The American Jewish Committee (AJC) is a Jewish advocacy group established on November 11, 1906. It is one of the oldest Jewish advocacy organizations and, according to The New York Times, is "widely regarded as the dean of American Jewish organizations". As of 2009, AJC envisions itself as the "Global Center for Jewish and Israel Advocacy".Besides working in favor of civil liberties for Jews, the organization has a history of fighting against all forms of discrimination in the United States and working on behalf of social equality, such as filing a friend-of-the-court brief in the May 1954 case of Brown v. Board of Education and participating in other events in the Civil Rights Movement.
In a broad review of the extensive engagement of Jews in American politics, Marc Stern shows how the longstanding unified tendency of American Jews to vote Democratic has become polarized along religious lines, with the minority Orthodox strongly Republican and the rest of the community strongly Democratic. This divergence is an expression of both a conservative-liberal divide on cultural issues like abortion and LGBT rights and differential support for an Israel that in recent decades has largely been run by conservative governments. Turning to the wide array of Jewish communal agencies concerned with politics, Stern points out that major national bodies like the American Jewish Committee have narrowed their focus largely to issues involving Israel. These bodies no longer enjoy the broad based support and involvement they once enjoyed from the Jewish public at large. In addition, there is no community consensus on mnay if not most, issues. An increasing number of Jews have attenuated connections to the organized Jewish community. With individual wealthy donors in the lead, Jews—both individually and via collectively—have become increasingly involved in partisan political activity. Stern argues that these trends presage difficult times for Jewish communal power.
Denominationalism is the skeletal framework of Judaism in America, and Lawrence Grossman provides a roadmap of the denominational streams—or, as they are more commonly known, "movements"—that established themselves in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The pluralist nature of American society has shaped the growth, development, and dynamism of the Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform movements along with the considerably smaller Reconstructionism. Grossman reviews the history of these movements, considers the normative differences among them, and examines the changes in each over the past quarter-century. He discusses the strengths of each movement and the internal and external challenges each is facing. As American Judaism looks toward its future, he argues, it is likely that that the denominational structure that controlled American Judaism in the twentieth century is on the way out.
