Prominent Foundation Bankrolling Campus Antisemitism in North Carolina

[Pre-order a copy of David Horowitz’s next book, America Betrayed, by clicking here. Orders will begin shipping on May 7th.]

Hamas sympathizers set up a “Gaza solidarity encampment” last Monday evening at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). Over the next twenty-four hours, the unruly mob commandeered the center of the state’s oldest and most venerable public university.

The chanted “intifada revolution,” meaning violent uprising against Jews. They tore down barricades and trespassed after being ordered to leave campus. They fought with police officers and pelted them with water bottles. In their final act of brazen lawlessness, they swapped the American flag at Polk Place with the Palestinian flag.

Thirty protestors were arrested according to local reports.  Ten of the protesters were UNC students and 20 were not affiliated with the University. The reason? Professional activists make up a large part of these protest mobs.

One North Carolina 501c3 funds the lion’s share of the anti-Israel activist recruitment, training, and event planning.

Founded in 1936 by the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco scions, the Z Smith Reynolds Foundation began as a well-known charity for building hospitals and universities in North Carolina. Like many family foundations, ZSR eventually abandoned support for causes that uplift communities for extreme left causes. Recently, the Winston-Salem-based foundation has focused its funding efforts on defunding police departments, removing school discipline parties, and harassing the Jewish community.

Since 2016, the foundation has invested nearly $2 million in groups pushing the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) movement across North Carolina. The BDS movement receives bipartisan condemnation for being antisemitic. Its attempts to demonize, delegitimize, and destroy Israel’s Jewish nature, denying Jews their right to national identity.

BDS activists use hostility toward Israel as a stand-in for Jews in America. In the wake of October 7th, a horrified American body politic has been confronted with the BDS movement’s embrace of jihadi antisemitism.

To understand how Z Smith Reynolds (ZSR) uses its grantees to create a juggernaut like the BDS movement in North Carolina, it is helpful to view them as a broker. ZSR acts as an intermediary between their paid grantees – all kindred spirits – who work on behalf of the foundation to change and set state policy.

Southern Vision Alliance, an organization in Durham, is the central command for activism in North Carolina’s BDS movement. Z. Smith Reynolds funded its anti-Israel efforts with $710K directly and $500K through pass-through grants from 2016-2022. According to recent IRS filings, the Foundation has pledged $365K in future funding to the group.

On its website, Southern Vision Alliance (SVA) boasts that it provides professional protester training, and serves as a “base for groups organizing for Palestinian liberation.” The group claims credit for organizing Raleigh, Durham, and Charlotte anti-Israel rallies where its paid activists call for complete eradication of the Jewish state.

Like its benefactor, SVA also serves as a broker for about a dozen anti-Israel groups – most with the same leader. The groups join forces with radical students on campuses to form demonstrations that appear to originate on campus.

The North Carolina branch of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) is one of the organizations based at SVA’s Durham headquarters. PSL is a self-described communist group. Its leaders publicly support Communist dictators such as Vladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong.

The group operates an Instagram account that notifies protestors of anti-Israel demonstrations in advance and then calls out for outside actors to participate in the agitations.

During Monday’s UNC riot, while protestors were being ordered to disperse, PSL issued a call for backup.  Through its social media, sent an “urgent call to action,” claiming that students faced “severe repression and need our solidarity now.”

In addition to staffing campus demonstrations, SVA coordinates campaigns for municipal cease-fire resolutions in cities like Raleigh, Durham, Asheville, and Charlotte.

Non-binding ceasefire resolutions are raised so activists can publicly blame the Jewish community for Hamas’s atrocities on October 7. This includes including murder, brutalization, sexual violence, and kidnapping of innocent Jews.

Another anti-Israel group funded by Z. Smith Reynolds is the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network (NCEJN) . Its website describes itself as a grassroots group of black activists who fight injustice. In reality, this group is on the frontlines of igniting Jewish hatred throughout the state, as well as on UNC’s campus.

NCEJN is led by a notorious anti-Israel zealot and former Bernie Sanders delegate, Rania Masri.

Over the years, she has led academic boycotts against Jewish scholars. She had delivered biased and one-sided accounts of Israel through presentations on various college campuses. Recently, Masri coordinated freeway shutdowns during rush hour to oppose Israel’s actions against Hamas.

A month after Hamas’s massacre in Israel, two UNC departments invited Masri to speak at a social justice roundtable.  Masri told the audience, “October 7, for many of us from the region, was a beautiful day.” She called for the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Israel and referred to the Jewish state as a “cancer.”

Shortly after Masri’s inflammatory performance, a Jewish group initiated a federal complaint against the school. Unsurprisingly, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights opened an inquiry into allegations of a hostile environment against Jewish students at UNC.

In North Carolina, Z. Smith Reynolds grantees have created open marketplaces for proliferating anti-Semitic hate speech comparable to the rise of the Nazis during the Weimar Republic.

The Foundation claims to follow core values in its grantmaking process. From its website:

“We value and respect the dignity of all and are committed to equity, diversity, and inclusion. We celebrate the unique attributes, characteristics, and perspectives of every individual.”

For the elites who run the Foundation, respecting the dignity of all people does not apply to Jewish people in North Carolina.

Sloan Rachmuth is executive directive of Pen and Shield Media, a nonprofit newsroom dedicated to exposing antisemitism and defending American values. As a conservative journalist, Sloan has written about terror recruitment and antisemitism on America’s college campuses for the Federalist, Daily Wire, and the American Conservative. She has an undergraduate degree from Harvard.