American Jewish Committee

The American Jewish Committee (AJC) is a Jewish ethnic advocacy group established in 1906. It is one of the oldest Jewish advocacy organizations in the United States and, according to The New York Times, is "widely regarded as the dean of American Jewish organizations".

Besides working in favor of civil liberties for Jews, the organization has a history of fighting against 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 African-American Civil Rights Movement.

About

AJC is an international advocacy organization whose key areas of focus is to promote religious and civil rights for Jews internationally.

The organization has 22 regional offices in the United States, 9 overseas offices, and 32 international partnerships with Jewish communal institutions around the world.

AJC's programs and departments include the Africa Institute, the Asia Pacific Institute, the Belfer Center for American Pluralism, the Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights, Contemporary Jewish Life, Government and International Affairs, the Harriet and Robert Heilbrunn Institute for International Interreligious Affairs, Interreligious and Intergroup Relations, the Dorothy and Julius Koppelman Institute for American Jewish-Israeli Relations, the Latino and Latin American Institute, Project Interchange, the Lawrence and Lee Ramer institute for German-Jewish Relations, Russian Affairs, Thanks to Scandinavia, and the Transatlantic Institute.

American Jews

American Jews, also known as Jewish Americans, are American citizens who are Jews, either by religion, ancestry, or both. The Jewish community in the United States is composed predominantly of Ashkenazi Jews and their U.S.-born descendants, making up about 90% of the American Jewish population. Minority Jewish ethnic divisions are also represented, including Sephardic Jews, Mizrahi Jews, and a smaller percentage of converts to Judaism. The American Jewish community manifests a wide range of Jewish cultural traditions, as well as encompassing the full spectrum of Jewish religious observance.

Depending on religious definitions and varying population data, the United States is home to the largest or second largest (after Israel) Jewish community in the world. In 2012, the American Jewish population was estimated at between 5.5 and 8 million, depending on the definition of the term. This constitutes between 1.7% to 2.6% of the total U.S. population.

History