When Interland Corporation founder Jim Joseph died in 2003 at age 68, few people outside San Francisco and the real estate field had heard of him.
Today, less than a decade later, the words “Jim Joseph” are among the most frequently uttered syllables in the American Jewish education world, at least among those responsible for fundraising.
Since restructuring in 2006, the Jim Joseph Foundation — its offices are located on Sansome Street in San Francisco’s Financial District — has committed $240 million to Jewish education, much of it in massive, multiyear gifts focused on recruitment and training of educators.
The foundation, the recipient of the bulk of Joseph’s estate, has announced in the last few months alone $33 million (to be paid out over five years) for educator training at the three major seminaries and $12 million to establish a Jewish education doctoral program at Stanford University.
Perhaps more than any other single player, the foundation is in a position to shape American Jewish life in the coming decades.
“They are potentially game-changers in Jewish education,” said Jeffrey Solomon, president of the Charles and Andrea Bronfman Philanthropies, one of the founding organizations of Birthright Israel.
However, with record numbers of American Jews lacking in basic Jewish literacy and largely disengaged from institutional life — as well as little consensus about just what defines a “vibrant Jewish life” — the foundation has its work cut out for it.
With an endowment estimated at $750 million, Jim Joseph is believed to be the second-largest private Jewish foundation in the country (after Baltimore’s Weinberg Foundation).
And while its beneficiaries range from Jewish summer camps to day schools to Hillel’s “senior educator” program to Israel education, some 40 percent of foundation grants have gone to “educating the educator” endeavors.
Since 2008, the foundation has paid for 35 staff members at the youth group BBYO to earn MBAs (with a focus on nonprofit management) and certificates in Jewish studies.
On an even more ambitious scale, the $33 million grant to Yeshiva University, the Jewish Theological Seminary and Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion aims to produce 1,000 new educators within the next five years, through a variety of master’s, doctoral and certificate programs.
The shortage of “well-prepared educators” has been documented in several studies and has for decades been a “chronic refrain from the field,” the foundation’s executive director, Charles “Chip” Edelsberg, explained.
“There has been a different reality since the recession, but that doesn’t obviate for us the premise on which we’re doing this: The belief that the educator — whether in a youth group, on an Israel trip, teaching in a day school, holding a book salon or leading a Shabbat service — is a person who is likely to have a chance to motivate and inspire others to opt into Jewish life,” he said.
Not everyone in Jewish education shares the foundation’s priorities.
Last month, in a weekly paid advertisement in the Jewish Week of New York, Marvin Schick, who has done extensive research on enrollment and finances in the Jewish day school world, lashed out at the foundation for investing so heavily in graduate institutions and what he called “a train to nowhere” rather than addressing the “severe financial stress” of the day school movement.
With day schools facing declining enrollment and congregational schools cutting hours, Schick asked, “What exactly are educators being trained for when dozens of talented Jewish teachers have been laid off?”
As for suggestions that day schools need cash and scholarship funds more than they need teachers, Edelsberg and foundation president Al Levitt noted that the foundation has provided various types of funding to day schools (including $11 million this year in “emergency funding” divided among five communities). But they also emphasized that day schools are just one piece of a much larger picture and that a core of highly educated professionals is needed at Hillels, Birthright, summer camps and congregational schools and elsewhere.
The Jim Joseph Foundation appears determined to work with a diverse cross-section of the Jewish community, from Orthodox to unaffiliated. Other emerging hallmarks are financial transparency, a hands-on approach with grantees, minimal spending on overhead and strong emphasis on evaluation and measurement.
“We can tell you right now that our camping initiatives, in terms of sheer numbers, are off-the-charts successful,” Edelsberg said, noting the number of first-timers Jewish campers using incentive grants and the hundreds of first-time campers at new specialty camps created with Jim Joseph funding.
Measurement is “more complicated” for other programs, such as Birthright Next (an alumni program) and Moishe House (group houses and activity hubs for 20-something Jews).
For these programs “we’re looking to make a difference in the number of young Jews who engage in ongoing Jewish learning, and that tells you that we have to follow them over a period of time,” Edelsberg said.
Although the JJF is a private foundation, most observers credit it with seeking broad communal input and, as one professional put it, “playing nicely” with other foundations.
“They’re going about things in a smart way,” observed Yossi Prager, executive director of the Avi Chai Foundation, another major funder of Jewish education.
Matthew Grossman, executive director of grantee BBYO, said the JJF has “a genuine desire to see the Jewish community changed” and to see grantees “succeed at a very high level.”
Mark Charendoff, president of the Jewish Funders Network, said the foundation’s long-range approach is good “if you really want to effect change,” but has its downsides.
“If you’re looking at 10 years [down the road], then it could take longer to see if you’re going in the wrong direction,” he said.
Several observers caution that private foundation giving, even by mega-foundations like Jim Joseph, represents a small portion of overall spending in the multibillion dollar world of Jewish education — and can hardly solve all the field’s problems.
Even if the foundation spent $100 million annually, “it would still be only 2 to 3 percent of the total expenditures on Jewish education,” said Jonathan Woocher, chief ideas officer and former executive vice president of the Jewish Education Service of North America. He noted that the bulk of revenues in the field come from tuition, fees, dues and individual donations.
Prager noted that while large foundations can be “catalysts” and “thought leaders” with initiatives, “there’s a risk of making national foundations seem like the answers to major financial challenges across the country.
“The needs of schools dwarf what a national foundation can do,” he added.