Prominent Donor to the University of Pennsylvania Will Donate to Israel Universities Instead!

Immediately after the terrible events of October 7, 2023, American college campuses were turned upside-down by dramatic anti-Israel protests and campus encampments that seemingly formed overnight. Antisemitic incidents became widespread as Jewish students and staff at major universities reported harassment, verbal and physical altercations, and more.

 Already in mid-October, David Magerman, a venture capitalist, investor, and computer scientist who had been a prominent donor to the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Engineering, publicly announced that he was withdrawing his grants to the school over the administration’s handling of the situation. He was one of several major donors to Ivy League schools to withdraw his donations.

But Magerman, an Orthodox Jew with long-term business and philanthropic interests in Israel, did more than that. He later announced that, through his Tzemach David Foundation, he would redirect funding intended for UPenn and donate $5 million dollars, divided among five Israeli universities, with the express intent of creating degree tracks for English speakers.

In June, the first of these donations was announced as a $1 million dollar grant to the Jerusalem College of Technology, and last week, it was announced that Tel Aviv University was the second recipient of the same amount. The funds are to be paid out over a five-year period.

These new programs funded by Magerman’s donations are not expected to be active for the upcoming academic year, which is set to begin November 3, and scant details about them have been released. According to the press releases, the donations are to create multi-year programs that slowly integrate students into Israeli society so that by the end, students will be able to take regular classes in Hebrew. Both JCT and TAU noted that the grants will go towards STEM-oriented programs.

The donation is “a really big deal” because “it paves the way for enabling non-Hebrew speakers to join our STEM programs at the undergraduate level,” Maureen Adiri Meyer, director of TAU’s Lowy International School, told The Times of Israel. “We’ve had a lot of success with a similar approach for programs in management and the humanities, so we know the impact this can have.”

Recently, ahead of the Sukkot holiday, The Times of Israel spoke with Magerman, via video call, to discuss the donations, the shifting landscape of Jewish philanthropy in the US, and more.

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

The Times of Israel: Thank you for speaking with us. You recently donated to Tel Aviv University, and earlier this year, you donated to the Jerusalem College of Technology. You plan to donate $5 million in total, to five different institutions.

David Magerman: Correct. We’ve already made two other pledges as well. The fifth one is being worked out.

Can you tell us the other two?

The Technion and Bar-Ilan University.

What is the thrust of these donations?

The focus is on making their academic programs accessible to English speakers by providing support for converting the non-Hebrew speakers into Hebrew speakers, however they feel they can best accomplish that.

We gave the universities the opportunity to define some of the parameters. I’m not a micromanager when it comes to philanthropy. I told them the mission. We defined the gift agreement to make sure that it covers my goals for the program. Then I leave it to them to spec out how they intend to do it, [with the] understanding that sometimes people make plans and they don’t work out the way they expect it.

There’s been a lot written about the antisemitic situation on America’s college campuses over the last year, as you’re obviously aware. But do you see this as an alternative? Are these campuses no longer safe for Jewish students, and so therefore you’ll create another opportunity for them?

I hesitate to say we should be afraid of antisemites and we should run away and hide because there are mean people out there. If it’s about antisemitism, we should fight them.

The issue is that we’re fighting to stay someplace where we don’t really get any value

The issue is that we’re fighting to stay someplace where we don’t really get any value. The product itself is what we should avoid, not the antisemitic environment.

The Ivy Leagues are just not the Ivy Leagues anymore. They’re not elite quality institutions for teaching curriculum that’s going to help people thrive in the world. There’s a whole lot of negativism around the heroes that founded America and Western society, and we don’t need to be teaching our kids to hate those people.

People can be critical of their own cultures. But in your view, it’s a bit more than that. It’s not just saying, Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, and we should look closer at that.

No, I think criticism is one thing, but the source of funding for this and the ideology behind it is not constructive criticism. The goal is to undermine, instead of looking objectively and deciding whether this is good or bad. It’s like, let’s find all the bad we can and focus exclusively on that and ignore the good and amplify the bad. And I think that’s the imbalance that’s causing our young adults to be conditioned to look at America and the West in a negative way.

You wrote a letter to the University of Pennsylvania announcing you were withdrawing your funding to the School of Engineering. You were very involved with the school?

I have been, yes.

I went to UPenn. I served on the Engineering Board of Overseers, which is a non-fiduciary board of the engineering school. I also was a donor, and eventually a parent. I also taught there for two years.

Actually, I privately told the university that I was going to stop giving money to the university before October 7, in response to their handling of the Palestine Writes Festival [held in September 2023], where they expressed an unwillingness to take a stand against this deeply antisemitic, terrorist-infested event that was clearly going to inflame antisemitic activity on campus. They were not going to take any stance on it.

And when was that dramatic, public letter afterward? October 15?

Yeah, that’s correct.

That’s fast.

I saw what happened… [and] I’d been aware of the enrollment reductions in the Orthodox community at Penn over the past decade, having two of my sons going to school there. I was aware of the deterioration of support for Jewish life there over that period of time.

Can you comment about the state of Jewish philanthropy, vis-à-vis the Ivy League universities? It’s a year after October 7. There have been reports about declining Jewish enrollment for this current year at a lot of these schools.

In Diaspora Jewry, there’s been a desire to integrate into the societies in which we are resident. And so in America, there’s been a strong desire for the Jewish community, especially the Jewish philanthropic community, to integrate with the institutions that are valued in American society, regardless of their role in Jewish life.

We’re a minority beneficiary of the programs that we’re giving to in an outsize way

We’re contributing an outsize percentage of the support for these institutions that are serving the broader population. Universities, hospitals, institutions. Certainly, we’re a minority beneficiary of the programs that we’re giving to in an outsize way. We have an obligation… America has been great to us over the centuries, and we should give to the community that’s welcomed us.

Only now they’re not. We should be responsive. When I talk to philanthropists, especially young philanthropists, I say, we should be forward-looking with our gifts, not backward-looking. The whole idea of giving to your alma mater is a very backward-looking mentality.

Jews still give to Ivy League schools and give to their alma maters, regardless of whether the values of the institutions line up with the philanthropists’ personal values. If you look and see that these Ivy League schools are actually not educating kids to be productive members of Western society in the way they once did, that should impact your decision-making.

That point could apply to a lot of different philanthropic groups, not just Jews, right?

A hundred percent. I’m… a Jew. I’m very concerned about Israel and the Jewish community. We’re a very small percentage of the world. It isn’t as though the world is giving to us, so we need to make sure that the infrastructure for our community is being served by our donations. And of course, we should be philanthropic outside that as well, but in a proportional way.

I think we love to think about ourselves as being the light unto the nations, which we are, but that doesn’t mean that we need to be putting the nations before ourselves.

You’re focusing specifically on this idea of bringing English speakers to these universities and helping them integrate into Israeli society, but most of these universities already have various tracks where you can come and do your whole degree in English.

I think those programs are misguided. Israel is a small country. It’s got limited resources. I think it’s an undue burden on the infrastructure to be an outsourced education system for the world in foreign languages.

The idea is to find ways in which the Israeli institutions are looking to improve themselves and be more capable of absorbing olim [immigrants] from around the world, including from America, and have them request funds from us to do things that they think are important.

It seems to me that these programs are a potential counter to what some people have been afraid of, given the war and the political situation, which is a brain drain in Israel, right?

Correct. I’m very concerned about that.

You’re not the only person. Do you look at these programs as part of that discussion?

I think it’s a bigger conversation. These gifts are not specifically focused on that. We are doing something that hopefully we’re going to announce in the next couple of weeks that creates programs that address that more directly, and [we are] also looking to attract more philanthropists to join in the effort.

There’s a spiritual component to it, a birthright, and also an obligation and responsibility. We need to attract the people who understand that. Those people will not be as exposed to the brain drain because they’ll be in Israel for a reason.

And I think that there are good reasons to be in Israel. I believe Mashiach [the messiah] is coming, and I believe that the future of the Jewish people will be in Israel. We need to look at the next generation of Jewish students around the world and show them that Israel is a place to live, to raise their families, to express their spirituality. It’s not just a place to join a startup and make a billion dollars.

But you still live in America, yes?

Yes. I have an apartment in Israel. I come at least every month or two. I’m coming for the holiday [Sukkot]. I wish I could live in Israel. I have a marriage contract that obligates me to take my wife’s views into consideration, and I also have a daughter finishing high school. Let’s just say that it has been a team decision that she’ll finish high school in America.

But my dream and my goal is that all of my children should make aliyah, and that all my grandchildren should be born in Israel, and that, please God, in time, I will move to Israel full-time. As long as I’m doing for Israel what I feel obligated to do, that I’m doing it from America isn’t the critical piece.