flooded with complaints. He deleted the statement almost immediately, as he told The Washington Post. Two days later, CASA, which relies on Maryland state and local governments for a portion of its revenue, received a warning from a group of Democratic Maryland state senators, who wrote, “We must ensure that public funds are not being used to promote antisemitism and Jewish hate.” The Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) of Greater Washington asked CASA for a “public apology.” And the influential Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation—a backer of CASA for 16 years—publicly claimed that a line in the statement “affirming the rights of Indigenous peoples and historically colonized nations to reclaim their land” was “antisemitic” because it “denies Jews as being indigenous to their ancestral homeland.” The CEO and the board chair announced that the foundation would withdraw a $150,000 grant payment and remove the names of Harry and Jeanette Weinberg from two of CASA’s buildings, paying for the signage removal itself. (A spokesperson told me that the foundation had no comment beyond the letter to Torres it had published on its website.)
Perhaps the most sweeping documented withdrawals have targeted organizations that, like ARC–Southeast, view Gaza through the lens of a reproductive justice struggle, as a war on parents and children. In March, the National Network of Abortion Funds announced to member funds that it would offer grants of up to $10,000 to those that “have lost or are at imminent risk of losing financial resources due to explicit political and/or public positioning in solidarity with Palestine”; around 25 of the network’s 100 members—virtually every fund that had publicly taken a pro-Palestine stance—applied, a person with direct knowledge of the matter told me. Among those funds was the DC Abortion Fund (DCAF), a critical node in the fragmented patchwork of abortion provision: Thanks to laws protecting access for minors and at any stage of pregnancy, the District of Columbia has long been considered a haven for abortion seekers from around the country. Following the Dobbs decision, DCAF has struggled to serve an influx of callers forced by new state-level abortion bans to travel to the area, especially from the South, to seek care. “It’s just been absolute chaos,” Alisha Dingus, DCAF’s director of development, told me.
The trouble for DCAF began about two months after the organization published a blog post in February announcing that it had signed onto ARC–Southeast’s open letter and reaffirming its own solidarity with the people of Gaza. In the eyes of the fund’s few staffers, these statements were long overdue: A senior employee, Allison Tombros Korman, had thwarted her colleagues’ initial efforts to respond to the ongoing horrors via DCAF’s Instagram page, eventually departing over the political friction in November. But in April, Korman surprised the fund by publishing an essay detailing her grievances in the right-wing Jewish magazine Tablet, accusing DCAF of using its “resources, time and reputation to push out individuals who do not share their perspective,” and of being “mired in antisemitism.” (As evidence for these charges, the piece mostly cited disagreements over Instagram posts, including an episode in which Korman successfully blocked a post decrying the “U.S.-funded genocide” by complaining to the chair of DCAF’s board. Asked for comment, Korman wrote in an email to Jewish Currents, “I was involved in organization-wide discussions to create a process to navigate potential social media messaging that could be considered sensitive or outside our mission . . . I think it was appropriate that as the most senior staff person in the organization that I be involved in these discussions.”)
The Tablet piece arrived at a delicate time: Dingus was preparing to submit a grant-renewal proposal to an important funder. The Morningstar Foundation—the philanthropic vehicle of Susie Gelman, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune and a prominent figure in American institutional Judaism—had made $25,000 grants to DCAF in 2021 and 2022, and increased its contribution to $30,000 in 2023. When Dingus emailed Morningstar to check in, the director of programs, Adina Dubin Barkinskiy, informed her that “we were appalled” by DCAF’s blog post and its description of “the war in Gaza as genocide”—and that the foundation was pulling its support. (Officials at the Morningstar Foundation did not respond to my emailed requests for comment.) The loss of the Morningstar grant came near the beginning of a broader wave of withdrawals touched off by Korman’s essay. The JCRC of Greater Washington released a statement accusing DCAF of “nothing less than pure bigotry,” and angry emails from small donors began pouring in. In one three-week period, five or six people were canceling donations to DCAF every day. Some were monthly donors; many had given once a year; some had been giving for a decade. By August, the fund had lost more than $120,000 in annual donations, nearly equivalent to a month’s worth of abortion funding, Dingus told me. “Those are just the people that yelled at me,” she said. “There are probably people who quietly will never give again. And there are the people who will Google our name and see the charge of antisemitism and never open their wallets to us.”
“What’s going to happen is, six months from now, a year from now, we’re going to have to start turning people away, because we will be out of money.”
Dingus says that DCAF has never turned away a caller. But even before the losses of the spring, the fund had been forced to cut its monthly budget in half as the post-Dobbs flood of donations dried up. Things got worse in the summer, when two national organizations—Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Federation—reduced their subsidies for low-income abortion seekers, increasing the demand for funds like DCAF. Each week in July, DCAF hit its weekly budget cap of $34,000 by Tuesday; any callers who could wait were told to call back the following Monday. For callers whose appointments were that same week, DCAF dug into its reserves and went over budget. “We can do it right now,” Dingus told me in July. “But what’s going to happen is, six months from now, a year from now, we’re going to have to start turning people away, because we will be out of money.”
Speaking on a panel at a Jewish Funders Network convention at the Hilton Tel Aviv hotel in March—a multiday affair whose opening reception at Hostages Square and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art featured blowtorch sashimi and an appearance by the Israeli actor Yadin Gellman, who was wounded in the attacks five months earlier—Stacy Schusterman told the assembled philanthropists that her foundation was working to “rebuild” the sense of Israel’s invincibility that had been “shattered” on October 7th. Schusterman, in a white floral top, her dark curly hair worn short, spoke of a need to “step up now,” urging: “We need to not shy away from explaining Israel’s story on the Hill and with our non-Jewish friends.” At her foundation, she said, “We plan to lean into all of that.”
If Schusterman was known for its unswerving support for Israel long before October 7th—thanks in part to the controversial grant agreement language requiring funding recipients to pledge not to “question Israel’s right to exist or the legitimacy of Israel as a secure, independent, democratic Jewish state”—the past year has seen its approach adopted by a growing number of Jewish family foundations. The Lisa and Douglas Goldman Fund—based in San Francisco and overseen by the Bay Area philanthropist Douglas E. Goldman, who is a brother of Susie Gelman of Morningstar—backs a range of progressive organizations, including abortion funds and voter education groups, in addition to its support for Jewish causes. While a Goldman Fund grant agreement from 2022 reviewed by Jewish Currents includes no mention of Israel, by December 2023, Goldman had furnished the same grantee with two new conditions for funding: one that echoed Ford’s provision on “terrorism,” and another that echoed Schusterman’s on “Israel’s right to exist” and its “legitimacy” as a “secure, independent, democratic Jewish state.” A Goldman grant agreement for a different organization, dated March of this year, includes a version of the same warning against questioning Israel’s “legitimacy.” (Officials at the Goldman Fund did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
In May, the Bethesda, Maryland–based Naomi and Nehemiah Cohen Foundation—which supports birth control programs and get-out-the-vote efforts among communities of color, in addition to Jewish and Israel-focused causes—similarly introduced new provisions on “Israel’s right to exist” and on “terrorism,” informing recipients of funding that the two points would be added to all standard grant agreements “starting immediately.” The Cohen Foundation’s executive director, Alison McWilliams, told me in an email that the foundation “copied the language from the Schusterman grant agreement because the trustees thought it was well-written, and there was no need for the Cohen Foundation to reinvent the wheel.” Mirroring the source text, the two prohibitions extend to any organizations that might themselves accept grants from recipients of Cohen Foundation dollars—a condition that would require Cohen grantees to closely police their own grantees’ behavior. “We don’t share the perspective that is called for there,” one nonprofit executive director who was presented with those grant terms told me. “But even if we did, we couldn’t enforce it.” McWilliams said that the new language “reflects the long held values and principles” of the foundation.
From a legal standpoint, donors require no excuse if they want to end a relationship with a grantee; political red lines can exist even if they’re not explicitly stated. But restrictions on Israel-related speech, rendered in ornate legalese, have a powerful signaling effect, and amount to a warning to any groups thinking of critiquing the Jewish state. A funder who works with organizations serving Muslim communities told me that the Schusterman provision would likely cause “fear and nervousness” among prospective grantees, “not that someone would be antisemitic in their speech or behavior or programming, but that they would be cast as such” because of their criticism of Israel. (Lisa Eisen, the Schusterman co-president, declined to comment on the grant agreement language when I reached her by phone.)
These grantmaking policies are making the politics of Israel/Palestine an ever more important site in American philanthropy’s longstanding practice of seeking to control social movements. While Jewish family foundations may be interested in “fostering a particularistic Jewish identity” that is “anchored to Israel,” as Lila Corwin Berman, a professor of Jewish history at New York University and the author of The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex, told me, non-Jewish philanthropies have their own motivations for engaging in the same project—including a fear of political backlash. In separate conversations in June, officials at the Ford Foundation advised at least two grantees of limits on their ability to express support for Palestinians, according to two people with direct knowledge of the conversations. In one case, the sources said, a grantee was told not to include language about Palestine solidarity work in the proposals and reports it submitted to the foundation; in another, a Ford official, citing concerns about congressional scrutiny, told a grantee that Ford money must not be used to promote anything related to the BDS movement. The Ford Foundation said in an emailed statement that its grantmaking was “governed by a philosophy of engagement. Because of this, we do not provide funding for boycott or divestment campaigns of any kind, on any issue.” The statement continued: “At the Ford Foundation, we respect everyone’s right to peacefully exercise free speech and to advocate for global issues—this remains true for our grantees.”
“They are playing into the right-wing playbook, which is to repress free speech, repress academic freedom, and destroy the progressive movement.”
But the limits imposed by funders are normalizing new and intrusive forms of scrutiny. In February, the Denver-based Rose Community Foundation introduced a new practice of “reviewing the social media pages of all potential grantees dating back to October 2023 to ensure the Foundation does not inadvertently fund groups engaged in activities and rhetoric causing harm in the Jewish community,” according to a May email that a Rose official sent to Margery Goldman, a local philanthropist who holds a donor-advised fund at the foundation. Rose funds a range of social justice groups in its region and says on its website that its values of “equity,” “empathy,” and “diversity & inclusion” stem from its Jewish roots. Yet the foundation’s board of trustees, at the quarterly meeting in May, voted to block a grant that Goldman had attempted to send to a prominent social justice organization whose Instagram posts about Israel and Gaza had been deemed offensive. The eight posts flagged for review included two in support of student protesters, one about “media bias,” and another about Israeli military training for American police; a number of them used the word “genocide.” (Goldman asked me not to identify the organization.) Lindy Eichenbaum Lent, Rose’s president and CEO, told me in an emailed statement that the foundation had expanded “the already robust due diligence we do on prospective grantees” in response to October 7th and events since, adding that this was the only case this year in which Rose’s board had intervened to halt a donor-advised fund grant. In the foundation’s own direct grantmaking, Lent said, the new practice led it to reject grant applications from four organizations. “I don’t believe it was Rose’s intention, but in fact they are playing into the right-wing playbook, which is to repress free speech, repress academic freedom, and destroy the progressive movement,” Goldman told me in November. “That’s where all this leads, whether that’s their intention or not.”
Whatever abuse may await social justice organizations under the incoming Trump administration and its Republican allies in Congress, nonprofit officials I spoke with felt they’d had a taste of Trump-style bullying already. “Any foundation that is cutting off funding because of Palestine is basically behaving in a Trumpian way themselves,” said Saqib Bhatti, the executive director of the Action Center on Race and the Economy, a Chicago-based racial justice and corporate accountability organization. Many feel that the abandonment by progressive funders has left them more vulnerable to new threats from the right like the “nonprofit killer” bill. “A lot of foundations are living in this past world where they’re saying, ‘We support all these good things, but not for Palestinians,’” Bhatti told me. “Philanthropy is what funds so much of our organizing, and that means that, fundamentally, we won’t be able to win as a movement until philanthropy gets the memo and shifts accordingly, or we find another way to fund ourselves.”
Going forward, organizers may have to “rethink our relationship to philanthropy,” as N’sangou of Mass Liberation Arizona put it. “It’s distorting our purpose, and it just has
to stop.”