The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded a nonprofit focused on the study of Jewish culture $10.4 million to “combat the recrudescence and normalization of anti-Semitism in American society” through educational, scholarship and public programs, the federal agency announced in a news release Monday.

The conservative organization Tikvah—which plans to recognize right-wing commentators Ben Shapiro and Bari Weiss, editor of the Free Press, with a key award—was invited to apply and did not win the grant through a competitive application process, according to The Washington Post. The grant to Tikvah is the largest in the agency’s 60-year history. Meanwhile, the NEH has laid off more than half its employees and canceled more than 1,000 grants that don’t align with Trump administration’s ideological tenets, including projects related to Black history and Indigenous cultures.

Michael McDonald, acting chairman of the NEH, said in the release that “the humanities have a vital role to play in this fight” against antisemitism.

Since the Israel-Gaza war began in October 2023, many Republican lawmakers have criticized colleges across the country for failing to adequately curb campus antisemitism. And since becoming president earlier this year, Trump has used those claims as a pretext to freeze federal money at numerous universities, including Harvard University and the University of California, Los Angeles. 

McDonald said Tikvah “is well positioned to bring a comprehensive approach, grounded in the best of humanities scholarship, to educating future leaders and the broader public on the ways in which the sinister and hate-filled attacks on Jewish people that we have been witnessing on American campuses and streets are, at a deeper level, also attacks on the very foundations that have made the United States the exceptional nation that it is.” 

The funding gives Tikvah three years of support for the group’s Jewish Civilization Project. It includes funding for:

• Creating a Jewish civilization curriculum for middle and high school students;
• Expanding a high school fellowship program for high school students regarding Jewish civilization;
• Developing university courses in the Jewish humanities offered in partnership with new Western civilization bachelor’s programs; 
• Public programs about antisemitism and the significance of Jewish civilization; 
• Publishing scholarly books about the meaning of Jewish resilience in the history of the United States and the Western world; and
• A fellowship program for early-career journalists who want to write about antisemitism and advance knowledge of Jewish history and culture.