The Association for Jewish Studies (“Association,” “AJS,” “we,” “us,” and “our”) respects individual privacy and values the confidence of our members, program participants, conference attendees, and our community. This Privacy Policy sets out the privacy principles that we follow with respect to the collection, use, and disclosure of information that you may provide through the Association’s website, www.associationforjewishstudies.org (our “website”), as well as through other channels, such as our community platform MyAJS, and at our events you may attend.
Please read this entire Privacy Policy before using Association’s website or submitting information to the Association through the website, the community platform, or other submission channels.
If you have any questions regarding our Privacy Policy and our practices regarding information you provide to us. Please contact:
Association for Jewish Studies
1441 Broadway 3rd Floor
Suite 3025
New York, NY 10018
Email: ajs@associationforjewishstudies.org
The AJS’s mission is to advance research and teaching in Jewish Studies at colleges, universities, and other institutions of higher learning, and to foster greater understanding of Jewish Studies scholarship among the wider public. As such, any information we collect serves to further our mission, including, but not limited to, the following:
• Provide relevant information to our potential members, active members, constituents, and the public
• Respond to inquiries relating to the Association
• Promote Association events, programs, and activities
• Perform our contractual obligations with members in good standing, registered attendees at our events, and subscribers of our publications and other products/services.
• Administer and manage our programs
You can access some areas of the website without submitting any information to us. However, if you wish to access additional content available on this website or participate in some of the Association’s activities, we may ask that you provide us personally identifiable information/personal data for the following purposes:
A. join the Association as a member or renew membership
B. register for an Association event
C. subscribe to the Association’s newsletter/publications
D. create a website account
E. donate to the Association
F. contact the Association
G. submit articles to the Association’s publications, AJS Review and AJS Perspectives
You will be entering into a contract with us by participating in any of the foregoing activities, and it will be necessary for the Association to collect your personal data in order to perform the Association’s contractual obligation to you.
Personal Data That You Voluntarily Provide to Us. The Association only collects personal data you voluntarily submit to the Association. The types of personal data we collect vary based on the programs, services, and products you opt to engage in, but generally include your name, business affiliation and contact information, telephone number, email address, and postal address.
Additionally, when you create a profile via MyAJS, we will collect the information that you elect to upload to your profile. You should carefully consider whether you wish to submit personal data and tailor any content you submit appropriately.
The Association maintains a data storage, retention, and disposal policy that governs the retention period of Association records. It is the Association’s general policy to keep your personal data for a period of seven years following your last active membership with us or your last business transaction with the Association. Notwithstanding the foregoing, the Association may keep your personal data for a longer period as required by law or as needed in legal proceedings or to fulfill the Association’s legitimate interest. The Association’s selected third party vendors may also have different data retention periods subject to their respective privacy policies, which are listed on the addendum section of this Privacy Policy.
Automatically Collected Data. When you visit the website, Google Analytics and Bloomerang (the Association's donor system vendor) collect IP address information and certain other information automatically that may not identify you personally:
• Type of browser and operating system used to access our website
• Date and time you access our website
• The pages on our website that you access
• Referring websites
• Frequency of visits
We use the foregoing information in the form of summary statistics to help us make our website more useful to our visitors, such as assessing what information is of most and least interest.
You can prevent Google Analytics and Bloomerang from recognizing you on return visits by disabling cookies on your browser.
You may opt out of Google Analytics entirely by using the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on.
Additionally, for some emails that we send to our members through our listservs and electronic newsletters, the Association may track whether a recipient subsequently clicks through to links provided in the message and collect specific information such as: email address of a user, the date and time of the user’s "click," a message number, name of the list from which the message was sent, tracking URL, and destination page.
“Cookies” are files that contain information created by a web server that can be stored on a user’s hard disk for future use. You can choose to accept or decline cookies. Most web browsers automatically accept cookies, but you can usually modify your browser setting to decline cookies if you prefer. However, if you decline the attachment of any cookie, you may not have access to the full benefits of the website.
We will use the information you provide to us in order to carry out the Association’s mission, purpose, and relevant programs and activities, to fulfill our contractual obligations, and for internal use such as performing marketing studies, research projects, and program development in support of the Association’s mission.
We do not share, sell, or rent information to any third party processors for their promotional use or for marketing purposes except in the following circumstances:
• Association Agents/Selected Vendors: your personal information may be used within the Association or by a company acting as an agent of the Association for operational support purposes, including but not limited to event registration, content management and analysis, system maintenance, email distribution, printing, and mailing. Our selected third party vendors and their respective privacy policies are listed on the addendum section of this Privacy Policy.
• Conference Proposal Submission System Data: All program submission and review data (abstracts, proposals, names, email addresses, and institutional affiliation, along with optional identity data such as current professional role and gender identity)
are stored online with All Academic in a secure abstract management system. None of this information will ever be shared with any other organization. Accepted abstracts, sessions and abstract titles, presenter names and titles, and presenter affiliations
at the annual meeting are published online, on the conference mobile app, and in print format as part of the conference program.
• Association membership list: The Association contracts with a third party marketing vendor, Negev Direct Marketing, which makes the Association’s membership mailing list available to organizations whose products and services may be of interest to our members. Association members may opt-out of being included on the foregoing membership list by contacting the AJS at ajs@associationforjewishstudies.org.
• Association Webinar Attendee list/contact info: The Association contracts with a third party webinar vendor, Zoom, to deliver educational programs for members and participants.
• Application for the Association’s scholarship/award program: The AJS uses Interfolio to collect information for its grant and award programs. This info is stored electronically in their system. If disbursements are made for programs, supporting documentation may be printed out and used as backup as part of our check processing system.
• Submission to the Association’s journal publications as follows:
AJS Review:
Starting January 1, 2019, the AJS Review accepts submissions through ScholarOne, an online peer review system, administered by University of Pennsylvania Press. ScholarOne is a product of Clarivate Analytics. The website asks submitting authors for:
1. Name
2. Email address
3. Mailing address
4. Institutional affiliation
AJS Perspectives:
Editors collect:
1. Name
2. Institutional affiliation (if applicable)
3. Email address
4. Informal demographic information about current professional role, geographic location, and other factors to reach out a diverse array of potential contributors.
Data is stored in Google Workspace.
When you terminate your membership or cancel website account access, the Association may continue to share information about you according to our legal and regulatory requirements.
Notwithstanding the foregoing, the Association may disclose your personal information as required by law or as needed in legal proceedings when the Association believes in good faith that disclosure is necessary to protect our rights, protect your safety or the safety of others, investigate fraud, or respond to a government request.
In addition, in the event of a merger, acquisition, or any form of sale or transfer of some or all of our assets to a third party, we may also disclose your personal information to the third parties concerned or their professional advisors. In the event of such a transaction, the personal information held by the Association will be among the assets subject to the transaction.
The Association does not disclose credit card information provided by its members and customers. AJS uses PayPal Pro as its secure payment processor for credit card transactions and refunds made via the Association’s website, and the organization itself retains no records of credit card numbers. Credit card data on hard-copy membership forms, donation forms, or any other document is entered into our CRM processing system, YourMembership, and processed, and hard copies are then immediately destroyed.
The AJS uses Bloomerang as its fundraising platform, which utilizes Stripe as its payment processor. Bloomerang stores credit card numbers for the purpose of recurring payments, but AJS staff are unable to see any credit card data in the Bloomerang system.
You can withdraw consent or opt-out of receiving our communications at any time by following the unsubscribe instructions included in each communication, or by contacting us at ajs@associationforjewishstudies.org.
You may access, correct, or delete your personal information by logging in to your MyAJS account and utilize the setting function or by contacting us at ajs@associationforjewishstudies.org. In addition, you may request a copy of the information the Association holds about you so you can correct or amend information that may be inaccurate or incomplete by contacting us at ajs@associationforjewishstudies.org. We may ask you to provide sufficient evidence of your identity for your own protection so we can ensure that information is being released to the correct person. We will respond to your request to access your information within 30 days.
In some cases, our business requirements and legal obligations may prevent us from being able to delete your information. If we are unable to delete your information, we will let you know if we are unable to do so and why.
The website has security measures in place to protect the loss, misuse, and alteration of the information under the Association’s control. When you enter sensitive information (such as a credit card number) as part of the purchase process, we encrypt the transmission of that information using secure socket layer technology (SSL).
When you submit information to the Association through our website, you should be aware that your information is transmitted across the Internet and that no method of transmission over the Internet is 100% secure. Although we take reasonable security measures to protect your information when we receive it, you also need to ensure you take appropriate steps to protect your information.
Our principal place of business is in the United States. If you are visiting the website from outside the United States, your information will be transferred to, stored, and processed in the United States where the Association is based. In addition, information that the Association collects may be stored and processed in and transferred between any of the countries in which the Association operates to enable the use of the information in accordance with this Privacy Policy. You agree to such cross-border transfers of personal information.
The AJS websites use third-party widgets such as YouTube. These widgets may set cookies. You can prevent these services from recognizing you by disabling cookies on your browser. These services operate independently of the AJS and have their own privacy policies (see addenda).
The AJS currently uses MailChimp as its email marketing provider. Member emails are stored on MailChimp's server and drawn from our YourMembership and Bloomerang databases. For more information on how MailChimp uses and stores data, please see here: here.
The Association will occasionally update this Privacy Policy. Any changes to our Privacy Policy will be posted here so that users will know what information we gather, how we might use that information, and whether we will disclose it to anyone. We encourage you to periodically review this page for the latest information on our privacy practices and this Privacy Policy.
Effective Date: February 2019
CommunityBrands/YourMembership
