Donor Advised Funds in Historical Perspective

This article argues that the emergence of a specific financial structure called the donor advised fund (DAF) developed in tandem with postwar efforts to extend the private sector’s reach into public welfare through new forms of charitable giving and voluntarism. In charting the gestation, birth, and expansion of DAFs from the late nineteenth century to our present day, it contends that the longstanding tension in American life between state-based regulation and individual freedoms has stood at the heart of debates about charitable tax law. Far from simply reflecting reigning historical forces, DAFs came to shape ideologies about public and private good in American life. A sea change in charitable giving occurred after the passage of the 1969 Tax Reform Act. In response, tax attorneys and charitable organizations sought to extend the designation of “public charity” to protect individuals’ charitable assets from being treated as “private foundations,” which were subject to new tax burdens and reporting obligations. By looking in particular at American-Jewish philanthropic activism during this period, the article concludes that DAFs emerged as one, among a handful, of new financial vehicles that empowered private wealth and decision-making with the privileges of putatively public charitable entities

Presenting Jews: Jewishness and America, 1920--1960.

In America, Jews had to learn how to explain and present themselves to non-Jews in order to survive and thrive. This dissertation argues that Jewish acts of self-presentation from the 1920s through the early 1960s sculpted the way that Jews thought about being Jewish and being American. Jewish leaders, intellectuals, and institutions remodeled, often self-consciously, Jewishness and Americanness when they articulated what made a Jew a Jew, and what Judaism's relationship was to Christianity, democracy, and America. The people I examine---who traveled under the sponsorship of the Jewish Chautauqua Society to universities with little or no Jewish student body to deliver lectures about Jewish beliefs, history and culture, who engaged in missionary experiments, who used the tools of social science to make Jews, Judaism, and America knowable, and who wrestled with the ban on intermarriage---transformed what it meant to be a Jew and what it meant to be an American in relation to their historical moment, personal proclivities, and ideological positions. Theirs was not only a struggle toward assimilating into American life, a story now well rehearsed in the historiography of American Jews; it was also an effort to assimilate American life into a Jewish framework.Jewishness could not be explained without taking a stake in the core debates of American political life---most importantly the competing values of American unity and American diversity or pluralism. At different moments and in different circumstances, Jewish Chautauqua Society rabbis and leaders, the Reform rabbis who advocated a Jewish mission, Jewish social researchers, and Jewish commentators, including rabbis and sociologists, on intermarriage imagined their destiny merging into America's destiny, and imagined it as somehow distinct. Whether Jewishness would strengthen the unity of America or its diversity, Jewish leaders believed Jewishness itself could represent something essential about American national identity.In the eyes of the Jewish leaders I examine, Jewishness could serve as both a model of America and a model for America. As Jews presented themselves to America, they helped shape the emerging contours of American political and cultural life.Thesis (Ph.D.)--Yale University, 2004.School code: 0265

Effective or expedient: Market devices and philanthropic techniques

Advocates of philanthropy often frame its worth through efficacy. Critical voices counter such narratives by exposing the social construction of these ideas by hegemonic forces. But they do not interrogate concepts of efficacy through close attention to the process of doing philanthropy. To address this gap, this article engages with philanthropy through the anthropology of techniques. Based on three months of participant observation among high-net-worth donors and organizations that work with them in the City of London, I argue that attention to expedience (here referring to maximizing funding rather than effects) invigorates critical reflection on “effective philanthropy.” Furthermore, I suggest that my ethnographically informed distinction between expedience and efficacy provides me with a new way to engage with philanthropists: demonstrating the relevance of anthropological theory to their practices and concerns rather than simply criticizing them