The foundation established by director Steven Spielberg with proceeds from “Schindler’s List” to support holocaust survivors is now bankrolling social justice organizations that vilify Israel and propagate falsehoods about its war in Gaza. 

The Righteous Persons Foundation was founded in 1995 by the acclaimed filmmaker and his wife using $100 million from his Academy Award-winning Holocaust drama. Mr. Spielberg explained at the time that he “could not accept any money” from the production, calling it “blood money” that “needed to be put back into the Jewish community.”

He established the foundation with the mission to “recover and make accessible Jewish stories from the past, and to help build a contemporary Jewish community predicated on meaning, joy, and a responsibility to help repair our world,” according to the group’s website.

In recent years, the foundation — on whose board Mr. Spielberg serves — has used that goal to justify support for left-wing Jewish groups whose condemnations of Israel have been criticized as spreading the very antisemitic tropes used against the Jewish community.

One such group is T’ruah, a rabbinic human rights organization that has vocally opposed Israel’s war against Hamas, organizing street blockades and protests calling on the Trump administration to pressure Israel to end the war and oppose “continued support” for what it called Israel’s “policy of starvation.”

A protest the group organized over the summer featured New York City comptroller Brad Lander, who, during his son’s 2009 circumcision ceremony, renounced his child’s right to move to Israel under its Law of Return. T’ruah had continued to accuse Israel of intentionally starving Palestinian civilians even after Israel’s military began pausing operations in parts of Gaza for up to 10 hours daily to facilitate humanitarian aid.

T’ruah’s chief executive, Jill Jacobs, claimed that Israel’s targeted attack on Hezbollah operatives via exploding pagers was a “war crime” and has accused Israel of committing ethnic cleansing in Gaza. The group’s operations have been buoyed by $650,000 from Mr. Spielberg’s foundation since 2021, according to a tally by Front Page magazine.

The Righteous Persons Foundation has also provided $1.2 million to Bend the Arc, a progressive “Jewish resistance” organization that in June 2024 blamed America’s “support for continued violence in Gaza” for driving a surge in antisemitism and urged President Biden to impose an arms embargo on Israel. Bend the Arc also endorsed incoming New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has refused to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.

In an ironic twist, the group also opposed the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which embraces the connection between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. The standard explicitly includes in its definition of an antisemitic act denying Jews the right to self-determination by claiming, for example, that the existence of the State of Israel is a racist endeavor.

Another Jewish group that has opposed the IHRA definition, Jews United for Justice, has received $900,000 from Mr. Spielberg’s foundation, Front Page reports. The group rejected the definition out of concern that it might “chill” Palestinian voices.

Jews United for Justice also offers a “guide” on antisemitism stating that Israeli officials and “the Jewish leaders and institutions that support them worldwide” must “be held accountable for their oppression of Palestinians.” The guide argues that antisemitism and Islamophobia are “not only entangled, but deeply rooted in the same systems of white supremacy and Christian hegemony that have also driven ongoing genocide against indigenous people, and bigotry toward non-Christians from other parts of the world.”

Since 2020, Mr. Spielberg’s foundation has provided $2.4 million to anti-Israel groups, according to Front Page. Over the same period, the foundation gave only $125,000 to projects explicitly dedicated to the Holocaust.

The foundation’s last donation to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum came in 2019 — the same year it made its most recent gift to a legal aid group, Bet Tzedek, which provides pro bono lawyers to Holocaust survivors. 

Mr. Spielberg broke his silence on the war in Gaza in March 2024, offering criticism of both Hamas and Israel. “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,” he stated.