The American Jewish Congress (AJCongress) is an association of American Jews organized to defend Jewish interests in the US and internationally through public policy advocacy, using diplomacy, legislation, and the courts.
History The idea for an American Jewish Congress was first proposed on August 30, 1914, by Bernard G. Richards. Leaders within the American Jewish community, consisting of Jewish, Zionist, and immigrant community organizations, convened the first AJCongress at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Rabbi Stephen Samuel Wise, Felix Frankfurter, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, and others joined to lay the groundwork for a national democratic organization of Jewish leaders from all over the country, to rally for equal rights for all Americans regardless of race, religion, or national ancestry.
The American Jewish Congress (AJCongress) was officially founded in November 1918. In addition to its goal of equal rights for all, it was founded to broaden Jewish leadership and to present a unified American Jewish position at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. More militant and confrontational than other Jewish defense organizations such as the American Jewish Committee, it represented a populist counterbalance to the American Jewish Committee, dominated by the wealthy and conservative German-Jewish establishment.
It has established a "reputation for being politically liberal." It protested the Nazi regime.
Post World War II, it made "its mark as an active litigant on church-state issues and civil rights"."AJCongress Crippled by Madoff Scandal". The Forward. February 8, 2009.
1930s AJCongress became effective as a pressure group in 1928 under the leadership of Rabbi Stephen Samuel Wise, who remained president and chief spokesperson until his death in 1949. Throughout the 1930s, Wise was vocal in his warnings about the dangers of Nazism. When Adolf Hitler was named Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933, Wise organized a mass protest rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City despite strong opposition by the German government, the U.S. State Department, and conservative Jewish organizations such as the AJC and B'nai B'rith. The AJCongress continued to organize protest rallies throughout the 1930s and 1940s. In August 1933, the AJCongress led a general boycott of German goods.
In 1934, Daniel Marks was named head of the AJCongress. He traveled to Germany and brought 5,000 Jews to America.
In 1936, the AJCongress was instrumental in establishing the World Jewish Congress (WJC). Maintaining his position as president of the AJCongress, Rabbi Wise was also elected president of the WJC. During World War II, the AJCongress acted as a liaison between the U.S. government and the WJC on issues relating to rescue attempts made on behalf of European Jews.
1940s and 1950s In August 1942, Rabbi Wise received a cable from Gerhart Riegner, the WJC representative in Switzerland. Riegner reported that the Nazis had planned, and were implementing, a policy to exterminate all of European Jewry; the cable also referred specifically to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. After the U.S. State Department confirmed the accuracy of the information in the cable, now known as the Riegner Telegram, the AJCongress convened a Joint Emergency Committee.
The AJCongress supported Zionism and cultural pluralism. Its leadership overlapped with that of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA). As a result, the two organizations agreed to concentrate on different tasks during the war. The AJCongress dedicated itself to rescuing European Jews, while the ZOA worked to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. This arrangement continued after the war, although its significance decreased after the creation of the State of Israel in 1948.On November 14, 1949, Rabbi Irving Miller was elected as president of the AJCongress, succeeding Wise.
After the war After World War II, middle-class Jews of Eastern European descent with socialist-labor and professional civil rights backgrounds began to take over leadership roles in the Jewish community. In contrast to the previous approach to placate the WASP elite in America, these leaders were eager and willing to join the public battle for Jewish civil rights. Unlike other Jewish organizations such as the American Jewish Committee and the ADL, AJC preferred a more direct approach to addressing antisemitism through litigation and lobbying for legal change.
Civil rights movement
Stanley Levison, a close friend and advisor to Martin Luther King Jr., served on the Manhattan board of the AJC. The two men met when Levinson began fundraising for the Montgomery bus boycott in 1956.
In January 1957, King Jr. reached out to the AJC's then-president, Israel Goldstein, looking to broaden support for the Southern Negro Leaders Conference. In response, Goldstein publicly condemned the bombing of Black churches and parsonages that same month. In 1958, King Jr. was invited by Levison to speak to the AJC's Miami conference — one of the few anti-segregationist organizations to convene in the South — and highlighted the shared impact of racism and segregation upon Blacks and Jews alike.
Rabbi Joachim Prinz (1902–88) was president of the Congress from 1958 to 1966, emphasized the shared commitment to justice among diverse communities — most notably in his speech at the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, delivered just before King's iconic "I Have a Dream" address.
1960s The AJCongress also supported coalition politics, legislative reform, and litigation as a means of bolstering a sense of Jewish identity and community. In order to further these goals, the AJCongress created the Commission on Community Interrelations (CCI) and the Commission on Law and Social Action (CLSA). CCI was planned in 1944 and launched in 1945 with social psychologist Kurt Lewin as its chief consultant. Its intent was to bring action research to bear on religious and racial discrimination, and to use psychology and social engineering to combat prejudice; it developed psychological studies to bolster anti-discrimination legislation, and continued into the early 1950s.
The CLSA, chaired by Shad Polier, was the legal arm of the AJCongress and was modeled after the Legal Defense Fund of the NAACP. The mission of CLSA was "to defend civil liberties and fight discrimination against all minority groups, based on an understanding that prejudice against any group was a threat to others." One of the earliest cases the CLSA worked on was Westminster School District v. Mendez, challenging Mexican-American segregation in California schools. The brief filed by the CLSA in this case was influential in future NAACP strategies.
AJCongress lawyers successfully challenged racial and religious segregation in public schools, citing the psychological harm produced in school children. These lawyers employed civil rights and Establishment Clause arguments. Jewish judges in New York, unable to gain the support of their colleagues to end religion matching of probationers, turned to AJCongress lawyers to craft a legal strategy. The lawyers at the AJCongress proffered an employment discrimination argument, noting that judges on the court only hired as many Jewish probation officers as there were Jewish probationers. They used this argument to file a claim with New York's State Commission Against Discrimination (SCAD), which was also the first state anti-discrimination agency in the country. This claim was partially successful in that it forced judges to hire probation officers without regard to religion, but still allowed matching based on religion.
The AJCongress's involvement in legal proceedings sometimes conflicted with other Jewish American organizations. In 1966, the AJCongress joined the New York Civil Liberties Union, the United Parents Associations, and the United Federation of Teachers in filing suit against provisions of the Federal Education Act, which would provide support to religious schools. Jewish day school educators and leaders in over 30 states and over 100 communities representing 330 Hebrew day schools insisted that the AJCongress did not speak for American Jews on religious or educational issues, and was viewed by some in the Jewish community as primarily a secular agency. The president of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America (also known as the Orthodox Union), Rabbi Joseph Karasick, said that the AJCongress "speaks for itself only and is under no circumstances to be taken as representing the American Jewish community. The Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, central spokesman for this country's 3,100 Orthodox synagogues, as well as all Orthodox rabbinic bodies and every other Orthodox Jewish body, have given full support to the Federal Education Act and deem its provisions to be consonant with the principle of church-state separation.""Orthodox Groups to Defend in Court Federal Aid to Parochial Schools". JTA. December 5, 1966.
1970s Among their most important actions was their participation on the touristic boycott by American Jews against Mexico in 1975, while Naomi B. Levine led the lawsuit when she was executive director of the American Jewish Congress. This was a response to the impulse of Arab countries, the Soviet bloc, and Non-Aligned Movement countries to consider Zionism as racism in the context of World Conference on Women in Mexico City, and the following UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 which equated it with South Africa's Apartheid and was supported by the Mexican government at the time. Joint with other Jewish American organizations, the AJCongress announced the suspension of all their trips to Mexico on November 18, 1975, after 30 unanimous votes during an executive committee reunion.
In late 1978, New York State's prison system reached an agreement, brokered in part by AJCongress's then-assistant executive director Marc D. Stern, "to arrange ... TV dinners ... along with packaged breakfasts and disposable utensils" to those requesting kosher food while in prison.
In the 1978 Regents of the University of California v. Bakke case, the AJCongress opposed racial quota systems and exclusive consideration of race in college admissions. The AJCongress celebrated Supreme Court's decision in the case to strike down racial quotas in university admissions, seeing it as a vindication of their view that racial quotas were unconstitutional. By 2003, the organization's opposition to affirmative action had tempered. The AJCongress's legal director Marc Stern said at the time that "The Jewish community is less concerned about affirmative action than it was 25 years ago...We've all shifted."
1980s and 1990s Following its heyday during the 1960s, when many of its activities coincided with the larger Civil Rights Movement, a drop-off in its membership throughout the 1980s and 1990s ensued.
In the late 1990s and into the 2000s, the AJCongress experienced the defection of a number of local chapters, including those in Boston, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles. There were disputes over ideological issues and finances. Some of those chapters have since reestablished themselves as independent non-profits focused on liberal social and community issues. Finding the AJCongress had become too conservative, members of the Los Angeles chapter, for instance, created the Progressive Jewish Alliance (PJA) in 1999. They sought to assert a Jewish interest in the campaigns for social justice in Southern California, which has the United States' second largest Jewish population. The Progressive Jewish Alliance expanded in February 2005 by opening a San Francisco Bay Area chapter.