Alex Soros Announces $30 Million Open Society Push Against Antisemitism And Anti-Muslim Hate
NEW YORK - Alex Soros said Open Society Foundations will commit $30 million over three years to organizations fighting antisemitism and anti-Muslim hate, casting the grant program as a response to rising threats against Jewish and Muslim communities in the United States and abroad.
Soros, the chair of Open Society Foundations, announced the commitment in a direct-to-camera video posted Wednesday. The foundation separately released a statement saying the money will support community safety, interfaith and cross-community partnerships, education, research, and groups working against discriminatory rhetoric and harassment.
"Today, the Open Society Foundations are committing $30 million to organizations fighting antisemitism and anti-Muslim hate around the United States and across the world." - Alex Soros, chair of Open Society Foundations, speaking in a video posted to X.
The announcement links two pressures that have intensified since the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel and the war in Gaza: documented antisemitic incidents and reported anti-Muslim bias. The foundation's release framed both as threats to community safety and democratic norms, while saying the funding would also protect lawful expression and open debate.
What Open Society Says It Will Fund
Open Society Foundations said the new initiative will run for three years. The foundation did not identify named grantees in the announcement, but it described several funding lanes: protecting communities facing threats and violence, building interfaith partnerships, expanding education and research, supporting Jewish, Muslim, and allied voices, and addressing harassment against Jews, Muslims, Palestinians, Arabs, and other affected groups.
The release also said the program will support work that safeguards free speech and fundamental freedoms. That language matters because fights over antisemitism, anti-Muslim hate, campus protest, criticism of Israel, and political speech have often collided in courts, schools, workplaces, and campaign politics.
Soros described the issue in personal terms. In the video, he identifies himself as the son of a Holocaust survivor and says he is married to a Muslim American. He says discrimination and hate are not abstract for his family, then frames the funding as an effort to keep people safe and push back against hate.
In the foundation's written statement, Soros said his family's Jewish identity has made it a target of antisemitism and strengthened its resolve to stand against all forms of hate.
"We are witnessing a disturbing rise in hate crimes targeting Jews and Muslims, which demands clarity, solidarity, and action." - Alex Soros, chair of Open Society Foundations, in the foundation's announcement.
The Numbers Behind The Announcement
The Justice Department's hate crime statistics page says religion accounted for 23.5 percent of victims in single-bias hate crime incidents in the FBI's 2024 data. Federal data is not a complete count of every incident, because reporting practices vary across jurisdictions, but it is the government's central national dataset.
Jewish and Muslim advocacy organizations have also reported elevated complaint levels. The Anti-Defamation League's 2025 audit said it tracked 6,274 antisemitic incidents in the United States in 2025, down from 9,354 in 2024 but still far above levels recorded a decade earlier. CAIR's 2025 civil rights report said its offices received 8,658 complaints nationwide in 2024, the highest number since the group began publishing its civil rights report in 1996.
Those numbers come from different collection systems and should not be treated as directly interchangeable. The federal statistics measure law-enforcement-reported hate crimes. The advocacy-group reports include complaints or incidents submitted through organizational channels. Together, they explain why foundations, civil rights groups, and government agencies are treating antisemitism and anti-Muslim hate as an active public-safety issue rather than a symbolic debate.
Why Soros Is A Political Lightning Rod
The announcement also carries political weight because the Soros name is already central to partisan arguments over philanthropy, prosecutors, elections, immigration, media, and campus politics. George Soros, the foundation's founder, has long been a major Democratic donor and a frequent target of conspiracy theories, including antisemitic claims about Jewish control or secret coordination.
Open Society's statement explicitly references that history. It says George Soros' experience as a Holocaust survivor shaped the foundation's mission and says he has been subjected to antisemitic attacks and conspiracy theories. The new commitment places that personal and political history inside a broader grant-making response to hate against both Jewish and Muslim communities.
That framing will likely draw scrutiny from multiple directions. Supporters of the initiative will point to documented increases in antisemitic incidents, threats against Muslim communities, and the need for community protection. Critics of Open Society may argue that the foundation's politics should be examined alongside any new funding program, especially when the money goes to advocacy groups working in contested speech and discrimination debates.
The foundation's announcement does not resolve those disputes. It does make clear that Open Society wants the initiative understood as a safety and civil-rights project, not only as a reaction to one conflict or one domestic political argument.
The Free Speech Question
One of the most important lines in the foundation's release says the program will safeguard free speech and fundamental freedoms, including lawful expression and open democratic debate. That is a significant promise because antisemitism and anti-Muslim hate are often debated in settings where speech protections matter: university protests, online platforms, workplace discipline, school policies, and criminal investigations.
Civil-rights enforcement can collide with speech disputes when institutions try to distinguish protected political expression from targeted harassment or threats. Jewish students have argued that some campus activism crosses into antisemitic intimidation. Muslim, Palestinian, and Arab students have argued that some anti-hate enforcement is used to suppress speech about Gaza, Israel, and U.S. foreign policy.
Open Society's funding description suggests the foundation is trying to occupy both lanes: support communities facing threats while defending lawful expression. The details will depend on which organizations receive grants, what work they fund, and how they handle conflicts between safety, protest, and political speech.
Binaifer Nowrojee, Open Society Foundations' president, said in the announcement that hate can become a danger to all communities if left unchecked. She also linked the current climate to events in the Middle East, saying injustice and violence there are fueling prejudice and dehumanization against both Muslims and Jews.
"Hate corrodes our shared humanity, and left unchecked, becomes a danger to us all." - Binaifer Nowrojee, president of Open Society Foundations, in the foundation's announcement.
What To Watch
The next test is disclosure. The announcement says $30 million is being committed, but it does not list recipient organizations, grant sizes, program dates, or geographic allocations. Those details will determine whether the initiative is primarily a community-security program, an education and research push, an advocacy campaign, or some mix of all three.
Another test is balance. Open Society's release names antisemitism and anti-Muslim hate together, but the political fights around those categories are not identical. Grants that fund bridge-building work may be received differently from grants that fund litigation, protest support, campus organizing, or public messaging.
The video matters because Soros does not present the announcement as a detached institutional memo. He ties it to his Jewish family history, his marriage, and the foundation's stated view that the two forms of hate should be addressed together. That is the news value of the clip: it shows the chair of one of the world's best-known progressive philanthropies putting his own biography behind a $30 million commitment.
