Dorot Foundation

In the early 2010s, trustees involved in the bankruptcy proceedings surrounding the Bernie Madoff investment scandals sued an Ungerleider family-associated fund and major donor to the Dorot Foundation, the Yesod Fund, for profiting from Madoff’s frauds. A court dismissed the claims on the basis that the Yesod Fund was not accused of knowing that Madoff engaged in fraud.  ⁴

In April 2026, the foundation announced it would begin spending down its assets before a planned shut down in 2034, with foundation president Jeanie Ungerleider, the daughter of founder Joy Ungerleider-Myerson, stating, “Given the urgent challenges we face today, this is a time to fully utilize our resources.”  ⁵

History

The Dorot foundation was launched in 1972 by Joy Ungerleider-Myerson. Under her leadership, the Dorot Foundation focused primarily on supporting archaeological research, libraries, museums, and scholarship related to Judaism until her death in 1994. ^{6 2 3}

After Ungerleider-Myerson’s death, her daughter Jeanie Ungerleider became president of the Dorot Foundation. Under her leadership, the foundation came to support left-of-center advocacy initiatives in the United States and Israel in addition to its traditional academic philanthropy. ⁴

In April 2026, the foundation announced it would begin spending down its assets before a planned shut down in 2034, with Jeanie Ungerleider stating, “Given the urgent challenges we face today, this is a time to fully utilize our resources.”  ⁵ She further stated, “The challenges to democratic norms, both in Israel and in the United States, have been a significant concern of ours… and have exacerbated many of the challenges that we had been previously focused on with respect to all kinds of equity and justice issues.” ⁵

Grants and Fellowships

Dorot Fellowship

The Dorot Foundation’s highest-profile program is its Dorot Fellowship Initiative. The program funds 12 annual fellowships for American Jews to live and study in Israel. It is operated in conjunction with the left-wing New Israel Fund, but claims it accepts fellows from a wide range of political beliefs. ⁷

Some notable Dorot Fellowship alumni include:⁸ Jodi Kantor, New York Times editor, correspondent on the 2008 Obama campaign, and author of The Obamas, and co-winner of a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for her story with Megan Twohey that reported sexual harassment and abuse allegations against producer Harvey Weinstein; Sacha Litman, McKinsey & Company Global Lead for Education, Public, and Social Sector Analytics; ⁹Jake Marmer, writer at Tablet; ⁹ Michael Rosen, an adjunct fellow specializing in intellectual property issues for the center-right American Enterprise Institute;¹⁰ Eric J. Stern, former co-chair of Obama Pride and the National LGBT Leadership Council for Obama’s 2008 campaign and former director of LGBT Outreach for the Democratic National Committee; ¹¹ and Bari Weiss, editor-in-chief of CBS News, founder of The Free Press, and former opinion page staff editor and writer at the New York Times. ¹²

Alliance for Justice Fellowship

In recent years, the Dorot Foundation has expanded its fellowship programs to include a Dorot Law Fellowship at the left-of-center legal policy organization Alliance for Justice. This program provides recent law school graduates with a $42,500 stipend to work in the organization’s Judicial Selection Project, which seeks to promote left-wing and Democratic-appointed judges while defeating conservative and Republican-appointed judges. ^{13 14 15}

Left-of-Center Jewish Grantmaking

Israel

• The Dorot Foundation actively supports left-wing organizations involved in Israeli politics and policy. It largely supports groups espousing a “two-state” solution, and it does not support groups active in the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement. Its grant recipients in this area have included J Street Education Fund ¹⁶

Judaism

The Dorot Foundation supports a variety of organizations that organize the Jewish community in America and other constituencies to support left-of-center causes. These have included Avodah – The Jewish Service Corps, Bend the Arc, Jewish Organizing Initiative/JOIN for Justice, and Union for Reform Judaism. ¹⁷

The Dorot Foundation continues to be active in its original scholarly interest areas such as Jewish archaeology, history, museums and libraries. These include the Jewish Museum in New York City, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the Dorot Professorship in Judaic Studies at Brown University,¹⁸ and a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Jewish Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. ¹⁹

Left-of-Center Advocacy

The Dorot Foundation’s largest donation in 2024 was a $505,000 grant to the New Israel Fund, which donates to left-of-center causes in Israel. ¹⁷ Among the causes that the New Israel Fund advocates for is a peace deal between Israelis and Palestinians that would require Israel make concessions to the Palestinians. In May 2026, New Israel Fund’s acting CEO Mickey Gitzin wrote an op-ed for the Israeli left-of-center newspaper Haaretz which proposed that in the event of the defeat of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his party in the next Israeli elections, the new government should carry out a complete purge of Netanyahu’s civil service appointees and their replacement with “real gatekeepers.” Gitzin’s model was the purge of supporters of defeated former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban by newly elected Hungarian Prime Minister Peter Magyar. ²⁰

The second largest donation by the Dorot Foundation in 2024 was $325,000 to NEO Philanthropy for its state infrastructure fund. ¹⁷ The state infrastructure fund was created in 2010 and funded groups working to mobilize voters and oppose voter integrity measures. In 2024, the state infrastructure fund donated nearly $36 million to support voter mobilization efforts in 15 states and nationwide. ²¹

Also tied for the second largest donation by the Dorot Foundation in 2024 was $325,000 for the Union for Reform Judaism to support its Religious Action Center’s Reform Action Center Project. ¹⁷

The fourth-largest donation awarded by the Dorot Foundation in 2024 was a $250,000 grant to the Tides Foundation to support several projects, including the Movement Voter Fund, A More Perfect Union: The Jewish Partnership for Democracy, and the Goodnation Foundation. ¹⁷

The fifth largest recipient of donations from the Dorot Foundation in 2024 was the Alliance for Justice, which received a $215,000 grant to support a program project. ¹⁷ The project was the funding of two Dorot Fellows at the group.  ²²

The sixth largest recipient of donations from the Dorot Foundation in 2024 was a $150,000 grant to the Democracy Fund to support its Trusted Elections Fund which “focused on election crises—including illegitimate disputes over election results, interference with vote tallies, political violence, and candidate refusal to accept legitimate results.” ^{17  23}

Controversy

Alleged Madoff Case Connection

Since at least 2001, the Dorot Foundation’s sole source of income, apart from its investment portfolio, was an annual donation in the range of $2 million to $3.4 million from the Yesod Fund, an investment vehicle that allegedly profited from Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. ²⁴

Between 2001 and 2014, the Dorot Foundation received a total of $36,055,673²⁵ from the Yesod Fund. ²⁶ The fund was created in 1995 after the death of Joy Ungerleider-Myerson as a charitable lead trust, an estate planning tool that can limit estate and gift tax liability. ²⁷ Funded by Ungerleider-Myerson’s estate, the Yesod Fund supported the Dorot Foundation with an annual donation for 20 years. The ultimate beneficiaries of its principal were Ungerleider family members, including Dorot Foundation President Jeane Ungerleider and her brother, Dorot Foundation vice president Steven Ungerleider.

In 2011, the Yesod Fund was sued by the court-appointed trustee tasked with unwinding Madoff’s finances. The suit alleged that the Yesod Fund, along with other Ungerleider family trusts, had collectively invested $17 million in Madoff’s investment firm and had received $7,565,531 in “fictitious profits” as a result. The trustee sought to recover those profits to compensate investors who had lost money to Madoff. The suit did not allege that any of Yesod’s trustees or beneficiaries knew about Madoff’s illegal activities or had any reason to believe their investment profits were generated by fraudulent means. ²⁸

The suit against the Ungerleider family trusts was eventually consolidated with many similar cases and dismissed by a federal judge under securities law that protected the fund’s profits from the trustee’s efforts to recover them. ²⁹ The trustee appealed this ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case in 2015. ^{30 31}

The Yesod Fund’s last donation to the Dorot Foundation was in 2014, which is also its last filing on record with charity regulators in New York State. ³²