“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 over the summer, was that one of the hate groups behind the anti-Israel protest, which ended in arrests, was funded by proceeds from Schindler’s List.
When Steven Spielberg 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. “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,” the filmmaker said at the time. “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 (pictured above with Stop Starving Gaza sign), 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 “Oct. 7 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 leaders. “Israel, too, has already committed war crimes in Lebanon, including by exploding the beepers and walkie talkies of hundreds of Hezbollah members,” Jacobs 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 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, who had defended terrorism, refused to condemn Hamas and was part of a movement that had celebrated the attacks of Oct 7. 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 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 (IHRA) 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 not only Bend the Arc, and T’ruah, but the New York Jewish Agenda, an anti-Orthodox group that was present at the anti-Israel rally. NYJA was co-founded by Rachel Timoner, an anti-Israel activist with T’ruah, who also serves as 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.
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 5 years.
Jews United For Justice 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.”
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 RPF even bothered funding it was back in 2020.
$250,000 was allocated to the Holocaust Museum and the last time RPF 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 USC Shoah Institute, a group that Spielberg is popularly associated with, for its recording of the memories of Holocaust survivors and more recently Oct 7 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 that he has to the groups defending antisemites and denouncing Israel for defending itself against Jihadist genocide.
Rachel Levin, one of the senior people at Spielberg’s RPF and the head of his Heartland Foundation, is also on the board of IKAR: the anti-Israel temple that Spielberg attends. There is a Rachel Levin listed as on the host committee of T’ruah’s 2025 banquet alongside Sharon Brous, the lead clergywoman at IKAR, who attacked Jews for opposing Rep. Rashida Tlaib and Rep. Ilhan Omar, claiming that Jews “have spent years in hive mentality, pouncing on indications of anti-Semitism among Israel’s critics”, and attacked the Jewish State before the Oct 7 attacks, including in a hateful Yom Kippur address, claiming that “there can be no democracy with occupation.”
Sharon Brous is a member of the councils of anti-Israel groups like J Street, and the New Israel Fund. 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 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.”
Those associations may provide some insight into why RPF has begun funding anti-Israel hate groups.
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, “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 Oct 7, 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 Oct. 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 USC 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.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.
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The definition of a true scumbag
Spielberg was always a scumbag. Even in Schindler’s List he edited out the history he disagreed with. The real Schindler armed the Jews he protected so they’d have a fighting chance if the Nazis came for them. Spielberg in his anti-gun, anti-Second Amendment zealotry kept that significant historical fact out of his film. He preferred helpless Jews, to Jews given the tools to defend themselves and willing to do so or die trying. It was too unacceptable to him to have a historically accurate positive message about firearms.