American Jews are building vibrant, values-aligned communities. Why is philanthropy leaving them behind?

By Joanna Ware and Keren Soffer-Roth

At the beginning of July, the Jewish Liberation Fund (JLF) — which grows the culture, capital, and conditions that the Jewish left needs to win — merged with Rise Up Initiative. Since emerging in 2019, Rise Up has funded the spiritual resilience of Jewish social justice leadership in our collective fight for inclusive, multiracial democracy. Now, Rise Up’s wisdom and expertise will be a core part of our work at JLF.

Both of our organizations have been leaders in the field of progressive Jewish philanthropy for over six years, funding many of the same inspiring groups. As each of us has played our distinct and overlapping roles, we’ve continued to arrive at the same conclusion: Even as many of our established and well-resourced communal institutions shrink in membership and participation, all we can see is a flourishing of progressive Jewish life — and a lack of resources to back it up.

Although 64 percent of Jews in the U.S. recently reported that nobody in their household was a member of a synagogue, hundreds of thousands of Jews are still building values-aligned organizations where their Judaism drives their hunger for justice. These Jews are fighting for a vision of this world where all of us —Jews and our neighbors — are treated as human beings deserving of dignity and care.

We merged because these same organizations have come to us time and again for support, far beyond what we’ve been able to provide on our own, and we need to be the safety net they can depend on.

Visit a study session at Ammud: Jews of Color Torah Academy, for example, and you'll see a community wrestling with Torah through the lens of their lived experiences as Jews of Color. Attend a High Holiday service at Kol Tzedek, and you'll find deep and lively spiritual and ritual practices created by and for Jews who never felt at home in the synagogues they grew up in. Join a community organizing meeting with Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, and you'll find Jews working alongside their neighbors to build a more just, affordable, and politically-engaged New York City. We're proud to call organizations like these our grantees, alongside dozens of others doing critical work driven by similar values. None of them ask their participants to choose between their politics and their prayer, their values and their belonging. 

Despite the importance of this work — for those who individually take part in it and for the future of our community as a whole — institutional Jewish philanthropy has either missed this seismic shift taking place in American-Jewish life, or has chosen to disregard it. Either way, we’ve found ourselves wondering: Why is this happening? And what can we, as funders, do about it?

The grantmaking priorities of more established Jewish funders may offer a clue. According to a 2018 study of American Jewish philanthropy, the largest 250 American-Jewish foundations collectively granted between $900 million and $1 billion annually on what they called Jewish "engagement" — activities that, by their own description, amount to bringing minimally-involved Jews to "episodic gatherings of a Jewish flavor." Meanwhile, the communities that JLF and Rise Up have funded are offering something that the establishment is not: Jewish life that is spiritually deep, morally consistent, and grounded in the reality of who their members actually are. These organizations are often doing their work on shoestring budgets, without the infrastructure to sustain it long-term, because they don't fit the criteria — many years of work under their belt, established boards, multi-year strategic plans — that most traditional funders use in order to evaluate who to fund. This is especially true for Jews of Color, who make up 12-15 percent of American Jews and are part of one in five Jewish families, yet whose organizations receive a fraction of established philanthropic support.

Then there’s the part of this story that’s harder for much of Jewish philanthropy to say out loud: Many of these emergent Jewish organizations hold political commitments that make traditional funders uncomfortable. A 2025 survey conducted by the Jewish Federations of North America found that only 37 percent of American Jews now identify as Zionist, a sign that disaffiliation runs deeper than synagogue membership and into the political and ideological frameworks that have long anchored institutional Jewish life. Inevitably, many of the organizations that were founded more recently reflect this generational shift: Some are trying to create community across the spectrum of Zionist and anti-Zionist belief, others are explicitly non-Zionist or anti-Zionist, and most center visions for justice that challenge the existing power structures foundations benefit from. Whether Jewish philanthropy funds this work or not, these are the places where hundreds of thousands of Jews are leading meaningful Jewish lives. 

If we truly care about the future of Jewish communal life, we need to fund the organizations who are actually reaching Jewish people today. That’s exactly what we’ve strived to do at JLF and Rise Up, and joining forces makes us even more effective at doing so. 

This merger allows us to do more than pool our resources and reduce overhead. It brings us one step closer to building the long-term, sustainable infrastructure that the Jewish social justice sector needs to bring forth olam ha'ba — the world to come. We're consolidating our knowledge, our relationships, and our power so that we can move more money to where it's really needed; tell a more compelling story about what it means to invest in Jewish life for the long haul; and build a future rooted in safety, dignity, and opportunity for each and every one of us.

In living rooms and community centers across the country, Jewish people are showing up, week after week, to build the spaces that make them feel truly at home. We’re doing our part to make sure that ecosystem has what it needs to last, but we can’t do it alone. We invite other funders — those with far greater resources than us — to take this vision for our Jewish community as seriously as we do.