William F. Buckley once observed that any group that wasn’t explicitly conservative would inevitably move left over time. A corollary seems true of Jewish foundations as well, as Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List-funded Righteous Persons Foundation is now funding anti-Israel organizations.
That the foundation established by Stephen Spielberg using funds from his Holocaust drama, “Schindler’s List,” has become a cash well for progressive groups that vilify Israel is a shonda. The charity was born from Mr. Spielberg’s conviction that the movie’s profits — “blood money” he called them — belonged not to him but to the people whose murder he chronicled on film. He committed $150 million to the cause.
The so-called Righteous Persons Foundation started out well enough. It adopted a mission “to recover and make accessible Jewish stories from the past, and to help build a contemporary Jewish community predicated on meaning, joy, and a responsibility to help repair our world.” It funneled money to supporting Holocaust survivors, preserving testimony, and ensuring the lessons of the Nazi’s genocide of the Jews would not be forgotten.
Yet, as our Novi Zhukovsky reports, its financing of such worthy groups began to dwindle — then eventually ran dry. The last donation to the United States Holocaust Museum came in 2019. The same year marked its final gift to a legal fund, Bet Tzedek, that provides pro bono legal services to Holocaust survivors. Since 2020, the foundation has funneled a modest $125,000 to Holocaust projects, according to calculations by Front Page magazine.
Where did the money go instead? To groups like T’ruah. It identifies itself as a rabbinic human rights organization that has received some $650,000 from the foundation to organize street blockades in protest of the war in Gaza and to accuse Israel of intentionally starving Palestinians — even after Israel adopted 10-hour daily pauses to facilitate humanitarian aid. Its chief executive called Israel’s beeper attack on Hezbollah a “war crime.”
Then there’s Bend the Arc, which collected $1.2 million while blaming American support for Israel for driving antisemitism at home and while endorsing in New York a mayoral candidate who refuses to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. Another $900,000 went to Jews United for Justice, an opponent to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which recognizes anti-Zionism’s link to Jew hatred.
It’s hard to believe that Mr. Spielberg, a Jew himself, expects to move the needle in the ways of preventing another Holocaust by demonizing Israel and undermining the Jewish people’s connection to the state.
Spielberg should overhaul and restaff his foundation to avoid funding anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli activity.
What good is a Jewish foundation if it caves to the institutional antisemitic bias of the radical social justice left?
Tags: anti-semitism, fraud, Holocaust, Israel, Jews, NGO, Novi Zhukovsky, Righteous Persons Foundation, Schindler's List, Steven Spielberg
Eric Hoffer: Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket
Just adapt John O’Sullivan’s First Law, as he stated in 1989, to the current political environment of antisemitism on the left:
“All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing. I cite as supporting evidence the ACLU, the Ford Foundation, and the Episcopal Church. The reason is, of course, that people who staff such bodies tend to be the sort who don’t like private profit, business, making money, the current organization of society, and, by extension, the Western world. At which point Michels’s Iron Law of Oligarchy takes over — and the rest follows.”
A shonda indeed, but hardly surprising. As I’ve always said about my fellow landssmen, if Hitler were non-white, American Jews would be fighting for first place in line for the camps.
The purpose of any organization is not what they say their purpose is, but rather what that organization actually does.
Saying “If only Spielberg knew his foundation was funding anti-Israel groups” is playing the “If only Stalin knew” game.
If he does not care to know, it’s the same as if he knows and does not care.
When October 7, 2023 occurred, how long did it take Spielberg to say anything?
Take a guess.
December 5, 2023 – over 8 weeks:
“Steven Spielberg Quietly Breaks Silence on Oct. 7 Attacks: ‘I Never Imagined I Would See Such Unspeakable Barbarity Against Jews’”
https://www.thewrap.com/steven-spielberg-oct-7-attacks-hamas-antisemitism-statement/
Wow, what a piece of garbage.
It is despicable that such organizations are funded by the foundation, but then Spielberg believes the film’s profits are “blood money,” therefore is “guilted” into funding the foundation. So how did he justify the time, expense, and risk of producing the film in the first place? Feelings of guilt for the results of one’s creative endeavor is one very deep psychological conundrum.
Israel is not the ad all end all of Jewish thought.
Gaza is not Israel or a Jewish land. Just ask Israel.
Suggesting that Israel is making an error is democracy, not anti-Jewish thought.
“a rabbinic human rights organization that has received some $650,000 from the foundation to organize street blockades in protest of the war in Gaza and to accuse Israel of intentionally starving Palestinians” Democracy in action.
Gaza is not Israel; thus, it is overtly wrong to assume that it is Israel’s business when children can eat in a foreign country.
@Tommy Perpetrating antisemitic libels is bad and definitionally anti-Jewish.
[…] It’s inevitable. A leftist American Jew with “good intentions” ends up funding antisemitic causes: […]