COMMENTARY: At 100, American Jewish Committee Alert as Ever to Anti-Semitism

c. 2006 Religion News Service (UNDATED) What qualities are required to reach the age of 100? Willard Scott, my Virginia high school classmate and now Florida neighbor, who salutes centenarians on NBC-TV’s “Today” show notes such people generally have three things in common: they have good genes, they’ve stayed mentally active, and they possess a […]

c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) What qualities are required to reach the age of 100? Willard Scott, my Virginia high school classmate and now Florida neighbor, who salutes centenarians on NBC-TV’s “Today” show notes such people generally have three things in common: they have good genes, they’ve stayed mentally active, and they possess a healthy self-esteem combined with the capacity to change with the times instead of becoming a gloomy wanderer down nostalgia lane.

Willard’s observations also apply to organizations, including the American Jewish Committee, which in early May celebrates its 100th anniversary with a gala series of public events, programs and meetings in Washington.


In the interest of full disclosure, I have been professionally associated with the AJC since 1968, working in the area of interreligious relations, a hallmark of the committee.

The organization was founded in 1906 in response to two massacres of Jews in the Czarist Russian city of Kishinev, now the capital of the Republic of Moldavia.

The first “pogrom,” the Russian term for massacre, occurred during Christian Holy Week in April 1903. While local police and the Russian military stood by, a mob killed 49 Jews, injured hundreds more, destroyed 700 homes and businesses, and made 2,000 Jewish families homeless. Another pogrom followed two years later.

Tragically, the mass murder of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust has inured us to such small numbers of victims, but the Kishinev pogroms represented the first state-sponsored physical attacks upon a Jewish community in the 20th century. The negative reaction in the United States to the violence was so great that President Theodore Roosevelt dispatched a strong letter of protest to the Czar who refused to accept it.

The Kishinev pogroms “radicalized” a group of prominent U.S. Jews who formed the “American Jewish Committee.” They recognized that collective action including the involvement of governments and religious communities was required to protect Jews from both physical and verbal anti-Semitism.

From the outset, the AJC leaders clearly understood that every religious, ethnic, or racial group is a potential victim of bigotry and prejudice. Robert Goodkind, the AJC’s current president, has said: “No group can be secure unless all groups, large and small, are treated with fairness, dignity and respect.”

David Harris, the AJC’s executive director, is proud that the “first Supreme Court case in which we became involved (during the 1920s) was in defense of the right of Catholic parents to send their children to parochial schools when that right came under attack in Oregon.” As a result of its organizational “genes,” strong support of civil and human rights has been a primary AJC mandate.


The AJC has remained “mentally alert” with numerous interreligious projects, a commitment to church-state separation, ground-breaking research projects, and a host of other advocacy efforts throughout the world.

(OPTIONAL TRIM FOLLOWS)

Following World War II, the AJC sponsored a landmark study on the “Authoritarian Personality” that remains relevant even though Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy are no more. The AJC also sponsored Professor Kenneth Clark’s analysis of the devastating effects of racial prejudice in the United States. That report played a key role in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 decision striking down racially segregated public education. The Committee’s research and advocacy efforts helped ensure the adoption in 1965 at the Second Vatican Council of the historic “Nostra Aetate” declaration on Catholic-Jewish relations.

At 100 years old, the AJC knows precisely what it is. For that reason, the organization with more than 150,000 members and supporters, offices in 32 American cities, and a strong presence in 26 foreign nations, has emerged as an effective and vocal foe of anti-Semitism. The AJC is a vigorous supporter of the state of Israel and that nation’s quest for peace, security and survival in the turbulent Middle East.

Because the American Jewish Committee was founded after two bloody pogroms, it is a global champion of remembering and educating the world about the Holocaust, the worst pogrom in history.

Both Goodkind and Harris remain confident about the future, albeit in a continually changing, increasingly polarized world: “We are motivated by hope and not fear … we are confident in our ability to meet future challenges and move the world that much closer to the prophetic vision of a world at peace and harmony.”

MO/JL RNS END

(Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s senior interreligious adviser, is the author of “The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right’s Plans for the Rest of Us.”)


Editors: To obtain a photo of Rabbi Rudin, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug. If searching by subject, designate “exact phrase” for best results.

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