Using Holocaust Money to Demonize Israel
Steven Spielberg’s Righteous Persons Foundation supports anti-Israel groups despite Zionism being the number-one protection against another Holocaust.
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This is a guest essay by Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
“Let Gaza live,” a mob of anti-Israel protesters screamed, brandishing signs falsely accusing the Jewish state of “ethnic cleansing,” “starving Gaza” and genocide while illegally blocking traffic outside the Israeli consulate in Midtown Manhattan.
The only thing more disgusting than the ugly spectacle, which had been timed around a Hamas famine propaganda campaign last summer, was that one of the hate groups behind the anti-Israel protest, which ended in arrests, was funded by proceeds from the 1993 Academy Award-winning movie “Schindler’s List.”
When Steven Spielberg, the film’s director and producer, created the Righteous Persons Foundation with some of the profits from “Schindler’s List,” he wanted to educate people about the Holocaust and build up Jewish life in America, saying:
“I could not accept any money from ‘Schindler’s List’ — if it even made any money. It was blood money, and needed to be put back into the Jewish community.”
“My parents didn’t keep kosher and we mainly observed all the holidays when my grandparents stayed with us. I knew I was missing a great deal of my natural heritage, and as I became conscious of it, I began racing to catch up.”
The race has long since gone the other way.
The last time the Righteous Persons Foundation, named after the rescuers of Holocaust survivors, funded Holocaust programs was in 2021. Most of its funding now goes to radical social justice groups including anti-Israel organizations like those protesting Israel.
Since 2021, Spielberg’s foundation has provided $650,000 to T’ruah, an anti-Israel hate group which took part in the Manhattan street blocking and whose CEO celebrated the move and gleefully posted photos of attendees falsely accusing Israel of “ethnic cleansing.”
“We have to keep up the pressure,” urged T’ruah CEO Jill Jacobs, who had accused Israeli officials of “incitement to genocide” and demanded an end to further Israeli attacks on Hamas. Jacobs had blasted American Jews for speaking about “October 7th and the plight of the hostages without once mentioning the unbearable death toll among Palestinians” because of what she claimed was their fear of wealthy Jewish donors.
Jacobs and T’ruah had even falsely accused Israel of “war crimes” by assassinating Hezbollah operatives. “Israel, too, has already committed war crimes in Lebanon, including by exploding the beepers and walkie talkies of hundreds of Hezbollah members,” she argued.
Within a year, Spielberg had gone from funding Holocaust survivors to funding those accusing Israel of a new Holocaust, while enabling Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran to perpetrate a new one. The Righteous Persons Foundation also provided $1.2 million to “Bend the Arc,” a radical group originally headed by an anti-Israel protester, which has close ties to anti-Israel protest groups. Bend the Arc demanded that then-U.S. President Joe Biden impose an arms embargo on Israel, blamed the Jewish state for the fighting, and defended the campus hate groups persecuting Jews.
CEO Jamie Beran appeared at a rally for Mahmoud Khalil, an Algerian-Palestinian man known for his role as a negotiator and spokesperson in the 2024 Gaza Solidarity Encampment and broader protests in solidarity with “Palestine” at Columbia University during the Gaza war. Beran claimed that deporting Khalil, a foreign national, for harassing Jews was “using antisemitism as a smokescreen” and urged that,“we have to keep fighting … to ensure that he is released “
Bend the Arc Action, headed by Alex Soros, responded to the murders of Jews in Washington, D.C. and Boulder, Colorado by anti-Israel terrorists, with a letter to Congress opposing any moves to prevent campus attacks on Jews, while complaining that “police actions have been taken disproportionately toward pro-Palestinian protests.”
Bend the Arc even came out against the International Holocaust Remembrance Association definition of antisemitism. Money from a movie about the Holocaust, that was supposed to be used to memorialize the Holocaust, was instead being used to fund an organization campaigning against the International Holocaust Remembrance Association.
Beyond the direct funding of Bend the Arc, Spielberg’s foundation also paid out over a quarter of a million dollars to the Jewish Social Justice Roundtable, a collective of radical groups that includes Bend the Arc, T’ruah, and the New York Jewish Agenda, an anti-Orthodox group that was present at the anti-Israel rally. New York Jewish Agenda was co-founded by Rachel Timoner, an anti-Israel activist with T’ruah, who also serves as U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer’s “rabbi” and had signed on to a T’ruah letter demanding that Biden “ensure that Israel does not invade Rafah.”
The Righteous Persons Foundation provided $900,000 to Jews United For Justice, another member of the Jewish Social Justice Roundtable network, which had also come out against the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism because it might “chill” the speech of “Palestinians” and others opposed to the Jewish state. Jews United For Justice also promoted a “guide” on antisemitism by an anti-Israel activist, which declared that “leaders of the Jewish state and the Jewish leaders and institutions that support them worldwide must be held accountable for their oppression of Palestinians.”
In short, Spielberg’s foundation gave over $2 million to groups opposed to the International Holocaust Remembrance Association and only $125,000 to Holocaust groups in the last five years.
To put the Spielberg foundation’s millions for anti-Israel groups into context, the Righteous Persons Foundation provided only $350,000 to the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles in the director’s own hometown. And the last time the Righteous Persons Foundation even bothered funding it was back in 2020.
Meanwhile, $250,000 was allocated to the Holocaust Museum and the last time the Righteous Persons Foundation funded it was in 2019. Bet Tzedek, pro-bono lawyers who help Holocaust survivors, was last funded in 2019. The Blue Card, a Holocaust charity that provides money to survivors, received $375,000, and there have been no further funds since 2021. Even the University of Southern California’s Shoah Institute, a group that Spielberg is popularly associated with for its recording of the memories of Holocaust survivors and more recently October 7th survivors, last received $500,000 from him in 2015 (out of over $10 million).
Since 2020, the Righteous Persons Foundation has provided $2.4 million to anti-Israel groups while spending only $125,000 on Holocaust projects. During a time of surging antisemitism, he has provided a fraction of the funds to groups fighting antisemitism than he has to the groups defending antisemites and denouncing Israel for defending itself against Jihadist genocide.
Steven Spielberg is entitled to spend his money however he wants, but the audiences that helped make “Schindler’s List” a hit were under the impression that the profits would be used to help Holocaust survivors and, in Spielberg’s words, to “try to teach the facts of the past to prevent another Holocaust in the future.” Instead he’s funding groups enabling another Holocaust.
To what degree is the billionaire filmmaker aware of the politics of what he’s funding?
After October 7th, David Schaecter, a 94-year-old survivor with the Holocaust Survivors Foundation, wrote an open letter to Spielberg pleading, “I along with countless other survivors, are so heartbroken that, since October 7, 2023, you have not spoken out and publicly taken a stand against terrorism, against Hamas and the millions who celebrate the shedding of Jewish blood — and want more.”
A year later, in remarks at the University of Southern California, which was honoring him for setting up the University of Southern California’s Shoah Foundation, the filmmaker briefly addressed the issue, warning about rising antisemitism including “the machinery of extremism is being used on college campuses,” which some of the groups he’s funding have been protecting, while also claiming that it’s “happening alongside anti-Muslim, Arab, and Sikh discrimination.”
Spielberg then appeared to denounce both Israel and Hamas, arguing that, “we can rage against the heinous acts committed by the terrorists of October 7th and also decry the killing of innocent women and children in Gaza.”
David Schaecter passed away in September 2025 without ever getting an answer. Meanwhile, the anti-Israel hate groups funded by Spielberg’s foundation continue to demonize Israel.
Part of the answer may lie with his affiliation with the IKAR Temple in Los Angeles, which is headed by Sharon Brous, a member of anti-Israel groups like J Street as well as ties to T’ruah and New Israel Fund (which is incredibly anti-Israel). Brous had attacked Israel before the October 7th attacks, including in a hateful Yom Kippur address, claiming that “there can be no democracy with occupation.” Worse still, IKAR has participated in events with IfNotNow, an anti-Israel hate group linked to many of the ugly protests against the Jewish state.
Brous has a long history of supporting antisemites, attacking Jews for opposing flagrantly antisemitic U.S. Congress Members Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, claiming that Jews “have spent years in hive mentality, pouncing on indications of antisemitism among Israel’s critics,” accused the Jewish state of a “52-year military occupation of millions of Palestinian people” and ranted that American Jews must “hear Palestinian voices.”
Brous also attacked Jewish critics of the antisemitism in the Women’s March leadership, falsely claiming that the criticisms were “a deliberate smear campaign from the Far-Right to delegitimize the march itself.” She complained that “a much greater problem would be if the Jewish community stepped out of activism because we’re afraid that someone on the stage has a position on BDS different than our own.”
Rachel Levin, one of the senior executives at Spielberg’s Righteous Persons Foundation and the head of his Heartland Foundation, is also on the board of IKAR. There is also a Rachel Levin listed as on the host committee of T’ruah’s 2025 banquet alongside Brous.
“Schindler’s List” was never meant to be a political weapon. It was a moral document — a warning etched in film that Jewish lives are fragile, that lies metastasize quickly, and that the world’s indifference can become lethal. The money it generated was supposed to reinforce that warning, not invert it. When Holocaust funds are redirected to groups that relativize Jewish suffering, excuse antisemitism as “free speech,” and portray the Jewish state as the moral equivalent of its would-be exterminators, the lesson of history is not being taught; it is being erased.
This is not a debate about criticism of Israeli policy. It is about the ethical boundary between dissent and delegitimization, between justice and blood libel. When organizations funded in the name of Holocaust memory accuse Israel of genocide, oppose the global standard for defining antisemitism, and defend movements that terrorize Jews on campuses and streets, they are helping to make one imaginable again.
The question is no longer whether Holocaust money is being used to promote anti-Zionism. It is whether those entrusted with Holocaust memory still understand what it was meant to defend.
 | A guest post by
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I’m furious at people who happened to be born to Jewish parents and think that alone gives them the right to speak for Jews who actually live Jewish lives.
Being born Jewish isn’t a free pass. Jewish identity isn’t just genetics—it’s responsibility, commitment, and connection. People who have deliberately opted out of Jewish life and distanced themselves from Israel have no business lecturing religious or committed Jews about values, morality, or what Judaism is supposed to stand for.
What’s especially enraging is watching people who have virtually no relationship with Judaism or Israel use the label “Jew” as a shield while actively undermining Jews who are devoted to both. If you’ve chosen to live outside Jewish life, own that choice—and stop hijacking the voices of those who actually live it every day.
As a 2G of Holocaust survivors I shared this widely. Absolutely disgusting, there are Holocaust survivors still among the living.