Richard Foltin
AJC Profile

Richard T. Foltin is legislative director and counsel in AJC's Office of Government and International Affairs in Washington, D.C. He is responsible for the development, promotion and execution of AJC's legislative agenda, which includes church-state, civil rights, immigration, social policy, hate crimes and terrorism, and foreign affairs issues. Before moving to Washington, Foltin served in AJC's New York headquarters as director of governmental affairs and house counsel. Prior to that, he was an associate with the litigation department of a major New York law firm. Among other accomplishments, Foltin has worked to promote passage of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1991, the Religious Violence Act, the Hate Crime Statistics Act, and the International Religious Freedom Act. He has testified before congressional committees and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights regarding religious liberty, immigration and hate-crimes. Most recently he testified before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce about religious discrimination in government-funded programs.

Foltin serves as a member of the National Immigration Forum's board of directors; co-chairs a coalition to promote passage of the Workplace Religious Freedom Act; serves as co-chair of the First Amendment Rights Committee of the ABA Section on Individual Rights and Responsibilities; and is a member of the National Council of Churches' Committee on Religious Liberty. In 1999, he was named a Wasserstein Public Interest Fellow at Harvard Law School. In 2000 and 2003, Foltin served as a faculty member for a course on "Religious Traditions and the Courts," offered as part of a continuing professional education program for Florida judges. From 2001-2003, Foltin served as a member of two successive working groups on human needs and faith-based and community responses organized by Search for Common Ground, an initiative convened by Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) and chaired by former Senator Harris Wofford (D-Pa.)

Foltin writes on current issues for AJC members and the general public, and speaks on these issues in the media and at conferences and workshops. In March 2004, he was a featured presenter at the First International Conference of the Gonzaga University Institute for Action Against Hate, held in Spokane, Washington. In October 2004, he is scheduled to be a keynote speaker at a Boston-area interfaith symposium on the USA-PATRIOT Act. He has published articles in various periodicals, including Human Rights, Reform Judaism, Liberty, the Christian Legal Society's Quarterly, Sh'ma, the Journal of Intergroup Relations, the Civil Rights Journal, The Responsive Community and the Anglo-Jewish press, and writes the annual report on domestic affairs for the American Jewish Year Book. Foltin's chapter on religious discrimination in the workplace appeared in The Test of Our Progress: The Clinton Record on Civil Rights, a report issued in March 1999 by the Citizens' Commission on Civil Rights. He edited Religious Liberty in the 1990s: The Religion Clauses Under the Rehnquist Court, published by AJC in 1994.

A native of New York City and a child of Holocaust survivors, Foltin received his bachelor's degree, magna cum laude, in political science from New York University, where he was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. He received his J.D. cum laude from Harvard Law School. In the 1980s, Foltin attended the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for a year in order to study Jewish philosophy and history, during which period he also took classes in Talmud and Jewish thought at a Jerusalem yeshiva.

He lives in Montgomery County, Maryland, with his wife and two children, and serves on the board of directors of a local synagogue.