Type: Private Family Foundation
The Abstraction Fund is a national, tax-exempt private family foundation run by an heir of the Sears-Roebuck fortune, Nina Rosenwald. Rosenwald builds upon her grandfather Julius Rosenwald’s remarkable legacy of philanthropy — he served as a key bulwark of Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, and provided critical assistance to Jewish refugees fleeing Europe for the United States., Unlike her family’s legacy of serving social justice, Nina Rosenwald has used the Abstraction Fund to fuel some of the country’s most vitriolic, paranoid, and toxic anti-Muslim institutions. The Abstraction Fund’s primary beneficiary is the Gatestone Institute, which she founded and where she serves as president.
The Gatestone Institute is an anti-Muslim hate group of which Trump’s National Security Advisor John Bolton served as chairman. Many of the Abstraction Fund’s grantees include conservative and pro-Israel groups, such as Turning Point USA and the Central Fund of Israel. From 2014 to 2016 the Fund had access to more than $4 million in revenue. It funneled 75 percent of this, nearly $3.2 million, toward anti-Muslim hate groups, including $1.87 million to the Gatestone Institute and $742,000 to the Middle East Forum. Through its grantmaking capacity, the Fund has fueled an “alliance between the pro-Israel mainstream and the Islamophobic fringe” that ranks among the most disturbing examples of the way in which American philanthropy is institutionally connected to the Islamophobia network.
