Tonight President Bush is scheduled to deliver a major policy address at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. He will be speaking before more than 2,000 American Jewish Committee delegates and others gathered in celebration of the Committee’s 100th anniversary.x

“Very few organizations are able to celebrate 100 years,” the Committee’s director of communications, Kenneth Bandler, told The New York Sun. “The American Jewish Committee was founded by a small group of immigrants with Jewish roots. They had a vision of an organization that would help change the world not just for Jews but for all groups” and would support societies based on democratic values.

This event, part of a week of activities, will mark the second time Mr. Bush has spoken before the organization; the first was in 2001. Other dignitaries in Washington planning to celebrate the centennial include the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, and the Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who is forming a coalition government in Israel, will not be attending. On May 24, Mayor Giuliani is scheduled to speak at a dinner in New York City celebrating the Committee’s centennial.

“The Committee, which is thought of historically as a defense organization, is most notable for all its work having a solid intellectual basis,” the editor in chief of the New Republic, Martin Peretz, told the Sun. He said this was in evidence at “this very learned conference.”

Entitled “At a Century’s End, At a Century’s Beginning: The Prospect for Judaism and the Jews,” the centennial symposium so far has featured the novelist and critic Cynthia Ozick; Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz; the literary editor of the New Republic, Leon Wieseltier; Michael Walzer, of the Institute for Advanced Study, and the Israeli novelist A.B.Yehoshua.

The parley opened Monday evening with a panel on “What Will Become of the Jewish People?” at which Mr. Yehoshua argued that Jewry in the Diaspora couldn’t sustain its peoplehood.

At a panel on Tuesday on old and new models of the Jewish community, Mr. Walzer spoke about the politics of Jewish communal life in the Diaspora. He posed two questions: Who rules, and what holds them together?

The president of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Rabbi David Ellenson, participated in a panel on the forms of Jewish spirituality. He said what was significant about the discussion was how aware everyone is of how much the American Jewish community has changed during the last 100 years.When the American Jewish Committee was formed, he told the Sun, it addressed what was largely an immigrant Jewish community.

“Now we are a community that is fourth, fifth, sixth generation . …Judaism is no longer for many American Jews what one might label a habit of the heart,” he said. “Jews go about creating their Jewish identity and meaning very much from an individual perspective, [which] means that the community has to respond in creative ways to provide a sense of religious meaning for individuals.”

The panelists agreed on the importance of Jewish education and Jewish texts. Rabbi Ellenson said many American Jews are highly educated, and though many participate in the Jewish community with great zeal, Jewish identity is dissolving for others. So the task is to speak to the core, which has never been healthier, and reach out to the periphery.

For the American Jewish Committee, the shrinking number of Jews has very serious implications. “I do think the AJC is reaching out to people on the periphery,” Rabbi Ellenson said, “and is concerned about the size [of the Jewish community] because it understands quite well that the political significance of the community is dependent on the numbers of Jews.”

A familiar Jewish pastime was discussed at a panel discussion on Tuesday called “What Should We Worry About Next?” The novelist Jonathan Rosen said: “Everyone is worried, but in his own way. And the worrying seemed divided between the worry that we would worry too much or that we would worry too little.”

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Scholarly luminaries will gather this weekend as the New-York Historical Society hosts its first Chairman’s Council Weekend with History, an event for donors to the NYHS. Henry Louis Gates Jr., Simon Schama, Ric Burns, Sean Wilentz, Eric Foner, Andrew Delbanco, and others will speak at sessions with such titles as “Breakfast with Historians” and “What Would the Founders Do?”

One historian apparently not participating is a professor at CUNY Graduate Center, David Nasaw. Mr. Nasaw was to appear on a panel about the press’s struggle with objectivity, from colonial times to the present. A spokeswoman for the Society, Laura Washington, confirmed that the panel has been canceled.

It appears that Mr. Nasaw was upset that the first New-York Historical Society American History Book Prize will be awarded to Doris Kearns Goodwin. Ms. Washington, who had not spoken with Mr. Nasaw about the reason he declined to participate, said the prize is for Ms. Goodwin’s current book, “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.” The president of the New-York Historical Society, Louise Mirrer, and Mr. Nasaw could not be reached for comment before deadline.

But in the past Mr. Nasaw had criticized Ms. Goodwin in the press regarding her book “The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys” after news broke, over four years ago, that she had paraphrased quotes from other books. She explained she had not been able to tell her work from others’ in reading over her many notes, a problem compounded by work from research assistants.

The new award reflects the fact that Ms. Goodwin is widely admired – for some, now more than ever – for her ability to illuminate current events through the prism of serious historical scholarship. Richard Brilliant, who is guest curating a show at the Society involving family portraits, said he has enjoyed reading “Team of Rivals.”

Though Mr. Nasaw’s panel has been canceled, there are several other stellar events that await attendees. Participating will be Mr. Foner, who used the NYHS in writing his Columbia doctoral dissertation, which was later published by Oxford University Press.

“The New-York Historical Society is the major center for those who want to study and encounter New York history,” Mr. Foner said. More than 40,000 students visit the Society each year to see collections that span from the earliest setters to relics from the terrorist attacks of September 11.

“For anybody who writes about the history of New York City,” said the Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz, “The New-York Historical Society is general headquarters.” He added, “I basically lived there between 1976-78” while researching his book “Chants Democratic.” Mr. Wilentz, who was nominated for a Grammy award for writing the album notes to a Bob Dylan concert, is currently at work on a history of America from 1975 to the present.

On Friday he will speak about the Constitution and the first inauguration. One aspect he will discuss is how fragile the Republic was at its founding.

A professor of history at UCLA, Joyce Appleby, wrote in an email, “I used the NYHS’s collection of newspapers and private papers when I was doing research for my’Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s.’ She praised the recent exhibits of photography of 9/11 and slavery in New York City. “The presence of such a great historical society library in a building ideal for mounting fine exhibits greatly enhances the cultural richness of New York City.” She will be participating in a panel where members of the audience will ask what the founding fathers would have done in connection to contemporary events. “We can only hazard guesses in our answers, but it should be fun,” she said.

A professor of history at MIT, Pauline Maier, noted that she had used the papers of John Lamb and Alexander Mc-Dougall at the NYHS for her dissertation, published in 1972 by Knopf as “From Resistance to Revolution.” She added, “I returned for another look at those papers for the chapter on Isaac Sears, a New York revolutionary, in ‘The Old Revolutionaries.'”

A professor of history at the University of Houston, Steven Mintz, wrote in an email, “Apart from its extraordinary archival collection of letters, diaries, personal papers, and other written and printed documents, my teaching has benefited enormously from the New-York Historical Society’s remarkable collection of art works and historical images.” He added, “The Henry Luce III Center for the Study of American Culture is an incredible fount of visual resources, which was indispensable in writing my history of American childhood, ‘Huck’s Raft.’ It has also been invaluable in teaching the history of children and families and of private life. Here one can literally see the transformation of the Puritan notion of the child as sinful and animalistic to the Victorian images of the angelic cherub or street urchin and the early twentieth century image of the scamp.”

He praised the NYHS: “As the ‘Slavery in New York’ exhibition made clear, the New-York Historical Society is much more than an archive of historical documents or a ‘local’ history society. It speaks to a national audience.It has the ability to place a historical topic on the national agenda and to attract attention nationwide.”

Describing the panel he will be on – “What Would the Founders Do?” – Mr. Mintz noted panelists “will examine the extent to which the founding generation still speaks to the issues of our time, such as whether the United States should try to export democracy and human rights abroad, what role government should play in enforcing morality, and how the United States should best address its ongoing racial problems.”