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Commission initiated by the US delegation at the peace negotiations of Versailles in July 1919, which was established to investigate anti-Jewish violence in Poland. The commission was set up in response to reports of pogroms in Pińsk and Vilnius in April 1919. This delegation, consisting of more than twenty members who conducted their research in numerous places in Poland during a two-month period, became known under the name of its head, Henry Morgenthau Sr. (1856–1946). Morgenthau presented a comprehensive report in early October 1919.Immediately after the founding of the R…

Trial in Paris in October 1927 concerning the assassination of the former president of the Ukrainian People’s Republic Symon Petliura by the Jewish watchmaker Shalom Schwarzbard. While the defendant Schwarzbard confessed to having shot Petliura in May 1926, the jury deemed the act to have been justifiable revenge, as they were in silent agreement with Schwarzbard that the Ukrainian politician had been responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Jews. The attack led to an increase in polit…

Journal “devoted to contemporary and historical aspects of Jewish life” that was published in New York between 1939 and 1993 by the Conference on Jewish Relations (renamed Conference on Jewish Social Studies in 1955). From the beginning,  Jewish Social Studies maintained its scholarly focus on contemporary history. The journal and its institutional environment also played a significant role in the emerging field of Holocaust studies. Its figurehead and enduring influence was the historian Salo W. Baron (1895–1989), who acted as the e…

The American Jewish Committee (AJC), established in New York in 1906, was dedicated to the global protection of civil and religious rights of the Jews. Its founders’ priority was to develop strategies against the discrimination and persecution of Jews in Eastern Europe. Unlike the American Jewish Congress formed at the end of the First World War, which also represented national-cultural and Zionist aspirations, the leadership of the AJC maintained a strict focus on civil and constitutional rights during the years between the wars.1. Establishment and programFive years after i…

The American Jewish Congress met for the first time in December 1918 in Philadelphia, with the goal of sending an American-Jewish delegation to the Paris Peace Conference, in order to speak up for the civic and political status of Jews in continental Europe. A permanently established congress with the same name was constituted in Philadelphia in 1922. Whereas the American Jewish Committee (AJC) participated in the first congress, it took no part in the work of the permanent congress. From the 19…

A circular letter of American foreign minister John Hay of August 11, 1902, on the anti-Jewish legislation in Romania. The letter was addressed to the leading US diplomats in the capitals of the seven signatory powers of the Berlin Congress of 1878 – Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire. It contained instructions to remind the foreign ministers of these countries that the Berlin Treaty obligated Romania not to discriminate against Jews. …

The concept of minority rights, which emerged in the second half of the 19th century, is associated with the notion of securing a certain amount of autonomy for linguistic and cultural, ethnic, or national groups within larger polities in order to protect them from discrimination and being continually outvoted. In Jewish history this concern relates first and foremost to the Russian Empire and individual regions within the Habsburg Empire as well as to the new, reconstructed, or expande…