American Jewish Congress

But when I say an African organization, you don't see any black people in B'nai B'rith.

You don't see any black people in the American Jewish Congress.

What are you seeing? Because those are Jewish or really they're European organizations of where those people who call themselves Jews come from.

They have a social theory.

The story soon leaked to the media, and stories started to run about a doctrinaire war criminal Nazi being granted asylum in the United States.

Rabbi Stephen Wise from the American Jewish Congress started a campaign to get the Axters removed, saying, quote, "These scientists and their families are supposed to have been screened.

The Axters prove that this screening is a farce, and the War Department screeners are entirely incapable of performing this task." Which, on the one hand, it's good to see, like, resistance to this.

On the other hand, he is giving them way too much benefit of the doubt.

That's right.

In fact, she and I discussed it, uh, when she was working for the American Jewish Congress, and I was also.

And I remember we had a conversation about Roe versus Wade.

It wasn't called Roe versus Wade at the time, but the right of abortion, and she was, although she had helped get it before the courts, she was quite skeptical about whether the Court had gone too far.

This happened as late as 1967.

Our ancestors, led by the major Jewish communal organizations, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, they created a grand coalition that was determined to make the promise of religious equality real.

Alongside secular Americans and Jehovah's Witnesses, Seventh Day Adventists and Unitarians, Baptists, other Protestant groups, they won court cases in the 1940s, the 1950s, the 1960s that seemed to beat back once and for all the forces claiming that America was a Christian republic.

It seemed like our country would finally, as Jefferson and Washington and Madison so desired, keep religion and state far from one another.