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Forward: Women at Jewish organizations lag behind in promotions, pay

By Ami Eden · November 6, 2009

The Forward has a major story and editorial focusing on gender discrepancies in the Jewish organizational workplace (just in case that's doesn't make clear how seriously the newspaper is taking the issue, editor Jane Eisner co-wrote the news article, which also comes with a helpful chart):

Despite notable gains for women in the past year, a Forward survey of 75 major American Jewish communal organizations found that fewer than one in six are run by women, and those women are paid 61 cents to every dollar earned by male leaders.

The numbers are especially striking when compared with the overall composition of the Jewish communal work force. Women comprise about 75% of those employed by federations, advocacy and social service organizations, and religious and educational institutions, but occupy only 14.3% of the top positions. Of the 11 female leaders identified in this survey, three are in interim roles.

Looking at the numbers of women in the ranks of chief executives, it is hard to argue when the Forward concludes that the community "clearly has work to do":

Had the Forward’s survey of women leaders in major communal organizations been conducted just two years ago, the results would have been even more dismal. Clearly some of the bastions of power once monopolized by men -- particularly in federation and religious life -- are beginning to open up to women, who often bring with them new perspectives, energy and leadership styles. Many more women are chairing important, policy-making nonprofit boards. Foundations are beginning to invest in educating and mentoring young women and men. Rabbinical schools are ordaining record numbers of women, who already are having a profound effect on Jewish ritual and spiritual practices.

Sybil Sanchez, the first woman to lead the Jewish Labor Committee, credits the Muehlstein Institute for Jewish Professional Leadership for preparing her for her new role and strengthening her Jewish commitment. Other women can point to similarly productive training and mentoring experiences.

Still, the numbers speak for themselves. With women holding only 14.3% of the top jobs in the 75 organizations surveyed by the Forward, and with salaries for women lagging far behind those for men, the community clearly has work to do.

But the Forward is on shakier ground when it gives equal emphasis in its lead sentence to the claim that women in top spots are paid " 61 cents to every dollar earned by male leaders."

The problem with the claim about unequal pay is that it's a case of comparing apples and oranges -- no two top jobs are exactly the same, so who's to say the salaries should be? For example, of the largest 18 federations, only San Francisco has a woman chief executive: Jennifer Gorovitz, who became acting CEO after Daniel Sokatch left to head up the New Israel Fund. According to the Forward's handy chart, Gorovitz is making $305,000 -- putting her at 13th on the list. The average salary of the 17 males on the list is $395,365.

According to the Forward's logic, Jewish federations don't give equal pay because Gorovitz earns 77% of what her male colleagues make on average. But this line of argument ignores a bunch of factors: size of budget, size of staff, seniority, Gorovitz's interim status, etc. Perhaps the better question would be: Are Jewish women in the top spots getting paid better than their predecessors.

In Gorovitz's case, she makes $305,000; according to the most recently available tax forms, the post paid $320,000 in 2007. Throw in the economic downturn, drop in fund raising and Gorovitz's interim status, and it seems hard to argues that she's getting a raw deal (assuming Sokatch didn't make a ton more in 2008).

The Forward article eventually gets around to acknowledging the point -- "salary comparisons can be imprecise because no two jobs are truly alike; the size of organizations and the length of service are factors that boards consider when setting compensation for top executives" -- but quickly gets back on message, insisting that "these comparisons can serve as a useful window into the level of equal pay and opportunity in the workplace and are a good measure of change over time."

All that said, even if think the evdience is shaky when it comes to the claim about unequal pay, that doesn't take away from the fact that there seems to be a major hiring discrepancy. Bottom line: There are as many Jewish lawmakers in the Iranian parliament as there are women in the stable of CEOs at top Jewish federations.

Plus, according to the Forward's editorial, where there is more helpful data on salaries -- lower down on the Totem pole -- it does appear women are getting the shaft:

Moreover, women seem to lag behind even in the same jobs. A just-published study by Bruce Phillips, professor of Jewish Communal Service at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, found “a significant difference exists between the income earned by men and women working in Jewish communal service.” But, he said, that is not because women are working in lower-paying settings, and it is not because men are more experienced in their jobs.

UPDATE: The Forward editorial has a line essentially anticipating (and attempting to shoot down) my criticism. I'm not convinced, but you decide: "The argument that women earn less because they run smaller organizations is a self-fulfilling prophecy if they are barred by custom or prejudice from competing for the high-paying jobs in the federation and national advocacy world."

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That’s alota Jewish grants: Weinberg foundation releases its 2009 grants

By Jacob Berkman · November 5, 2009

The Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation released its annual report Nov. 4, disclosing more than $100 million in grants to organizations that serve several categories – elder adults, health and disabilities among them.

While the Baltimore-based foundation gives tens of millions of dollars to general causes each year, the majority of its grants go to Jewish organizations in the U.S. and abroad.

The full list of grants given to Jewish causes, listed below, is staggering. Reinforcing why the Weinberg foundation is perhaps our most important private Jewish foundation.

And again, it is tough to realize that this list includes more than $10 million less than foundation officials hoped to give away in 2009 before the recession.

To check out the foundation's full annual report, click here.

Or to just see the Jewish grants, read below:

Another Madoff in South Florida? (Miami Herald, New Times)

By Ami Eden · November 5, 2009

Federal agents raided the law offices of Scott Rothstein, a South Florida attorney-political donor-philanthropist:

Dozens of federal agents on Wednesday night raided the Fort Lauderdale law offices of attorney Scott Rothstein, a swaggering lawyer under investigation for allegedly masterminding an investment scam that could reach hundreds of millions of dollars. ...

Rothstein, 47, has been accused by his investors and law partners of wiping them out. He is cooperating with federal investigators and identifying others who may be involved in the alleged Ponzi scheme, sources familiar with the probe said Wednesday.

People in Broward County legal circles have wondered how Rothstein -- a man-about-town who lived large and donated millions to charities and politicians -- could have pulled off the alleged scheme without colleagues at the law firm knowing about it.

Investigators are looking into allegations that Rothstein bilked investors by selling them falsified lawsuit settlements, and that he stole from client trust funds and operating accounts at his 70-attorney law firm, the sources said.

Lisa Rab at New Times plays the Madoff card:

​South Florida's Jewish community just can't catch a break. First Bernie Madoff, now an alleged Ponzi scheme by Fort Lauderdale attorney Scott Rothstein -- what gives?

Madoff lured Jewish friends at the Palm Beach Country Club to be investors in his Ponzi scheme, and when his fraud collapsed, Jewish charities lost hundreds of millions of dollars. It's not yet clear how Rothstein's scandal will impact Jewish investors -- although Yeshiva World News is buzzing with rumors that the Orthodox community in Brooklyn may have lost millions.

One thing is obvious: Rothstein's imprint on the Fort Lauderdale Jewish community is indelible and very visible. The chabad center on Broward Boulevard bears his name -- the Rothstein Family Downtown Jewish Center Chabad.
 

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Joshua Venture relaunches

By Jacob Berkman · November 2, 2009

Joshua Venture, the incubator of innovative Jewish projects that helped found such organizations as JDub, Heeb, Sharsheret and Storahtelling, has been revived after a four-year hiatus.

The incubator, which will now be known as The Joshua Venture Group, will recruit 8 fellows for its first two-year cohort. The fellows will receive two years of seed funding at $40,000 each, as well as mentoring.

The group has secured five years of funding for core operations from the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation, the Lippman Kanfer Family Foundation, the Nathan Joshua Venture Group, Cummings Foundation, and the Stanford and Joan Alexander Foundation and remains committed to the goal of revitalizing and enhancing Jewish communities, according to a press release it issued.

The group has also relaunched its Web site.

Nonprofit and for-profit ventures that are younger than 5 years old and have budgets of under $500,000 are eligible to apply for the fellowships. Applications for the 2010-2012 cohorts are available at www.joshuaventuregroup.org; Fellows will be announced in April 2010. Here’s the press release with more details.

Paying for programs—and the studies that love them

By Jacob Berkman · November 2, 2009

Last week I filed a story on the new Birthright study, and noted that the findings were serving as key plank in the organization's fund-raising push:

Birthright Israel is hinging a major fund-raising push on a new study that says the program, which sends young Jews on free 10-day trips to Israel, has a major impact on Jewish continuity.

The study, released Monday by Brandeis University’s Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies, found that those who participated on Birthright trips are more likely to have stronger connections to Israel, raise their children as Jews and belong to a synagogue than their peers who have not made a Birthright trip.

Titled "Generation Birthright Israel: The Impact of an Israel Experience on Jewish Identity and Choices," the study is based on interviews with some 1,200 young people who applied for Birthright trips between 2001 and 2004 -- two-thirds of whom went on the trips, the rest whose applications were denied. The survey compared the answers of the two groups.

Of the 500 or so interviewed who are now married, 72 percent who made the trip married Jews, while 46 percent of those who did not married Jews. This means that Birthright participants were 57 percent more likely to marry within the faith, according to Len Saxe, the head of the Cohen Center and the researcher who oversaw the survey.

A few more thoughts (that you could have read last week, if you were subscribed to The Fundermentalist's weekly newsletter) ... Birthright's most vocal philanthropic boosters -- Charles Bronfman, Lynn Schusterman and Michael Steinhardt -- all were at the news conference last week to make fund-raising pitches (as was Michael Bohnen, who runs Sheldon Adelson's foundation). And some of them also have been hammering home the message in well-timed opinion pieces citing the new study.

Does such a coordinated campaign, with the same funders backing the project and the research, risk undermining the credibility of the final study?

Even Saxe acknowledged to The Fundermentalist that he wishes the funders had waited a couple of weeks before using the study in their pitches.

The goal here isn't to pick on Birthright, because every Jewish survey is used ultimately by some organization to push policy and raise money. And as some researchers have whispered to me even before the new Birthright campaign, in general the lines between the funding and the research seem to have become increasingly blurred.

It's an issue that we will be looking into in the coming weeks.

As for Saxe and Birthright officials, they have gone out of their way to address any questions about the credibility of their study. At JTA's offices Tuesday, Saxe said that as a tenured professor at Brandeis, he felt absolutely no pressure to find certain results to placate his funders. The report lists half a dozen noted independent sociologists and researchers who also reviewed the methodology and findings of the study.

"My concern is how people will use the report," Saxe said, though he did acknowledge that "I wish that people hadn't started talking about funding for two weeks. I wish they had talked about education."

Besides, he said, pressure from philanthropists is no big deal. As a Congressional Science Fellow, Saxe conducted research in 1983 that he says helped prove the invalidity of lie detector tests.

"When the CIA doesn't like the results of your research," he said, "that is pressure."

The Birthright Foundation pulled off another nifty move in vouching for the validity of the survey: It had Steven M. Cohen -- a Jewish sociologist and researcher at New York University who has clashed with Saxe frequently and loudly -- to weigh in on the report. Despite their previous debates, Cohen was at the Oct. 26 news conference to vouch for Saxe's research.

Given the chance to respond to the report officially just after the Brandeis man presented his findings, Cohen said that he had interrogated Saxe's findings and, "from what little one can tell, they check out and make sense."

While Cohen and Saxe have butted heads often over how to respond to intermarriage, the report confirms that there is a "race between intermarriage and Birthright," Cohen said in front of about 100 reporters and philanthropy officials gathered at the Brandeis House in Manhattan. "I said I agree."

After the event, Cohen told me that he also supported the way the research was being used in a direct effort to promote a specific policy (higher funding for Birthright).

"Should social science be used for policy purposes? Yes. I'm an engaged intellectual," Cohen told JTA.

While Cohen said that researchers must do their work in a vacuum and be honest about their results, they can use the results to push an agenda.

"I have no objections," he said. "Intermarriage is a problem. Israel needs support. Why shouldn't I lend my voice to it?"

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Landing Obama and Brin

By Jacob Berkman · November 2, 2009

I filed a report last week tying together the Jewish community's to big "gets": Barack Obama and Sergey Brin:

NEW YORK (JTA) -- The relative calm that annually settles in over the Jewish nonprofit world during the High Holidays season ended with a bang this week, as the Jewish communal world landed two big gets.

President Obama agreed to speak next month at the General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America to be held in Washington -- his first speech as president to a Jewish audience. And one of the country’s richest men, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, made his first major charitable gift to a Jewish organization.

Both developments provide a boost to a Jewish philanthropic world facing tough times.

Brin, the 36-year old programming whiz who is worth $15.3 billion according to the recently released Forbes 400 list, announced Sunday that he would give $1 million to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, one of the aid groups that helped his family when they emigrated from the Soviet Union to the United States 30 years ago.

The announcement, made on the 30th anniversary of the Brin family’s arrival in America, came as a welcome surprise to a Jewish nonprofit world that has been speculating for years on whether or not the Google co-founder would become engaged philanthropically in the Jewish world as he ramps up his giving.

For the Jewish Federations, which recently changed its name from United Jewish Communities, landing Obama could provide a boost to a North American charitable network coping with sagging fund-raising campaigns and other significant challenges.

Read the full story.

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Weinberg foundation to announce $100 million in grants.

By Jacob Berkman · November 2, 2009

The country’s largest Jewish-focused foundation, the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation, will announce roughly $100 million in grants at its annual public meeting in Baltimore Nov. 4.

The foundation will surely give a large percentage of those gifts to Jewish organizations.

Though $100 million is still a lot of money, the foundation before the recession had estimated that it would be giving out up to $25 million more than that this year, as I reported here this summer. Last year the foundation gave out $106 million. And while it did accept new grant applications starting in August, after taking a hiatus from new applications, the majority of the money the foundation will grant out is most likely going to come from multi-year commitments it had made before 2009.

From the Weinberg Foundation’s press release:

By making grants of approximately $100 million during the past year, The Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation has continued to secure its position as one of the major American private funders for the benefit of financially disadvantaged individuals.

• After a several month hiatus in the receipt of Letters Of Inquiry (LOI), the first step in the grant application process, the Foundation’s “mailbox” was opened during August 2009. The result was a deluge of over 1,100 LOI’s received during that one month.

• In July, the Weinberg Foundation hosted its third annual Employee Giving Program event. $180,000 was awarded to 18 nonprofits.

• Since April 2009, The Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation Family and Informal Caregiver Support Program RFP has awarded 14 grants totaling $8,184,145 to provide support for innovative and evidence-based community initiatives and projects that help family and friends assist low- and moderate-income, community dwelling older adults in maintaining their independence and quality of life. The grants were made to organizations in California, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Maine, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania and Texas.

• Launched in December 2007, the Foundation initiated the Maryland Small Grants Program (MSGP) to help eligible nonprofits more easily and efficiently apply for a grant. Nonprofits are required to complete a simple, five-page proposal. In most cases it takes only 50 days for applications to be processed and funded. The response to the Maryland Small Grants Program has been overwhelming. The Foundation has awarded $10,463,450 to 181 nonprofits across the state since the program began less than two years ago.
 

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JPost: Silverman and Manning look at overseas funding and young people before GA

By Jacob Berkman · November 2, 2009

In his run-up to the GA, to be held next week in Washington, the Jerusalem Post’s Haviv Rettig spoke with the Jewish Federations of America’s top professional and lay leader, Jerry Silverman and Kathy Manning.

The story covers the federations’ plight in broad strokes. Silverman and Manning both say that the federation needs to rethink itself, from a revamping of the funding relationship between the American Jewish community and the federations’ overseas partners – the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the Jewish Agency for Israel – to integrating young people and the organizations they run into the federation world.

Rettig writes:

AMONG THE first acts Silverman wants to lead in the federation system is a rethinking of the federations' priorities outside the US.

"We need to clarify with our federations what our mission is overseas," he says. Once, the federations were a pillar of Israel's survival. "In 1948, US Jews sent $250 million to Israel, when the entire state budget was just $500m.," notes Silverman.

The circumstances have changed, but the principle hasn't. "World Jewry still needs to have an important connection to Israel today," he insists. 

As for young people:

ONE OF American Jewry's most pressing problems is ensuring that a new generation of young Jews grows up with the same charitable and communal commitments of their predecessors.

To do this, says Silverman, federations have to "communicate with an iPod culture that doesn't look at the world the way we do. We grew up listening to entire record albums start to finish. These 18 to 30 year olds, sometimes called the 'odyssey group,' only listen to the songs they want, only download what they want to hear."

This youth culture means American Jewry will need new ways of plugging into communal life. In Silverman's words, "there have to be many paths for entering this tent." The good news, he adds, is that many federations are already leading the way.

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Good God: Steinhardt no longer an atheist?

By Jacob Berkman · October 28, 2009

After following Michael Steinhardt closely for three years (for a yet-to-be-published lenthy profile examining his mischievous streak), I thought I had heard it all from him.

Until Tuesday night.

Steinhardt -- the hedge funder who famously retired from Wall Street to become a full-time Jewish community builder and counts the creation of Birthright among his successes -- was at the 92nd Street Y to give the cultural center’s annual state of the Jews address.

Steinhardt. Asked to critique the Jewish communal world.

It’s certainly a recipe for entertainment.

And he did not disappoint -- spending about 45 minutes, before several hundred Manhattan Jews, ripping into the Jewish communal world, lambasting Hebrew schools, Jewish federations, the secular Jewish world and the way Jewish organizations in general spend their money.

When asked by an audience member what advice he would give to new graduates of Reform and Conservative rabbinical seminaries, he replied, “Go to Wall Street.”

He tore into the decisions that many large organizations make when they take out full-page newspaper adds in support of Israel. Not only do they rarely change public opinion, but they are a waste of philanthropic resources.

“How much did that ad cost?” he asked. “By my reckoning, let’s figure around $50,000. Well, how many trees in a JNF forest does $50,000 plant? How many poor people in Bat Yam does $50,000 feed? Why are we spending money on advertising, rather than on doing what we say we’re supposed to be doing?”

And to that end, he repeated a public call that he made shortly after the Madoff scandal for the Jewish community to hire an official ombudsman who would look objectively at the finances and missions of all Jewish organizations to make sure that they were effective and not squandering communal cash.

Jewish unity and the notion of Jewish peoplehood upon which so many organizations have hinged their mission are dead, he said, calling such concepts "noble lies.”

So far, par for the course.

Then came the zinger.

For years Steinhardt has touted himself as an atheist, making his disbelief in God very much a part of his public persona and his identity as a Jewish philanthropist (another phrase he hates).

Yet in talking about how to boost Jewish education, he suggested that Jewish parents join their children in struggling honestly with the notion of God. That, he said, is the Jewish tradition, citing the open squabbles that Abraham, Moses and Job all had with God.

“A God with whom we struggle is a God I could accept and still look myself in the mirror the next morning. And I suspect it is also a God that the next generation of Jews can live with as well,” Steinhardt said. “Our kids will respect us if they feel we are talking to them about a kind of Deity that we, ourselves, struggle to comprehend. It will convince them that we, their parents, are for real; that we aren’t trying to push some pious sounding, but insincere, horse manure on them. In the end, we can only gain by speaking honestly about this. I think it will not lead our kids away from faith. It might even lead them towards it.”

An atheist certainly could not wrestle with something that he does not think exists. 

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Jewish charities on Top 400 list: See how they ranked

By Jacob Berkman · October 26, 2009

The Chronicle of Philanthropy is out with its annual list of the largest 400 nonprofits (sorry, no link yet). Here's a quick look at how the Jewish ones on the list fared in 2008 -- by rank, level of private support and performance compared to 2007 (thanks to Gil Shefler):

Here's the JTA news (not so) brief:

NEW YORK (JTA) -- More than 20 Jewish charities were featured on the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s Philanthropy 400, despite some serious drops in fund raising.

The annual ranking of top money-collecting nonprofits looked at charitable collections for 2008, a year in which many charities felt the pain of the recession and the early fallout from Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.

The Jewish charities included on the list each took in more than $55 million, but they also saw some of the biggest individual drops in donations.

The country’s largest Jewish charity, the Jewish Federations of North America, formerly known as the United Jewish Communities, took in $398.5 million but its donations fell by 25.3 percent. The tally for the umbrella organization of the Jewish federation system consists of money that passes through from local federations to the system’s overseas arms, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the Jewish Agency for Israel, as well as federations’ dues to the national group, money from special campaigns and an annual grant the system receives from the U.S. government.

The Jewish Communal Fund of New York, a donor-advised fund that relies heavily on patrons who work in the financial services industry, saw a 26.9 percent drop. The Jewish federations in San Francisco and New York saw 28.8 and 21.3 percent falloffs, respectively.

And Hadassah, though its officials have worked hard to avoid being hurt by the fallout from the Madoff scandal, saw its donations drop by nearly half, to just over $85 million in 2008.

Meanwhile, one of the biggest gainers on the list was the United Jewish Communities of MetroWest New Jersey, which saw its contributions grow 71.4 percent to $78.8 million. MetroWest and the Birthright Israel Foundation, which took in $87.5 million in 2008, were new to the list.

The American Jewish Committee and the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia dropped from last year's list.

The top-ranking federation on the Chronicle’s list was New York’s, which despite its drop in support finished No. 111 with $177.5 million. In addition to New York and MetroWest, seven other local federations made the list: Chicago (132), San Francisco (181), Boston (197), Detroit (274), Cleveland (346), Los Angeles (349) and Baltimore (355). Communal funds in Los Angeles (241) and San Diego (317) made the list, in addition to New York's (55).

Yeshiva Univeristy (108) and Brandeis Univeristy (239) made the list, in addition to the U.S.-based fund-raising arm of the Weizman Institute of Science (286). Several national organizations also finished in the top 400.

In all, according to the Chronicle, donations to the country’s largest charities grew by 1 percent last year. But many of the organizations listed closed their fiscal years in June or September, before the recession truly took hold.

The Chronicle expects the 1 percent increase to drop precipitously in 2009, and perhaps further in 2010.

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