David Magerman, a former donor of the University of Pennsylvania, has redirected $5 million to Israeli Universities.
The move comes as widespread anti-Israel protests swept across U.S. universities following last year’s October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas.
Magerman said he plans to give $1 million grants to five institutions across Israel, including Tel Aviv University, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Bar-Ilan University, and Jerusalem College of Technology, he told Fox News Digital.
He also intends to donate to programs supporting STEM programs and English-speaking students learning academic Hebrew.
“My plan is to redirect my philanthropic efforts going forward largely to Israel,” he told the outlet. “I don’t see much value generated by giving to American universities. I think that liberal colleges in America are flawed institutions that are doing a poor job of preparing students for the real world.”
He added that it is foolish to believe that leading U.S. universities are “reformable.”
“They’re fulfilling the mission they want to fulfill. Their goal, it seems, is to indoctrinate their students to question the validity of Western civilization, to question the value of the Founding Fathers and to criticize Western society,” he explained. “I don’t think that’s what these philanthropists believe and I don’t think that they should be donating money to support propagating that ideology.”
A week after the October 7 attack and the university’s failure to take action against antisemitism, Magerman told the University of Pennsylvania in a letter that he was “deeply embarrassed” by his connection to it.
“My only conclusion, from your fierce support for the Hamas-affiliated speakers at the Palestine Writes festival, followed by your equivocating statements about the heinous acts of barbarism perpetrated by the same Hamas you allowed these speakers to promote, from your failure to call out evil, is that you are ambivalent to the unprecedented evil their acts represent,” the letter added.
“I refuse to donate another dollar to Penn. There is no action anyone at Penn can take to change that,” he wrote. “I’m not asking for any actions. You have shown me who you are. My only remaining hope is that all self-respecting Jews, and all moral citizens of the world, dissociate themselves from Penn.”
