The New York Kehillah (from the Hebrew word for community) was established in 1908 as a unified governing body for the Jewish community of New York City. Its founding was precipitated by a statement by New York City Police Commissioner Theodore Bingham, who had written in the North American Review that foreign-born Jews constituted approximately half of the criminal element in New York City. The Jewish community organized a mass protest at Carnegie Hall, and out of that gathering came the founding of the Kehillah under the leadership of Rabbi Judah Magnes. The Kehillah created committees covering education, industry, philanthropy, public morals, and social welfare.
Ford's seventh chapter focused heavily on the Kehillah as evidence of Jewish organizational capacity. Ford noted that the Kehillah was, in effect, a parallel municipal government for the Jewish population of New York — one that set policies, resolved disputes, lobbied city and state officials, and maintained its own investigative arm (the Bureau of Social Morals, led by Abraham Schoenfeld, which investigated Jewish involvement in gambling, prostitution, and organized crime). Ford argued that the existence of this parallel government demonstrated that the Jewish community operated as a coherent political entity with its own interests, its own leadership structure, and its own enforcement mechanisms — quite apart from and often in tension with the formally democratic institutions of the American state.
The American Jewish Committee was founded in 1906 by a group of prominent American Jewish leaders in response to the Kishinev pogrom of 1903 and subsequent anti-Jewish violence in Russia. Its founding members and early leadership included Jacob Schiff — the senior partner of Kuhn, Loeb & Company and at the time possibly the most powerful private banker in the United States; Louis Marshall — a prominent New York attorney who would lead the AJC for 22 years; Oscar Straus — a former U.S. minister to Turkey and later the first Jewish cabinet secretary (Commerce and Labor under Theodore Roosevelt); Cyrus Sulzberger; and Mayer Sulzberger (no relation to the newspaper family but a prominent Philadelphia judge).
Ford described the AJC's stated purposes — to prevent the infringement of civil and religious rights of Jews, to secure for Jews equality of economic opportunity, and to alleviate the consequences of persecution — and then contrasted these stated purposes with what Ford characterized as the AJC's actual operations. Ford argued that the AJC functioned as a lobbying organization that applied its very considerable resources — and the personal influence of men like Schiff, Marshall, and Otto Kahn (another Kuhn Loeb partner) — to American foreign policy in ways that served specifically Jewish interests. Ford cited the AJC's successful lobbying for the abrogation of the 1832 Treaty of Commerce with Russia in 1911, on the grounds that Russia discriminated against American Jews holding passports — an example of a Jewish organization altering U.S. foreign policy toward a major power in the Jewish interest.
Ford also cited the role of Benjamin Schlesinger, a Jewish labor leader, in organizing Jewish garment workers while maintaining what Ford characterized as parallel loyalty to specifically Jewish communal interests. Ford's broader point was that the men who led the AJC — Schiff, Marshall, Kahn — simultaneously held positions at the apex of American finance and civic life and positions as leaders of specifically Jewish communal organizations with specifically Jewish agendas. Ford argued that this dual position gave a small group of men extraordinary leverage: they could apply both their mainstream American influence and their specifically Jewish communal organization toward the same objectives.