Since 2014, the Jewish Community Foundation of Los Angeles (JCFLA) has distributed more than $150 million from so-called “donor-advised funds” — money the foundation holds in trust for would-be donors.
Now, a contentious episode with one donor raises the question of whose money, exactly, it is, and where it can be donated.
Investor and businesswoman Lisa Greer opened a donor-advised fund with her husband, Joshua, some five years ago at JCFLA, expecting they would be able to give from it to any registered nonprofit they chose. They’ve used it to donate to a number of progressive Jewish nonprofits like the New Israel Fund, as well as to non-Jewish groups like the Girl Scouts of America.
But when they decided to donate to IfNotNow, a nonprofit consisting mostly of younger Jews that has clashed with the organized Jewish community over its approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, JCFLA refused. Lisa Greer, in an interview with the Journal, described JCFLA’s decision as a result of a growing rift between the Jewish establishment and an ascendant generation of progressive, millennial Jews.
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