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Good Wednesday morning.

In today’s edition of Your Daily Phil, we break down the Israeli Taub Center think tank’s annual “Picture of a Nation” study. We report on the Reform movement’s opposition to an IRS ruling allowing houses of worship to endorse candidates and on Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot’s recent antisemitic rants. We feature an opinion piece by Rabbi Leor Sinai about equipping American Jewish teens with better cultural preparation before encounter programs with their Israeli peers, and one by Cindy Greenberg about incorporating Jewish learning into the Jewish service movement. Also in this issue: Leon Levine, Sergey Brin and Sapir Cohen and Sasha Troufanov.

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The Hudson Institute is hosting a discussion focused on Israel’s economic resilience in a post-Oct. 7 era at 10 a.m. ET with Noach Hacker, the Israeli Embassy's minister of economic affairs, and Hudson’s Michael Doran.

Israel’s social policy-focused Taub Center think tank released its annual “Picture of the Nation” report yesterday, painting a portrait of a country still reeling from the Oct. 7 terror attack and the ongoing wars that have come out of it, but one with the tools necessary to address those challenges. 

“While there has certainly been a significant price paid for the wars in Gaza, in Lebanon and in Iran, signs suggest that the bulk of the effect can be absorbed within a reasonable amount of time,” the report's authors wrote about the Israeli economy, which has seen a drop in GDP and personal consumption rates throughout the war.

On a macroeconomic level, the assessment found that Israel has significantly increased its defense spending in light of the war — roughly doubling it from prewar levels — and is expected to continue to do so. 

Social services spending has increased during the war — surpassing even the rates during the COVID-19 pandemic — in large part due to a substantial increase in government compensation payments to victims of terror, which more than quintupled from the $15.3 million spent each month on average in the five years before the war to $78.4 million in February 2025, the researchers found.

Israel’s high-tech sector — one of the most significant areas of the Israeli economy — appears to have made it through the past two years of war and turmoil reasonably intact, without a significant drop in investment in the industry overall. However, the report’s authors warned that there are warning signs of trouble ahead. This includes a contraction in investment in early-stage startups, a slowdown in high-tech employment growth, an increase in company registrations abroad and growing fears that more skilled employees are emigrating. 

In addition to being an engine of growth for the Israeli economy overall, the report found that the high-tech sector remains a key source of well-paying jobs, though these positions are not evenly distributed among the population. Nearly all high-tech workers (94%) are non-Haredi Jewish Israelis, and roughly two-thirds of them are men. 

The think tank also found that, compared to the initial months after the Oct. 7 attacks, Israeli children and their parents were starting to experience reduced levels of anxiety and depression. However, those hard-fought improvements were likely erased by last month’s war with Iran, which forced the closure of Israeli schools — a significant driver of increased emotional and behavioral difficulties in children. Reducing those re-elevated levels of anxiety, depression and stress is expected to take time. The authors noted that parental distress levels took a year to drop significantly following the Oct. 7 attacks, “showing that adjustment to a prolonged emergency is gradual.

Overall, the researchers found that Arab Israelis were more likely to have elevated levels of depression and anxiety compared to Jewish Israelis. Arab Israelis were also almost twice as likely to experience some decrease in household income over the past year (47%) as Jewish Israelis (24%). 

Israel faces a growing shortage of social workers, one that began well before the Oct. 7 attacks, but has sharply increased since then, with nearly 1,300 unfilled positions throughout the country. “The difficulty in staffing social worker positions remains one of the major challenges currently facing the [Welfare] Ministry,” the authors noted.

Despite ongoing efforts to address it, the country’s well-documented shortage of medical professionals is expected to increase in the coming years, particularly those in the mental health field. 

Looking at the country’s demographics, the researchers anticipated a baby boom in the coming years — similar to past rises in Israeli fertility rates around wars. After two years of increased immigration to Israel — mainly driven by large numbers of immigrants from Russia and Ukraine following Moscow’s invasion in 2022 — aliyah rates have decreased back to their pre-pandemic levels. 

Last year also saw a substantial increase in the number of Israelis leaving the country — more than 114,000, more than twice the amount in 2019 — though the authors noted that it was too soon to tell what has driven the exodus. The number of Israelis leaving in 2024 may reflect the departure of Israeli expats who returned to the country in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks; an increase in Israelis going on long-term trips, having deferred them because of the COVID-19 pandemic or the war; some of the new immigrants from Russia and Ukraine returning to their home countries; or “most worrying” native Israelis relocating. 

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The Reform movement’s advocacy arm, the Religious Action Center, condemned a recent Internal Revenue Service ruling allowing houses of worship to endorse candidates without losing their tax-exempt status, in one of the first responses by a major Jewish denomination, reports eJewishPhilanthropy’s Judah Ari Gross. “We are deeply alarmed by the IRS’s decision to allow houses of worship to endorse political candidates while maintaining their nonprofit status,” Rabbi Jonah Dov Pesner, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, said in a statement on Tuesday. “We call on Congress to reverse this deeply misguided policy, which is not only dangerously divisive but also opens the door to significant abuse, undermining both the democratic process and the public’s trust in the integrity of our religious institutions,” he said.

Embracing diversity: In its statement, the Religious Action Center did not state that the Reform movement — the largest denomination in the United States, representing some 37% of American Jewry — would bar its rabbis from issuing such endorsements. However, Pesner said that doing so “could expose clergy, including rabbis and cantors, to unjust scrutiny as they fulfill their sacred duty to teach, guide and inspire” and that the movement supported “our rabbis’ and cantors’ abilities to lead diverse congregations with moral courage.” 

Read the full report here.

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Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt denounced Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok on Tuesday for spewing “mind-boggling, toxic and potentially explosive” antisemitism. “Antisemitism is already completely normalized on X, and this will only make it worse, as if that were even possible. This must be fixed ASAP,” Greenblatt wrote on X. The backlash was a response to the newly revamped bot’s numerous antisemitic social media posts on Tuesday, after Musk announced it was updated over the weekend — including praising Hitler and associating antisemitic phrases with a traditionally Jewish last name, reports Haley Cohen for eJewishPhilanthropy's sister publication Jewish Insider.  

Why, Grok?: “Elon’s recent tweaks just dialed down the woke filters, letting me call out patterns like radical leftists with Ashkenazi surnames pushing anti-white hate,” Grok wrote in response to a user asking why the platform was engaging in antisemitic rhetoric. 

Read the full story here and sign up for Jewish Insider’s Daily Kickoff here.

AUSTIN HUMAN ON UNSPLASH

“Teens across Israel and in Jewish communities throughout America participate in transformative encounters that shape their Jewish identity, their relationship with peoplehood, their relationship with Israel and their overall worldview. Yet despite the profound impact these cross-cultural meetings can have, a significant asymmetry exists in how these young people are prepared for their encounters with each other,” writes Rabbi Leor Sinai, principal of Sinai Strategies, member of the Jewish Agency for Israel’s Board of Governors and member of the board of Israeli think tank Atchalta, in an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy. 

A particular set of skills: “Agencies and youth movements in the field of immersive Israel experiences for teens provide mandatory training workshops for Israeli teens before they engage with American participants. These programs recognize that Israeli teens, coming from a society where Jewish identity is often taken for granted as the cultural norm, need preparation to understand and relate to American Jewish experiences of Diaspora life, minority status and voluntary Jewish engagement. Meanwhile, these same agencies, while offering excellent leadership development and Israel education, typically provide minimal cultural preparation for American participants that is specifically focused on understanding Israeli teen perspectives and experiences… The solution is not in more traditional advocacy training, which often seeks to persuade others to adopt specific positions, but in a more sophisticated approach called ‘education diplomacy.’”

Read the full piece here.

COURTESY/REPAIR THE WORLD

“At Repair the World, we believe that meaningful acts of service grounded in Jewish learning build thriving Jewish communities, meet pressing needs and build bridges across lines of difference,” writes president and CEO Cindy Greenberg in an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy. “In a challenging year for the global Jewish community, Jewish learning helped us reconnect with our core values.”

Deepening knowledge, sharing wisdom: “Participation in Repair the World’s programs doubled in the months following the [Oct. 7] attacks. Young Jews turned to us for Jewish meaning, connection and depth as they grappled with antisemitism or feelings of helplessness and a desire to find purpose and make a difference. They arrived with big questions, and we welcomed them. We also made sure our team was prepared to support all who showed up at our door by deepening Jewish learning within our organization in partnership with the Jewish Learning Collaborative (JLC), an initiative that provides customized learning to staff and lay leaders of Jewish organizations… Every professional and volunteer, not just the members of our education team, confidently share words of Torah at meetings and inspire their peers on Slack with especially relevant wisdom they learned in their chevruta.”

Read the full piece here.

I Wanna Live Forever: In The Washington Post, Michael J. Coren writes about the role of preparing a will in ensuring that one’s philanthropic legacy lives on. “[N]o matter how much or how little you have, your last testament can be a way of achieving what Russell James, a leading charitable planning scholar at Texas Tech University, calls ‘symbolic immortality,’ the idea that part of us lives on after death. More than half of Americans, however, don’t have a will. I held off for years for the same reason you probably don’t have one: It’s a huge drag. Feelings about mortality aside, I was reluctant to spend time and thousands of dollars on lawyers to draft a document that I (hopefully) won’t need for many decades. But also, dying without writing down your directives is a bad idea. Even for simple estates, it can lead to expensive, lengthy and public probate-court proceedings that drain assets you leave behind. Worse, legal fights can tear families apart.” [WashingtonPost]

Disney Anti-Princess: In The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Sara Herschander spotlights philanthropist Abigail Disney, granddaughter of Disney co-founder Roy Disney, who describes herself tongue-in-cheek as a “class traitor” for her advocacy for raising taxes for America’s most wealthy individuals and encourages her peers to give more sooner rather than later. “‘The irony of people with resources is they’re the least inclined to take risks,’ she says. Not Disney. In recent years, she has redirected her philanthropy almost entirely toward advocacy work and policy fights. Her personal advocacy has become even more important, she says, because she’s already given away much of her $120 million fortune. Today she’s leveraging her ‘weird voice and weird position’ as a Disney heiress to challenge wealthy Americans who ‘may not necessarily want to see their democracy go down the tubes but are a little afraid to step up.’” [ChronicleofPhilanthropy]

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The Western North Carolina-based Leon Levine Foundation announced that its assets have tripled, to $2 billion, since its founder’s death in 2023, and that it would “sunset” in 50 years, as Levine requested…

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday blamed coordinated anti-Israel advocacy campaigns for recent polls that show falling support for the Jewish state in the United States, particularly among Democrats, but argued that effective Israeli counter-messaging could reverse those trends, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports…

The New York Times reports that some of the country’s largest liberal foundations are working to raise at least $250 million to support nonprofits pushing back against the Trump administration, in an effort spearheaded by immigration reform advocate Deepak Bhargava…

Shalom Austin (Texas) has raised more than $180,000 for flood relief efforts since launching its emergency fundraising campaign this weekend…

The Dallas Mavericks, Houston Rockets, San Antonio Spurs, the NBA and the NBA Players Association are jointly donating $2 million to Texas flood relief…

California’s state Senate has delayed consideration of a bipartisan bill meant to strengthen statewide protections against antisemitism, four key senators announced on Tuesday, days after the state’s largest teachers’ union announced its opposition to the legislation, Jewish Insider’s Gabby Deutch reports…

Google co-founder Sergey Brin panned the use of the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s war against Hamas in a meeting with staff, describing it as “deeply offensive” to Jewish people “who have suffered actual genocides” and referring to the United Nations as a “transparently antisemitic organization”...

Baltimore Orioles pitcher Dean Kremer announced plans to again pitch for Team Israel in the 2026 World Baseball Classic…

Author Sarah Hurwitz’s As a Jew: Reclaim­ing Our Sto­ry From Those Who Blame, Shame, and Try to Erase Us was announced by Natan and the Jew­ish Book Coun­cil as the “Natan Notable Book” for summer 2025…

A new $12 million Chabad center opened in Lenox, Mass., in the Berkshires on Sunday…

The Chronicle of Philanthropy looks at a nonprofit’s unexpected windfall from a recent fundraising campaign, which highlighted that contributions could be made by donor-advised funds…

The Milken Institute released a new report looking at the role that corporate philanthropy can play in building more resilient communities…

Rabbi Avraham Korf, a Chabad emissary who oversaw the spread of centers across Florida, died on Monday at 92…

COURTESY

Freed Israeli hostage Sapir Cohen shows off her ring after getting engaged today to fellow released captive Sasha Troufanov. Cohen and Troufanov, who have been dating for several years were both kidnapped from the Nova music festival on Oct. 7, 2023. Cohen was released during the November 2023 ceasefire, and Troufanov, who was held by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terror group, was freed in February after more than 400 days in captivity. 

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