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With Israel at war, what counts as a worthy Jewish cause?
(JTA) — Moving Traditions is a small Jewish organization with an unusual name and a mission that can be hard to describe on one foot. Working through synagogues, Hebrew schools and its own programs and curricula, it helps Jewish kids navigate their teen years in healthy, safe, appropriate and socially conscious ways.
When the Hamas attacks in Israel on Oct. 7 threw the Jewish world into crisis, Moving Traditions created curricula to help teachers and teens talk about the conflict. And its CEO, Shuli Karkowsky, ordered up a “worst-case scenario” plan in case some of her reliable funders decided to hold back on their support and direct more money to Israel.
“We need to be humble and realize that we are an organization that serves North American teams. And so I don’t think we can put ourselves out there as the people who are going to be solving the Middle East crisis,” she said earlier this week.
To her relief, at a time when the Jewish philanthropic community is mobilizing around the war, her funders said they are going to “make the pie bigger”— that is, continue supporting groups like hers and expanding their giving in Israel.
As they have during previous crises in Israel, American Jews are pouring dollars into Israel to support people displaced by the war, to bolster nonprofits whose employees are headed to the front and, in a newish twist, to defend both Israel in the court of public opinion and Jews abroad who are seeing an uptick in antisemitism.
Jewish Federations of North America has raised $638 million among its network of local Jewish community chests. UJA-Federation, the largest of these, has so far allocated more than $38 million for work on the ground in Israel. Israel Bonds said it sold more than $200 million worth of bonds in the week following the Hamas attacks.
Jewish nonprofit execs celebrate this outpouring, but are quietly anxious. As priorities shift to the defense of and support for Israel, what will happen to the bottom line of the schools, social services agencies, cultural centers and other Jewish institutions that don’t have an obvious Israel portfolio?
An adjacent question is one of discretion, even tact: With many nonprofits dependent on the end-of-the-year gifts that allow donors to claim tax benefits, should they go ahead with their own fundraising appeals and perhaps attach their “asks” to the current crisis?
“What irks me particularly is an emergency campaign now when they’re not related to the crisis,” said Andres Spokoiny, the president and CEO of the Jewish Funders Network, speaking generally. “If you’re a school that is not affected by the crisis, just tell the truth that despite the crisis, you need to continue operating, and that having a strong community means that institutions and organizations like yours need to be strong and healthy.”
Spokoiny, whose organization’s “How You Can Help” Israel page lists “trusted agencies and nonprofits,” has been recommending to the private foundations and philanthropists under his organization’s umbrella that they give “above and beyond,” supporting their traditional grantees as well as the emergency campaigns for Israel. “Otherwise,” he said, “you’re robbing Peter to pay Paul.”
Hundreds gather for a pro-Israel rally in Philadelphia’s Independence Square, sponsored by the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia, Oct. 16, 2023. (Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia)
Spokoiny also knows that the pot of funds allocated for Jewish giving is not bottomless. He is hoping the current crisis serves as a “wake-up call to the many Jewish donors that give, you know, token gifts to the Jewish community and huge gifts to their alma mater or to the hospital to give more to Jewish and Israeli causes.”
Barry Finestone, president and CEO of the Jim Joseph Foundation, recommended a similar approach in a recent essay in eJewish Philanthropy. Finestone prefers “yes, and” to “above and beyond,” and he also calls on Jewish donors to divert more of their secular giving to Jewish causes.
“Yes, we absolutely need to support Israel and Israelis. We need to contribute mightily to the multitude of needs Israel has,” he writes. “But unless philanthropy steps up in the U.S. as well, there is a genuine chance that much of the organizational structure we have spent generations building will be stretched to its limits.”
Normally, the San Francisco-based Jim Josephs Foundation funds Jewish education in the United States. (70 Faces Media, JTA’s parent company, has been a grantee.) In an interview, Finestone said he wrote the article partly in response to colleagues and friends who called him in recent weeks unclear where to send their donations.
“They ran the risk of being forgotten,” he said of the Jewish organizations that don’t directly serve Israel. “And please God when this is over, and we know there’s going to be a long tail both literally and psychologically, we’re going to turn back to our camps, and to our synagogues, and to our JCCs and we’ve got to make sure that they’re there, or else the fabric of Jewish life that we’ve built over the years has the potential to crumble.”
Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute, says the outpouring for Israel has been inspiring, but also worries that the shift toward what he calls, in a Facebook post, “defensive, protective, and supportive” causes will come at the expense of “foundational” and “constructive” philanthropy.
Foundational giving, he said in an interview, is about “keeping the lights on in the synagogues and Jewish institutions that do the core work of Jewish life. Deeply unsexy.”
As an example, he points to the flood of giving that is expected in response to the pro-Palestinian and antisemitic activism on college campuses. “Jewish students feel vulnerable on college campuses, so dollars are going to go to, quote, unquote, fighting antisemitism on campus,” said Kurtzer. “But there’s another set of dollars that Hillels need right now: They have record turnout for students coming to Shabbat dinner over the past month. They’re looking for foundational dollars so they can support [that] or provide counseling services, whatever students need.”
Constructive giving, meanwhile, is about developing new ideas. “What would be the next major play for college students,” asks Kurtzer, “that can help them build resilience and knowledge and relationships and all of the stuff that might grow out of a moment of crisis like this?”
Past crises have shaped Jewish priorities for generations. In response to the Six-Day War in 1967, American Jews donated more than $100 million — close to $1 billion in today’s dollars — in a little over two weeks. Six years later, when the Yom Kippur War punctured Israel’s aura of invulnerability, American Jews contributed $700 million in emergency aid, or $6.4 billion in today’s money. Both wars also cemented Israel as a central component of American Jewish identity, politics and philanthropy.
At the time, however, Israel was still viewed as a developing country, the historian Lila Corwin Berman points out. “For quite a while, Israel has been economically a fairly well-to-do nation and hasn’t needed American Jewish dollars in the same sort of fundamental way,” said Corwin Berman, the chair of American Jewish History at Temple University. As Israel prospered and the military threats against it appeared to recede, donors’ priorities shifted to the American Jewish “intermarriage crisis,” which led to the creation of the Birthright trips for young people and a push for affordable Jewish day schooling.
UJA-Federation of New York led a rally in support of Israel and calling for the release of Israeli hostages, Manhattan, Nov. 6, 2023. (Luke Tress)
Corwin Berman acknowledged that Israelis still have genuine needs — for example, those who lost their homes and loved ones in the Oct. 7 attacks. But she notes that money going into less material needs — like the fight against antisemitism — will ultimately shape Jewish priorities, perhaps in unexpected or unwelcome ways. Some on the Jewish left have already complained that many groups fighting antisemitism have a right-wing agenda, while others worry that too many groups are fighting the same fight.
“The concern that I have about putting lots and lots of money into this fight against antisemitism is that it might develop a very, very blunt set of tools to use,” said Corwin Berman, who has written a critique of what she calls the “American Jewish Philanthropic Complex.” “I would say the tools at this point lag well behind what would be required to deal with an extraordinarily complex phenomenon.”
UJA-Federation, for example, is allocating $600,000 to responding to antisemitism on campus, normally a sizable allocation if only a fraction of the money raised for the emergency campaign. Mark Charendoff, the president of the Maimonides Fund, said the board of his grantmaking organization is also focusing on fighting antisemitism, along with what he calls the “internal refugee crisis” — Israelis displaced and traumatized by the war — and “strategic communications,” or advocating for Israel to politicians and the public.
Charendoff said the Maimonides board does not intend to cut back on any of its current grant-making, which supports education and issues-oriented programs in North America and Israel, like Hadar Institute for Jewish learning, an L.A.-based organization that encourages Jewish filmmaking and the fund’s own journal of ideas, Sapir. But that they do intend to focus on “anything that we can do to respond to the current crisis. We should be looking for those options on both sides of the ocean. And this would be over and above our current budget,” he said.
And yet he knows that pivoting to new priorities can come at a cost in attention to other needs.
“Human beings only have so much bandwidth,” he said. “And on both sides of the ocean, our staff are single-mindedly focused on the current crisis, obviously. Which means that we’re not focused on new opportunities, new ways of engaging in the elements of our portfolio that are not related to or not affected by the war.”
Karkowsky, at Moving Traditions, said her organization doesn’t intend to do significant fundraising around the emergency in Israel, but that doesn’t mean it has nothing to offer to a Jewish world in crisis.
“I do think there’s an enormous need for work with North American Jewish teens right now who feel confused and lonely,” she said. “They’re not sure what their political opinions are, or they do and they feel abandoned by their friends, or they do and they disagree really strongly with their parents who are coming back and saying, ‘How do I connect with my kid who’s saying things I really don’t agree with?’ So I do think there’s a small role for us to play as part of the work we would be doing anyway.”
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The post With Israel at war, what counts as a worthy Jewish cause? appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Bryan Singer Secretly Filmed Period Drama With Jon Voight Critical of Israel for Lebanon War: Report
Jon Voight at the opening night of the 2023 Beverly Hills Film Festival held at TCL Chinese 6 Theatres in Hollywood, California, on April 19, 2023. Photo: FS//AdMedia/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
Jewish-American filmmaker Bryan Singer has returned to the director’s chair after a long hiatus with a film starring Oscar winner Jon Voight that is set in the Middle East and critical of Israel, Variety revealed on Wednesday.
Singer secretly filmed the period drama and one source who saw the final cut, but is not involved with the production, thinks the feature is “going to be a huge hotbed of controversy” because of its attention on the Middle East. “It makes Israel look really bad and could be polarizing,” the insider told Variety.
The source said the film is set in late 1970s or early 1980s. On June 6, 1982, Israel launched the First Lebanon War against Palestinian terrorists based in southern Lebanon following the attempted assassination of Israeli Ambassador to the United Kingdom Shlomo Argov by a terrorist cell.
The “Superman Returns” director shot the new film in Greece in 2023, and it focuses on the relationship between a father and son, Variety added. Israeli filmmaker Yariv Horovoitz is also reportedly collaborating on the project. There are no details about a release date.
Voight is a longtime supporter of Israel and said in 2018 that he feels an obligation to combat antisemitism. Last year, he was critical of his daughter, actress and filmmaker Angelina Jolie, when she slammed Israel’s defensive military campaign against Hamas in Gaza following the Palestinian terrorist group’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of and massacre across southern Israel.
Singer – who was raised Jewish in suburban New Jersey – has not directed in mainstream Hollywood since he was infamously fired by 20th Century Fox from “Bohemian Rhapsody” in 2017 and replaced during shooting, after several absences during the film’s production. He was signed on to direct a remake of the action film “Red Sonja,” but was reportedly fired from the project amid allegations in 2019 of sexual misconduct involving minors, which he denied.
The director’s past credits include four films in the “X-Men” franchise, “Valkyrie,” and the Oscar-winning film “The Usual Suspects.”
Singer faced sexual misconduct allegations starting in 1997, when two teenage boys claimed the director ordered them to strip naked for a scene in his film “Apt Pupil.” The filmmaker has never faced criminal charges for the sexual misconduct allegations made against him in 1997 or in later years.
Singer has been living in Israel for several years and Variety reported in 2023 that he was looking to make a comeback into the mainstream Hollywood film industry with features set in and around Israel.
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Italian Law Professor Faces Backlash Over Viral Antisemitic Social Media Posts
An Italian law professor is facing mounting backlash after past antisemitic social media posts went viral, sparking outrage among the local Jewish community and public officials.
Professor Luca Nivarra, who teaches in the Faculty of Law at the University of Palermo in Sicily, has come under scrutiny after several of his social media posts went viral, spreading antisemitic and hateful content.
“I don’t want to meddle in matters that don’t concern me directly, but, having very few tools at our disposal to oppose the Palestinian Holocaust, a signal, however modest, could be to unfriend your Jewish ‘friends’ on Facebook, even the ‘good’ ones, who declare themselves disgusted by what the Israeli government and the IDF are doing,” Nivarra wrote in one of his posts.
“They lie, and with their lies, they help cover up the horror: it’s a small, tiny thing, but let’s start making them feel alone, face to face with the monstrosity to which they are complicit,” he continued.
On Tuesday, the university issued a public statement distancing itself from Nivarra’s antisemitic remarks. Despite mounting public outrage, Nivarra has not faced any disciplinary action yet.
Massimo Midiri, Dean of the University of Palermo, condemned such hateful rhetoric, calling it “a personal and culturally dangerous initiative, far removed from our academic principles.”
“Nivarra’s statements risk fueling the very dynamics he claims to oppose. Complex issues like the Middle East conflict require dialogue and critical engagement, not exclusion or ideological censorship,” Midiri said in a statement.
Italy’s Minister of University and Research, Anna Maria Bernini, also denounced Nivarra’s remarks, saying they “not only offend the Jewish people but also all who uphold the values of respect and civil coexistence.”
“Conflicts are overcome through dialogue, not isolation and it is only through this path that an authentic journey toward peace can be built, an objective to which Italy and the international community continue to dedicate their efforts,” the Italian diplomat wrote in a post on X.
This is not the first time Nivarra has made public antisemitic statements and spread anti-Jewish hateful rhetoric. In his previous Facebook posts, he also wrote that “there are no good Israelis” and that “Israeli society is morally rotten.”
Nivarra also compared the Israeli Defense Forces’ defensive campaign against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas to the actions of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann during the Holocaust.
“The only difference between Adolf Eichmann and the IDF is that Eichmann defended himself by saying he was following orders, while Israeli soldiers happily do what they do,” he wrote in another social media post.
Since his posts went viral, Nivarra has faced mounting criticism on social media, but he has denied any accusations of antisemitism.
“You can call me an anti-Semite when I am not one at all. There is an insurmountable distance between me and the perpetrators of these horrors,” he wrote on his Facebook page.
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‘Six Million Not Enough’: Minneapolis School Shooter Scrawled Antisemitic, Anti-Israel Messages on Guns
Law enforcement officers set up barriers after a shooting at Annunciation Church, which is also home to an elementary school, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, US, Aug. 27, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ben Brewer
The lone suspect in Wednesday’s mass shooting at a Catholic school in Minneapolis, Minnesota, scrawled antisemitic and anti-Israel messages across his weapons and allegedly shared his desire to kill “filthy Zionist Jews” in a notebook before unleashing a barrage of gunfire on students and parishioners.
Law enforcement officials identified the shooter as Robin Westman, 23, who died by suicide at the scene. According to police, Westman opened fire during morning Mass in the school’s adjoining church, killing two children (aged 8 and 10) and injuring 17 others.
Witnesses said the church erupted in chaos as stained-glass windows shattered and gunfire ripped through pews filled with children. Teachers and staff rushed to shield students, with some ushering them outside the building.
The shooting is being investigated as both a domestic terrorism case and a hate crime against Catholics, according to FBI Director Kash Patel.
However, the assailant also appeared to endorse antisemitic conspiracies and express a desire to kill Jews and Israelis.
Researchers at the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) reported they found videos believed to be from Westman showing firearms and ammunition magazines marked with the antisemitic messages. Investigators are also reviewing the now-deleted YouTube channel allegedly linked to Westman that featured disturbing videos uploaded before the attack.
“Israel must fall and “Burn Israel” were among the writings on the weapons, as seen in the video. In addition, the messages on the guns included “6 million wasn’t enough” — an apparent reference to the 6 million Jews killed during the Holocaust, and “Burn HIAS” — an apparent reference to a Jewish organization which helps settle refugees.
Westman also allegedly wrote “kill Donald Trump” on a gun magazine as well as anti-black and anti-Latino racist messaging.
The videos also included images of a notebook with writing in the Cyrillic alphabet.
“If I will carry out a racially motivated attack, it would be most likely against filthy Zionist jews,” the notebook said, according to a translation by the New York Post. Westman also allegedly wrote slogans such as “Free Palestine.”
Images of the content has been widely circulated on social media.
Robin Westman, the suspected shooter in today’s mass shooting at the Annunciation Catholic Church and School in Minneapolis, Minnesota, appears to have had a YouTube Channel named “Robin W” which has since been deleted, that contained several video consisting of guns, a manifesto… pic.twitter.com/B3JJUOIGJp
— OSINTdefender (@sentdefender) August 27, 2025
Shocking antisemitic messages spotted on the Minneapolis shooter’s gun including:
– “Israel must fall,”
– “Burn Israel”
– “6 million wasn’t enough.”
– “ Burn HIAS (originally a Jewish resettlement org for refugees)Via our colleague @RealSaavedra pic.twitter.com/NFUnkRNlDs
— StopAntisemitism (@StopAntisemites) August 27, 2025
An analysis of the shooter’s apparent manifesto by the ADL found no singular political motive. The assailant “scrawled numerous references and symbols on their weapons linked to a broad range of mass attackers, mimicking the 2019 Christchurch, 2022 Buffalo, and 2025 Antioch shooters, among others, who marked their weapons before launching their attacks,” the ADL wrote.
“The references found on the attacker’s weapons do not suggest a deep knowledge of white supremacy. Instead, the references point to a broader fixation on mass violence,” the group concluded.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, who is Jewish, spoke with raw emotion after visiting the scene. “There are no words that can capture the horror and the evil of this unspeakable act,” he said.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said the students “were met with evil and horror and death.”
“We often come to these and say these unspeakable tragedies or there’s no words for this. There shouldn’t be words for these types of incidents because they should not happen and there’s no words that are going to ease the pain of the families today,” Walz added.
The suspect was reportedly a transgender woman who changed her name from Robert to Robin in 2020. Westman’s mother worked as a secretary at Annunciation until 2021, according to news reports, and authorities are still examining whether that connection influenced the target.
The tragedy adds to a growing list of school and faith-based shootings in the United States this year. Experts warn that antisemitic conspiracy theories, spread widely online, can inspire such violent attacks.
The tragedy came a week after the ADL released a new report highlighting how extremist online spaces are fueling not only school shootings but also a broader rise in antisemitism across the US. According to the report, many websites containing violent and gruesome material have pulled young people into white supremacist propaganda and conspiracy theories, inspiring them to commit deadly attacks.