December 17, 1998 | Read Time: 1 minute
Some of America’s richest and best-known Jews are at the “vanguard of a revolution in Jewish philanthropy,” according to an article in Moment magazine (December).
The giving habits and plans of such figures as the moviemaker Steven Spielberg and the Wall Street wizard Michael Steinhardt demonstrate how Jewish philanthropy “is rapidly being privatized, personalized, and decentralized,” the magazine says.
For most of this century, the Moment article explains, Jewish giving was the nearly exclusive domain of the UJA Federation North America. The federation has typically supported what the magazine calls “existing mainstream agencies that help maintain the infrastructure of Jewish life.”
But the federation is no longer the only game in town. Among the new players are a rapidly growing pool of endowed funds affiliated with the federation — but largely controlled by individual donors — and a number of new private foundations established by Jewish Americans. These funds have combined assets of $20-billion, according to the magazine, and are “grabbing headlines and in many cases setting the Jewish agenda.”
This increased independence and diversity has meant less broad-based consensus in Jewish giving and, the magazine says, a decreasing share of Jewish gifts to Jewish institutions. But at the same time, the magazine says: “The most effective foundations have collectively carved out a niche as the research and development arm of Jewish philanthropy — the visionaries who benefit the larger enterprise by keeping it from stagnating and turning inward.”
