The American Jewish Committee (AJC) is an American Jewish civil rights and advocacy group established on November 11, 1906. The oldest Jewish defence organization and one of the oldest Jewish advocacy organizations in general, it was founded in response to the extensive pogroms then occurring in Russia and initially also advocated a liberal United States immigration policy. The New York Times has characterized it as "widely regarded as the dean of American Jewish organizations".
The AJC has consistently opposed antisemitism in the United States and internationally and has worked to protect the civil liberties of Jews. Since the Second World War, its concern with civil liberties has also extended to non-Jewish groups, and it has opposed broader forms of discrimination and promoted social equality in the United States. Among its activities in the civil rights movement, it filed an amicus curiae brief in the 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education and participated in other civil-rights initiatives. The American Jewish Relief Committee and other philanthropic organizations developed from the AJC, which has also sponsored numerous publications, including The American Jewish Year Book.
Organization American Jewish Committee (AJC) is an international advocacy organization whose key area of focus is to promote religious and civil rights for Jews and others.
AJC has 25 regional offices in the United States, 13 overseas offices, and 35 international partnerships with Jewish communal institutions around the world."Where We Work " (2016). American Jewish Committee. ajc.org. Retrieved 2016-12-24.
Programs and institutes
AJC's Jacob Blaustein Institute (JBI) for the Advancement of Human Rights, led by Felice Gaer from 1993 to 2024, is the only human rights division within a major Jewish organization. Under Gaer, the JBI expanded its focus to global universal rights, including women's rights, torture victims, and the protection of political dissidents. The AJC Transatlantic Institute, based in Brussels, was opened in February 2004 to promote ties between the transatlantic relationship between the United States and Europe. Alexander Young Leadership Department ACCESS, AJC's young professional program Arthur and Rochelle Belfer Institute for Latino and Latin American Affairs Asia Pacific Institute Combating Antisemitism in Washington, D.C. Heilbrunn Institute for International Interreligious Understanding in Jerusalem Information Center and Digital Archives Interreligious and Intergroup Relations Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights in New York Jewish Religious Equality Coalition (JREC) in Jerusalem Lawrence and Lee Ramer Institute for German-Jewish Relations in Berlin Muslim-Jewish Advisory Council Project Interchange Policy and Political Affairs in Washington, D.C. Shapiro Silverberg AJC Central Europe in Warsaw Sidney Lerner Center for Arab-Jewish Understanding in Abu Dhabi William Petschek Contemporary Jewish Life
History 1900–1929 On November 11, 1906, 81 American Jews of Central European background met in the Hotel Savoy in New York City to establish the American Jewish Committee. The impetus for the group's formation was to eliminate the barriers to full Jewish participation in American life. More broadly, AJC sought to protect the rights of Jews all over the world and to combat anti-Jewish discrimination and antisemitism.
In its early years, the AJC worked quietly, utilizing the contacts of its most financially successful members, who were mostly Reform Jews. Early leaders included lawyer Louis Marshall, banker Jacob H. Schiff, Judge Mayer Sulzberger, scholar Cyrus Adler, and other politically connected Jews.
Marshall was AJC's president from 1912 until his death in 1929. While president, Marshall is credited with making the AJC a leading voice in the 1920s against immigration restrictions. Additionally, he succeeded in forcing Henry Ford to cease publication and distribution of his antisemitic newspaper The Dearborn Independent. Ford was also made to apologize publicly and pay a cash settlement.
In 1914, the AJC helped create the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, established to aid Jewish victims of World War I.
In the 1920s, AJC fought virulent antisemitism and pogroms in Romania, as well as discrimination against Russian Jewish refugees in Turkey, and Jews in Yemen. The AJC also filed complaints with the Council of the League of Nations after Norway passed a law banning schechita, Jewish ritual slaughter by butchers. After the 1929 Palestine riots, AJC asked the U.S. government to ensure the British government protected the Jews in Mandatory Palestine.
In the late 1920s, AJC advocated for reform of the Immigration Act of 1924, including repeal of the National Origins Formula that effectively made immigration from Eastern Europe, where the vast majority of the Jewish diaspora lived at the time, impossible.
After Marshall's death, Cyrus Adler was unanimously elected AJC's president at the organization's annual meeting in November 1929.
1930s and 1940s The AJC advocated finding places of refuge for Jewish refugees from Adolf Hitler in the 1930s, but had minimal success. After World War II broke out in 1939, the AJC stressed that the war was for democracy and discouraged emphasis on Hitler's anti-Jewish policies lest a backlash identify it as a "Jewish war" and increase antisemitism in the United States. When the war ended in 1945, it urged a human rights program upon the United Nations and proved vital in enlisting the support that made possible the human rights provisions in the UN Charter.
During the interwar period, AJC was the most powerful Jewish organization in the United States. The group was decidedly non-Zionist not in principle against the State of Israel, but in opposition to Jewish nationalism being the raison d'etre of American Jews. The group faced a crisis in the 1940s due to its president Joseph Proskauer's opposition to Zionism, and AJC left the umbrella group American Jewish Conference due to its position, even though that organization was making efforts to save Jews from the Holocaust.
The AJC "worked to contain nativist sentiment in America rather than work to open America's doors to refugees" during the Holocaust. For fear of provoking an increase in antisemitic sentiment, the AJC opposed public activism. They have been widely criticized for their inaction during the Holocaust; historian and AJC National Director of Jewish Communal Affairs Steven Bayme said AJC leaders "never understood the uniqueness of Nazism and its 'war against the Jews'." This cautious approach changed after the war, when the AJC began openly lobbying for a new immigration law allowing entrance to the United States for displaced persons from Europe. This law also led to Nazi collaborators entering the United States, though it remains unclear whether a more restrictive policy would have avoided this outcome.
Post World War II After World War II, AJC changed its stance on the State of Israel. In 1950, AJC President Jacob Blaustein reached an agreement with Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion stating that the political allegiance of American Jews was solely to their country of residence. By the Six-Day War of 1967, the AJC had become a passionate defender of the Jewish state, shedding old inhibitions to espouse the centrality of Jewish peoplehood.
The organization worked successfully to include a human rights provision in the UN Charter.
Anti-Communism The Rosenberg Case severely alarmed the AJC and other Jewish organizations, and the AJC supported the Rosenbergs' execution. Writing from Sing Sing, Julius Rosenberg charged that "self-appointed leaders of Jewish organizations" were behaving like an "American Judenrat", accusing the AJC's Solomon Andhil Fineberg of spreading a false rumor that the Rosenbergs believed they were being prosecuted because they were Jewish.
During the Second Red Scare, the AJC sent a representative to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, emphasizing that "Judaism and Communism are utterly incompatible." The AJC shared files with HUAC and also employed a staff member to investigate alleged Communist infiltration among the Jewish community. At the organization's conference in October 1950, the executive committee adopted a resolution stating that the protection and advancement of civil liberties and civil rights could not be accomplished with combatting communism in the United States. AJC chairman Irving M. Engel said that "loyalty to the fundamental basis of Judaism requires all Jews to stand with the vanguard in the struggle against totalitarianism. Our attitude as Americans...should be positive and vigorous against communism. Let all of us lead the attack against this common foe of America."
Civil Rights Movement As part of broader Jewish involvement in the Civil Rights Movement, AJC took the position that the rights of Jews in the United States could be best protected by pursuing equality of all Americans. AJC commissioned the social science research of black psychologist Kenneth Clark, which demonstrated how segregation affected black children. AJC cited Clark's research in its amicus curiae brief in support of Oliver Brown during the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education. The court cited Clark's research in its decision establishing racial segregation in public schools were unconstitutional.
AJC, along with the ADL and American Jewish Congress, believed that racial quotas were unconstitutional, and Jewish groups opposed their use in determining admission in higher education in the United States. For this reason, AJC celebrated the landmark 1978 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke that struck down racial quotas in university admissions. Despite the Bakke decision, AJC supported affirmative action programs for disadvantaged groups. By 2003, the organization's opposition to affirmative action had tempered. The AJC's director of public policy Jeffrey Sinesky said that "It's the quota concept that's anathema" after the organization submitted a brief in defense of the University of Michigan's affirmative action program.
According to the New York Times, the AJC had taken a leading role in the struggle for equal rights for African Americans in the United States by the early 1990s.
1960s and 1970s Through direct dialogue with the Catholic Church, the AJC played a leading role in improving Jewish-Christian relations, leading the Vatican to issue the Nostra aetate in 1965, absolving Jews of collective responsibility for the death of Jesus. American Jewish Committee, along with the Synagogue Council of America, and the American Ethical Union each submitted briefs in Engel v. Vitale urging the US Supreme Court to rule that the public school prayer was unconstitutional.
Before the Six-Day War in 1967, the AJC was officially "non-Zionist". It had long been ambivalent about Zionism as possibly opening up Jews to the charge of dual loyalty, but it supported the creation of Israel in 1947–48, after the United States backed the partition of Palestine. It was the first American Jewish organization to open a permanent office in Israel.