A Baffling Congressional Report Threatens the Jewish Establishment
A House Republican attack on mainstream Jewish funders reads like a political favor to Netanyahu.
Mass protests against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts to upend Israel’s judiciary swept the country in September of 2023.
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Last week, the Republican staff on the House Judiciary Committee issued a baffling letter claiming that two of the largest Jewish charities in the US had endangered their nonprofit status by making grants to liberal Israeli civil society groups.
The letter doesn’t convincingly substantiate its claims. But the strange, thinly argued attack indicates that mainstream pro-Israel Jewish groups that have been critical of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu face growing political peril as Netanyuahu scrambles to preserve his political future.
The groups targeted in the Republican staff letter constitute the plumbing of Jewish communal giving to Israel. One of them, the Jewish Communal Fund (JCF), warehouses billions of dollars in charitable funds on behalf of wealthy Jewish donors. The other, PEF Israel Endowment Funds (PEF), serves as a pass-through for more than $100 million per year in grants from the US to Israeli charities. Both are largely passive vehicles for grantmaking decisions made by thousands of individual donors, and JCF’s grantees range from the Friends of Ir David, which supports the Israeli settler organization Elad, to the liberal Zionist New Israel Fund. (The tent has limits: The group won’t pass donations to Jewish Voice for Peace, according to a 2024 report in The Intercept.)
The letter poses a puzzle: Who was this for? Why is the Republican staff of Rep. Jim Jordan’s Committee on the Judiciary threatening Jewish establishment groups for allowing relatively run-of-the-mill donations to Israeli causes?
The committee staff didn’t get back to us. But experts we spoke with said they suspect the letter wasn’t intended for a domestic audience at all, but was rather a political favor to Netanyahu, allowing him to paint his domestic opponents as US-backed plants and to scare off US donors from funding liberal groups in Israel.
“This was a memo released on a sleepy recess weekday with very little fanfare,” one Democratic Hill staffer told me. “At the end of the day, it’s the Trump White House doing a solid for Bibi.”
The letter framed itself as an update on an ongoing committee investigation into claims by far-right pundit Caroline Glick, a top advisor to Netanyahu, that the Biden administration was secretly funding the Israeli protests against right-wing efforts to upend the country’s judiciary in 2023. It alleges that JCF directed donations through PEF and other groups to a handful of liberal Israeli organizations involved in the protests, including Women Wage Peace, Standing Together, and Darkenu. The Republican staffers wrote that, because US charities can’t intervene in political campaigns, JCF’s “fiscal sponsorship of anti-Israel groups and protests against Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government may constitute a violation of the Internal Revenue Code.”
The charge doesn’t hold up. Tax-exempt US charities can’t support or oppose a specific candidate, at home or abroad. But they can participate in political protests—something they do every day in the US—and they can fund overseas groups that participate in such protests.
Perhaps savvy to the weakness of its claims, the US media ignored the letter. But if the intended audience was the right-wing Israeli public, the strategy worked. Pro-Netanyahu outlets in Israel seized on the memo as evidence that the judicial reform protests were manufactured by Americans, and Channel 14, the right-wing TV station, ran a report saying the letter showed the “American government is determined to lift the mask off the industry of American foundations” behind the protests. “The path to dismantling the Israeli deep state runs through the United States,” wrote a political commentator on the Israeli news site Walla.
In the US Israel-focused nonprofit world, meanwhile, there are signs that the letter is sparking worry. EJewishPhilanthropy, an outlet widely read in Jewish organizational circles, published an anxious report noting that the letter comes as “Israeli civil society faces growing challenges.” The House letter has no enforcement power; it’s not a criminal investigation. But it does seem to be a warning shot at establishment groups like the JCF and PEF, which have continued to facilitate support for liberal civil society groups in Israel even as the country’s political center of gravity has swung right.
“If you are PEF or anybody else, you’re basically being told by the government in Israel, either you put loyalty tests on who you fund, or we’ll call you an enemy, and work to direct the power of the Trump administration against you,” one person who has worked on Israel/Palestine issues for many years told me on Monday. “This is the murder of liberal Zionism by the state of Israel.”
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Josh Nathan-Kazis is the news director at Jewish Currents. Previously, he was a senior writer at Barron’s, where he covered healthcare companies, and a staff writer at The Forward, where he investigated Jewish communal institutions.
