Sheryl Sandberg is about to become a very rich woman — and I’m really happy about it. The world needs more rich women, especially women who understand the importance of empowering other women. The New York Times called Sandberg the “$1.6 billion woman,” based on the anticipated public offering of Facebook, where Sandberg is COO….
Donor-advised funds are the fastest growing method of philanthropy that you’ve probably never heard of. Nationwide last year, these funds had assets totaling $30 billion. Almost $3 billion was held by Jewish institutions, the largest of which — the Jewish Communal Fund of New York — had assets of almost $1 billion, making it among…
An American immigrant to Israel received today one of the country’s great honors, the Knesset Speaker’s Prize for Quality of Life. In 1990, three decades after immigrating to Israel, Hebrew University academic Eliezer Jaffe set about taking the old shtetl idea of a free loan society and building it on a national scale in Israel….
Remember that little cardboard or plastic (and if you are even older, metal) tzedakah box that you used to drop coins into at home or at Hebrew school? Well, so does the American Jewish World Service, which is using it as the inspiration for a new design competition to be launched in January. “Where Do…
While attending a Jewish Funder’s Network conference 15 years ago, I received a monograph on Jewish social justice. The powerful essay, written by Leonard Fein, lifelong champion of many social justice issues, had a major flaw. It did not refer to a single woman activist. When I challenged Fein on this, he responded with a…
It’s not quite worthy of a Sherlock Holmes story, but the mystery continues: Who censored Steven Spielberg’s name at a movie theater in Lebanon? In a piece picked up by The Washington Post, the country’s Blog Baladi reported yesterday that the director’s name had been covered up on a poster for his next movie, the…
For our upcoming special section on philanthropy, the Forward will profile American Jews aged 21 and under who are making a difference, locally or globally, with cool new approaches to helping others. We are looking for young people who are having a direct impact on their community in the novel way they are confronting poverty,…
Harold Grinspoon, the Jewish philanthropist who founded the PJ Library — a program that distributes free Jewish children’s books to families across the country — invites 50 or 60 of his closest friends and philanthropic collaborators to go hiking with him in Aspen, Colo., each summer. For some reason, this time he has invited me…
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