Let Us Prove Strong: The American Jewish Committee, 1945–2006 (review)

Let Us Prove Strong was commissioned by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) to mark its centennial. Founded in 1906 in response to a series of pogroms and riots in Russia, the AJC soon became the voice of the American Jewish establishment on public issues and an important defender of the rights of Jews. It is certainly the world's foremost secular Jewish organization. Three and a half decades have elapsed since the publication of the last major history of the AJC, Naomi W. Cohen's Not Free to Desist: The American Jewish Committee, 1906-1966 (1972), and now Let Us Prove Strong has brought its story up to the present. The AJC made a wise choice in selecting Marianne Sanua, an historian at Florida Atlantic University, to undertake the project. She has produced a deeply-researched, smoothly written, and engrossing volume.

The first third of Let Us Prove Strong covers events previously discussed by Cohen and can be skimmed. Sanua's discussion of the last four decades is another matter. Here she skillfully recounts how the AJC responded to the many challenges faced by Jews both here and abroad. These responses included forging strong ties with Roman Catholic and Protestant leaders, launching its National Project on Ethnic America, and expressing its views on a myriad of matters, including race relations, the Vietnam War, religious pluralism, feminism, aid to parochial schools, Soviet Jewry, the energy crisis, and intermarriage. "Virtually everything that happened in the American Jewish world," Sanua concludes, "engaged the AJC in one form or another" (xiii). The AJC also fostered scholarship on matters of Jewish concern. It continued to publish the invaluable American Jewish Year Book, established the magazine Present Tense and helped fund the magazine CommonQuest, and underwrote dozens of studies on the American Jewish poor, black-Jewish relations, Jewish demography, and other topics. The AJC, Sanua notes, was "the leading "think-tank" of American Jews" (xiii).

The AJC was also a microcosm of American Jewry. This was illustrated in many ways. As the children and grandchildren of East European immigrants ascended the social and economic ladder, they assumed positions of power in the organization which had previously been an exclusive preserve of members of "Our Crowd." And as the membership of the AJC changed, so did its professional staff, even to the point of including Orthodox Jews. In 1979 the AJC's kitchen in its New York headquarters became kosher. Prior to World War II, many American Jews had been skeptical toward Zionism, and the AJC shared in this skepticism. By the 1960s, however, the defense of Israel was American Jewry's most important priority, and by then the AJC had become a strong supporter of the Jewish state. This support, however, was not unqualified. As was true of other American Jews, many of the AJC's lay and professional leaders were less than enthusiastic regarding Israel's post-1967 settlement policies. With the decline of domestic antisemitism after 1945, the AJC changed the focus of its work from a narrow defense of Jewish rights and interests to a broader involvement in intergroup relations and the protection of the rights of all Americans, particularly Blacks. And with Jews entering the American mainstream en masse after World War II, the AJC became less concerned with domestic antisemitism and more concerned with the state of Jewish identity and continuity.

As might be expected from an official history, Let Us Prove Strong views the history of the AJC from the perspective of its Manhattan headquarters and has a celebratory flavor. Its title is taken from I Chronicles 19:13: "Be of good courage, and let us prove strong for our people." There is good reason for this optimism. During the past century the AJC grew from an organization with sixty-five members to one with one-hundred-and-seventy-five thousand members, thirty-three chapters in the United States, and...