By David J. Butler
For nearly half a century, Leslie Wexner did something almost no other American Jewish philanthropist has ever accomplished: He did not merely fund Jewish leadership — he helped create it.
Through the Wexner Foundation, Wexner and his wife Abigail built one of the most influential leadership incubators in modern Jewish life. The Wexner Heritage Program cultivated volunteer and lay leadership across North America. The Graduate Fellowship and Davidson Scholars programs helped shape generations of rabbis, educators and communal professionals. In Israel, senior public officials and military officers participated in Wexner leadership initiatives tied to Harvard’s Kennedy School.
The reach of these programs became so pervasive that “Wexner Fellow” evolved into something more than a credential. It became a marker of belonging within the upper tier of Jewish communal leadership.
And this was not passive philanthropy. Wexner did not simply write checks to existing institutions. He built networks, cultivated talent, mentored leaders and invested personally in human capital over decades. Entire sectors of organized Jewish life — federations, schools, rabbinical institutions and nonprofits — were shaped by people whose careers were influenced by the Wexners’ vision and generosity.
Few individuals have done more to cultivate the leadership infrastructure of American Jewish life. And now, in a decision that feels both generous and quietly heartbreaking, the Foundation has announced that it is spinning off two of its flagship North American leadership programs into an independent nonprofit while contributing another $40 million to sustain them into the future.
Officially, this is an organizational restructuring. Emotionally, it feels like something else: a separation. A conclusion. Perhaps even a weary recognition that the relationship between the Wexners and the elite leadership culture they helped build has become untenable.
One does not have to look hard to understand why.
Jeffrey Epstein’s shadow has hung over Leslie Wexner for years, and understandably so. Epstein was not a peripheral acquaintance. He exercised extraordinary influence over Wexner’s finances and affairs, held power of attorney and operated inside Wexner’s orbit for years. Wexner later acknowledged that Epstein had misappropriated large amounts of his wealth and described the relationship as a profound betrayal.
Those facts matter. Any intellectually honest discussion must begin there.
At the same time, something equally important must also be said clearly: there is no established evidence that Leslie Wexner participated in Epstein’s crimes or knowingly facilitated his abuse. Wexner has never been charged with wrongdoing. Reasonable people may still judge him harshly for the depth of the association and the astonishing degree of access Epstein enjoyed. But moral seriousness requires distinctions. A culture incapable of distinctions eventually loses the ability to think clearly at all.
Which brings us to the more uncomfortable story inside the Jewish community itself.
Over the past several years, many alumni of Wexner programs publicly distanced themselves from the Wexners and from the Foundation. Some contributed to survivor-support initiatives tied explicitly to Epstein’s victims. Others removed Wexner affiliations from biographies and resumes. The tone of some of these efforts conveyed not merely moral concern but moral repudiation — as though public separation itself had become a form of ethical purification.
Some of this was undoubtedly sincere. Some alumni likely felt genuinely conflicted or betrayed. Those sentiments deserve respect. But another question deserves to be asked as well: What obligations of gratitude survive moral complication?
Judaism has a name for this concept: hakarat hatov — recognition of the good one has received from another person, even an imperfect one. It does not erase wrongdoing or require silence in the face of misconduct. But it does demand humility, proportion and memory. And those virtues now seem strangely fragile within parts of elite Jewish culture.
What is striking about the Wexner controversy is not merely the criticism itself. It is the asymmetry. There were organized efforts to distance from Wexner. Statements of moral discomfort. Symbolic acts of separation. But where were the organized expressions of gratitude? Where were the collective acknowledgments that whatever one thinks of Leslie Wexner’s failures of judgment, a remarkable portion of contemporary Jewish leadership owes part of its formation and success to his extraordinary investment in them?
Modern elite culture increasingly treats gratitude itself as morally compromising once a benefactor becomes tainted. The safer posture is public distancing — demonstrate your moral clarity quickly before anyone questions your own standing.
But Jewish ethics has traditionally demanded something harder than that. It asks people to live within tension. To condemn wrongdoing without erasing merit. To acknowledge failure without pretending that flawed individuals never contributed profound good to the world around them.
The irony is that Leslie and Abigail Wexner appear to understand this tension better than many of the leaders they helped cultivate. They are not dismantling the programs. They are not bitterly withdrawing support. Instead, they are endowing the future one final time, contributing another $40 million and stepping aside.
There is something deeply Jewish in that act — generosity without applause, continuity despite disappointment, responsibility even after estrangement.
And there is something revealing in the response it received. The Jewish world that Leslie Wexner helped cultivate proved fully capable of speaking the language of accountability. But too much of it seemed to forget the equally Jewish language of gratitude, loyalty, memory and human complexity.
That may be the most unsettling lesson of this entire episode.
David J. Butler is an attorney. He is president of Dvash Consulting, LLC and a member of the ownership group of Mid-Atlantic Media, which owns and publishes Philadelphia Jewish Exponent.