World Jewish Congress head Ron Lauder threatens to pull University of Pennsylvania funding, citing antisemitism
Lauder says timing of controversial Palestinian literary event held at Penn a week before Hamas attacks ‘couldn’t have been worse’
Billionaire philanthropist Ronald Lauder threatened to pull support from his alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, in a letter to UPenn President Liz Magill. Photo by John Lamparski/Getty (Lauder) and courtesy of University of Pennsylvania (Magill)
By Beth Harpaz October 18, 2023
Billionaire Ronald Lauder, who heads the World Jewish Congress, threatened to pull funding from the University of Pennsylvania and accused its president of failing to fight antisemitism on campus.
“You are forcing me to reexamine my financial support absent satisfactory measures to address antisemitism at the university,” he wrote Monday in a letter to the school’s president, M. Elizabeth Magill.
Lauder is the latest philanthropist to express concerns about antisemitism at the university. Jon Huntsman, the former U.S. ambassador, Utah governor and heir to a business fortune, said his family would “close its checkbook on all future giving to Penn” over the university’s “silence in the face of reprehensible and historic Hamas evil against the people of Israel.”
Marc Rowan, chair of the board of advisers at the the university’s Wharton School and CEO of the equity firm Apollo Global Management, also called on alumni and donors to “close their checkbooks” until Magill and Board of Trustees Chair Scott Bok resign. Rowan made the call in an unpublished op-ed that he submitted to the campus newspaper, The Daily Pennsylvanian.
Other donors who reportedly cut ties include hedge fund manager Clifford Asness, HighSage Ventures founder Jonathon S. Jacobson and venture capitalist David Magerman.
Lauder holds a bachelor’s degree from the university. He and his brother, Leonard, fund the school’s Lauder Institute, which offers Wharton MBA students the opportunity to earn joint degrees in either law or international studies.
The Palestinian literary festival
Lauder said his concerns began when the school hosted a controversial Palestine Writes literary festival in late September. In his letter to Magill, he said he’d met with her two weeks before the festival to warn that the event would “severely tarnish” the university’s reputation and to urge its cancellation.
On Tuesday, Magill published an open message in which she said that she, “and this University, are horrified by and condemn Hamas’s terrorist assault on Israel and their violent atrocities against civilians.” She acknowledged there had been “antisemitic acts on campus” and that individuals “with a public history of speaking out viciously against the Jewish people” had participated in the Palestinian literary festival. She said the university “did not, and emphatically does not, endorse these speakers or their views.”
The Palestinian festival’s guests included writers Aya Ghanameh, who has tweeted “Death to Israel,” and Randa Abdel-Fattah, who has said of Israel that she “can’t wait for the day we commemorate its end.” Pink Floyd’s former frontman Roger Waters, who has dressed as a Nazi for concerts, participated in the festival via Zoom.
Lauder claimed that the number of Jewish students at UPenn has dropped in recent years and that the campus environment is “openly hostile” to Jews.
“I have spent the past 40 years of my life fighting antisemitism all over the world and I never, in my wildest imagination, thought I would have to fight it at my university, my alma mater and my family’s alma mater,” he wrote.
He also said the timing of the festival, a week before the Oct. 7 massacres carried out by Hamas, “could not have possibly been worse.”
Lauder said he didn’t want any Lauder Institute students to be taught by anyone associated with the festival. In addition to heading the World Jewish Congress, Lauder is a major philanthropist and supporter of Republican politicians. He and his brother Leonard have donated millions of dollars to the University of Pennsylvania. They inherited their wealth from their parents, Joseph and Estée Lauder, who founded the Estée Lauder cosmetics company.
Incidents on campus
On Wednesday, Magill issued a second statement reiterating her condemnation of the Hamas attacks and adding that “disparate views of the Israel-Palestinian conflict” were “testing” the university’s commitment to free expression, but that incitement to violence and actual violence would not be tolerated. “Hateful speech has no place at Penn,” she wrote. “I categorically condemn hateful speech that denigrates others as contrary to our values.”
Since the Oct. 7 massacres by Hamas in Israel, anti-Israel protests have taken place at campuses nationwide, including one at the University of Pennsylvania where demonstrators chanted, “We charge you with genocide.” A video of that rally posted on social media incorrectly transcribed the chant as, “We want Jewish genocide.” The post, originally made on Instagram by a site called Jewish Breaking News, was then shared by others as evidence of antisemitism.
A speaker at that rally can clearly be heard in the video saying that Israelis who were murdered by Hamas were “legitimate targets” because they were “settlers.” Kibbutzim near Gaza targeted by Hamas are located within borders recognized internationally as Israel’s since 1948.
Posters of Israelis kidnapped by Hamas have been torn down at the University of Pennsylvania and many other campuses. At New York University, two young women were caught on video ripping down the flyers and one of them issued an apology after being publicly identified on social media.
Other incidents at elite schools around the country include an Israeli student attacked with a stick at Columbia University; three dozen student groups at Harvard signing a statement blaming the Hamas attacks entirely on Israel; and a Stanford instructor suspended for making Jewish students stand in a classroom corner, then calling them “colonizers.” At the University of Pennsylvania, a day before the Palestinian festival, the lobby of the campus Hillel was ransacked by someone shouting antisemitic epithets. That individual was described by campus police as a “person experiencing a crisis.”
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