What Gives? The Jewish Philanthropy Podcast

Episode 86 of What Gives?—the Jewish Philanthropy Podcast from Jewish Funders Network, hosted by JFN President and CEO Andrés Spokoiny. In this episode, Andrés speaks with Jamie Simon, CEO of the Foundation for Jewish Camp, which supports a network of 340 nonprofit Jewish camps across North America. 

Research consistently backs up what many of us have long suspected about Jewish camp: creating the space for Jewish belonging gives campers the confidence to make Jewish practice and community feel like their own. A 2026 peer-reviewed study from FJC found that a camper's sense of belonging is one of the strongest predictors of the life skills and character strengths they walk away with, and their 2011 Camp Works study found that people who felt that sense of belonging as kids are significantly more likely to be engaged Jewish adults, from synagogue membership to a stronger connection to Israel.

Jamie and Andrés talk about what makes Jewish camp such a powerful setting for building that identity, why affordability and bed capacity are the two biggest obstacles standing between FJC and its goal of doubling camp attendance, and how camps are navigating conversations about Israel and Zionism with staff and teens in this pivotal moment.

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Episode 85 of What Gives?—the Jewish Philanthropy Podcast from Jewish Funders Network, hosted by JFN President and CEO Andrés Spokoiny. In this episode, Andrés speaks with Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, Senior Rabbi of Central Synagogue in New York and author of the New York Times Best Seller Heart of a Stranger. Rabbi Buchdahl leads one of the most influential pulpits in the country. In this episode, she talks about what it takes to lead a community through a moment this divided. She and Andrés talk about what courageous leadership costs when you cannot afford everyone's approval, and how she addressed a charged election season without telling any young Jew there was no longer room for them in the tent.

Angela’s career grew out of a life spent feeling like an outsider in every community she belonged to, and looking for home in all of them. But rather than treat it as something to overcome, she argues it may be the most Jewish thing about her, and she makes a case for why that has everything to do with how we lead and who we let in.

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Episode 84 of What Gives?—the Jewish Philanthropy Podcast from Jewish Funders Network, hosted by JFN President and CEO Andrés Spokoiny. In this episode, Andrés speaks with Eric Goldstein, who, after more than twelve years at the helm of the largest local Jewish charity in the world, is stepping down this fall as CEO of UJA-Federation of New York. Eric came to the role by an unusual path, spending thirty-one years as a litigator before he ever sat behind a federation desk, and he arrived already knowing the organization from the inside as a board vice chair and a major donor.

In this conversation, Andrés and Eric reflect on a tenure that ran through COVID-19, October 7, and a run of once-in-a-generation crises that arrived almost yearly. They talk about what all of this revealed about the Jewish community and the institutions meant to hold it together. Eric makes a full-throated case for the federation model in an age that loves to root for its disruptors. He speaks about the way UJA draws its boundaries while funding a community that includes both the Haredi world and LGBTQ Jews, and why he believes the widening animosity between the Jewish right and left, along with the drift of younger Jews away from organized Jewish life, may be the most urgent problem he leaves behind.

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Episode 83 of What Gives?—the Jewish Philanthropy Podcast from Jewish Funders Network, hosted by JFN President and CEO Andrés Spokoiny. In this episode, Andrés speaks with Jonathan Gottschall, literary scholar and author of The Storytelling Animal. Jonathan has spent his career studying why human beings are wired for narrative, which he explored with attendees in a fascinating keynote at this year's JFN Conference in San Diego.

In this conversation, Andrés and Jonathan explore the idea that we are not only Homo sapiens but Homo fictus, a species that lives its whole life inside stories. They talk about how stories bind people into groups far larger than kinship ever allowed. We talk about why human communities, whether a nation, a family, or the Jewish people itself, are held together by the stories they share even more than by borders or bloodlines, and what happens when those stories begin to fracture. They also get into the darker side of narrative: how stories can quietly replace reality, why antisemitism is one of the oldest and most destructive fictions ever told, and why the hardest discipline is turning our skepticism on our own stories.

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Episode 82 of What Gives?—the Jewish Philanthropy Podcast from Jewish Funders Network, hosted by JFN President and CEO Andrés Spokoiny. In this episode, Andrés speaks with Mark Tooley, President of the Institute on Religion & Democracy and editor of the journal Providence, who has spent decades thinking and writing about the relationship between Christianity, democracy, and American public life.

In this conversation, Andrés and Mark set out to do something that too rarely happens: offer Jews, and frankly a lot of Christians too, a clear and non-caricatured map of the American Christian world. They talk through the real differences between mainline Protestants and evangelicals, where the religious right fits and where it doesn't, why denominations are collapsing into non-denominational and megachurch Christianity, and what actually separates these traditions theologically rather than just politically. They also touch on the defense of democracy, the future of Christian support for Israel, the corrosion of our political discourse, and why the older biblical arguments for standing with the Jewish people may need to be rebuilt on the more basic ground of human dignity.

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