So, I looked up the top 100 donors in 2024 versus in 2020 and then estimated their ethnicities from online sources. (Note that looking at the top 100 donors will overstate the Jewish share of total contributions, large and small, because Jews are so heavily represented among the very rich: e.g., about one-third of the richest 100 Americans in 2019 were Jewish. Still, the top 100 donors get listened to by important politicians.)
Among the biggest few dozen donors, it’s not that hard to figure out ethnicity. Wikipedia often has a line like “X was raised in a Jewish family.” After that, the going gets tougher. Still, the Jewish press loves reporting on Jewish zillionaires. And there are countless prestigious Jewish charities.
Gentiles can be a little less forthcoming, but the task is mostly pretty straightforward.
For example, in 2020, the biggest donors were casino owner Sheldon Adelson and his Israeli-born wife, Miriam ($218 million to Republicans), followed by former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg ($153 million to Democrats) and financier Tom Steyer ($72 million to Democrats).
The Adelsons and Bloomberg are obviously Jewish. Steyer identifies as a Jew through his father but is also a practicing Episcopalian through his mother, so I listed him as 50 percent Jewish and 50 percent gentile. (Larry Ellison is, biologically, half Italian and half Jewish, but he was raised by his mother’s Jewish uncle and aunt. Therefore, on the theory that nature and nurture are of equal importance, I list him as 75 percent Jewish and 25 percent gentile. Your estimate may vary.)
In fourth place are packaging magnates Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein ($68 million to Republicans). Although there is a stereotype that anybody high-achieving with a Germanic surname must have Yiddish-speaking ancestors, a plethora of evidence shows that Mr. Uihlein is a gentile German-American.
