Transforming Philanthropy: Finance and Institutional Evolution at the Jewish Federation of New York, 1917–86

Transforming Philanthropy: Finance and Institutional Evolution at the Jewish Federation of New York, 1917–86 Matthew Berkman Jewish Social Studies, Volume 22, Number 2, Winter 2017, pp. 146-195 (Article) Published by Indiana University Press For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/649095 Access provided by University Of Pennsylvania (3 Mar 2017 02:20 GMT) Transforming Philanthropy: Finance and Institutional Evolution at the Jewish Federation of New York, 1917–86 Matthew Berkman Abstract At the beginning of the 1970s, the Jewish Federation of New York underwent a rapid ideological transition from a politics of assimilation to a politics of ethnic survival. Whereas previous treatments of the survivalist turn have focused on cultural change, this article offers an explanation rooted in the financial dynamics and core institutional imperatives that drove executive decision making by Federation’s board of trustees. Over the first half of the twentieth century, recurrent fiscal strain, Jewish class mobility, and the growth of the welfare state propelled the expansion of Federation’s organizational infrastructure and geographic reach far beyond the limited vision of its founders. For a time, the imperative to generate new revenue and preempt competition helped stabilize the ideological consensus around assimilationism. But those same structural dynamics gradually empowered new actors—students, rabbis, and militants—who mobilized to put concerted pressure on Federation to adopt a survivalist program just as old mod- els of institutional reproduction began to break down. Questions of Federation’s political orientation are thus bound up with the same overarching process of institutional adaptation that engendered its sprawling contemporary architecture and communal preeminence. Key words: Federation of Jewish Philanthropies, fundraising, ethnicity, suburbanization Matthew Berkman, “Transforming Philanthropy: Finance and Institutional Evolution at the Jewish Federation of New York, 1917–86,” Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society n.s. 22, no.2 (Winter 2017): 146–195. Copyright © 2017 The Trustees of Indiana University. doi:10.2979/jewisocistud.22.2.05 ince the late 1960s, the social, political, and financial capi- tal accrued by local Jewish federations has made them targets Sfor social movement activism, a site of contestation for Jews of [147] different ideological stripes vying over the material and symbolic resources of the Jewish community. In his study of radical challenges Transforming Philanthropy to the American Jewish establishment, Michael Staub describes one of the earliest mobilizations against the federation system: “In • November 1969, a group of young radical Jews took over the Jewish Matthew Berkman Federation-Council in Los Angeles, affixing two hundred mezuzahs to the doors in the building, dramatically symbolizing what they saw as the Federation-Council’s indifference to Jewish educational, spiritual, and cultural concerns.”1 That same month, at the General Assembly of the Council of Jewish Federations in Boston, an activist named Hillel Levine stood up to passionately denounce the cultural barrenness and plutocratic governing structure of the Jewish federations. Noting that his opportunity to speak was secured only by the “threat of disruption,” Levine demanded that federations “no longer be run by a few generous men or the patrons of particular projects” and that “rabbis, people involved in Jewish education, students, and concerned Jews should participate on all levels of decision-making and allocations.”2 These protest actions were the opening salvos of a countercultural youth insurrection making demands on federations for increased financial allocations to Jewish educational and identity- building projects. In retrospect, the demands of the Jewish counterculture appear to have prefigured a programmatic shift in subsequent decades, across most American Jewish political and social institutions, from a politics of liberal integrationism to one of ethnic identitarianism.3 The appar- ent success of the youth activism of the 1960s raises questions relevant to the study of complex social and political institutions: What were the underlying mechanisms that translated the protest actions and shifting cultural currents of the 1960s and 1970s into lasting organizational modifications? How do exogenous pressures interact with core demands of institutional reproduction to engender programmatic shifts? In this article, I explore these questions through an intensive case study of one particular Jewish federation, what is now the United Jewish Appeal-Federation of Jewish Philanthropies of New York (UJA- Federation, or simply Federation4). Given the exceptional size and structure of the UJA-Federation, in addition to social conditions particular to New York City, this study is not intended to represent the historical trajectory of the national Jewish federation system. Though there is some evidence of a convergence, it remains for future research to determine whether the dynamics I describe below reflect the expe- riences of Jewish federations in other American cities. Nonetheless, [148] I believe the UJA-Federation story usefully illuminates institutional logics that continue to shape the Jewish communal landscape today. Jewish Although organized philanthropy has begun to attract increased Social Studies scholarly attention, little has been written about the New York 5 • Federation in particular or federated Jewish philanthropy in general. Vol. 22 The most detailed look at the New York Federation’s long-term trends No. 2 is an extensive 1979 article by Charles Liebman published in the American Jewish Year Book.6 Like the present study, Liebman offers an explanation for Federation’s ideological and programmatic transition from assimilationism to survivalism at the end of the 1960s. Though he notes developments in government policy and the changing socio- demographics of New York City, Liebman zeroes in on the evolving personal attitudes and priorities of Federation’s leadership. Surveying successive generations of Federation trustees, he finds heightened levels of Jewish literacy and ethnic solidarity among the younger cohort, leading him to locate Federation’s survivalist turn at the intersection of this renewed Jewish commitment and a broader set of attitudinal- cultural shifts among American Jews purportedly catalyzed by the Six Day War and the rise of black nationalism. In short, Liebman contends that Federation’s orientation changed because the beliefs and values of its governing elite changed along with the rest of American Jewry. My examination of Federation records, including minutes of the board of trustees and executive committee and numerous committee reports, publications, correspondence, and financial documents, reveals a more complicated picture. Instead of viewing cultural or attitudinal shifts as primary causes, I argue that Federation’s programmatic reorientation after 1970 was driven chiefly by the efforts of its leadership to safeguard what organizational theorist James Thompson would call Federation’s core technology—namely, its fundraising and distribution apparatus.7 In what follows, I attempt to move beyond a description of Federation’s cultural and ideological transition points to explore the way internal financial dynamics drove Federation’s high-level decision making, including, ultimately, its survivalist turn. The latter, I argue, is most fruitfully understood with reference to a broader dynamic of expansion through fiscal crisis that propelled the entire institutional history of the New York Federation until 1986. As one Federation director put it, In the sharpest analysis the functions of Federation, historically and factually, are two—one, the solicitation of money and the other the distribution to the beneficiary societies of the money collected. All the work of this Board, and all the other problems of Federation with which this Board has had to cope are incidental with one or the other of [these] [149] two main Federation functions.8 Transforming According to Thompson, complex organizations cope with environ- Philanthropy mental uncertainty by establishing buffering mechanisms to smooth • input and output transactions. As I will demonstrate, Federation’s Matthew early decades were characterized by recurrent financial uncertainty. Berkman Its trustees and staff responded by pushing for the release of bylaw constraints that impeded the establishment of buffer mechanisms. On the input side, these mechanisms included the accumulation of a permanent endowment fund to hedge against fluctuations in the business cycle. On the output side, they included means for effecting economies in Federation agencies, for instance by eliminating dupli- cative activities and coordinating the joint purchasing of supplies and services. Finally, Federation elites were perennially concerned with limiting or managing fundraising competition. As large num- bers of Jews moved from Manhattan into suburban Nassau, Suffolk, and Westchester counties, Federation expanded its physical reach in an attempt to preempt the development of alternative fundraising appeals in those localities. Consequential decisions regarding Israel and Federation’s disposition towards other political matters were driven largely by a concern with fundraising—in particular with defending Federation’s extractive machinery against the threat of its more ideological competitors. By the late

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