The Trump administration, through the National Endowment for the Humanities, is giving the largest grant in the agency’s history — over $10 million — to the Jewish-American neoconservative Tikvah Fund to counter “the pathology of anti-Semitism” and teach the Talmud.
The Tikvah Fund is an Israel First group dedicated to advancing “Jewish excellence” that is run by CEO Eric Cohen and famed neoconservative Elliott Abrams.
The group made headlines last month for contributing “nearly 400,000 shekels (around $110,000)” to translate Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s book into Hebrew and not reporting it as a political donation, Haaretz reported last month.
“Even though the memoir was used in the Likud campaign and some of the revenues presumably went to Netanyahu as the author, the 400,000 shekels was not reported as a political donation,” Haaretz noted.
The Tikvah Fund was founded in the 1990s. The roughly $15 million to $20 million it spends on annual operations are partly funded by donations and from returns on assets bequeathed by American Jewish businessman Zalman Bernstein.
The Tikvah Fund is among the funders of the Kohelet Policy Forum, a conservative Israeli think tank that provided the blueprint for the effort to weaken the judiciary, as declared by Justice Minister Yariv Levin on January 4, 2023.
Kohelet founder Moshe Koppel sits on Tikvah’s board. The fund has bankrolled conservative projects for years, some of them involving close associates of Netanyahu. These include the Mida website, founded by Netanyahu confidant Ran Baratz, and the Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy, which is chaired by the former head of the National Security Council, Meir Ben-Shabbat. [Emphasis added]
Haaretz noted that Tikvah also hosts an annual conference in Tel Aviv.
“In its 60-year history, NEH had rarely given more than a few hundred thousand dollars to any single project,” the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports. “On Monday, the NEH announced an even larger, $10.4 million grant for a nationwide ‘Jewish Civilization Project’ aimed at combating antisemitism.”
“Among the prominent alumni of Tikvah’s programs is Jacob Reses, chief of staff to Vice President J.D. Vance,” JTA added.
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