The Center for Education Advocacy at American Jewish Committee (AJC) sets the standard for responsible advocacy, thoughtful pedagogy, and intellectual integrity, fostering inclusive educational communities that refuse to normalize antisemitism in any form—one institution, educator, parent, and student at a time.
The Academic Affairs department within AJC’s Center for Education Advocacy (CEA) includes content experts and experienced educators who are available to provide strategic guidance to university leaders and their teams on confronting and countering campus antisemitism. We also offer educational programming to address the specific needs of campus communities.
OUR APPROACH
Since 1906, AJC has been a trusted voice representing the Jewish community, building relationships across sectors, with diplomats, policy makers, and interfaith leaders. Our campus team prides itself on translating AJC’s longstanding commitment to diplomacy, civil dialogue, and partnership-based solution-seeking to our work in higher education. We work with administrators at all levels as well as faculty, staff, and students to build campuses that are set up for success to counter antisemitism in all its forms. AJC shares universities’ deep commitment to working within the frameworks that make research and teaching excellence possible, and higher education’s sustained commitment to robust pluralism as a keystone of our democracy, which allows all groups, including the Jewish community, to thrive.
STRATEGIC GUIDANCE
Higher educational institutions have a uniquely important role to play in countering antisemitism and the pathways through which it spreads. We are happy to discuss specific, effective strategies to improve your campus atmosphere, including challenges that involve governance
structure, curriculum, and policy. Our strategic action plans include short, medium, and long-term recommendations for confronting campus antisemitism:
We offer expert-led and data-driven briefings, educational presentations, and workshops for senior leadership teams, administrators, faculty, staff, and students on the following topics:
Jewish history, identities, and cultures
Jews, race, and making sense of Jewish difference
Israel, Zionism, and modern Jewish identity
Understanding historical and modern manifestations of antisemitism
Building campus communities that are inclusive of Jewish students and resilient against hate
ACADEMIC AFFAIRS’ PROFESSIONAL TEAM
AJC’s strategic engagement with university administrators and faculty is led by Director of Academic Affairs, Sara Coodin, Ph.D. who was an Associate Professor of Classics and Letters at the University of Oklahoma before joining AJC. Dr. Coodin has published on premodern ideas about Jews and race and their impact on modern-day forms of antisemitism. She oversees Academic Affairs’ strategic vision for addressing campus antisemitism.
Daniel Rosenthal, Ph.D. is AJC’s Assistant Director of Academic Affairs. Dr. Rosenthal is a scholar of modern European Jewish history with over a decade’s worth of teaching experience and expertise on staging effective classroom conversations about Israel, Zionism, and Jewish history. His published work has focused on the construction of modern Jewish selfhood and the intersection between secular and Jewish religious law in Eastern Europe.
AJC’s Center for Education Advocacy is led by Laura Shaw Frank, Ph.D. a modern Jewish history scholar with over 20 years of teaching, curricular, and education administration experience, including 17 years in the classroom.
Please contact us at academic@ajc.org for more information or to discuss how we can help.
To learn more about AJC’s Center for Education Advocacy, visit: AJC.org/CEA
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