Dear Reader,

We’re thrilled to announce that our Fall/Winter 2024 issue is now online and available to subscribers! We’re so excited to share deep-dive reported features by Mari Cohen and Will Alden, a historical essay by Arthur Asseraf, a comic from Solomon Brager and Chris Blackwell, an art collaboration with Hyperallergic, and much more. If you haven’t already, you can subscribe now to receive the gorgeous print magazine in your mailbox—and read the contents on our website today!

As a preview of the exciting work you’ll find in this issue, we’re unpaywalling a major investigative report by Will Alden about the quiet crackdown on Palestine solidarity currently underway in the world of American philanthropy. Will shines a light on a wave of funding withdrawals affecting groups organizing around everything from abortion access to immigrant rights, from prison abolition to housing justice. As one philanthropy insider warns, these shifts amount to a “massive backsliding” that will damage movement work for years to come.

We hope you’ll read and share Will’s important report, and that you’ll subscribe today so that you can explore the rest of the issue in print as well as online.

Best,
The Editors

In late October 2023, the Atlanta-based abortion fund Access Reproductive Care–Southeast (ARC–Southeast) published an open letter titled “Reproductive Justice Includes Palestinian Liberation.” Like many abortion funds—which channel money directly to abortion seekers who couldn’t otherwise afford the procedure—the organization views itself as engaged in a broader struggle for reproductive justice, a framework developed by Black feminists that emphasizes the right to “personal bodily autonomy,” including to “have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.” The staff was consumed by the horror of Israel’s assault on Gaza, which, then in its third week, was killing or injuring more than 400 children every day and had stranded up to 84,000 pregnant women without access to basic supplies. “Israel’s apartheid regime represents the restricting of bodily autonomy at the highest level possible,” they concluded in the letter, drawing parallels to the obstacles to health care faced by their own callers. Musa Springer, a spokesperson for ARC–Southeast, told me that the fund’s leaders had felt a “moral duty” to provide a pathway for others in the reproductive justice movement to proclaim their solidarity. Within a month, more than 50 reproductive justice organizations, including at least 20 other abortion funds, had signed on.

Founded by three Black clinic workers in 2015, ARC–Southeast operates across six southern states with some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country, helping its callers cover not just the bill from an out-of-state clinic but also the travel expenses involved in getting there. Of the more than 3,000 people it served last year, 82% identified as Black, and 87% were uninsured or on Medicaid. While the organization’s staffing budget is underwritten by a relatively stable base of small donors, much of the funding for abortion seekers comes from institutional givers, with one foundation in particular, the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, accounting for roughly a third of the $1 million that ARC–Southeast pledged for abortion assistance in 2023. Schusterman, founded by a Tulsa oil-and-gas magnate and his wife in 1987, had first backed ARC–Southeast with a $250,000 grant in 2020, followed by a $400,000 donation in 2021, tax records show. In 2022, the year the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Schusterman awarded the abortion fund nearly $1 million to be paid over three years, an important source of stability, with the final installment of the grant due in 2024, Springer told me.

ARC–Southeast had expected to reapply for more funding once that grant expired; the demand from abortion seekers was growing only more acute as more states imposed bans. But after the abortion fund published its Palestine solidarity letter last year, Schusterman moved to distance itself from its grantee. In the weeks following the letter’s release, the foundation informed ARC–Southeast that, rather than pay the third installment of the grant as normal, it would route it through a third-party donor-advised fund. The staff surmised that the change had been made “so that Schusterman’s name was not attached to funding us,” Springer told me. They had reason to worry: An employee at the foundation, whom Springer described as an “ally,” had warned them in an off-the-books meeting that the solidarity statement had put their funding in jeopardy. In late July, after the final installment, of $325,000, had arrived via the third-party fund, a Schusterman official told ARC–Southeast in an email that the payment amounted to a “tie-off/closing grant,” and that the foundation was “waiving any pending report requirements,” according to Springer, who read me the email. In philanthropy-speak, Schusterman was saying that it didn’t want to hear from ARC–Southeast again. (Roben Smolar, a spokesperson for Schusterman, disputed the idea that the philanthropy had cut ties with the abortion fund for political reasons, telling me in an emailed statement that the foundation “made the strategic decision long before October 2023 to shift away from funding individual funds to a long-term approach that will advance broad-scale access across the country,” and adding, “Our level of giving to abortion access has not changed—in fact, it has increased.” She declined to elaborate or answer further questions.)

It was a striking turnabout by a foundation that had quickly become a top funder of abortion care in the United States as the revocation of Roe became an imminent possibility and then a reality with the Dobbs v. Jackson decision in June 2022. That year, Schusterman gave more than $3 million to local and national branches of Planned Parenthood and made six- or seven-figure grants to at least a dozen abortion funds and other reproductive justice organizations, including $1 million to the National Network of Abortion Funds (NNAF), the umbrella organization that provides local funds with financial and technical support. As of June 2024, Schusterman ranked among NNAF’s top five donors, according to a document distributed to member funds. But Schusterman is also guided by other considerations: “We’re a Zionist foundation,” Lisa Eisen, a Schusterman co-president, said on a podcast episode in 2021. “We don’t fund organizations that delegitimize Israel,” she added, describing this as a “red line.” As recently as 2020, Schusterman put this condition in black and white, requiring organizations receiving its grants to pledge not to “support, endorse, or engage in policies or activities that are anti-Semitic or that question Israel’s right to exist or the legitimacy of Israel as a secure, independent, democratic Jewish state,” according to grant agreements obtained by Jewish Currents. (Grant agreements from later years that I reviewed require a vaguer promise not to “promote or engage” in “antisemitism or the destruction of any state.”) A longtime funder of Hillel centers on college campuses, Schusterman has played a major role in opposing perceived anti-Israel sentiment in academia, including by establishing the Israel on Campus Coalition (ICC) with Hillel International in 2002. According to reporting by The Forward in 2018, the ICC has built a “sophisticated political intelligence operation” to monitor dissenting students and aggressively oppose Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) resolutions on campuses. (The ICC did not reply to Jewish Currents’s request for comment.)

After October 7th, a number of Schusterman’s grantees in the reproductive justice world, like ARC–Southeast, made or signed statements that tested the foundation’s “red line.” At a Zoom meeting for NNAF member funds in late June, Diana Parker-Kafka, the executive director of the Chicago-based Midwest Access Coalition—which signed ARC–Southeast’s letter and released its own detailed ceasefire statement on Instagram—noted that Schusterman had “made it clear that they’re specifically divesting from funds that make a solidarity statement.” Parker-Kafka asked NNAF officials about the organization’s own relationship with Schusterman. “I think it’s safe to say that we are misaligned,” Naimah Bilal, NNAF’s deputy director of development, said on the call, in a recording obtained by Jewish Currents. In late August, NNAF told its members in an email that its partnership with Schusterman had “sunsetted.” (A spokesperson for NNAF told me the two sides reached a “respectful and mutual” decision to end their relationship due to disagreements over whether broader reproductive justice advocacy has a place in abortion funds’ work.) For some funds, the loss of Schusterman and other donors could harm their ability to support abortion seekers even as the national context grows increasingly hostile to reproductive freedom. ARC–Southeast may have to reduce the amount it gives to callers as soon as mid-2025 if it can’t replace its Schusterman grant. “To remove funding from an abortion fund for political reasons is to directly impact some of the most marginalized individuals in our entire society,” Springer told me.

Donors’ break with abortion funds is just one example of a quiet crackdown currently underway inside the veiled world of American philanthropy. In conference rooms, Zoom meetings, and email inboxes, largely hidden from public view, funders who style themselves as champions of progressive values are conditioning their grants on support for—or, at least, silence about—Israel’s brutal campaign in Gaza, denying resources to organizations they had previously supported and praised. More than 40 interviews with people on either side of the grantmaker–grantee divide reveal a pattern of funding decisions that punish expressions of Palestinian solidarity, affecting social justice organizations that work on a range of domestic issues, from police violence and the prison system to environmental justice and the affordable housing crisis. For funders—including prominent Jewish family foundations like Schusterman—the enforcement of Israel-related guardrails lays bare the contradictions inherent in a philanthropic portfolio that pursues a progressive domestic agenda while promoting allegiance to the Jewish state. “These liberal Zionist foundations were not necessarily hiding their focus on Israel, and their support of Israel, as part of their philanthropic work,” before October 2023, said Rebecca Vilkomerson, a former executive director of the anti-Zionist organization Jewish Voice for Peace. “It’s just that there was an apparent dividing line between the support for progressive causes—which is in line with the ‘liberal’ part of liberal Zionist—and the Zionist causes. And now they’re feeling forced to choose, and they’re choosing Zionist over liberal.”