American Jewish Committee - History

History

AJC was established in 1906 by a small group of American Jews concerned about pogroms aimed at the Jewish population of Russia. Its official purpose was to prevent infringement of the civil and religious rights of Jews and to alleviate the consequences of persecution."

The organization was dominated for years by banker Jacob H. Schiff, lawyer Louis Marshall, Judge Mayer Sulzberger, and other well-to-do and politically connected Jews. Most were from New York City while others lived in Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, and San Francisco. Later leaders were Judge Joseph M. Proskauer, industrialist Jacob Blaustein, and lawyer Irving M. Engel. In addition to the central office in New York City, local offices were established around the country. AJC took the position that prejudice was indivisible, and that the rights of Jews in the United States could be best protected by arguing in favor of the equality of all Americans. AJC supported social science research into the causes of and cures for prejudice, and forged alliances with other ethnic, racial and religious groups. AJC research was cited in the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education that outlawed segregated schools.

The AJC leaders in the early days were mindful of their responsibility toward the large numbers of poor Yiddish-speaking East European Jews pouring into New York and other cities. Nevertheless they feared that these not-yet-Americanized masses threatened to create the wrong image in the public mind because they brought with them Old World customs and alien ideologies, and held public rallies and protest meetings instead of working patiently through the existing Jewish establishment. The AJC did not want the American public to envision American Jewry as a foreign culture transplanted artificially to American shores. The profound fear, repeated over and over, was the risk of evoking an anti-Semitic reaction that would endanger the status of all American Jews. The AJC seeing itself as the natural "steward" of the community, took on the mission of educating the new arrivals in proper Americanism.

Louis B. Marshall (1856–1929) was a key founder and long-time president (1912–29). He made the organization the leading voice in the 1920s against immigration restriction, but could not stop passage of legislation setting quotas on the inflow of immigrants. He did succeed in stopping Henry Ford from publishing anti-Semitic literature and distributing it through his car dealerships; forcing Ford to apologize publicly to Marshall. In 1914 AJC helped create the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, established to aid Jewish victims of World War I, and would later play an instrumental role in aiding Jewish victims of World War II and the Holocaust. After World War I, Marshall had some success in inserting into the peace treaties provisions guaranteeing the rights of minorities.

In the 1920s the AJC was concerned with dangers in Poland and Romania, where violent outbreaks of anti-Semitism and the restriction of civil rights made the position of Jews precarious. In the 1930s it advocated finding places of refuge for Jewish refugees from Hitler, but had little success. Once World War II broke out it stressed that this was a war for democracy and discouraged emphasis on Hitler's anti-Jewish policies lest a backlash identify it as a "Jewish war" and increase anti-Semitism in the U.S. 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.

Through direct dialogue with the Catholic Church, AJC played a leading role in paving the way for a significant upturn in Jewish-Christian relations in the years leading up to the Roman Catholic Church's 1965 document Nostra Aetate, and in the ensuing years.

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, after the U.S. backed the partition of Palestine in 1947–48. It was the first American Jewish organization to open a permanent office in 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. As 1967 began, it still was the major Jewish body that was most self-consciously American, most reluctant to acknowledge links to other Jewish communities beyond those of religion and philanthropy, and least willing to subordinate institutional autonomy to the cause of Jewish communal solidarity. That it transformed itself almost overnight into a passionate defender of the Jewish state and, in so doing, shed old inhibitions to espouse Jewish peoplehood was itself a measure of the impact this 1967 crisis had on American Jewry as a whole.

In the 1970s, AJC spearheaded the fight to pass anti-boycott legislation to counter the Arab League boycott of Israel. In particular, Japan's defection from the boycott was attributed to AJC persuasion. In 1975, AJC became the first Jewish organization to campaign against the UN's "Zionism is Racism" resolution, a campaign that finally succeeded in 1991. AJC played a leading role in breaking Israel's diplomatic isolation at the UN by helping it gain acceptance in WEOG (West Europe and Others), one of the UN's five regional groups.

From 1945 to 2007, the organization published Commentary magazine, focused on political and cultural commentary and analysis of politics and society in the U.S. and the Middle East. Originally liberal, the magazine moved right, and since the 1980s has been the voice of Neoconservatives. It is now independent of AJC. From 1906 through 2008 AJC published the American Jewish Yearbook, a highly detailed annual account of Jewish life in the U.S., Israel and the world. Each year AJC releases a "Survey of American Jewish Opinion" that monitors the attitudes of American Jews on issues of concern.

AJC was active in the campaign to gain emigration rights for Jews living in the Soviet Union and was one of the founders of the American Jewish Conference on Soviet Jewry. In December 1987, AJC's Washington representative, David Harris, who would later become the organization's executive director, organized the Freedom Sunday Rally on behalf of Soviet Jewry. 250,000 people attended the D.C. rally, which demanded that the Soviet government allow Jewish emigration from the USSR.