The ‘Schindler’s List’ Scandal

That the foundation established by Stephen Spielberg using funds from his Holocaust drama, “Schindler’s List,” has become a cash well for progressive groups that vilify Israel is a shonda. The charity was born from Mr. Spielberg’s conviction that the movie’s profits — “blood money” he called them — belonged not to him but to the people whose murder he chronicled on film. He committed $150 million to the cause. The so-called Righteous Persons Foundation started out well enough. It adopted a 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.” It funneled money to supporting Holocaust survivors, preserving testimony, and ensuring the lessons of the Nazi’s genocide of the Jews would not be forgotten. Yet, as our Novi Zhukovsky reports, its financing of such worthy groups began to dwindle — then eventually ran dry. The last donation to the United States Holocaust Museum came in 2019. The same year marked its final gift to a legal fund, Bet Tzedek, that provides pro bono legal services to Holocaust survivors. Since 2020, the foundation has funneled a modest $125,000 to Holocaust projects, according to calculations by Front Page magazine. Where did the money go instead? To groups like T’ruah. It identifies itself as a rabbinic human rights organization that has received some $650,000 from the foundation to organize street blockades in protest of the war in Gaza and to accuse Israel of intentionally starving Palestinians — even after Israel adopted 10-hour daily pauses to facilitate humanitarian aid. Its chief executive called Israel’s beeper attack on Hezbollah a “war crime.” Then there’s Bend the Arc, which collected $1.2 million while blaming American support for Israel for driving antisemitism at home and while endorsing in New York a mayoral candidate who refuses to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. Another $900,000 went to Jews United for Justice, an opponent to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which recognizes anti-Zionism’s link to Jew hatred. It’s hard to believe that Mr. Spielberg, a Jew himself, expects to move the needle in the ways of preventing another Holocaust by demonizing Israel and undermining the Jewish people’s connection to the state. The Nazis came for religious Jews and secular Jews, Zionists and anti-Zionists. The lesson of the Shoah is not that Jews can avoid persecution by pandering to their critics. It’s that the Jews need a state of their own. Mr. Spielberg’s own film taught this lesson. The Jews of Krakow couldn’t save themselves. They had no army, no state, no means of self defense. They relied on the conscience of one German businessman who, by recruiting Jews as factory employees, shielded some 1,200 of them from certain death in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Schindler is greatly honored in the state that is committed to Israel mounting its own defense of the Jewish people.

The ‘Schindler’s List’ Scandal

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