Givers, Doers, & Thinkers—A Podcast on Philanthropy and Civil Society
Givers, Doers, and Thinkers introduces listeners to the fascinating people and important ideas at the heart of American civil society. We speak with philanthropists, foundation leaders, reformers, social entrepreneurs, nonprofit executives, religious believers, historians, sociologists, philosophers, journalists, and anyone else who will help us understand contemporary civil society’s achievements and failures. We also sprinkle in practical advice for nonprofit leaders and fundraisers. This is the podcast for anyone interested in that vital space where philanthropy and civil society intersect.
Givers, Doers, & Thinkers—A Podcast on Philanthropy and Civil Society
Les Lenkowsky & the Jewish philanthropic tradition in America
This week on Givers, Doers, & Thinkers, Jeremy is joined by one of America’s foremost thinkers on philanthropy, Indiana University’s Les Lenkowsky, about the Jewish philanthropic tradition in America. They highlight, in particular, Julius Rosenwald, who funded over 5,000 schools for African Americans in the Deep South in the first half of the 20th century. They also discuss the impact of the Trump administration on contemporary philanthropy and touch on the troubling rise of anti-Semitism.
Center for Civil Society's YouTube Channel
This week on Givers, doers and Thinkers, we talk to one of America's foremost thinkers on philanthropy, indiana University's Les Lankowski, about the Jewish philanthropic tradition in America. We highlight in particular Julius Rosenwald, who funded over 5,000 schools for African Americans in the Deep South in the first half of the 20th century. Les also discusses the impact of the Trump administration on contemporary philanthropy and we touch on the troubling rise of anti-Semitism. Let's go Welcome to Givers, doers and Thinkers, a podcast on philanthropy and civil society. My name is Jeremy Beer.
Speaker 1:I'm your host, honored to have you with us and very honored to have with me today as our guest Dr Les Lankowski. How are you doing, les? Hello, I'm fine, thank you. We are going to be talking about the Jewish philanthropic tradition in America and specifically an especially interesting representative of that tradition in Julius Rosenwald. Before we get going, let me tell people a bit about who you are, although this is your second time on this podcast and I appreciate you coming on. Les is professor of practice in the Paul H O'Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University, my alma mater. We used to call it SPIA. Do they still call it SPIA?
Speaker 2:I think we have. We somehow combined them, so it's very long.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it is it's too long a name but it works and a member of the philanthropic studies faculty of the IU Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, which, of course, is the leading such academic department or school in the country. Les is a political scientist by training PhD from Harvard, also served as the president of nonprofits in the past, including the Hudson Institute, and in government as the CEO of the Corporation for National and Community Service under President George W Bush from 2001 to 2004. So, pretty much correct. That's got it. I know there's more, but try to keep these things reasonably simple. Ray, happy to have you with us.
Speaker 1:We're going to talk about Julius Rosenwald, what he did, why he was important. Let's go back to the founding era first, because the theme of this season of the podcast is the American semi -quincentennial I think I'm saying that correctly America's 250th birthday or anniversary. So because that's a theme here, let's just go back first before we get to Julius Rosenwald. What was the position or place of American Jews within American society around 1776? And what kind of interaction did Jewish communities have with key figures in the founding generation?
Speaker 2:There were not a lot of Jews here, but I think the general atmosphere of toleration in many, though not all, of the colonies proved to be a welcoming one for Jews. A Jewish financier named Chaim Solomon helped finance the Revolutionary War armies. Shortly after he became president, george Washington wrote a famous letter to the Truro Synagogue in Rhode Island welcoming Jews and pledging that this would be a country which they'd be able to pray and sit under their own I believe it was a fig tree peacefully. So there was a general recognition of tolerance. On the other hand, you know it was also true that there were elements of discrimination in practice against Jews, say, admission to higher education, for one. There were quotas, limits to that, perhaps certain businesses, but they were certainly less than those that Jews had encountered in the old world.
Speaker 1:Fewer pogroms per year.
Speaker 2:Oh, absolutely, in fact, a very different attitude here. One of my favorite stories is when Ulysses S Grant was president in the latter part of the 19th century. There was a pogrom, I believe it is, in what is now Romania or Moldova, and Grant not only denounced it, but he nominated as his ambassador to that country a Jewish American. This was the spirit, not consistently, of course, but there was certainly a lot of that.
Speaker 1:What were the great periods of Jewish immigration into the US prior to the 20th century?
Speaker 2:There was a major Jewish immigration in the middle part of the 1800s, mostly coming from Germany. There were quite a bit of political ferment in Germany at the time. Right, a lot of Jews left the country. 1948 and all that, yeah, exactly. And then again, at the end of the 19th and the early 20th century, we saw a major influx of Jews in the United States, this time from Eastern Europe, russia, poland and so on. That was probably a much larger group.
Speaker 2:Just like we would see with Catholic philanthropy, as you get these huge influxes of Irish and Italian immigrants and others, which we would regard as mutual societies today in New York City in the early 20th century, and found hundreds of them, often among new Jewish immigrants, often organized by the parts of Europe from which they came, and these were societies that enabled these new immigrants to learn how to become Americans. They would typically begin with the Pledge of Allegiance and so on. They also provided some useful functions, such as maintaining cemeteries. My family, actually there is a family plot in a cemetery on Long Island that dates back to this period, and regularly I send a small amount of money to a person I've never met but is a distant relative whose job it is to collect the money and send it to the people who maintain the cemetery.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we forget that burial was one of the big needs that mutual aid societies rose to meet, wasn't it?
Speaker 2:Yes, indeed, of course there were lots of synagogues in all parts of the country. We typically think of the Jewish immigration into the Northeast, but in fact it spread widely. Julius Rosenwald, whom we'll be discussing later, his family made it to Illinois. Others went into the South. A lot of them were merchants and some of the famous early marketing names were Jewish families that had immigrated and moved elsewhere, and where they went they founded communal institutions. In addition to cemeteries, of course, there would be synagogues, hospitals or other kinds of health clinics, not so much schools as we saw among Catholics. For example, there was a Jewish day school movement. It was pretty small until fairly recently.
Speaker 1:The communal institutions that were founded and funded these communal institutions? Were they mainly to serve the Jewish community or do they have more of an external focus?
Speaker 2:They were mainly to serve the Jewish community. So as Jews became more prosperous in their community they would join other groups that were broader the Rotary, kiwanis and so on. Obviously, public schools provided a very important nexus for communication with the wider community. Also, again, one shouldn't minimize the amount of discrimination that went on. I still remember I went to high school in the 1950s and I was invited to join a club, or the possibility of joining a club arose, and it was explained to me by my parents that this was a club for Christians, not for Jews. Yeah, interesting, but Jews had their own clubs and their own institutions.
Speaker 1:The experience of discrimination. That's a good segue into talking about Julius Rosenwald. So Rosenwald was born in 1862. Yeah, is he born in Chicago?
Speaker 2:I believe it was Springfield Illinois. In fact the house in which he grew up is now part of the Abraham Lincoln Homestead. It's one of the buildings on that homestead in Springfield Illinois.
Speaker 1:How does he rise to become an executive at Sears Roebuck? Yeah, for those who don't know, that's what he did.
Speaker 2:It's a fascinating story that really touches on what we were just talking about. Mr Rosenwald's parents were tailors and they ran a clothing store in Springfield, illinois, and Julius was headed into the business In Yiddish we call it the shmata business and he was headed into it and as part of his education he took a trip to New York to learn about the business as well as finance and so on, and he wound up living in a boarding house. He's a young man now, probably late teens, early 20s lives in a boarding house where among's a young man now probably late teens, early twenties lives in a boarding house where among the other residents there were people named Morgenthau and Goldman, as in Goldman Sachs that was the Goldman. So in this little network I'm sure this would have been a boarding house for young Jewish men. They got to know each other well. He goes back into the business eventually is the chief executive, moves up to Chicago. A business there and got a reputation in Chicago.
Speaker 2:Sears what we knew as Sears Roebuck started in the late 19th century and was modestly successful but did have its problems. And Rosenwald moved over to Sears Roebuck as, I believe, the marketing executive for it. Sears in many ways was the Amazon of its day. If you think of it that way, one of the principal marketing efforts was a catalog that would go to houses, families, all over the United States and particularly in the Midwest. You could buy anything you needed from this catalog, including a prefabricated home that you could then put up.
Speaker 2:Eventually, opportunities arose, largely because of some business problems the company had and I think this was the first decade of the 20th century, maybe the last of the 19th and Mr Rosenwald used his connections with a young Goldman to develop an initial private offering. This was the first one that the company we now know as Goldman Sachs ever did Wow, and he used it to buy out by a controlling share in the company and became its chief executive and used his marketing skills as well, as he was very good on what today we would call HR personnel. He had a real feel for how do you motivate employees, get the best performance out of them and so on, and he used all those skills to build Sears Roebuck into a colossus as well as create a substantial fortune for himself.
Speaker 1:Had to be one of the biggest companies in America at this time we're talking about. Probably was at that time. Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 2:A lot depends how you count. The Rockefeller Oil Trusts Okay, and maybe the Ford Motor Company Right, but there's no question at all that Rosenwald was among the giants of commerce in that time. There are any number of pictures of banquets and so on which you'll see people like Rockefeller and Ford and Rosenwald Carnegie and those guys.
Speaker 1:Did he have the personal wealth of those, the Robert Barron types? Was it that big or is it really a tier or two down?
Speaker 2:It probably was a tier or two down, partly because he would continue to give it away. One of the key characteristics of Mr Rosenwald's philanthropy, whose roots lie in the Jewish religious obligation to repair the world as it's called he would constantly be engaged in philanthropic projects.
Speaker 2:So while he made a lot of money, he also gave a lot of it away. In the 1920s, in fact, he wrote two famous essays I believe for Harper's Magazine, believe for Harper's Magazine making the case for what we call today giving while living and limiting the lifetime of your foundations. Now, this was not a new idea. In fact, andrew Carnegie, in the Gospel of Wealth, also said that wealthy people should give away their money in their lifetimes. Carnegie wrote the man who dies with his wealth intact dies in disgrace.
Speaker 2:But Carnegie himself never managed to do it, whether because he didn't try hard enough or because his wealth just kept growing, and so at a came a point around 1910 where he transferred everything into a foundation, which we know today is the Carnegie Corporation. Rosenwald really had the same idea and articulated it very well, as not only an obligation to give in one's lifetime, but he also felt that foundations that were set up as permanent endowments were likely to become too bureaucratic. This was not a political argument, as far as we know.
Speaker 2:Rosenwald was a Republican businessman of his era, very much a centrist, a Midwestern Republican, but that didn't really enter into his philanthropy. Republican, but that didn't really enter into his philanthropy. He felt that if a foundation is set up to live forever, the people running it, especially after the initial donor, would be spending too much time worrying about preserving the endowment, avoiding taking risks and so on. Employment, avoiding taking risks and so on. So basically his argument was for good philanthropy, you need to have a limited lifetime give while living, and that's what he did initially. A lot of his giving went to jewish communal causes, particularly in chicago, cultural centers and so forth but then he starts giving to black yMCA's.
Speaker 1:Is this sort of his first foray into?
Speaker 2:Yeah, this is always a little bit murky, but I think he attended a synagogue in Chicago whose rabbi knew Booker T Washington. Okay, and so connected the two. Rabbi was a very famous rabbi in the United States at the time, connected the two and Rosenwald started supporting Washington's school, tuskegee Institute in the South and others like it. The Washington's thrust was really for what today we would call vocational and technical training for people who, after all, were the children of free slaves. At some point, though, rosenwald asked Washington what else could he do? Remember, rosenwald's an entrepreneur and, like most entrepreneurs, he's looking for the next thing, and Washington basically tells him I'm summarizing. There's an excellent book by a woman who is married to a Rosenwald descendant on the schools, stephanie Deutsch, called you need a schoolhouse and I was not going to show very well, yeah, but I was going to ask you this question anyway, though, so I'm glad we're calling it out.
Speaker 1:So you need a schoolhouse. That's a good book on this, right.
Speaker 2:You need a schoolhouse, by Stephanie Deutsch. And what Washington told Rosenwald was we're in the in. In the South and the States below the Mason Dixon line, schools were still segregated, which meant for African-Americans and for especially rural ones the quality wasn't very good. So in 1910, Rosenwald began a program that resulted in the building of 5,000 schools for African-Americans in the South. You might think of them as early versions of charter schools. They were public schools. In fact, Rosenwald also gave money to the various state education departments in the South to provide for the oversight of these schools, but they were run. They were built, actually, and run by the communities themselves. They were community schools.
Speaker 2:And they had to help come up with the money for these schools too, right, yes, they did and they had to come up with the money, but also a lot of sweat equity. There were buildings to bring in teachers. We're talking about the poorest region in the country and the poorest parts of that region needed housing for schools. Many of them were elementary schools. Some were also junior high schools or junior senior high schools combined. The school, for example, from which the young people left to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas in the 1950s was a Rosenwald Junior High School.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I would assume that, by definition, most of these schools are fairly small because of yes, they're very small. That's why there have to be 5,000 of them because of transportation difficulties and everything.
Speaker 2:They're basic one-room schoolhouses, yeah, and so you had multiple grades in the room and so on, but it was a great improvement over what otherwise would have been available. Wise would have been available. In fact. We estimate I believe it was something like a third of the children being educated at the elementary school in the deep South over the period 1910 through the 1930s were educated in Rosenwald schools. Wow, an enormous number.
Speaker 1:Was Rosenwald. Besides the schools themselves and maybe some. I don't know if any money did go from the state boards of education, I guess for oversight and maintenance and so forth were there other large philanthropists that got in on this? There was.
Speaker 2:There was a branch of the Rockefeller Foundation, the Laura Spellman Rockefeller Foundation, that was involved, and several others. This was a big interest of a number of philanthropies in the first third of the 20th century. In fact, what happened was by the middle of the 20th century. They did what foundations do by the end of the first or during the depression and commissioned a big study of what we've accomplished. What should we do next? That study eventually turned out to be an important work in the development of the civil rights movement. A book called An American Dilemma by Gunnar Myrdal.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's what informed that book that is exactly what did.
Speaker 2:The foundations wanted to take stock of where they were. It was led by the Carnegie Foundation at this point To finish the Rosenwald story, by the way. So he does this over a 20 year period and unfortunately he passes away in 1932. The foundation is set to live for a generation after his death. It was called the Rosenwald Fund, and so there was a staff headquartered in Memphis, tennessee, and they continued with the schools, but they also established another program that had enormous effect. It was the Rosenwald Fellowship Program, and what it did was identify African-American professionals of great talent and essentially give them fellowship. These were people already into their careers but needed a boost.
Speaker 2:Old-fashioned patronage it was, but it was also a talent search. There was a lot of talk at the time of finding the talented 10th the talented 10th yep, and that's what the Rosenwald Fund did, and they were very successful. Among the people they selected was the singer Marian Anderson, the diplomat Ralph Bunche, and all sorts of scientists and others who went on to great distinctions in their career. Marian Anderson, for example, used her fellowship to go to France to continue her vocal training.
Speaker 1:Did I read too, that Langston Hughes and James Baldwin were also recipients? It's quite possible I couldn't even begin. There were several of them. I think I read that they had some sort of connection with Rosenwald support. I think I read that they had some sort of connection with Rosenwald support.
Speaker 2:The fund eventually dissolves, as was Rosenwald's intention right after the Second World War. In effect, there's still a number of Rosenwald-related foundations, the different branches of the family, but the main one, the Rosenwald Fund, does dissolve as intended.
Speaker 1:So it's hard to imagine more impactful I hate that word, I can't barely just use that word but a strategy that had more effectiveness than what Rosenwald did. We're talking about something that leads right up to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. It raises the groundwork, I think everybody agrees.
Speaker 2:In fact, one of the young men who went to a Rosenwald school turned out to be John Lewis, the Civil Rights leader.
Speaker 1:And Maya Angelou too, for that matter. Maya Angelou.
Speaker 2:You could just trace all sorts of people with ties back to those schools.
Speaker 1:If you're educating one third of the African-American kids in the South, you're going yeah, there's going to be a lot of famous people who went through those schools. But my point in saying this was going to be here. You have this very effective strategy of the schools and the fellowships here. You have this very effective strategy of the schools and the fellowships and then it really lays the groundwork for the civil rights movement. All from a centrist midwestern kind of republican businessman type. Exactly curious, it wasn't. He didn't have a socially radical point of view, as far as we know not.
Speaker 2:As far as I know, he was basically your midern business. He was always and I think this is partly out of his religious upbringing care for the poor and the needy was always very central. His experience as a Jew recognizing that discrimination is something you have to work to overcome, over, overcome, and then just a vision, which was actually widely shared at the time, of what united states should be like, where people have opportunities.
Speaker 1:We were really believed quite strongly in equal opportunity and this was a way that he could do something directly to further it a sense I guess you could look at the, the triumph of Rosenwald, as the triumph of Booker T Washington and his particular philosophy for how the African-American community was going to be raised up and or raise itself up socially to something more looking more like equality. But is that fair to say? I?
Speaker 2:think that's true. Washington, of course, has become more controversial now than he was when he lived, but it certainly does testify to the importance of Washington's philosophy, though it really should be noted that in the context of his time, his philosophy was by no means unique number one. Also, Rosenwald was involved in supporting other kinds of efforts for civil rights. The NAACP, for example, is created during this period, and Rosenwald was among the supporters. Was among the supporters. He did recognize that the obstacles were not only those of lack of education and training, but laws as well. This too, this was something the Jewish community generally recognized.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so talk about the National Park Campaign. How did this?
Speaker 2:come about. I've been a member for several years of an organization whose mission is to create a national historic park in honor of Julius Rosenwald and the Rosenwald schools. The genesis of this park really came about because it turns out there are no parks, nothing, no national parks, historic sites that commemorate the work of a philanthropist as important as philanthropy is in our country park or historic site that commemorates the work of a Jewish American and nothing that commemorates the importance of the partnership between the two groups. And it was that last point. We all know that the last years have been very difficult in terms of A variety of things we don't need to rehearse, but the idea was we need something that tells a positive story about the role of philanthropy in American life, of Jewish-American and African-American partnerships and so on.
Speaker 2:So this began several years ago to create a National Historic Site to be administered by the National Park Service as a permanent reminder of this. That's what national historic sites do they serve as permanent reminders. The site itself is meant to consist of a museum or visitor's center in Chicago that will talk about Rosenwald's work and the schools. And then there are maybe we don't even have an exact number of the 5,000 schools that were created we think about three dozen at least are still existing in some shape or form, and so the historic site would provide for the National Park Service to take over perhaps up to six of those schools provide, upgrade them as necessary, maintain them and then open them to the public with docents and so on, so you can visit them. And these schools are in various parts of the country Maryland, south Carolina, arkansas, and so on. So that's the idea for the historic site. So it's not one place, but you might call it a virtual historic site.
Speaker 1:It's all part of the same National Historic Park. They would be right.
Speaker 2:Yes, exactly different, and so it's meant to be a memorial, but also teaching.
Speaker 1:What is the level of support for this, especially in the south? Do you have the painful memory problem? Yeah, this is so far so good.
Speaker 2:so where the project stands in, the first step in the process is to have the National Park Service do what you might call a feasibility study of this idea of work, and to do that you need a bill that directs the Park Service to do it, and that bill was passed in December of 2020 with bipartisan support on the Senate side. Senator Durbin of Illinois took the lead, but the co-sponsor was Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee. There's also bipartisan support on the House side, and then it goes to the White House, since a bill does not become law unless a president signs it, and President Trump did sign it. He understood the importance of this, why it was important to do this. Feasibility study involved public hearings and all sorts of stuff, and recommended creation of the historic site, as has the Department of the Interior. So it was awaiting further action in Congress but, of course, in 2024, but that was not to be done. But that was not to be done.
Speaker 2:So we are about to see the introduction of a new bill in the current Congress. We know Senator Durbin is prepared to be a co-sponsor and we're talking to a variety of Republican senators at this point about co-sponsoring Similarly on the House side am confident. Uh, it will be bipartisan again. There are some cost implications, though. A lot of the money for the buildings and so on will have to be raised privately is that typical for how these things work that is how they work these days.
Speaker 2:the park service basically is a standard setting operation, provides the docents and things like that, but the actual facilities, collection of materials and so on usually are financed privately. On the cusp of actually seeing a piece of legislation to create the park or the historic park is re-gearing itself to be a kind of friends of group that will raise the funds and oversee the collections.
Speaker 1:I would think there would be pretty widespread interest in this for the reasons you mentioned, a sort of celebration of what can be accomplished with private philanthropy, certainly a celebration of something that's just good, a social good that was brought about through private philanthropy. Is that your expectation too, that there's going to be a lot of support?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we have a number of people besides me with backgrounds in philanthropy on the governing board of the campaign and we don't really think that fundraising is going to be a major problem. Now. We haven't really started, but all of us have lots of experience and, I think, have a good idea that this is a very doable fundraising task.
Speaker 1:And people want to know more about this.
Speaker 2:I think it's. Is it Rosenwaldparkorg? I believe?
Speaker 1:that's our website. I double check myself here, yep, so you can go there. There's actually a lot, lots and lots of historical stuff.
Speaker 2:You'll see some of the schools that'll be included in the park. There's also an excellent video that we commissioned like you normally do to promote something, but it really is wonderful and emphasizes the theme of working together to improve the nation, which we so badly need today.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and a great, as I say, we talk about America 250, a great, historical, positive, historical story to tell an important one. So, yeah, I wish you luck with it Now. While I have you, though, we're going to get off Rosenwald here for a little bit.
Speaker 1:Switch, switch, okay, break. I have you here and you're a frequent and incisive commentator on philanthropy and politics. What do you think? Or I should say, we're recording this, it's February 21, 2025. What do you think the new administration if, at a whirlwind, five weeks of the new six weeks of the administration, what do you expect the impact to be on philanthropy and nonprofits.
Speaker 2:As you say, we're only one month in. We live under what I call the tyranny of the hundred days, which is all presidential terms. Are supposed to do things in a hundred days and they rush to do them, create a lot of confusion and chaos and philanthropic world about what the administration is doing. For example, its actions related to USAID actually affect lots of nonprofits, including religious charities that do a good deal of contracting for AID. So I'm hearing a lot of that. I've spoken to lots of people in the philanthropic world. The things to keep in mind, besides the fact that we're only one month in number one the actual direct actions the administration has taken need to be looked at. Richard Nixon's attorney general, john Mitchell, once said don't look at what we say, look at what we do, and it's sometimes hard. The rhetoric, I know, is very difficult, but it's important to look at what the administration is doing.
Speaker 2:Number one a memorandum issued on heads of federal agencies that work with nonprofits. It consisted of two paragraphs. One was a lot of bluster. I would have preferred it didn't, but then. But there it was. The second, though, was the operative paragraph, which basically instructed the agencies to review their rules, their guidelines, procedures to make sure they're consistent with administration policy. That's standard operating procedure. I did it in Bush 43 when I headed the Corporation for National Community Service. So we really have to look carefully at what is being done. A lot of concern about the DEI rules. Again, there's a lot of symbolism here. I don't want to underestimate the importance of symbolism, but when you look at it, most of what the administration is doing is going back to the Supreme Court decision and telling grantees and contractors to comply with it. So that's number one.
Speaker 2:Number two Congress has yet to weigh in. We're going to start to see now what happens. Perfect example A lot of nonprofits are concerned by an effort to reduce the amount allowed for overhead expenses by the National Institutes of Health to 15 percent. Right now, every institution negotiates an overhead rate which could be as high as 60 percent or so, could be as high as 60% or so. The Trump administration has proposed a flat 15% rate, pointing out, not incorrectly, that this is still higher than private donors often allow.
Speaker 2:This is not a new idea. The first Trump administration tried exactly the same idea. What happened? It was rebuffed by Congress. The appropriations bills made it quite clear Can't do this, and it was repeated many years. We'll have to see what happens and I'm not drawing any conclusion about merits here. Yeah, I'm just saying that the process has just begun Already. I know Senator Britt of Alabama raised questions about this cut, so this is an issue and of course it'll affect University of Alabama and other institutions in her state. This is a big issue. It could account for a lot of savings, but that the Trump administration has taken a step doesn't mean it will be the final word. We'll see where Congress weighs in what I've told groups.
Speaker 2:I did a briefing for a group in philanthropy. I said difficult as it is. I did a briefing for a group in philanthropy. I said difficult as it is. Now is the time to recall the famous World War II motto from Great Britain keep calm and carry on. Non-profit sector should just keep calm, keep doing what it does, including advocate for points of view that it feels are not being properly considered. I think there are going to be a lot of those with regard to international development. But don't panic. We have a process here. We have to go through it. Obviously, president Trump, elon Musk, jd Vance are very articulate in expressing their views, and that will undoubtedly rub people the wrong way. There are lots of people, particularly probationary employees, who are being let go from the federal government. This is a big mistake. Creating a climate of fear and anxiety is not a way in any organization to get good performance and I think sooner or later the Trump administration will recognize this To some extent, already had to roll back some of these cuts it moving target.
Speaker 1:Yeah, after October 7th and everything that's happened after that, both abroad and domestically, with protests and universities and so forth, I would get a call from reporters several times, well, every couple of months, like, hey, what do you think the outcome of all this will be for philanthropy? What's going to change? What is changing? And it wasn't really my area, I didn't know enough about that, but what have you seen with Jewish philanthropy perhaps in particular, maybe philanthropy more broadly, in light of October 7th, because it seems to me there's been a big light bulb moment in the last, whatever now 18 months, 16 months.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that's right. There's going to be an important new book coming out in July by a man named Jack Wertheimer who is the guru on Jewish philanthropy, and I've read a long article drawn from the book and his findings are we've heard a lot about Jewish donors withdrawing money from universities where there have been protests. That has happened, but it's not the most important event. The most important event has been a renewal of support for Jewish communal organization. This has been a major issue why there has, in our country certainly, and other countries, been a lot of assimilation and when, say, a Jewish woman or man marries a non-Jewish man or woman, chances are funding of Jewish institutions will decline. But October 7th has reminded everybody about their importance and so we are seeing that Now. How long that will last is an important issue, important question. The other side of this is there are there's no question of all at all and well-documented an increase in anti-Semitism. Jewish students I just did an event here with our Jewish students are concerned about being too identifiably Jewish. This is all unfortunate. We need good leadership here.
Speaker 2:At Indiana University we had an encampment last spring. The president brought the state police in immediately. President brought the state police in immediately. I'd like to see more leadership like that from people who had institutions of higher education, but also other kinds of institutions. It would be very good. There's also, by the way, a growing amount of interest in Jewish Christian Hindu. Jewish Christian Hindu. Interestingly, collaboration. We've worked with groups in the Christian community that want to do something about rising anti-Semitism. Same with Hindus Interesting, so we may see lots developing Hindus.
Speaker 1:I didn't know about Catholics and Christians. I did through an organization called the Filos Project.
Speaker 2:Yes, that's exactly the one we've been working with.
Speaker 1:Yeah, on the Christian side to highlight and expose and address this to me just absolutely bonkers. Insane rise in anti-Semitism, not just on the fringy or highly progressive left but also on the right. Maybe it'd be good in the end too.
Speaker 2:It certainly is very good for Jewish students to know that they are not alone.
Speaker 1:Telling the, as we said, the very inspiring, positive story of Julius Rosenwald and what he accomplished maybe is one way to do that. Thanks, les, for what you're doing on that project and for joining us here today.
Speaker 2:My pleasure. Thank you very much, Jeremy.
Speaker 1:Appreciate you as always. Thanks, my friend. Hey, thanks for joining us for today's podcast. If you enjoyed it, we invite you to subscribe and or rate and or review us on YouTube, apple, spotify or wherever you listen to our podcasts. Thanks a lot.