Lila Corwin Berman
The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex: The History of a Multibillion-Dollar Institution
Princeton University Press
Tzedakah, the obligation to provide for the less-fortunate of the community, is one of the signal ethical values of Jewish life. “We are obligated to be more scrupulous in fulfilling the mitzvah of tzedakah than any other positive commandment,” the great philosopher Maimonides opined in the late-12th century, “because tzedakah is the sign of the righteous person.”
Jewish philanthropy – institutionalized tzedakah – has long been both a source of pride for American Jews and evidence that, for all of our shortcomings, our community cleaves to righteousness. In a diverse and often fractious community, our philanthropic organizations and institutions represent a thread of unity and continuity with tradition that binds us to deeply-held, and shared cultural values.
Nothing is quite that simple, of course, but because tzedakah is so central to Jewish self-image, and community organizations so essential to Jewish communal life, how these institutions evolved and shaped that life has rarely been explored to any depth. In her new book, The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex, Lila Corwin Berman, the Murray Friedman Chair of American Jewish History at Temple University, attempts to do just that. And what she excavates will probably come as a shock to many American Jews.
Berman writes that American Jewish associational life is neither entirely traditional, nor entirely Jewish. It did not evolve spontaneously from ancient customs so much as in conversation with and suspended within “a web of state policies intended to manage [Jewish] property and interests,” Berman writes. Indeed, far from being an expression of American Jewish communal unity, the “history of American Jewish philanthropy belies the existence of a singular Jewish power, revealing, instead, a complex.”
To be sure, this complex evolved from roots in the fraternal groups, mutual aid societies, educational institutions, and other cultural bodies that shaped and defined Jewish life in the United States in the 19th century. Few American Jews were shul members in the early part of the 20th century, Berman writes, and many relied on communal organizations to provide the framework for living a Jewish life, raising a Jewish family, and being buried with a Jewish funeral. However, many were also poor immigrants and, as the American community grew throughout the century, that often meant providing for fellow Jews who could not provide for themselves.
This required both the accumulation and distribution of capital and, it was that reality, Berman writes, that most shaped American Jewish institutional life. This capital, and the organizations that controlled it, came under government regulatory and disciplinary structures evolving in tandem with capitalism, and “made Jews, through their collective and philanthropic endeavors, visible subjects of the American state.”
Berman’s book is thus a history of the process of how Jewish communal and institutional life became imbricated in American capitalism, and began to resemble it.
In the years after the Second World War, in particular, American Jewish philanthropies evolved into corporations whose primary purpose was to accumulate and defend capital, rather than serve community interests. They faced a kind of existential crisis as Jewish Americans benefitted from upward and outward mobility in the postwar economic boom. Economically enfranchised and increasingly dispersed into growing middle-class suburbs, the American Jewish community became much less geographically cohesive and less likely to seek philanthropic assistance, and the philanthropies lost their original raisons-d’être.
It proved to be a critical juncture in American Jewish life; the community was rapidly changing, and the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, in the wake of the catastrophe of the Holocaust, had both galvanized and realigned its focus. “In the early 1950s, precipitated by Israeli statehood and its precarity, as well American Jews’ uncertainty about how consistent their country’s support for Israel would be, American Jewish leaders sought to construct a unified set of Jewish interests visible to the American state.”
This, in fact, is Berman’s most penetrating intervention. Forced by postwar conditions to redefine themselves, American Jewish philanthropies reoriented their missions away from the material and economic needs of members of the community toward an abstract notion of “preserving Jewish culture.” This strategic blending of finance and identity helped to redirect “Jewish philanthropy away from present wealth distribution and toward capital accumulation.”
This new corporate-philanthropic equation dovetailed with the operating principles of American finance capitalism in the speculative economy of the 1970s and 1980s that “steadily empowered the rule of capitalism and its putatively free and private market over the public good.” Seeking “capital returns on identity,” Jewish philanthropies evolved into centers of corporate power and political influence with little real connection either to their original philanthropic missions, or to the communities they had served.
Berman offers an incisive critique of late-capitalism and the commodification of cultural identity. Her account of Bernie Madoff, who pleaded guilty to fraud charges for a $68.4 billion Ponzi scam in 2009, and died in prison this spring, makes for chilling reading. Madoff’s confidence game, which focused primarily on wealthy Jewish Americans accustomed to unquestioningly making philanthropic contributions in the name of tzedakah, depended to a large extent on his personal connections in the community, and his reputation as a Jewish philanthropist. “And, at least momentarily,” Berman writes, “it exposed the hollow prize of putting the public good in the trust of capitalism.”
This is a demoralizing tale of how capitalism has colonized a once-vital institution in American Jewish life and how Jewish philanthropies have become utterly alienated from the people they once served – but on whose largesse they continue to depend. Berman concludes on a hopeful note of reform. Yet, it is worth asking whether her prescription of a kind of noblesse oblige can truly reform Jewish philanthropies, or if it is itself too much a creature of late-capitalism.
With lucid prose and painstakingly-sourced research, The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex offers an important and uncompromising analysis of a vital component of American Jewish life. Berman’s analysis explodes many of long-cherished myths of tzedakah and communal unity, and it is sometimes difficult to read because of it. In this challenging time for the American Jewish community, it is a necessary book.
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Photo © Nikodem Nijaki