New York – Floyd Abrams, Senior Counsel in Cahill Gordon & Reindel LLP’s, has been chosen as the 2018 recipient of the JCPA Albert D. Chernin Award. The 2018 Award will be presented at the JCPA Annual Conference, Sunday, April 22 – Tuesday, April 24, 2018 at the Sheraton Times Square Hotel in New York City.

The Chernin Award is named for the JCPA’s Executive Vice Chair Emeritus and given to Jewish leaders whose life work best exemplifies the social justice imperatives of Judaism, Jewish history, and the protection of the Bill of Rights. Past JCPA Albert D. Chernin Award recipients include Senator Ronald Wyden, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Rabbi David Saperstein, Professor Lawrence Tribe, and Alan Dershowitz.

Floyd Abrams is an adjunct professor at New York University Law School. He has written three books about the First Amendment of which the most recent is The Soul of the First Amendment (Yale U. Press (2017). For the past half century, Mr. Abrams has been counsel or co-counsel in numerous cases before the Supreme Court ranging from the Pentagon Papers Case, in which he represented the New York Times, to the Citizens United case in which he represented Senator Mitch McConnell. Mr. Abrams was described by Senator Patrick Moynihan as “the leading First Amendment lawyer of our age.”

The JCPA is comprised of 16 national and 126 local member agencies (JCRC’s) and serves as the organized Jewish community’s coordinating body in the public affairs arena. For over 70 years, JCPA has served as an effective vehicle to identify issues, formulate policy, develop strategies and programs, and has given expression to a strongly united Jewish communal voice.