Your Daily Phil: A broad Jewish coalition to fight climate change + Perfecting funder updates – eJewish Philanthropy
Good Thursday morning!
In today’s Your Daily Phil, we cover a major new Jewish coalition to combat climate change, and feature an op-ed on keeping foundation funders engaged. In today’s newsletter: Rabbi Ashira Konigsburg, Liore Milgrom-Gartner, Aaron Saxe, Bill Gates, Rabbi Levi Duchman, Lea Hadad, Israeli President Isaac Herzog, Erica Brown and Roni Dalumi. We’ll start with yesterday’s Supreme Court decision on a Yeshiva University LGBTQ student group.
Yeshiva University must recognize an LGBTQ student group at least temporarily, according to a ruling Wednesday afternoon by the U.S. Supreme Court. The 5-4 decision, which joined the court’s liberal faction with two conservative judges, was decided on procedural rather than ideological grounds.
The ruling is the latestdevelopment — but almost certainly not the last —in a yearslong fight over whether Y.U., the country’s flagship Modern Orthodox educational institution, located in Upper Manhattan, must afford the student group funding and recognition on par with other student groups. Students have been trying to officially form the Y.U. Pride Alliance since at least 2019, and have appealed to government bodies to that end for more than two years.
In Wednesday’s decision, the Supreme Court refused to block a New York State court’s decision mandating that Y.U. recognize the group. Instead, the justices instructed Y.U. to first exhaust the process in New York State’s legal system before returning to the high court. Last week, Justice Sonia Sotomayor had temporarily blocked the state court order while the Supreme Court considered the matter.
“The application is denied because it appears that applicants have at least two further avenues for expedited or interim state court relief,” the decision said, according to Reuters.
The state court had ruled that, as a primarily educational rather than religious institution, Y.U. cannot discriminate against the group on the basis of sexual orientation. The school has countered that it is in fact a religious institution and that recognizing the group would contravene its Orthodox Jewish values. Wednesday’s dissent, written by Justice Samuel Alito, supported that view.
“The First Amendment guarantees the right to the free exercise of religion, and if that provision means anything, it prohibits a state from enforcing its own preferred interpretation of Holy Scripture. Yet that is exactly what New York has done in this case,” Alito wrote.
Students and administrators at Y.U. have grappled with issues surrounding LGBTQ inclusion for more than a decade. In 2009, hundreds of people attended a panel on campus called “Being Gay in the Modern Orthodox World.” A decade later, in 2019, students held a march at the school in support of LGBTQ inclusion. The following year, the university updated its policies to include diversity training on sexual orientation and gender identity, and added staff to its counseling center, according to the Commentator, the student newspaper.
Katie Rosenfeld, a lawyer for the student group, said that the ruling was “a “victory for Yeshiva University students who are simply seeking basic rights that are uncontested at peer universities.” But Eric Baxter, a lawyer for the school, said that the ruling indicated that Y.U. “can return to the Supreme Court to seek its protection again. We will follow the court’s instruction.”