EJEWISHPHILANTHROPY—August 28, 2024—High-profile Jewish donors made headlines during the last academic year when they halted financial support for Ivy League universities, but there was surprisingly little public debate over where else those funds might go. Marc Charendoff proposed the minyan idea in eJewishPhilanthropy, and Brett Stephens offered his own challenge in The New York Times: “If you are an Ivy League megadonor wondering how to better spend the money you no longer want to give to a Penn or a Columbia,” Stephens wrote, “maybe it’s time to forgo the fading prestige of the old elite for the sake of something else, something new.” 

CUNY has the largest number of Jewish undergraduates of any university system in the United States: some 13,500 undergraduates, according to Hillel International. Like most CUNY undergraduates, Jewish students are primarily first-generation college students and/or first-generation Americans. They come from Latin America, Israel, the former Soviet Union, Iran and Syria, and they attend CUNY for many of the same reasons earlier generations did when City College was known as “the Jewish Harvard”: the high cost of private college; ongoing family responsibilities; cultural preferences that discourage leaving home before they are married; and CUNY’s renewed attention to honors programs.

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The Charles H. Revson Foundation, where I work, chooses to reach Jewish students directly through the Hillels that serve CUNY, as does UJA-Federation of New York. (The Revson Foundation also supports CUNY directly through programs at City College and the Newmark School of Journalism.) The five CUNY Hillels we support have dedicated and talented directors who play an outsized role in the lives of students, providing Jewish programming and general support services that increasingly extend to non-Jewish students as well.

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