The war between Israel and Hamas has unleashed a torrent of antisemitism throughout the world. In America, college professors have targeted pro-Israel students and even encouraged violent attacks on “Zionist” journalists. In the most extreme cases, people have been killed in the spiraling tensions, such as a Jewish man in California who died following an altercation with a pro-Palestinian demonstrator.
How can people stand up to antisemitism and advocate a more tolerant world in this turbulent and sometimes dangerous environment? One way is donating to nonprofit organizations that advocate the rights of Jewish Americans and fight against hate. In fact, recent research shows that Jewish people who have personally experienced antisemitism are far more likely than others to donate to nonprofit groups.
That finding speaks to the profound role nonprofit donations play in opposing antisemitism and advocating its victims. While many forms of advocacy require people to paint a target on their backs, nonprofit donations can be made privately. Extremists opposed to your cause can’t track you down at your home or workplace.
Every American has a constitutional right to support the causes in which they believe. To protect that right, we need to embrace privacy as well as free speech.
In recent years, politicians on the Left and the Right have attacked private giving to nonprofit groups that speak about social matters, such as antisemitism and political violence, as “dark money.” They advocate new laws that would allow extremists to monitor people’s records of support for nonprofit causes. These proposals would bring harassment and hate to the doorsteps of Jewish people who support nonprofit groups associated with Israel.
This is one point on which supporters of Israel and Palestinians should agree. Last fall, a right-leaning group sent a “doxing truck” after individual students associated with groups that signed a controversial anti-Israel statement following Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack. Numerous people have lost their jobs for speaking out about the conflict, including a magazine editor who was fired for sharing an article from the Onion satirizing reactions to the war as indifferent to Palestinian deaths.
Speech on all sides cannot be free if government officials, big companies, or unruly mobs — whether in person or online — can easily track you down and punish you for your beliefs. Donor privacy is, therefore, a vital form of protection for speakers against retaliation for their ideas, beliefs, and associations.
Fortunately, donor privacy is enshrined in our Constitution. The First Amendment protects the right to support social causes privately as well as publicly. The Founding Fathers, who formed private organizations and wrote under pen names, knew full well the importance of protecting their identities and their loved ones.
The wisdom of protecting these rights has been demonstrated numerous times in our history. Most famously, private giving allowed civil rights groups such as the NAACP to go into the Jim Crow South and fight for change while shielding their members and supporters from harm. Hostile state officials in places such as Alabama tried hard to force the NAACP to expose its members. The Supreme Court unanimously shut them down.
In recent years, some have suggested that NAACP v. Alabama is outdated and that nonprofit groups should be required to expose their supporters. They argue donors today don’t face the risks that civil rights activists did back then. Yet, as tension and hatred continue to fester from the Israel-Hamas war, a recommitment to privacy rights and free speech is key.
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It is a blessing that people usually can speak out safely, even on the most heated topics, without having someone show up at their home to seek revenge. But this did not happen by accident. It is the product of a hard-won culture of tolerance and respect for freedom of expression. That culture grows weaker by the day.
The rapid escalation of attacks and hate should be a wake-up call. American notions of free speech and privacy are anything but outdated. They are, in fact, urgently needed in our world today.
Heather Lauer is the CEO of People United for Privacy, a nonprofit group that defends the First Amendment rights of all Americans, regardless of their beliefs, to come together in support of their shared values.