There is a very particular sort of cognitive dissonance that only money can clearly produce. In the weeks and months following 7 October 2023, American Jewish donors gave and gave. The Jewish Federations of North America raised over $650 million through its Israel Emergency Campaign in the months that followed, and the broader surge of diaspora philanthropy exceeded that.

By any measure, this was one of the largest voluntary mobilizations of philanthropic capital in modern history, both Jewish and general.

But this time, the cheques were arriving at the very same moment as the surveys, the campus protests, and the oh-so-anguished op-eds. The hand writing the cheque and the hand receiving it no longer belonged to the same ideological world – that is to say, the staunchly Zionist world.

The American Jewish relationship with Israel has always been a sort of long-distance marriage that has its rough patches; it is intense, financially entangled and occasionally maddening for both parties. What is new in this arrangement is that the younger partner has ceased to pretend that this relationship is at all simple.

If we are to understand just how much the structural dependency of this contract has deepened and contorted, we ought to start not with the emergency campaigns, but with the otherwise ordinary ones. The New Israel Fund, founded in 1979 as a vehicle for the Jewish progressives of the diaspora to support Israeli civil society, has channelled $350 million to over 900 Israeli organizations over its lifetime. Its annual budget hovers around $30 million. It is, by most credible estimates, the largest single foreign donor to progressive causes in Israel.

In a great many ways, NIF, among the many other American Jewish philanthropic organizations, has built the State of Israel from the ground up. And when the state faltered in the immediate aftermath of 7 October, when governmental institutions were overwhelmed and disoriented, it was precisely this diaspora-funded infrastructure that helped to identify the dead and the kidnapped, and organized support for the hundreds of thousands of people displaced from the north and the south; the cheque-writers had quietly constructed an alternative state.

Israel is indubitably a wealthy country. Its GDP exceeds that of Poland and Portugal and Spain. And yet, despite this, its civil society, particularly on the progressive side, remains substantially reliant on American Jewish money. The reasons are partly historical, partly political and partly cultural – diaspora philanthropy predates Israeli statehood, the Israeli right has consistently defunded those left-leaning civil institutions, and the American Jewish community has long understood supporting Israel as a communal obligation regardless of whatever their ideological alignment might be.

What results from this? The money continues to flow even while the ideological consensus that once justified it fractures.

But this will not always be the case, and Israel had better start preparing for that future. The donors who built this architecture were shaped by one specific historical experience: the Holocaust, the very founding of the State of Israel, the existential wars of 1948, 1967 and 1973. For that generation, supporting Israel was closer to an act of collective survival than anything else. Their assumption, correctly held, was that Jewish vulnerability was permanent and that therefore diaspora support was not optional.

Their grandchildren see the world differently: more than four-fifths of older-generation Jewish households give, in some form, to charity; among millennials and younger generations, that figure falls to barely two-thirds, and then below that by other estimates. This is a community that is moving away from the synagogues and institutions of Jewish life into which previous generations channelled their identity and their money.

The one thing that unites all of these donors is their collective identity as American Jews. If they falter (change themselves to ‘Jewish Americans,’ and then just to Americans) there will be no identity to rally around, and the money pipe will stop flowing.

But the young American Jew who yet remains and is engaged is increasingly progressive in a way that creates a tension with the Israeli political reality. And, even then, the number of those few is steadily decreasing. Younger Jews are less likely to have visited Israel even once (and even fewer repeatedly), less likely to be religiously observant (which is, in itself, a matter of choice; but when we lose the religious part of our religious identity, our identity will quickly follow down the drain), and more likely to hold liberal, or very liberal views.

Ordinarily, one’s political leanings would be of little interest. But the American left is uniting itself precisely on that anti-Israel premise. What will it mean for our young Jews if the state that is for them is the very one they are taught to hate? And, perhaps more importantly, what will it mean for our state if it is the one our young Jews are taught to hate?

Jewishness and Zionism, which an older generation experienced as virtually synonymous, are being decoupled.

This decoupling has accelerated dramatically since 7 October. Among very liberal Jewish undergraduates, surveys show that 44% – almost half – describe themselves as not at all connected to Israel. Needless to say, this figure would have been almost unimaginable a generation or two ago. More than half of young Jews report having felt unwelcome or excluded because of their Jewish identity since the war began. The conflict has not, as some hoped it would, served as a clarifying moment for Jewish identity to rally around. Indeed, for many American Jews, it has done the opposite. It has forced a reckoning of sorts between their progressive commitments and an unconditional support for Israel that they were never entirely sure they held in the first place.

So too, this increase in the percentage of young Jews disconnected from Israel has produced another, even uglier result: no longer is the fringe group the non-Zionists, but the anti-Zionists. Over a tenth of young American Jews aged 18 to 34 now identify as the latter – keep in mind that this is a word that, in the mouths of their grandparents, was reserved only for the most extreme of extreme peripheries.

Simultaneously, nearly 70% of American Jewish adults across all generations agreed that they sometimes find it hard to support actions taken by Israel or by its government. This, of course, is not radicalism in any meaningful sense. They are still here, they still care (in some fashion), but they are no longer prepared to sign that blank cheque as they used to.

What makes the New Israel Fund so instructive as a case study is precisely the contradiction it embodies. Here is a major philanthropy that is explicitly progressive, that has consistently supported organizations the Israeli government regards as adversarial, and that has nonetheless continued to grow. That growth was particularly radical since 2023, when its donor base expanded by more than 7,000 to over 21,000 in 2024. It more than doubled its grant funding in 2023.

Benjamin Netanyahu, for his part, has returned the compliment – on the count of supporting organizations he and his government oppose. He has attacked the NIF by name on multiple occasions, and his coalition has pursued legislation that would tax foreign donations to Israeli NGOs at an almost unheard-of rate. (That is, while exempting organizations that receive even a single shekel of Israeli government funding.)

What is the effect of this, you ask? It would devastate the left-leaning groups, which rely primarily on diaspora and foreign foundation funding, while leaving the right-wing NGOs that receive government support essentially untouched. It is, in other words, an attempt to use tax law to settle a purely ideological score.

The irony ought not to be lost here. The Israeli right, which has spent decade upon decade cultivating American Jewish support as the very bedrock of the bilateral relationship, is now actively trying to constrain the expressions of that support, should it find them politically inconvenient. The money is welcome; Americans’ values are less so. Historically speaking, this is not a formula for sustaining a long-term relationship.

The response from the progressive donor community has not been to withdraw. But that will soon change. This conversation would have been almost a taboo in American Jewish philanthropic circles a decade ago; now it happens in boardrooms and at foundation retreats with increasing frequency and seriousness. What will be the result of this?

Every discussion of American Jewish philanthropy eventually arrives at the same uncomfortable question: what will happen when the founding generation is gone? Everything that gives the American people the ability to donate to Israel was built by those who had survived a catastrophe. Their grandchildren were formed by prosperity and assimilation. How are we surprised that their viewpoints differ? If you raise a child to be pampered and give him whatever he wants whenever he wants it, how can you be surprised that he will end up coddled?

American sympathy for Israelis fell to under 50% in 2025. This is a 25-year low, driven almost entirely by Democrats and independents; driven, that is, by the political home of most American Jews.

What 7 October clarified is not the terms of the relationship as is commonly held, but rather how much ambiguity has come to the surface. For now, the money is still flowing. Love among American Jews has not departed entirely. It has simply developed an argument that will put the Jewish state in jeopardy.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)