What The Forward’s Jewish Charity Poll Teaches

Image by Kurt Hoffman

Josh Nathan-Kazis April 11, 2014

Jewish charity goes largely to Israel-related groups. Our readers think that’s a bad idea.

Last week, as part of our ongoing investigation into Jewish charity finances, we asked you how you thought Jewish charitable dollars should be spent.

The results, embedded below, suggest that Forward respondents think that education-related Jewish charities should get the largest share of contributions, followed by health care and social service-related charities. Israel-related charities rank fourth.

These poll results are far from scientific. Still, they shed light on the opinions of Forward readers, as Jane Eisner wrote in her editorial this week.

Close readers confused by the disparity between the “How They Spend It” figures reported below and the numbers reported in our story on this two weeks ago, take note: We excluded two categories from the poll for the sake of clarity, which resulted in tweaked figures.

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Josh Nathan-Kazis is a staff writer for the Forward. He covers charities and politics, and writes investigations and longform.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Forward. Discover more perspectives in Opinion. To contact Opinion authors, email [email protected].

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