The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex
I’m following my post from yesterday about a really good book, by posting about another really good book. Lila Corwin Berman’s The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex: The History of a Multimillion-Dollar Institution is a history of philanthropy in America in the past hundred years or so, with a special focus on Jewish philanthropic institutions. One of my favorite things about this book is that my great uncle, Henry Zucker, plays a relatively minor, but important role in the story (albeit plausibly as a villain).
Even if you’re not very interested in American Jewish history or unlikely to read the whole book, I highly recommend watching this conversation between Berman and Rob Reich (not to be confused with Robert Reich) from 2021. I especially like the way that they provide a general introduction to what’s at stake in the study of philanthropy generally (6:40-13:30), in which Berman calls philanthropy “a certain kind of engine that pulls [government and the market] together.” She argues that giving to philanthropy is “not exactly a private activity at all” but is “as deep a relationship [with the state] as April 15th when you pay your taxes.”
The conversation also has a very interesting discussion of the historical development of donor-advised funds (“DAFs”), which Reich calls “the kudzu” of contemporary American philanthropy, and “a genuine problem.” The book does a very compelling job of describing two historical trends in American Jewish philanthropy, one of which arguably gave us the historical antecedent of the DAF. In the first half of the 20th Century, Jewish federations began to appear and flourish as a mechanism for “professionalizing” Jewish philanthropy. These federations almost exclusively focused on current spending, believing that donors wanted to see the immediate benefits of their charitable giving. There was massive immigration of poor Jews to American cities at that time, and institutional philanthropy was one potential support for those migrants. In the beginning of the second half of the 20th Century, this “present spending” ideology was countered by a movement for to facilitate endowment giving, possibly because the volume of needy immigrants declined. The Jewish Community Federation of Cleveland (under the direction of my Uncle Henry) promoted a new philanthropic “institutional technology” which allowed donors to give to the federation not for current spending but for the future. Even more novel was the ability of donors to “advise” the federation how to spend the money in the present or future. That structure became the DAF. It also resulted in the reduced influence of the “present spending” advocates.
My main criticism of the book is that one could read it as presenting the flourishing of the “present spending” movement as unremarkable, and the rise of endowment advocates as a novel (and negative) trend. In the longer history of philanthropy, of course, the urge of donors to create perpetual endowments, and the development of legal innovations to facilitate that urge, is the norm. After all, the very first purpose of the charitable trust in 17th Century England was to permit an exception to the “rule against perpetuities,” which prevented donors from creating perpetual charitable institutions until the law was modified. An historical moment when Jewish institutions successfully persuaded their donors to resist that urge is the surprising story, not the fact that legal institutions permit charitable endowments today. Whether the current law of DAFs goes too far and constitutes “a genuine problem” or not, the law of charities in the United States has always been deeply supportive of delayed charitable giving, whether through university endowments, private foundations, or (non-DAF) public charities with large endowments. Berman’s book gives us evidence that advocates of immediate spending also have a long history to draw from.
Benjamin Leff