Adam Garfinkle

“The main mass-membership advocacy organizations of American Jewry — B’nai B’rith and its Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the American Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee, the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds, the National Conference of Jewish Federations, and the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations (a kind of steering group for the major organizations), to mention only a few — are not religious organizations but ethnic ones. It is not necessary to have any Jewish religious affiliation to be a member in good standing in these organizations, and their leaderships are composed mainly of people who are not religious or Jewishly learned Jews.
We need not go into foundational texts and statements of purpose on the question of origins, for the answer is simple enough: organizations like B’nai B’rith and the American Jewish Committee were created to lobby for particular Jewish interests. … In time, these and most other Jewish organizations became explicitly or implicitly Zionist, and thereafter existed to one degree or another to support, first, a Jewish home in Palestine, and then, after 1948, the security and prosperity of the State of Israel. In other words, all these organizations have depended, and still depend, on the validity of their serving parochial Jewish ethnic interests that are simultaneously distinct from the broader American interest but not related directly to religion.”
― Adam Garfinkle, Jewcentricity: Why the Jews Are Praised, Blamed, and Used to Explain Just About Everything