As congregations sympathetic to Wine's approach formed in other cities through the later 1960s, he helped organize the Society for Humanistic Judaism in 1969 to serve as a national umbrella body linking them, coordinating publications, holiday resources, and a biennial assembly for what remained, and remains, a small and specifically North American movement. Wine later established the International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism as a seminary to train and ordain rabbis and other leaders formally in Humanistic Judaism's own philosophy rather than importing them from theistic movements; Tamara Kolton, ordained in 1999, became the Institute's first rabbi trained specifically for the humanistic movement, and the Institute has since ordained further rabbis of both genders.
The movement holds no central theology beyond its rejection of supernaturalism, leaving individual communities and members considerable latitude, but it is united by its insistence that Jewish identity is a matter of culture, history, and ethical commitment rather than doctrine, and its congregations mark Shabbat, the major festivals, and lifecycle events such as bar and bat mitzvah with ceremonies drawn from Jewish tradition but reframed in humanistic terms. The Society for Humanistic Judaism, headquartered in the Detroit area, reports a movement of roughly 40,000 people across North America and affiliated communities abroad, a modest but internationally organized presence within contemporary Judaism's wider denominational landscape.