The National Endowment for the Humanities announced on Monday that the Tikvah Fund will receive the largest grant in the agency’s history—$10.4 million—for a new project to combat Jew-hatred.
The award will support the New York-based, Jewish nonprofit’s “Jewish Civilization Project,” a three-year educational program to “combat the recrudescence and normalization of antisemitism in American society.”
“While it is essential to combat the rise of antisemitism in the political and legal arenas, the humanities also have a vital role to play in this fight,” stated Michael McDonald, acting chairman of the NEH.
“The sinister and hate-filled attacks on Jewish people that we have been witnessing on American campuses and streets are, at a deeper level, also attacks on the very foundations that have made the United States the exceptional nation that it is,” he stated.
Tikvah’s educational, scholarship and public programs under the project will include creating a Jewish civilization curriculum for middle and high school students and university courses in the Jewish humanities and publishing scholarly books on “the meaning of Jewish resilience in the history of the United States and the Western world.”
The activities supported by the grant will focus on “foundational” Jewish texts like the Talmud, Bible and modern Jewish literature, as well as the history and meaning of Zionism.
“At this weighty moment in the history of the West, we believe that Jewish ideas are essential to strengthening the best of our shared American culture and answering the perverse ideology of antisemitism with the enduring majesty of Jewish civilization,” stated Eric Cohen, CEO of Tikvah.
Founded in 1992, Tikvah describes itself as “shaping the rising generation of Jewish, Zionist and American leaders” by “advancing the most serious thinking about the great challenges facing the Jewish people.”
