Your Daily Phil: Koum bets big on pluralistic education in L.A.

Your Daily Phil: Koum bets big on pluralistic education in L.A. Good Friday morning! In today’s edition of Your Daily Phil, we examine the growing condemnations of the emerging deal with Iran. We interview Tara Brown, the CEO of Momentum, about her plans for the mom-focused Jewish engagement group, and report on a $36 million gift from the Koum Family Foundation to Los Angeles’ Milken Community School. We feature an opinion piece by Rabbi Rachael Klein Miller with a message for anyone thinking of walking away, be it from belief in God or support for Israel; and Rabbi Rob Gleisser and Mollie Feldman spotlight a pilot program exploring an approach to boosting male engagement in Jewish life. Also in this issue: Mijal Bitton, Alisha Sela and Van Jones. Shabbat shalom and happy Juneteenth! Today’s Your Daily Phil was curated by eJP Managing Editor Judah Ari Gross, Opinion Editor Rachel Kohn and Israel Editor Justin Hayet. Have a tip? Email us here. What We’re Watching Jewish News Syndicate’s second annual international policy conference kicks off Sunday in Jerusalem at the Waldorf hotel featuring a host of speakers from the current Israeli government. In New York, the Jewish Food Society’s Great Nosh will take place on Sunday on Governors Island. The Orthodox Union’s Advocacy Attorneys Conference begins Sunday and runs through Monday in Washington, bringing together lawyers to talk strategy on fighting antisemitism through the law. What You Should Know A QUICK WORD FROM EJP’S JUDAH ARI GROSS When news first emerged of an agreement between the United States and Iran to end the war, many Jewish groups were hesitant to weigh in on the matter, holding out until the full details were released. Now, as the official language for the memorandum of understanding has been published, a growing number of initially reluctant Jewish organizations and figures, including Jewish GOP donors, are speaking out about the deal, which some warn emboldens the Islamic Republic and endangers Israel’s national security. The condemnations of the agreement, which calls for an end to Israel’s fighting against Hezbollah in Lebanon, are likely only to grow after four Israeli soldiers, including a battalion commander, were killed today in a strike on their tank by the Iran-backed terrorist militia in southern Lebanon. In a separate incident, five Israeli soldiers were also injured in a drone attack early this morning. While some of President Donald Trump’s Jewish and Israeli supporters hold out hope that the emerging agreement merely represents a stall tactic ahead of the midterm elections or the start of a negotiation that can still be turned against Tehran, others have resigned themselves to a new, complicated reality. The “Heimish Humor” social media account captured this fatalistic feeling in a joke: One person asks how the new Iran agreement sounds, and the other responds, “Hashem is in control of the world,” to which the first replies, “Wow, that bad?” Read the rest of ‘What You Should Know’ here. News Q&A After 19 years at AIPAC, Tara Brown is building Momentum for Israel-Diaspora ties For nearly 19 years, Tara Brown was a fixture of AIPAC’s Mid-Atlantic region, running between fundraisers, the halls of Congress, AIPAC Policy Conference and all the coffee meetings in between — until last year, when she was appointed CEO of Momentum, a Jewish nonprofit that seeks to empower Jewish mothers to connect with their Jewish identity through trips to Israel and post-visit engagement. Speaking to eJewishPhilanthropy’s Justin Hayet, Brown said that her dream is to grow Momentum’s flagship Israel program fivefold, from about 2,000 women a year to 10,000. JH: Critics say immersive Israel experiences are most impactful during “formative years” teens and college years. How do you respond to that? TB: We focus on moms specifically, but moms aren’t actually our target audience. Their kids are. We focus on moms because the greatest social influencer of all time isn’t TikTok, isn’t Noa Tishby — it’s the Jewish mom. When a mom decides she wants to raise her kids a certain way, or think differently about her own family’s Judaism, it happens. MAJOR GIFTS Koum Family Foundation gifts $36 million to L.A.’s Milken School for campus expansion The Koum Family Foundation donated $36 million to Los Angeles’ Milken Community School, one of the largest non-Orthodox Jewish day schools in the country, as part of a major capital campaign, the school announced on Thursday, reports eJewishPhilanthropy’s Judah Ari Gross. Koum keeps giving: The donation to the Milken school is the latest allocation by the foundation launched by the WhatsApp co-founder, Jan Koum, who has emerged as one of the most significant Jewish philanthropists today, supporting a wide array of Jewish causes in the United States, Israel and the former Soviet Union. Opinion SOUNDS FAMILIAR The God you don’t believe in (and the Zionism you don’t believe in either) “A bar or bat mitzvah student sits across from me, leans in with a look of practiced defiance, and prepares to blow my rabbinic mind. ‘Rabbi,’ they say, ‘I have to be honest. I don’t really believe in God,’” writes Rabbi Rachael Klein Miller of Temple Emanu-El in Atlanta in an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy. “I don’t recoil. Instead, I ask the question that has become (almost?) every rabbi’s favorite opening move: ‘Tell me about the God you don’t believe in.’” Real talk: “Judaism is a tradition of wrestling. You cannot wrestle with a shadow; you have to get close enough to feel the weight of the thing you’re grappling with. … If you find yourself ready to walk away from a big idea — be it faith or peoplehood — ask yourself first: How much do I actually know about the thing I’m walking away from? You might just find that the version you’re rejecting is one that the rest of us don’t believe in, either.” READERS RESPOND What happens when students lead Jewish learning: An experiment in Jewish male engagement “Zack Wainer, Isaac Kurtz and Doron Kenter recently wrote in eJewishPhilanthropy about the Jewish community’s need to confront ‘a growing body of data’ revealing that ‘on many of the measures that matter most for a flourishing life, men are falling behind.’ They concluded with a challenge: If we want different outcomes, we need to experiment with different approaches,” write Rabbi Rob Gleisser of Penn State Hillel and Mollie Feldman of Hillel International, in an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy. A promising pilot: “On a Tuesday night at Penn State, groups of fraternity brothers gather in their living rooms to talk about masculinity, responsibility and what it means to be a Jewish man. There is no rabbi or teacher at the front of the room. The conversation is led by a peer, for their peers.” Worthy Reads Race to Scale: In the Philanthropy Roundtable, David Bass follows the rollout of the new Federal Scholarship Tax Credit and the funding, supply and political challenges shaping its implementation. “‘The barriers are information, making sure supply is free and politics,’ said Robert Enlow, CEO of EdChoice, the national school choice research organization founded as Milton Friedman’s legacy foundation. ‘You could have all the new money out there and no supply, and that’s a problem.’ For philanthropists, the opportunity goes beyond funding scholarships. It is helping build the legal, operational and educational infrastructure capable of supporting a national educational choice ecosystem before the system fully comes online.” [PhilanthropyRoundtable] Go to the Tents: In her Substack, Mijal Bitton uses the Korach story to argue that Jews worried about the Democratic Socialists of America need to stop mocking them and start out-organizing them. “The Talmud in tractate Sanhedrin records that even though Moses was the aggrieved party, he tried to persuade the people before God decided the dispute. He didn’t approach Korach, but went to the tents of Datan and Aviram – the people in the