Jews thought Trump wanted to fight antisemitism. Why did he cut all of their grants?

By Mira Fox April 12, 2025

When DOGE routed the National Endowment for the Humanities, hundreds of grants for Holocaust history and Yiddish culture were terminated.

Christina Crowder was in London, presenting on her work with the Klezmer Institute at a conference, when she got the news that the federal grant funding the trip had been terminated by the Trump administration. That meant that the cost of the flight she’d already taken and the hotel where she was staying would not be reimbursed.

Crowder and her colleague Clara Byom had been thrilled to receive a $150,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2020 to fund the creation of an archive of technologically innovative Klezmer music. They were more than two-thirds of the way through the grant’s period, and only $57,000 remained — hardly enough to fix the national debt, but an important amount to the tiny organization, where Byom and Crowder are the only two full-time employees.

Most of their other funding comes from small individual donations — often checks for $18 or $36 — from musicians who care about klezmer. So the money, and the prestige, that came with the NEH grant was life-changing.

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