The New York Kehillah (from the Hebrew word for community) was set up in 1908 as a single governing body for New York City's Jewish community. What sparked it was a claim by New York City Police Commissioner Theodore Bingham, who wrote in the North American Review that foreign-born Jews were about half of the city's criminals. The Jewish community held a mass protest at Carnegie Hall, and that meeting led to the Kehillah, led by Rabbi Judah Magnes. The Kehillah set up committees for education, industry, philanthropy, public morals, and social welfare.
Ford's seventh chapter leaned hard on the Kehillah as proof of Jewish organizing power. He said the Kehillah was, in effect, a second city government for New York's Jews — one that set policy, settled disputes, lobbied city and state officials, and ran its own investigative arm (the Bureau of Social Morals, led by Abraham Schoenfeld, which looked into Jewish involvement in gambling, prostitution, and organized crime). Ford argued that this parallel government showed the Jewish community acting as a united political body with its own interests, its own leaders, and its own enforcement — separate from, and often at odds with, America's democratic institutions.
The American Jewish Committee was founded in 1906 by a group of leading American Jews after the Kishinev pogrom of 1903 and the anti-Jewish violence in Russia that followed. Its founders and early leaders included Jacob Schiff — the senior partner of Kuhn, Loeb & Company and maybe the most powerful private banker in the United States at the time; Louis Marshall — a well-known 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 aims — to protect the civil and religious rights of Jews, to win equal economic opportunity for Jews, and to ease the effects of persecution — and then set those aims against what he said the AJC actually did. Ford argued the AJC worked as a lobbying group. It used its large resources, and the personal pull of men like Schiff, Marshall, and Otto Kahn (another Kuhn Loeb partner), to steer American foreign policy toward Jewish interests. Ford cited the AJC's successful push to end the 1832 Treaty of Commerce with Russia in 1911, on the grounds that Russia discriminated against American Jews holding passports — an example, he said, of a Jewish group changing U.S. policy toward a major power in the Jewish interest.
Ford also pointed to Benjamin Schlesinger, a Jewish labor leader, who organized Jewish garment workers while keeping what Ford called a parallel loyalty to Jewish communal interests. Ford's bigger point was that the men who led the AJC — Schiff, Marshall, Kahn — sat at the top of American finance and civic life and, at the same time, led Jewish communal groups with Jewish agendas. Ford argued this double role gave a small group of men huge leverage: they could aim both their mainstream American influence and their Jewish communal organizing at the same goals.