Good Friday morning!
In today’s edition of Your Daily Phil, we examine the opportunities and challenges for Israel and the Jewish world with the start of a 10-day ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon, and get the scoop on a new push in the Senate to secure $750 million in funding for the federal Nonprofit Security Grants Program. We feature an opinion piece by Ilana M. Horwitz about acknowledging the socioeconomic spectrum of the Jewish community in how we design and operate our institutions, and one by Moshe Lencer sharing what he’s learned about Jewish leadership from today’s Jewish college students. Also in this issue: Steven Windmueller, Michael Schwarz and Andrew Keene.
Shabbat shalom! Today’s Your Daily Phil was curated by eJP Managing Editor Judah Ari Gross, Israel Editor Justin Hayet and Opinion Editor Rachel Kohn. Have a tip? Email us here.
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For less-distracted reading over the weekend, browse this week’s edition of The Weekly Print, a curated print-friendly PDF featuring a selection of recent eJewishPhilanthropy and Jewish Insider stories, including: Photographer Bill Aron on capturing, and donating, decades of images documenting Jewish life; Two years on, the post-Oct. 7 Simchat Torah Challenge not only survives but thrives; and From trauma to table: An Israeli duo uses food therapy and song to foster connection. Print the latest edition here.
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A U.S.-brokered ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon is underway, launching an initial 10-day window for negotiations toward a permanent peace agreement between the two countries. More on this below.
- Ahead of Israel’s Independence Day, the World Zionist Organization will hold a reading on Sunday of the country’s Declaration of Independence — with cantillation — at the Western Wall.
- Brandeis University will present its 2026 Alumni Achievement Award on Sunday to actress Loretta Devine, Philadelphia Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie and cancer researcher Sheila Efron Taube for their achievements in the arts, philanthropy and medicine.
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Also on Sunday night, Rachel Goldberg-Polin will be interviewed by Anderson Cooper on CBS’s “60 Minutes” ahead of the release on Tuesday of her new book, When We See You Again, about grieving the death of her son, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, in Hamas captivity.
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A QUICK WORD WITH EJP'S JUDAH ARI GROSS |
A 10-day ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon went into effect at 12 a.m. local time, halting more than a month of fighting. With the armistice in Gaza largely holding since October and the truce with Iran still in place as Tehran and Washington negotiate, Israel — and the rest of the Jewish world — enters a period of precarious calm. This effectively marks a return to how things were before Feb. 28, when the first U.S. and Israeli bombers targeted Tehran, albeit with Israel in a different geopolitical situation and with even more people across the region killed, injured, displaced and vulnerable.
This resumption of routine, temporary or permanent, brings with it both opportunities and challenges. For the past two-plus years, since the Oct. 7 terror attacks, the Jewish world has been jumping from crisis to crisis — wars, antisemitic attacks, natural disasters — with scant time for long-term planning and introspection.
While it’s not clear how long this armistice will last, Jewish organizations and leaders can take advantage of the respite to devote greater resources to constructive, non-crisis considerations.
In the short term, this includes planning for the summer, with camps and travel programs due to start in roughly two months. On a larger scale, the past week demonstrated the political shifts underway in the United States as it relates to Israel, with 40 Senate Democrats voting to block arms sales to Israel, including several lawmakers who previously rejected such efforts. For Jewish organizations that oppose such restrictions — and the message that it would send about U.S.-Israeli ties — major, multipronged efforts would need to be undertaken to at least begin to make military support for Israel a bipartisan issue.
But in addition to providing the Jewish world an opportunity for productive planning, this period of respite also allows for long-simmering, destructive disputes to again boil over.
It is worth remembering that the days before the start of the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran saw the passage of a bill in the Knesset that would make it a criminal offense to hold mixed-gender and women-led prayer services at the Western Wall, including at the current egalitarian plaza. Responding to the bill in these pages on Feb. 26, a self-described “lifelong Zionist” and longtime communal layleader called on American Jewish institutions to give “not one more dollar” to Israeli causes unless the country agrees to halt its infringement on non-Orthodox Judaism. Ultimately, over the course of the war, North American Jews allocated tens of millions of dollars to
Israeli causes, even without these pluralistic assurances.
Within Israel as well, long-standing disputes about the role of the judiciary are already gaining steam and are likely to continue over the coming months ahead of the next national elections. Read the rest of ‘What You Should Know’ here. |
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Senate lawmakers push for $750 million in security grant funding for 2027 |
Saying that funding to protect synagogues and other religious-based nonprofits "has not kept pace to meet the moment," 41 Senate lawmakers — almost exclusively Democrats — wrote to leaders of the Senate Appropriations Committee urging members to provide $750 million in funding for the Nonprofit Security Grant Program in 2027, reports Marc Rod for eJewishPhilanthropy’s sister publication Jewish Insider.
Increasing need: Last year, 33 senators requested $500 million for the program, a record-high request at the time. This year’s request represents a new high-water mark, both in terms of the funding requested and the number of lawmakers who signed the bipartisan letter in support. “The threat of violence is unfortunately increasing at places of worship across our country at alarming rates,” the lawmakers wrote, citing “an increase in hoax bomb threats and attacks against houses of worship that are intended to interrupt services and intimidate worshippers” in recent years, as well as “an increase in antisemitic incidents across the country following the October 7th attack on Israel.”
Read the full report here and sign up for Jewish Insider’s Daily Kickoff here. |
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Design institutions to meet, not accommodate, Jews where they are |
“Sociologists use the phrase ‘life course’ to describe the sequence of roles, transitions and events that make up a person's life over time,” writes Ilana M. Horwitz, the Fields-Rayant Chair in Contemporary Jewish Life at Tulane University, in an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy. “People with more economic resources tend to have more stable, predictable life courses. … People with fewer resources tend to experience more disruption: earlier or later parenthood, more divorce, more health crises, more job instability and more geographic dislocation. And Jewish educational institutions, from preschool through adult learning, have
been designed almost entirely around the first kind of life course.”
What we’re missing: “The communal architecture that emerged over the 20th century — day schools, camps, youth movements, synagogue programming — reflected the trajectory of a rapidly upwardly mobile community. It works well for families living that kind of life, but it has a hidden dependency: when the life course deviates from the expected pattern, the architecture breaks down. It doesn’t mean that the education itself is flawed, but that the on-ramps — the timing, the cost structures and the social assumptions — are all calibrated to a life that many Jews are not living.”
Read the full piece here. |
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5 things this generation of Jewish students taught me |
“Four in 10 Jewish college students have experienced antisemitism during their time on campus,” writes Moshe Lencer, director of campus affairs at the American Jewish Committee, in an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy. The figure comes from the AJC’s “State of Antisemitism in America 2025 Report,” conducted in partnership with Hillel International.
Next gen leadership: “I thought I understood what Jewish campus life looked like. This generation taught me that I was only partially right. What they have navigated leading up to and since the Hamas terrorist attack against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, is not what any of us trained for. And yet, the students whom I have watched show up, speak up and refuse to disappear have taught me more about Jewish leadership than almost anything else in my career. Here are five lessons I'm carrying forward.”
Read the full piece here. |
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Institutional Wars: In a Times of Israel opinion piece, Steven Windmueller posits that the era of unified Jewish consensus has been replaced by a fragmented, donor-driven marketplace. He argues that the historical "civil religion" of American Jewry — once managed by a coordinated network of legacy organizations — has collapsed into a "Jewish Wild West" defined by competition and a lack of collective strategy. “With the rise of a dominant wealth class, we can extrapolate a Jewish subtext to this broader American economic storyline. The potential for a sustained and broader set of conflicts is linked to the growing presence of this
Jewish oligarchy that has entered the institutional fray, employing their foundations and networks of resources to advance their respective interests and organizational preferences…Take as an example, the 'antisemitism industry' with currently some 160 Jewish groups all claiming to take down Jewish hatred. One finds minimal collaboration amongst these institutional players, limited examples of measurable outcomes, and often little to no self-assessment of effectiveness or impact." [TOI]
Quiet Quitting: In The Chronicles of Philanthropy, Sharon Leslie warns of a growing equity “blind spot" as the primary driver behind a talent drain of Jewish professionals from secular nonprofits. "Progressive nonprofits pride themselves on inclusion and equity. These organizations, however, may quietly be losing Jewish talent because they haven’t integrated antisemitism into their equity work...Jewish professionals working in secular nonprofits and philanthropy today face an impossible choice: stay true to their identity and risk ostracism or suppress it to avoid animosity in organizations that claim to champion equity for all but demand ideological conformity…Antisemitism belongs in DEI
frameworks, training curricula, onboarding materials, and organizational policy, alongside racism, homophobia, and other forms of bias... Until organizations name it as a bias with ethnic, cultural, and religious dimensions, every other step is built on an unstable foundation.” [ChronicleofPhilanthropy]
Lounge for Sale: In his whistleblower account for The Atlantic, Josef Palermo details a period of unprecedented institutional decay at the Kennedy Center, including a specific, high-tension moment during a commemorative event for the Oct. 7 attacks. “Last fall, I organized an exhibition commemorating the anniversary of the October
7 Hamas attacks in the Israeli Lounge, featuring the paintings of an American Israeli artist. Speaking at the opening reception, [former Kennedy Center head Ric] Grenell warned the mostly Jewish audience that unless donors came forward to sponsor the space and pay for renovation costs, the lounge would be given away to a new donor. ‘It certainly would be a shame if we lost this room to a corporation or an individual and it was no longer the [Israeli] lounge,’ he said. Such a strong-armed fundraising pitch, at an event commemorating a pogrom, struck many of us in the room as inappropriate. I was mortified.” [The Atlantic]
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Be featured: Email us to sponsor content with the eJP readership of your upcoming event, job opening or other communication. |
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Investor Daniel Loeb accused New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani of “stirring up class warfare” yesterday with his new plan to impose an additional tax on second homes in the city. “You can’t tax a city into prosperity and you don’t attract capital by demonizing philanthropists,” Loeb wrote in a post on X…
The Baltimore Banner examines the operational crisis at the Johns Hopkins University-affiliated nonprofit Jhpiego, where a restricted $352 million federal windfall remains unusable for rehiring the 2,000-plus staffers or restoring the programs lost during the dismantling of USAID… The Israeli ambassador to France met quietly with far-right leader Marine Le Pen, signaling a potential shift in Israel's long-standing boycott of her party…
The Wall Street Journal reports that Florida billionaires are bypassing traditional reform to fund and build their own private schools. This "build-it-yourself" approach allows donors to directly implement their educational visions and circumvent the bureaucracy typically associated with the public school system… Prince Harry and Meghan Markle met with survivors of December’s Bondi Beach massacre while in Australia…
Two Israeli films have been selected for the Tribeca Festival in New York this June…
The New York Times looks at Vice President JD Vance’s efforts to build up donor support — including from Paul Singer and Dr. Miriam Adelson — ahead of a likely 2028 presidential run, as he serves as finance chair of the Republican National Committee — the first sitting vice president in the role…
The International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame recently announced its Class of 2026, which includes Julian Edelman, Omri Caspi and Nancy Lieberman, among others…
The Wall Street Journal spotlights Factory co-founder and CEO Matan Grinberg, whose AI coding startup is in talks to raise $150 million in a funding round led by Khosla Ventures with backing from Sequoia Capital, Insight Partners and Blackstone…
Michael Schwarz, former board member of the Jewish Federation of Atlanta and founding co-chair of the Atlanta Jewish Foundation, died on Tuesday at 88… |
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NPR secured a $113 million windfall anchored by an $80 million gift from Connie Ballmer, which marks the network’s largest-ever gift from a living donor, plus an additional $33 million from an anonymous donor to stabilize operations and fuel digital innovation following the loss of federal funding… |
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Mitch Hamerman was hired as the next vice president and chief advancement officer at American Jewish University…
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Torah Scroll MST No. 41 — one of the 1,564 rescued from the Czech Republic after the Holocaust — is seen on Tuesday in its new permanent display case at the Chamber of Deputies of the Parliament of the Czech Republic in Prague. The scroll, which originally came from the Czech Jewish community of Ricany, was permanently installed in the parliament in a ceremony on Yom HaShoah, following years of work by Memorial Scrolls Trust, along with local and international Jewish groups, writes Andrew Keene in an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy.
“Today, approximately 1,400 of the 1,564 scrolls are in communities and organizations around the world — in synagogues, schools, universities, museums and Jewish institutions across continents. Some have been restored and are used for ritual purposes. Others, too damaged to be used liturgically, serve as educational and commemorative scrolls. All of them are silent witnesses to the Shoah,” Keene writes. “That phrase — ‘silent witnesses’ — is one we use often at the Memorial Scrolls Trust. But standing in the Czech Parliament on Yom HaShoah, I was struck by how much these scrolls speak, even in silence.”
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Executive director of the American Zionist Movement, Herbert Block celebrates his birthday on Saturday...
FRIDAY: Short story writer, novelist and essayist, Cynthia Ozick turns 98... Retired Los Angeles cardiologist and active Yiddish enthusiast, Dr. Martin Bobrowsky turns 86... NYU professor and noted legal scholar, he spent 38 years on the faculty of University of Chicago Law School, Richard Allen Epstein turns 83... Affiliate of Tel Aviv law firm Guy, Bachar & Co., Barry Schreiber... Official historian for Major League Baseball since 2011, he was born in a DP camp in Germany following WWII, John Abraham Thorn turns 79... Talk radio host best known for his work on NYC's sports radio station WFAN, his nickname is "The Schmoozer," Steve Somers turns 79... Rebbe and leader of the Pupa Hasidic group, Rabbi Yaakov Yechezkiya Greenwald turns 78... CEO of B'nai B'rith International, retiring at the end of June, Daniel S. Mariaschin turns 77... Dean of Beth Medrash Govoha in Lakewood, N.J., one of the largest yeshivas in the world with more than 9,000 students, Rabbi Aryeh Malkiel Kotler turns 75... French businessman, based in Geneva, he and his brother own the House of Chanel perfume company as well as holdings in vineyards and a thoroughbred horse racing stable, Gérard Wertheimer turns 75... Former member of the Rhode Island Senate, Joshua Miller turns 72… Elizabeth H. Scheuer… Israeli journalist for the daily Yedioth Ahronoth, Ben-Dror Yemini turns 72... Rabbi emerita, after 39 years, of Beth Hillel Temple in Kenosha, Wis., her brother is the former U.S. senator from Wisconsin, Russ Feingold, Dena Feingold... Co-founder and former CEO, now board member, of United Talent Agency (UTA), Jeremy Zimmer turns 68... Actress, screenwriter and film director, Daphna Kastner turns 65... Winner of two Super Bowl rings during his career with the San Francisco 49ers, he is now a physician and an inductee in the National Jewish Sports Hall of Fame, Dr. John E. Frank turns 64... Director of Rutgers University Press since 2016, following 15 years at Temple University Press, Micah Kleit turns 56... Professor of politics at NYU and longtime co-author of “The Monkey Cage,” a politics and policy blog at The Washington Post, Joshua A. Tucker turns 55... Congressional editor for The New York Times, she is also a political analyst for CNN, Julie Hirschfeld Davis turns 51... Member of the Alaska Legislature, first in the Assembly and then in the state Senate, Jesse Kiehl turns 50... Israeli actor, musician, director and television presenter, Ido Mosseri turns 48... Executive director at Morgan Stanley, Nadya Belenkiy… Deputy editor-in-chief at Semafor, Shelly Banjo... Southern California-based regional director
at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Ora Miriam "Miri" Katz Belsky... Press secretary for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Angelo Roefaro... Wikipedia editor since 2004, having made at least one edit to one-third of all English Wikipedia articles, Steven Pruitt turns 42... Senior communications manager at the Center for Responsible Lending, Matt Kravitz... Partner at Bully Pulpit Interactive, Alex Kellner... Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter, Avriel "Avi" Benjamin Kaplan turns 37... Former deputy national security advisor for strategic communications and speechwriting for then-VPOTUS Kamala Harris, Dean Lieberman... Member of the Baltimore City Council, Isaac "Yitzy" Schleifer turns 37... Deputy general counsel at the Missouri State Highway Patrol, Brian T. Earll turns 34... Offensive lineman for the NFL's Tampa Bay Buccaneers for seven seasons, he retired in 2022 and is now pursuing a doctorate in psychology, Alexander "Ali"
Marpet turns 33... Associate at Covington & Burling, Ahuva Neuberger…
SATURDAY: Chief rabbi of the Old City of Jerusalem until 2008, Rabbi Avigdor Nebenzahl turns 91... Senior counsel in the intellectual property law firm of Adwar Ivko, Philip Furgang turns 89... Former executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union for 23 years until 2001, Ira Saul Glasser turns 88... Biochemist, geneticist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1985, Joseph Leonard Goldstein turns 86... Partner and managing director of fundraising consulting firm Mirsky, Jaffe & Associates, Michael Jaffe turns 86... English barrister and arbitrator, his clients have included the British chief rabbi in a case which held that the rulings of the beit nin were not subject to judicial review, Michael Jacob Beloff turns 84... Corporate turnaround
expert and mergers & acquisitions specialist, Jerry W. Levin turns 82... Los Angeles resident, Saul Bernstein... Former member of the Vermont state Senate and co-founder of Jogbra, the original sports bra, Hinda Miller turns 76... Former mayor of Phoenix for eight years after two terms on the Phoenix City Council, Phil Gordon turns 75... Composer, pianist and musicologist, Robert M. Greenberg turns 72… Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and director of the Northeastern University School of Journalism, Jonathan Kaufman turns 70... Former college basketball coach for 34 years, he is now an ESPN analyst, Seth Greenberg turns 70... Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of four acclaimed books, Susan Faludi turns 67... Community leader in Detroit and former president of AIPAC, David Victor... Editor of Commentary magazine, John Mordecai Podhoretz turns 65... President and dean of Ohr Torah Stone institutions in Israel since 2018, prior to making aliyah he was a VP at Yeshiva University and rabbi of the Boca Raton (Fla.) Synagogue, Rabbi Dr. Kenneth R. Brander turns 64... VP and deputy general counsel at Scholastic Inc, he is a past president of Beth El Synagogue Center in New Rochelle, N.Y., Mark Seidenfeld... Emmy Award-winning actress known for her work on daytime television, Tamara Braun turns 55... Film director and producer associated with the horror genre, Eli Roth turns 54... Chabad rabbi, founder and executive director of the Aspen Chabad Jewish Community Center, Mendel Mintz turns 51… Poet, critic, translator and professor, Ilya Kaminsky turns 49… Under secretary of homeland security for strategy, policy and plans during most of the Biden administration, now partner at Ropes & Gray, Robert P. Silvers turns 46… VP for political campaigns and strategy for AIPAC's Florida region, Evan Philipson… Dov Maimon…
SUNDAY: A cofounder of Judea Reform Congregation, in Durham, N.C., Nancy Jean Warner Laszlo turns 90… Jocelyn's father, Robert Brotman turns 89... Legal scholar and public intellectual, now a visiting professor at Cardozo School of Law, Stanley Fish turns 88... Prominent Israeli criminal defense attorney who also served as the attorney general of Israel, Yehuda Weinstein turns 82... Rebbi of the Vizhnitz hasidic dynasty based in Bnei Brak, Rabbi Yisroel Hager turns 81... Head of strategic human resources at Elliott Investment Management, prominent philanthropist on the board of The Paul E. Singer Foundation, Tikvah Fund, Jewish Food Society and Startup Nation Central, Terry Kassel... Comedian, actress and mental health campaigner in the U.K., Ruby Wax turns 73... Investor and hedge fund manager, Jacob Ezra Merkin turns 73... VP of GEM Commercial Flooring Company in Kansas, Gloria Elyachar... Angel investment fund manager, he won three Super Bowls during his 12-year NFL career, Harris Barton turns 62... Law professor at Arizona State University and senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Orde Félix Kittrie turns 62… Historian, author, screenwriter, political commentator and senior lecturer at the Hebrew University, Gadi Taub turns 61… Board chair of Prizmah: Center for Jewish Day Schools, Laurie Hasten... Israeli entrepreneur best known as the founder and former CEO of Better Place, an electric car company that raised $850 million yet was liquidated in a 2013 bankruptcy, Shai Agassi turns 58... Attorney general of Michigan, Dana Nessel turns 57... French stand-up comedian and actor, during 2019 he starred in "Huge in France," an American comedy series on Netflix, Gad Elmaleh turns 55... Author of five books and a frequent columnist in The New Yorker, Rivka Galchen turns 50... Executive director
of Honest Reporting, Gil Hoffman turns 49... Award-winning film, television and theatre actor, his official bar mitzvah was in 2015 at age 37, James Franco turns 48... Toronto-based entrepreneur, philanthropist, CEO and co-founder of Klick Health (a digital marketing firm in the medical field), Leerom Segal turns 47... Actress, author and fashion entrepreneur, she co-founded
Fabletics (a fitness brand and membership program), Kate Hudson turns 47... Chief development officer at NYC's Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty, Brian Tregerman... Rabbi, philosopher, poet, coach and entrepreneur, he writes a weekly Torah commentary on Substack, Zohar Atkins turns 38… Senior program officer at Schusterman Family Philanthropies, Seffi Kogen… Jake Gerber...
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