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Alex Soros, just named as father George’s successor, is a longtime donor to liberal Jewish causes

(JTA) — When George Soros gave control of his vast charity to his son, Alexander, it was clear that the new 37-year-old chairman would follow in his father’s footsteps in many ways.
Alex Soros is known to work well with George, the billionaire hedge funder, liberal philanthropist and Holocaust survivor who turns 93 next month. “We think alike,” George Soros said about his youngest son when naming him in June as his successor at the Open Society Foundations, which distributes roughly $1.5 billion per year to an array of causes.
But some departures are already evident. Alex Soros revealed one himself on the day of the handover announcement, saying, “I’m more political.” Another is less prominent but no less apparent: Alex Soros’ deep and public embrace of his Jewish identity.
George Soros, born in Hungary in 1930, was hidden as a child during the Holocaust and, as an adult, has always openly identified as Jewish — in addition to being one of the most prominent targets of right-wing antisemitism. But he is not active in any Jewish institutions, has given relatively little to Jewish nonprofits and, in 2007, wrote, “I am not a Zionist, nor am I a practicing Jew.”
Alex Soros is more vocal about his Judaism and once organized a convening to address rising antisemitism. He regularly posts pictures from his holiday celebrations, and has long been active in Jewish philanthropic causes. The first donation made by his own foundation, established in 2012, was $250,000 to Bend The Arc, a progressive Jewish group on whose board he remains today.
Alex Soros declined an interview request, as did other OSF staffers. But he has written and spoken extensively about how Judaism has shaped him, how he believes the Jewish community is developing, and how he hopes to shape Jewish philanthropy.
“Progressive causes, like the civil rights movement, are a part of the Jewish legacy in the United States,” he said in 2012. “Bend The Arc for me has a lot more to do with preserving this legacy than with anything else.”
Alex Soros’ ascendance at the Open Society Foundations was hardly a given. For many years, George Soros’ older son from his first marriage, Jonathan, was long presumed to be his heir: His middle name, Tivadar, comes from George Soros’s beloved father, and he was president of the elder Soros’ investment firm for nearly a decade. But he left after a clash with his father over hiring decisions and has launched his own investment firm, though the two reportedly remain friendly.
Alex is the older of two sons from George’s second marriage, to the Jewish historian Susan Weber. While Alex praises his father and, in a recent social media post featuring a grinning photo, called him “the greatest,” he described his upbringing as difficult to the Wall Street Journal. The elder Soros has a reputation for being controlling and for plowing through senior staff, both at his hedge fund and charitable endeavors. Alex, who grew up in New York City and a northern suburb, told the Journal he spent his childhood longing for his father’s attention.
“I was very angry at him, I felt unwanted,” he told the New York Times in 2012. “He had a very hard time communicating love, and he was never really around.”
In 1998, Alex Soros became George’s first child to have a bar mitzvah. (In addition to Jonathan, George Soros had a daughter and another son with his first wife, who was not Jewish.) He told Yediot Aharonot in 2018 that his father pulled him aside after the ceremony with some advice: “If you’re serious about being Jewish, you might want to consider immigrating to Israel,” he recalled being told. In a photo he shared with the Wall Street Journal, his father is handing him a Torah scroll as father and son wear the same kippah, black and patterned with white Stars of David.
An undated photo of George Soros handing his son Alex a Torah scroll at his bar mitzvah. (Courtesy of the Soros family)
Alex has said he grew close with his father after his mother filed for divorce in 2004, when Alex was starting out at New York University. But his trajectory toward heir apparent at first appeared uncertain, as he came into the public eye as a partier.
In 2008, the summer after his graduation, CityFile, a now-defunct New York City gossip site, mined his Facebook pages for photos and said he spent the time “chilling at dad’s house in Southampton, drinking 40s while cruising on the family boat, and making out with the babes at places like La Playa and Pink Elephant.”
Alex Soros deleted the photos and set about involving himself more intensely in his father’s charity. He traveled to the Amazon to meet with indigenous leaders and joined the board of Global Witness, a human rights group that focuses on victims of mining.
He also dove into therapy. “Growing up on the Upper East Side, going to a psychologist is like going to Hebrew school,” he told The New York Times in 2012. “It’s expected.”
That year, he launched his own eponymous foundation. His first donation was $250,000 to Bend The Arc.
Speaking to Philanthropy News Digest at the time, he made the case that his philanthropy did not mark a departure from his father’s.
“Given my dad’s history and given the values that led to the creation of OSF, it can be argued that OSF is a Jewish foundation,” he said.
“His Jewish identity has had a major impact,” he added. “I see it as formative in what he does, especially in his philanthropy, and probably my own concern with the Jewish community comes from him as well.”
As he grew his philanthropic profile, Alex Soros also followed in his mother’s footsteps, earning a doctoral degree in history. His 2018 dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley, had a title that, according to the Wall Street Journal, delighted his father: “Jewish Dionysus: Heine, Nietzsche and the Politics of Literature.”
Today, Alex Soros does not belong to a synagogue but observes Passover and the High Holidays with his mother, a source close to the family told JTA. In addition to Bend The Arc, he is on the board of the Center for Jewish History, based in New York City.
Over time, the younger Soros also built a social media presence that, rather than showing off his displays of wealth, features his Jewish identity, alongside a litany of encounters with world leaders. On Hanukkah in 2020, he posted on Instagram what he said was “one of the greatest bar mitzvah gifts I received,” a menorah made of dancing robots. He routinely posts Jewish holiday photos, usually focused on food. Passover is the Jewish holiday that is most important to him, and he hosts large meals with his mother, inviting both Jews and non-Jews. Challah, he once wrote, is his “favorite (leavened) bread.”
Alex Soros has also brought up his Judaism when posting to social media about his politics. Earlier this month, he posted a photo of himself with his arm around New York Sen. Charles Schumer, the Democratic majority leader. “With the man, many, including Robert A. Caro have called the Jewish LBJ,” he wrote, referencing President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s biographer, who is also Jewish. He also posted an encomium for Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg when she died at the onset of Rosh Hashanah in 2020, writing that according to Jewish tradition someone who dies on the holiday “is a person of great righteousness or a tzaddik.”
Simon Greer, who founded Bend the Arc, told JTA that Alex Soros’ Instagram presence is typical of his generation, and not just because younger Jews tend to live more online. George Soros was never apologetic about his Judaism, Greer said, but was typical of an older generation who tended not to speak publicly about it. Alex is of a generation that is happy to broadcast identity, Jewish and otherwise.
“Think about that generation of Jews who immigrated here and they wanted to be American. … They wanted us to believe in being Jewish, but they weren’t going to practice it the way maybe they had as kids,” he said. “And then as young adults, we were like, ‘Well wait, I love Passover. I’m happy to talk about the Exodus story.’”
Comments by Alex Soros suggest that he is attuned to fault lines within Jewish communities.
In the 2012 Philanthropy News Digest interview, he lamented what he saw as “a bit of an existential crisis happening for many American Jews” in which “many are turning to religious orthodoxy to get answers.”
He added, “While this in itself is not inherently negative, it is often coupled with more conservative political beliefs and a tribal outlook. Eventually, I think there will be a split, with the secular, universalist Jews on one side and the more Orthodox and religious on the other.”
Alex Soros has also had his Jewish outlook shaped by antisemitism, including attacks on his father. Greer said in an interview that he first met Alex when Greer and George Soros were being targeted by Glenn Beck, the right-wing provocateur who was then a Fox News host.
Alex Soros was young but already steeped in the history of antisemitism, which stemmed in part from his devotion to his father, recalled Greer, whom Alex Soros has cited as an influence.
“Beck had used the puppet-master stereotype against his dad,” Greer recalled. “Alex was well versed in the puppet-master trope. He studied antisemitism in Europe so he was totally clear that that’s from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He had no no illusions about it.”
Alex Soros, he said, convened a meeting in 2017 at Chatham House, a research institute in London, to tackle rising antisemitism.
“It was still early in the Trump administration, and Alex really saw ahead on it,” Greer said. “I think he saw the rising tide of antisemitism. It concerned him and he funded and attended a convening where we brought experts from the U.S.”
He has also said his father’s experience in the Holocaust has guided his philanthropic work, inspiring him to continue his father’s commitment to human rights advocacy and political activism.
“My father, George Soros, lost family members in the Holocaust,” he wrote in a CNN op-ed last month applauding the Biden administration’s plan to combat antisemitism. “And for him, those experiences — of being ‘the other,’ of being hated for something that he couldn’t control — helped fuel his philanthropic career, and his dedication to help others fight for a life free from fear.”
The elder Soros’s philanthropy has focused on pro-democracy efforts in the former Communist bloc and elsewhere, and has focused on Democratic politics and criminal justice reform in the United States. His critics have taken aim at his advancement of progressive politics at the local and national level, as well as at the influence he wields as one of the most prominent megadonors in the world.
Unlike his son, George Soros has rarely donated to explicitly Jewish causes, and some of his pronouncements on Jews and Israel have sparked backlash from Jewish leaders.
In 2003, George Soros told a gathering of the Jewish Funders Network that there was “a resurgence of antisemitism in Europe. The policies of the Bush administration and the [Ariel] Sharon administration [in Israel] contribute to that.” Those comments elicited outrage from some Jewish figures such as then-Anti-Defamation League head Abraham Foxman, who said Soros was “blaming the victim for all of Israel’s and the Jewish people’s ills.”
In a 2007 essay in the New York Review of Books, Soros wrote that he has “a great deal of sympathy for my fellow Jews and a deep concern for the survival of Israel.” But he also wrote of the “pervasive influence of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee” and added that the group’s conduct lent “some credence” to antisemitic claims of an “all-powerful Zionist conspiracy.” A year later, he would provide approximately $750,000 in seed funding to J Street, founded as a liberal alternative to AIPAC. Last year, he donated $1 million to J Street’s Super PAC.
Alex Soros shares his father’s opposition to right-wing politics in Israel and some of the country’s policies.
“I worry when Jews in America start to support policies in Israel which they wouldn’t support in America, which don’t allow for separation of church and state, which don’t give full rights to people who are technically living under occupation, and which don’t allow for immigration of people who aren’t Jews, or for non-Jews to become citizens,” he said in the 2012 Philanthropy News Digest interview.
In 2016, years after his role in his father’s charitable giving had intensified, hacked emails showed that the Open Society Foundations backed groups that aimed to work on “challenging Israel’s racist and anti-democratic policies.” The foundation’s Arab regional office in 2015 praised a 2007 initiative to create a binational constitution for Israel. (In his interview with Yediot, Alex Soros said he opposes the movement to boycott, divest and sanction Israel, known as BDS, and said the Open Society Foundations’ Arab office makes funding decisions autonomously.)
Two years later, in his Yediot interview, Alex Soros lacerated Netanyahu for forcing the foreign ministry to qualify its prior condemnation of a Hungarian government anti-Soros campaign that the country’s Jewish community had deemed antisemitic. (His father suggested that he speak to the Israeli newspaper after it initially asked George Soros for an interview, the paper reported.)
“I was disappointed by the Israeli prime minister’s cynical conduct, his failure to help Jews and to stand behind them,” Alex Soros said. “This isn’t Israel, this is Netanyahu. His ties with radical right-wing, antisemitic and corrupt elements contradicts Israel’s commitment as a Jewish state.”
In his recent CNN op-ed, Alex Soros criticized the current Israeli government — led again by Netanyahu — for “increasingly aggressive and hostile policies towards its Arab population, elevating extremists to cabinet rank, authorizing new settlements in the occupied West Bank and proposing dramatic new curbs on the independence of the judiciary.” He has visited the country several times, the Wall Street Journal recently reported.
Israel may be unlikely to be a centerpiece of Alex Soros’ philanthropy, but democracy is one.
In addition to being elected chairman of OSF in December, he is also president of Democracy PAC, George Soros’ powerhouse political action committee that made him the leading donor to Democrats in last year’s midterm elections. Alex is also the only family member on the committee overseeing Soros Fund Management, the family’s investment office, which is worth $25 billion.
He is already making changes at OSF. At the end of June, he announced 40% cuts to the foundation’s staff of about 500, Bloomberg News reported, in the name of “generating a nimbler organization.” He also told the Wall Street Journal that he plans to invest more heavily in political causes such as abortion or voting rights.
That’s in line with his long-standing giving. In 2012, the year he broke into philanthropy, he gave $200,000 to a Jewish super PAC responsible for the “Great Schlep,” a campaign that originated in 2008 to convince elderly voters in Florida to back Barack Obama in that year’s presidential election.
In 2016, he urged Hillary Clinton to embrace progressive policies to win the Florida Jewish vote — and in so doing offered a glimpse into his looming future as one of the world’s most influential philanthropists.
“As a community, our response to improved fortune has been to do whatever we can to cast a wider net for other Americans,” he wrote in a South Florida Sun-Sentinel op-ed. “When one looks through the history of progressive battles in the U.S. from labor to civil rights, one has seen American Jews on the front lines.”
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US Clamps Sanctions on Israel-bashing UN Rights Monitor Albanese

Francesca Albanese, UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, attends a side event during the Human Rights Council at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, March 26, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Denis Balibouse
The Trump administration has imposed sweeping sanctions against Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, citing the UN official’s lengthy record of singling out Israel for condemnation.
In a post on X, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the sanctions under a February executive order targeting those who “prompt International Criminal Court (ICC) action against U.S. and Israeli officials, companies, and executives.” He accused Albanese of waging “political and economic warfare” against both nations and asserted that “such efforts will no longer be tolerated.”
“Today I am imposing sanctions on UN Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese for her illegitimate and shameful efforts to prompt [International Criminal Court] action against U.S. and Israeli officials, companies, and executives,” Rubio announced on X/Twitter.
“Albanese’s campaign of political and economic warfare against the United States and Israel will no longer be tolerated,” declared the Trump administration’s top foreign affairs official. “We will always stand by our partners in their right to self-defense.”
Rubio concluded: “The United States will continue to take whatever actions we deem necessary to respond to lawfare and protect our sovereignty and that of our allies.”
The decision to impose sanctions on Albanese marks an escalation in the ongoing feud between the White House and the United Nations over Israel. The Trump administration has repeatedly accused the UN and Albanese of unfairly targeting Israel and mischaracterizing the Jewish state’s conduct in Gaza.
Albanese, an Italian lawyer and academic, has held the position of UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories since 2022. The position authorizes her to monitor and report on alleged “human rights violations” by Israel against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
Last week, Albanese issued a scathing report accusing companies of helping Israel maintain a so-called “genocide economy.” She called on the companies to cut off economic ties with Israel and warned that they might be guilty of “complicity” in the so-called “genocide” in Gaza.
Critics of Albanese have long accused her of exhibiting an excessive anti-Israel bias, calling into question her fairness and neutrality.
Albanese has an extensive history of using her role at the UN to denigrate Israel and seemingly rationalize Hamas’ attacks on the Jewish state.
In the months following the Palestinian terrorist group’s atrocities across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Albanese accused the Jewish state of perpetrating a “genocide” against the Palestinian people in revenge for the attacks and circulated a widely derided and heavily disputed report alleging that 186,000 people had been killed in the Gaza war as a result of Israeli actions.
The action comes as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visits Washington, where he has received a warm reception from the Trump administration. Netanyahu has been meeting with US officials to discuss next steps in the ongoing Gaza military operation.
Gideon Sa’ar, Minister of Foreign Affairs for Israel, commended the Rubio announcement with his own post on X/Twitter, exclaiming: “A clear message. Time for the UN to pay attention!”
The post US Clamps Sanctions on Israel-bashing UN Rights Monitor Albanese first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Hardball: Trump Administration Reports Harvard to Accreditor Over Antisemitism Allegations

US President Donald Trump speaks during a Cabinet meeting at the White House in Washington, DC, July 8, 2025. Photo: Kevin Lamarque via Reuters Connect.
The Trump administration escalated its showdown against Harvard University on Wednesday, reporting the institution to its accreditor for alleged civil rights violations resulting from its weak response to reports of antisemitic bullying, discrimination, and harassment following Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 massacre across southern Israel.
The US Department of Education (DOE) announced the action on Wednesday. Citing Harvard’s admitted failure to treat antisemitism as seriously as it treated others forms of hatred in the past, the DOE called on the New England Commission of Higher Education to review and, potentially, revoke its accreditation — a designation which qualifies Harvard for federal funding and attests to the quality of the educational services its provides.
“Accrediting bodies play a significant role in preserving academic integrity and a campus culture conducive to truth seeking and learning,” said Secretary of Education Linda McMahon. “Part of that is ensuring students are safe on campus and abiding by federal laws that guarantee educational opportunities to all students. By allowing anti-Semitic harassment and discrimination to persist unchecked on its campus, Harvard University has failed in its obligation to students, educators, and American taxpayers.”
The DOE, McMahon added, “expects the New England Commission of Higher Education to enforce its policies and practices, and to keep the Department fully informed of its efforts to ensure that Harvard is in compliance with federal law and accreditor standards.”
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, Harvard’s Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism has acknowledged that the university administration’s handling of campus antisemitism fell well below its obligations under both Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its own nondiscrimination policies.
In a 300-plus-page report, the task force compiled a comprehensive record of antisemitic incidents on Harvard’s campus in recent years — from the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee’s endorsement of the Oct. 7 terrorist atrocities to an anti-Zionist faculty group’s sharing an antisemitic cartoon depicting Jews as murderers of people of color. The report identified Harvard’s past refusal to afford Jews the same protections against discrimination enjoyed by other minority groups as a key source of its problem.
Coming several weeks after President Donald Trump ordered the freeze of $2.26 billion in federal research grants and contracts for Harvard, the task force report found it was “clear” that antisemitism and anti-Israel bias have been fomented, practiced, and tolerated not only at Harvard but also within academia more widely.”
The university is now suing the federal government over the funding halt.
President Trump has spoken scathingly of Harvard, calling it, for example, an “Anti-Semitic, Far Left Institute … with students being accepted from all over the world that want to rip our Country apart” in an April post to his Truth Social platform.
In recent weeks, however, both Trump and McMahon had commended Harvard’s constructive response in negotiations over reforms the administration has asked it to implement as a precondition for restoring federal funds. The requested reforms include hiring more conservative faculty, shuttering diversity, equity, and inclusion [DEI] programs, and slashing the size of administrative offices tangential to the university’s central educational mission.
The administration has since changed its tone in the wake of a report by The Harvard Crimson that interim Harvard President Alan Garber has said “behind closed doors” that he has no intention of doing anything that would make Harvard more palatable to conservatives.
Earlier this month, the Trump administration’s Joint Task Force to Combat Antisemitism issued Harvard a formal “notice of violation” of civil rights law. Charging that Harvard willfully exposed Jewish students to a flood of racist and antisemitic abuse both in and outside of the classroom, it threatened to strip whatever remains of Harvard’s federal funding.
“Failure to institute adequate changes immediately will result in the loss of all federal financial resources and continue to affect Harvard’s relationship with the federal government,” wrote the federal officials comprising the multiagency Task Force. “Harvard may of course continue to operate free of federal privileges, and perhaps such an opportunity will spur a commitment to excellence that will help Harvard thrive once again.”
In Wednesday’s announcement, US Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Harvard’s conduct “forfeits the legitimacy that accreditation is designed to uphold.”
“HHS and Department of Education will actively hold Harvard accountable through sustained oversight until it restores public trust and ensures a campus free of discrimination,” he said.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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IDF Strikes Hezbollah Sites in South Lebanon as Terror Group Pushes to Rebuild Amid US Disarmament Talks

IDF operating in southern Lebanon. Photo: IDF Spokesperson
Israeli forces uncovered and destroyed Hezbollah weapons caches in southern Lebanon on Wednesday, as a new report indicated that despite ongoing U.S.-led efforts to secure a disarmament deal, the Iran-backed group is making repeated, largely concealed attempts to rebuild its military presence in the area.
Troops carried out several operations targeting Hezbollah infrastructure in southern Lebanon on Wednesday morning, destroying weapons depots, explosives and multibarrel launchers concealed in forested terrain, the IDF said, in violation of the November ceasefire, which requires Hezbollah to withdraw its forces 20 miles from the Israeli border.
A new report released this week by the Alma Research and Education Center found that Hezbollah is focused on rebuilding in three areas: operational deployment, weapons acquisition, and financial recovery.
“Hezbollah didn’t give up its resistance narrative and motivation,” Alma’s director, Lt. Col. (Res.) Sarit Zehavi, told The Algemeiner.
“It wants to rebuild its capabilities and infrastructures, whether it’s the villages that will be used as human shields or the military infrastructure in South Lebanon and in Lebanon in general.”
According to Zehavi, Hezbollah is attempting to return Radwan fighters to positions south of the Litani River as part of a wider plan to restore its elite forces to operational readiness. The IDF on Monday killed Radwan commander Ali Abd al-Hassan Haidar in a targeted strike. The action came hours after US Special Envoy for Syria Thomas Barrack met with Lebanese President Joseph Aoun, Prime Minister Nawaf Salam and Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri in Beirut to discuss a long-term deal that would include an Israeli withdrawal and complete disarmament of Hezbollah.
Barrack described the Lebanese response to the proposal as positive. Later, he issued a blunt warning to Hezbollah in response to a vow by the terror group’s leader, Naim Qassem, not to lay down its arms. “If they mess with us anywhere in the world, they will have a serious problem with us,” Barrack said in an interview with Lebanese news network LBCI. “They don’t want that.”
Zehavi said it was premature to predict the outcome of the diplomatic efforts. She warned that the challenge of disarming Hezbollah remains enormous and emphasized that the Lebanese Armed Forces have not demonstrated the capability or willingness to confront the group.
“It’s too soon to be optimistic or pessimistic,” she said, noting that no firm commitments have emerged from the Beirut talks.
Hezbollah’s efforts to smuggle and manufacture weapons have been complicated by both Israeli strikes and the regional realignment over recent months. While Israeli strikes have disrupted many supply routes, according to Zehavi, Syrian authorities have intercepted far more Hezbollah-bound weapons than the Lebanese Army, which claims to have uncovered 500 arms caches but has provided no evidence.
The financial front marks the third aspect of Hezbollah’s rebuilding effort. Last week, the group halted cash payments to Shiite civilians whose homes were damaged in the war, citing liquidity problems. Zehavi attributed the shortfall to disruptions in Iran’s funding networks — an outcome of the 12-day war against the regime in Tehran — and said the constraints would likely hamper Hezbollah’s ability to compensate its base and sustain operations.
“I hope they will continue to have problems with the cash flow, that way it will be very difficult for them to recover,” she said.
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