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Articles about Jews and numbers. Are we getting bigger or smaller? Which groups are growing and which are shrinking and why?

Keywords: Affiliation, identify, self-identify, practicing vs. non-practicing, generational, rise/fall,

Other keywords:  Pew report, demographers, longitudinal, intermarriage/intermarry, assimilate/assimilation

Optional keywords: "making meaning" / meaningful, religious, denomination, Chassidic, secular, liberal, orthodox, Conservative

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Articles about the psychological cost of NOT being part of an interconnected group.

Keywords: isolation, depression, mental health, loneliness, alienation.

Other keywords: aggression, anxiety, violence, crime, suicide, unhappiness, meaninglessness

Optional keywords: prison, teens/teenagers, Netflix/Video Games, increasing/decreasing, America vs...???

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Articles about what happens when "everything" is for sale and what can go wrong when "everyone" gets whatever they want, whenever they want.

Keywords: commodification, trafficking, industry, environmental, human rights, commercialization, dehumanizing,

Other keywords: sweat-shops,  environmental degradation, commercialism, spirituality/love/community for sale

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Articles about art / examples of art: about the human condition of extreme individualism

Keywords: isolation, loneliness, alienation, separation, the Urban landscape.

Other keywords: modern art, contemporary art, youth artists, 21st century art, dystopic art

Optional Keywords: Hopper / Munch, Pink Floyd's "The Wall," Sylvia Plath, meaninglessness

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Articles about the disappearance, growth, or value of groups/communities that try to maintain unique identities / ancient traditions in the modern world

Keywords: cultural diversity, subculture, diminishing numbers, indigenous, living traditions, dying languages, last of ___ speakers, extinct cultures, extinct languages, dying religions

Other keywords: tradition, chain of tradition, break in chain of tradition, disappearance of ancient knowledge

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Mental Health America (MHA) is committed to promoting mental health as a critical part of overall wellness. We advocate for prevention services for all, early identification and intervention for those at risk, integrated services, care and treatment for those who need them, and recovery as the goal.

We believe that gathering and providing up-to-date data and information about disparities faced by individuals with mental health problems is a tool for change.
FILL OUT THE FORM BELOW TO DOWNLOAD THE PRINTABLE VERSION OF THE REPORT.
2022Key Findings

In 2019, just prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, 19.86% of adults experienced a mental illness, equivalent to nearly 50 million Americans.

Suicidal ideation continues to increase among adults in the U.S. 4.58% of adults report having serious thoughts of suicide, an increase of 664,000 people from last year's dataset. The national rate of suicidal ideation among adults has increased every year since 2011-2012. This was a larger increase than seen in last year's report and is a concerning trend to see going into the COVID-19 pandemic.

A growing percentage of youth in the U.S. live with major depression. 15.08% of youth experienced a major depressive episode in the past year, a 1.24% increase from last year's dataset. In the bottom-ranked states, up to 19% of youth ages 12-17 experienced major depression.

Over 2.5 million youth in the U.S. have severe depression, and multiracial youth are at greatest risk. 10.6% of youth in the U.S. have severe major depression (depression that severely affects functioning). The rate of severe depression was highest among youth who identified as more than one race, at 14.5% (more than one in every seven multiracial youth).

Over half of adults with a mental illness do not receive treatment, totaling over 27 million adults in the U.S. who are going untreated. In Hawaii, the bottom-ranked state, 67% of adults with a mental illness did not receive treatment. Even in Vermont, the top-ranked state in the U.S., 43% of adults experiencing a mental illness were not receiving treatment.

The percentage of adults with a mental illness who report unmet need for treatment has increased every year since 2011. In 2019, 24.7% of adults with a mental illness report an unmet need for treatment.

Over 60% of youth with major depression do not receive any mental health treatment. Even in states with the greatest access, nearly one in three are going without treatment. In Texas, the bottom-ranked state for this indicator, nearly three-quarters of youth with depression did not receive mental health treatment.

Nationally, fewer than 1 in 3 youth with severe depression receive consistent mental health care. Even among youth with severe depression who receive some treatment, only 27% received consistent care. In Tennessee, the bottom-ranked state, that rate is as low as 12%. 65.6% of youth in Maine (ranked 1st) received consistent treatment, which is 16% higher than Vermont (49.7%) which is ranked 2nd.

Both adults and youth in the U.S. continue to lack adequate insurance coverage. 11.1% of Americans with a mental illness are uninsured. There was a 0.3% increase from last year's dataset, the second year in a row that this indicator increased since the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). 8.1% of children had private insurance that did not cover mental health services, totaling 950,000 youth.

Rates of substance use are increasing for youth and adults, even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. 7.74% of U.S. adults and 4.08% of youth had a substance use disorder in the past year. Substance use increased 0.07% for adults and 0.25% for youth over last year's report.

This year's report includes spotlights on two of MHA's policy priorities in 2021-2022 - the implementation of 988 as the national three-digit suicide prevention and mental health crisis hotline and increasing mental health education and supports in schools, particularly for BIPOC youth.

Suicidal Ideation and 988 Implementation: With the passage of the new 988 number for suicide prevention and mental health crises, there is an opportunity to create a continuum of crisis care with adequate funding that ensures mental health responses to mental health crises and prioritizes equity, particularly for BIPOC individuals. However, Of the 13 states (ranked 39-51) with the highest rates of suicidal ideation among adults, only four have successfully passed state legislation for 988 implementation: Utah, Oregon, Indiana, and Colorado. Of these, only one currently includes user fees.

Disparities in Mental Health Treatment for Youth of Color: White youth with depression were most likely to receive mental health treatment, and Asian youth were least likely to receive mental health care. Youth of color with depression, particularly Native American or American Indian, multiracial, and Black youth, were most likely to receive non-specialty mental health services in education settings. To create healthier communities, and to better serve students of color who may only receive mental health services in educational settings, schools need long-term financial support to build up sustained and sufficient school infrastructure.

Explore the web-based report using the links provided on the left or download the printable report.
The State of Mental Health in America
In the above links you will find a Collection of Data across all 50 states and the District of Columbia answering the following questions:

How many adults and youth have mental health issues?

How many adults and youth have substance use issues?

How many adults and youth have access to insurance?

How many adults and youth have access to adequate insurance?

How many adults and youth have access to mental health care?

Which states have higher barriers to accessing mental health care?

Our Goal:

To provide a snapshot of mental health status among youth and adults for policy and program planning, analysis, and evaluation;

To track changes in the prevalence of mental health issues and access to mental health care;

To understand how changes in national data reflect the impact of legislation and policies; and.

To increase dialogue and improve outcomes for individuals and families with mental health needs

Why Gather this Information?

Using national survey data allows us to measure a community's mental health needs, access to care, and outcomes regardless of the differences between the states and their varied mental health policies.

Rankings explore which states are more effective at addressing issues related to mental health and substance use.

Analysis may reveal similarities and differences among states in order to begin assessing how federal and state mental health policies result in more or less access to care.

This publication was made possible by the generous support of Alkermes, Otsuka America Pharmaceutical Companies, and Neurocrine Biosciences.

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Mental Health America (MHA) is committed to promoting mental health as a critical part of overall wellness. We advocate for prevention services for all, early identification and intervention for those at risk, integrated services, care and treatment for those who need them, and recovery as the goal.

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Everyone's at it right now-isolation, that is. These artworks, selected by the Elephant team, each delineate isolation in its many challenging, introspective and piquant states of mind.

As Corona chat replaces weather-based small talk, galleries (along with pretty much everything else) are closing and supermarket shelves are stripped bare, self-isolation has become familiar to us all. Isolation has presented a naturally rich subject for artists throughout history, and it is a theme that haunts everything from photography to paintings, graphic novels to sculptures, and much more. The word itself is multifarious: ranging from a calming sense of solitude or quiet moments of contemplation to its darker counterparts-depression, despair, loneliness and existential ennui.

The Elephant team has chosen a few iconic artworks across multiple disciplines that express isolation in bold, brutal, innovative or moving ways-from Emin's poignant messy bed, to Ren Hang's vibrant, red-hued backdrop with a lone face blowing bubbles, to Edward Hopper's ubiquitous depiction of a solo diner in Nighthawks. Maybe they'll inspire those with cabin fever, or at the very least, show those currently self-isolating that they're far from alone in their aloneness.

Photography: Ren Hang, Untitled

What could better capture self-isolation than losing yourself in a long hot bath? In this distinctive shot by Ren Hang, the murky water becomes a cocoon from the exterior world, emphasised in the Chinese artist's preferred colour palette of deep red, accompanied by black hair and bare skin. He made no secret of his struggles with depression and mental health, and took his own life in 2017 at the age of twenty-nine. Surrealism and sexuality come together in his photography, which captures an erotic freedom of the body that goes beyond gender. "I don't want others having the impression that Chinese people are robots with no cocks or pussies," he once declared.

Emin 's Bed has gone down in history as possibly the most tabloid-baiting piece in Turner Prize history, which does the brutally raw, emotive installation something of an injustice. The piece reeks of heartbreak-perhaps there's a faint glimmer of recognition in seeing despair as a catalyst for catatonic, bed-bound filth. The piece was apparently created when Emin spent four days in her bed, coating it in menstrual blood and the detritus of a break-up-used condoms, fag butts, empty vodka bottles... this is isolation summed up in a single domestic mess.

Sculpture: Alfredo Jaar, The Garden of Good and Evil

If any artist sums up isolation in its most horrific form, it is Alfredo Jaar, whose series of metal cells read as modernist sculptures, while also calling to mind the simple boxes that are used to contain and emotionally torture prisoners. Ten cells are currently situated throughout Yorkshire Sculpture Park, nestled in the trees and, in one case, half submerged in the lake. "You just get the most horrible, dreadful feeling of somebody being underwater in a cell," Clare Lilley, YSP's director, previously told Elephant magazine. The works reference US "black sites", which are secret detention facilities managed by the CIA around the world.

Graphic Novel: Daniel Clowes, Ghost World

Is there a time in your life that feels more isolating than your teenage years? It's all too easy for petty frustrations, bitter squabbles and a whole lot of heartache to run riot in classrooms full of hormonal adolescents, and no one has conveyed it with such bittersweet accuracy as Daniel Clowes in his now-iconic 1997 graphic novel Ghost World. Best friends Enid and Rebecca experience their lives as if they were outsiders looking in, consumed with an ironic detachment that situates them as loners on the outskirts of the throngs of life. Bored and with only each other for company, the minutiae of their day-to-day suburban lives take on the tone of a series of adventures, with every encounter observed in painful detail.

Painting: Edward Hopper, Nighthawks

Its incredibly rare for such a ubiquitous image to retain such potency, but no matter how many million times you've seen Hopper's Nighthawks, the palpable sadness of the lone figure in the foreground never seems to diminish. He sits opposite a beautiful couple, apparently having a lovely time, a contrast that heightens his own aloneness even amidst a crowd. Alone but not alone, he is striking in his bleak despondency. Hunched over his drink, he appears purposeless, lonely and lost in thought.

Gillian Wearing 's silent video piece exemplifies that sense of aloneness that many of us have felt, in spaces that are far from desolate or unpeopled. But it's not sad; it feels joyful and defiant: the artist, standing in the middle of a shopping centre in south London, really is dancing like no one's watching-and despite her confident abandon and arm-flailing, to the sound of nothing but a wall of chattering noise, no one really does bother to watch. She busts out moves that are usually the preserve of the bedroom or dark dance floors, and by situating them in an incongruous context demonstrates a strange disconnect as the personal becomes very public.

Photography: Todd Hido, Homes at Night

Todd Hido has long explored the isolation that can exist in the middle of a densely populated area. His images of suburbia are often chillingly devoid of human form, and life is only suggested by the odd light emanating from a steamy window, or by a rows of cars parked on a frosty street. Homes at Night captures the present moment remarkably well; in these works, empty roads have an eerie feel, while the yellow glow coming from inside homes suggests a certain warmth-albeit, with a sense of solitude.

Music: Joy Division, Isolation

An obvious choice, perhaps, but Joy Division's Isolation, released on the album Closer posthumously, following frontman Ian Curtis' suicide, is a testament to his writing and performance skills. The harrowing lyrics belie an almost jaunty bass line and synth parts, tempered with an excruciatingly plaintive, fatalistic delivery. The album artwork for Closer's exemplifies the Factory Records aesthetic, pioneered by Peter Saville, united by subtle graphical elements such as typography combined with uniquely fitting imagery. This sleeve, designed by Saville with Martyn Atkins, using a photograph by Bernard Pierre Wolff, of the Appiani family tomb in Genoa's Monumental Cemetery of Staglieno in 1978.

Stay the Fuck Home

Our special series offers creative approaches to the long days of self-isolation during this global crisis.

EXPLORE THE SERIES

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The Artworks That Perfectly Capture Isolation - ELEPHANT

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Everyone's at it right now-isolation, that is. These artworks, selected by the Elephant team, each delineate isolation in its many challenging, introspective and piquant states of mind.

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Overview

CE credits: 1

Learning objectives: After reading this article, CE candidates will be able to:

1. Identify the effects of social isolation and loneliness on physical, mental and cognitive health.

2. Explore how loneliness differs from social isolation.

3. Discuss evidence-based interventions for combating loneliness.

For more information on earning CE credit for this article, go to www.apa.org/ed/ce/resources/ce-corner.

According to a 2018 national survey by Cigna, loneliness levels have reached an all-time high, with nearly half of 20,000 U.S. adults reporting they sometimes or always feel alone. Forty percent of survey participants also reported they sometimes or always feel that their relationships are not meaningful and that they feel isolated.

Such numbers are alarming because of the health and mental health risks associated with loneliness. According to a meta-analysis co-authored by Julianne Holt-Lunstad, PhD, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Brigham Young University, lack of social connection heightens health risks as much as smoking 15 cigarettes a day or having alcohol use disorder. She's also found that loneliness and social isolation are twice as harmful to physical and mental health as obesity (Perspectives on Psychological Science , Vol. 10, No. 2, 2015).

"There is robust evidence that social isolation and loneliness significantly increase risk for premature mortality, and the magnitude of the risk exceeds that of many leading health indicators," Holt-Lunstad says.

In an effort to stem such health risks, campaigns and coalitions to reduce social isolation and loneliness-an individual's perceived level of social isolation-have been launched in Australia, Denmark and the United Kingdom. These national programs bring together research experts, nonprofit and government agencies, community groups and skilled volunteers to raise awareness of loneliness and address social isolation through evidence-based interventions and advocacy.

But is loneliness really increasing, or is it a condition that humans have always experienced at various times of life? In other words, are we becoming lonelier or just more inclined to recognize and talk about the problem?

These are tough questions to answer because historical data about loneliness are scant. Still, some research suggests that social isolation is increasing, so loneliness may be, too, says Holt-Lunstad. The most recent U.S. census data, for example, show that more than a quarter of the population lives alone-the highest rate ever recorded. In addition, more than half of the population is unmarried, and marriage rates and the number of children per household have declined since the previous census. Rates of volunteerism have also decreased, according to research by the University of Maryland's Do Good Institute, and an increasing percentage of Americans report no religious affiliation -suggesting declines in the kinds of religious and other institutional connections that can provide community.

"Regardless of whether loneliness is increasing or remaining stable, we have lots of evidence that a significant portion of the population is affected by it," says Holt-Lunstad. "Being connected to others socially is widely considered a fundamental human need-crucial to both well-being and survival."

As experts in behavior change, psychologists are well-positioned to help the nation combat loneliness. Through their research and public policy work, many psychologists have been providing data and detailed recommendations for advancing social connection as a U.S. public health priority on both the societal and individual levels.

"With an increasing aging population, the effects of loneliness on public health are only anticipated to increase," Holt-Lunstad says. "The challenge we face now is figuring out what can be done about it."

Who is most likely?

Loneliness is an experience that has been around since the beginning of time-and we all deal with it, according to Ami Rokach, PhD, an instructor at York University in Canada and a clinical psychologist. "It's something every single one of us deals with from time to time," he explains, and can occur during life transitions such as the death of a loved one, a divorce or a move to a new place. This kind of loneliness is referred to by researchers as reactive loneliness.

Problems can arise, however, when an experience of loneliness becomes chronic, Rokach notes. "If reactive loneliness is painful, chronic loneliness is torturous," he says. Chronic loneliness is most likely to set in when individuals either don't have the emotional, mental or financial resources to get out and satisfy their social needs or they lack a social circle that can provide these benefits, says psychologist Louise Hawkley, PhD, a senior research scientist at the research organization NORC at the University of Chicago.

"That's when things can become very problematic, and when many of the major negative health consequences of loneliness can set in," she says.

Last year, a Pew Research Center survey of more than 6,000 U.S. adults linked frequent loneliness to dissatisfaction with one's family, social and community life. About 28 percent of those dissatisfied with their family life feel lonely all or most of the time, compared with just 7 percent of those satisfied with their family life. Satisfaction with one's social life follows a similar pattern: 26 percent of those dissatisfied with their social lives are frequently lonely, compared with just 5 percent of those who are satisfied with their social lives. One in five Americans who say they are not satisfied with the quality of life in their local communities feel frequent loneliness, roughly triple the 7 percent of Americans who are satisfied with the quality of life in their communities.

And, of course, loneliness can occur when people are surrounded by others-on the subway, in a classroom, or even with their spouses and children, according to Rokach, who adds that loneliness is not synonymous with chosen isolation or solitude. Rather, loneliness is defined by people's levels of satisfaction with their connectedness, or their perceived social isolation.

Effects of loneliness and isolation

As demonstrated by a review of the effects of perceived social isolation across the life span, co-authored by Hawkley, loneliness can wreak havoc on an individual's physical, mental and cognitive health (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B , Vol. 370, No. 1669, 2015). Hawkley points to evidence linking perceived social isolation with adverse health consequences including depression, poor sleep quality, impaired executive function, accelerated cognitive decline, poor cardiovascular function and impaired immunity at every stage of life. In addition, a 2019 study led by Kassandra Alcaraz, PhD, MPH, a public health researcher with the American Cancer Society, analyzed data from more than 580,000 adults and found that social isolation increases the risk of premature death from every cause for every race (American Journal of Epidemiology , Vol. 188, No. 1, 2019). According to Alcaraz, among black participants, social isolation doubled the risk of early death, while it increased the risk among white participants by 60 to 84 percent.

"Our research really shows that the magnitude of risk presented by social isolation is very similar in magnitude to that of obesity, smoking, lack of access to care and physical inactivity," she says. In the study, investigators weighted several standard measures of social isolation, including marital status, frequency of religious service attendance, club meetings/group activities and number of close friends or relatives. They found that overall, race seemed to be a stronger predictor of social isolation than sex; white men and women were more likely to be in the least isolated category than were black men and women.

The American Cancer Society study is the largest to date on all races and genders, but previous research has provided glimpses into the harmful effects of social isolation and loneliness. A 2016 study led by Newcastle University epidemiologist Nicole Valtorta, PhD, for example, linked loneliness to a 30 percent increase in risk of stroke or the development of coronary heart disease (Heart , Vol. 102, No. 13). Valtorta notes that a lonely individual's higher risk of ill health likely stems from several combined factors: behavioral, biological and psychological.

"Lacking encouragement from family or friends, those who are lonely may slide into unhealthy habits," Valtorta says. "In addition, loneliness has been found to raise levels of stress, impede sleep and, in turn, harm the body. Loneliness can also augment depression or anxiety."

Last year, researchers at the Florida State University College of Medicine also found that loneliness is associated with a 40 percent increase in a person's risk of dementia ( The Journals of Gerontology: Series B, online 2018). Led by Angelina Sutin, PhD, the study examined data on more than 12,000 U.S. adults ages 50 years and older. Participants rated their levels of loneliness and social isolation and completed a cognitive battery every two years for up to 10 years.

Among older adults in particular, loneliness is more likely to set in when an individual is dealing with functional limitations and has low family support, Hawkley says. Better self-rated health, more social interaction and less family strain reduce older adults' feelings of loneliness, according to a study, led by Hawkley, examining data from more than 2,200 older adults (Research on Aging , Vol. 40, No. 4, 2018). "Even among those who started out lonely, those who were in better health and socialized with others more often had much better odds of subsequently recovering from their loneliness," she says.

A 2015 study led by Steven Cole, MD, a professor of medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, provides additional clues as to why loneliness can harm overall health (PNAS , Vol. 112, No. 49, 2015). He and his colleagues examined gene expressions in leukocytes, white blood cells that play key roles in the immune system's response to infection. They found that the leukocytes of lonely participants-both humans and rhesus macaques-showed an increased expression of genes involved in inflammation and a decreased expression of genes involved in antiviral responses.

Loneliness, it seems, can lead to long-term "fight-or-flight" stress signaling, which negatively affects immune system functioning. Simply put, people who feel lonely have less immunity and more inflammation than people who don't.

Combating loneliness

While the harmful effects of loneliness are well established in the research literature, finding solutions to curb chronic loneliness has proven more challenging, says Holt-Lunstad.

Developing effective interventions is not a simple task because there's no single underlying cause of loneliness, she says. "Different people may be lonely for different reasons, and so a one-size-fits-all kind of intervention is not likely to work because you need something that is going to address the underlying cause." Rokach notes that efforts to minimize loneliness can start at home, with teaching children that aloneness does not mean loneliness. Also, he says, schools can help foster environments in which children look for, identify and intervene when a peer seems lonely or disconnected from others.

In terms of additional ways to address social isolation and feelings of loneliness, research led by Christopher Masi, MD, and a team of researchers at the University of Chicago suggests that interventions that focus inward and address the negative thoughts underlying loneliness in the first place seem to help combat loneliness more than those designed to improve social skills, enhance social support or increase opportunities for social interaction ( Personality and Social Psychology Review, Vol. 15, No. 3, 2011). The meta-analysis reviewed 20 randomized trials of interventions to decrease loneliness in children, adolescents and adults and showed that addressing what the researchers termed maladaptive social cognition through cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) worked best because it empowered patients to recognize and deal with their negative thoughts about self-worth and how others perceive them, says Hawkley, one of the study's co-authors.

Still, some research has found that engaging older adults in community and social groups can lead to positive mental health effects and reduce feelings of loneliness. Last year, Julene Johnson, PhD, a University of California, San Francisco researcher on aging, examined how joining a choir might combat feelings of loneliness among older adults (The Journals of Gerontology: Series B , online 2018). Half of the study's 12 senior centers were randomly selected for the choir program, which involved weekly 90-minute choir sessions, including informal public performances. The other half of the centers did not participate in choir sessions. After six months, the researchers found no significant differences between the two groups on tests of cognitive function, lower body strength and overall psychosocial health. But they did find significant improvements in two components of the psychosocial evaluation among choir participants: This group reported feeling less lonely and indicated they had more interest in life. Seniors in the non-choir group saw no change in their loneliness, and their interest in life declined slightly.

Researchers at the University of Queensland in Australia have also found that older adults who take part in social groups such as book clubs or church groups have a lower risk of death (BMJ Open , Vol. 6, No. 2, 2016). Led by psychologist Niklas Steffens, PhD, the team tracked the health of 424 people for six years after they had retired and found that social group membership had a compounding effect on quality of life and risk of death. Compared with those still working, every group membership lost after retirement was associated with around a 10 percent drop in quality of life six years later. In addition, if participants belonged to two groups before retirement and kept these up over the following six years, their risk of death was 2 percent, rising to 5 percent if they gave up membership in one group and to 12 percent if they gave up membership in both.

"In this regard, practical interventions need to focus on helping retirees to maintain their sense of purpose and belonging by assisting them to connect to groups and communities that are meaningful to them," the authors say.

To that end, cohousing appears to be growing in popularity among young and old around the world as a way to improve social connections and decrease loneliness, among other benefits. Cohousing communities and mixed-age residences are intentionally built to bring older and younger generations together, either in whole neighborhoods within single-family homes or in larger apartment buildings, where they share dining, laundry and recreational spaces. Neighbors gather for parties, games, movies or other events, and the cohousing piece makes it easy to form clubs, organize child and elder care, and carpool. Hawkley and other psychologists argue that these living situations may also provide an antidote to loneliness, particularly among older adults. Although formal evaluations of their effectiveness in reducing loneliness remain scarce, cohousing communities in the United States now number 165 nationwide, according to the Cohousing Association, with another 140 in the planning stages.

"Older adults have become so marginalized and made to feel as though they are no longer productive members of society, which is lonely-making in and of itself," Hawkley says. "For society to be healthy, we have to find ways to include all segments of the population, and many of these intergenerational housing programs seem to be doing a lot in terms of dispelling myths about old age and helping older individuals feel like they are important and valued members of society again."

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Evidence links perceived loneliness and social isolation with depression, poor sleep quality, impaired executive function, accelerated cognitive decline, poor cardiovascular function and impaired immunity at every stage of life.

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Edward Hopper: the artist that evoked urban loneliness and disappointment with beautiful clarity

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Edward Hopper: the artist that evoked urban loneliness and disappointment with beautiful clarity

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Edward Hopper: the artist that evoked urban loneliness and disappointment with beautiful clarity

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The realist painter’s brand of Americanism was a counterpoint to the country’s optimism. Fifty years after his death, his legacy lives on

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A Life Apart: Introduction - 1/5 - POV | PBS

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Credit... Michela Buttignol

Nonfiction

Five new books touch on American Jewish identity and what will sustain it into the future.

Credit... Michela Buttignol

When a gunman slaughtered 11 worshipers in a Pittsburgh synagogue on a Shabbat morning last month, American Jews were left with a jumble of intense emotions: horror and fear, certainly, but also an old embattled feeling, centuries in the making. They were victims, in America, a country that has never seen even a hint of a pogrom. In their pain and worry, individual Jews had a rare chance to feel themselves part of a larger community - one that mourns together, gets angry together, imbued with a separate and unique identity, threatened yet resilient. And in this, victimhood offered an illusion.

For one thing, the violence of Pittsburgh is far from the everyday reality of American Jews. They live in a country that has offered them a great deal more love than it ever has hate. We're beyond mere tolerance. A recent Pew poll found that Americans felt "warmer" about Jews than any other religious group. There is an accumulated sense of comfort and acceptance that has persisted even with a president whose winks have emboldened thousands of internet trolls and hundreds of white men bearing tiki torches. The positive side of the ledger remains plentiful.

A shared sorrow may have provided the briefest taste of unity after Pittsburgh, but anti-Semitism is not what defines the experience of Jews in America today; assimilation is. To hear the professional worriers in the Jewish community, it's love, not hate, that poses the bigger existential challenge. A vast majority of Jews - 72 percent among the non-Orthodox - now marry outside the tribe. The infrastructure of Judaism, from the synagogue to the long-established liberal denominations, is being steadily abandoned. Almost a third of millennial Jews are so unidentified with Judaism they say they have no religion at all. And Israel, which once inspired, now alienates many, especially the young. Even the massacre in Pittsburgh, for those who knew where to look, offered hints of this demise. The average age of the victims, those mainstays who turned on the lights and made sure the grape juice and cookies were set up for the kiddush, was 74. Three congregations gathered in one synagogue that morning because of dwindling numbers.

Once the candlelight vigils are over, where is the solid ground for the future of American Jewish identity? It won't come from being victims - it shouldn't - and cultural and ethnic identity, the bagels and lox version, is disappearing fast. From where then? As a handful of new books make abundantly clear, there really is only one source left: the religion - Judaism itself, and its unique capacity for adaptation.

Reformers have been here before, in a radical moment of reinterpretation during the 19th century when a minuscule community numbering in the thousands ripped up received rituals and theology in order to adjust to the new reality of living in an open society. But it has been some time since American Jews have needed a dynamic religion to give them purpose. The 20th century brought the Holocaust and the foundation of Israel, two events that offered greater, world-historical, anchors of identity - the genocide creating an obligation to the murdered, and the Jewish state creating a homeland that offered dignity and pride.

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An alternative Passover Seder, "Unleavened," organized by a group of Broadway insiders. Credit... Karsten Moran for The New York Times

Those anchors, weighty though they were, have now come unmoored. The last Holocaust survivor will most likely die within the next decade or two, and Israel, increasingly since 1967, is a thornbush. American Jews are now back to where they once were: on their own, as they haven't been in over a century, left to try to sustain themselves. The choice, according to Tal Keinan, the author of a new book to which I'll return, is stark and, to my mind, true: "Create meaning in Judaism or accept extinction."

The great transformation of American Judaism began in the early 19th century with younger religious dissidents who felt alienated from their own faith. "Almost no one understood the language," complained Abraham Moise, a congregant living in the 1820s in Charleston, S.C. - which, with 700 Jews, then had the largest Jewish population in the country. "Substance has yielded to form, the religion of the heart to the observance of unmeaning forms and ceremonies."

Within a few years, that Charleston congregation would split in two over the question of whether to add an organ to their synagogue. The reformers sought to imitate the practices of their Christian neighbors in order to make Judaism less alien to the dominant other - and to themselves. They no longer wanted to split their identity between the Americanized peddlers and podiatrists and businesspeople they had become in the outside world and the practitioners of an ancient religion in a dead tongue they turned into inside the synagogue. Soon English replaced Hebrew. Women and men sat together, sang hymns together, even in choirs. They abandoned as a relic anything stodgy or primitive-seeming. A few congregations even replaced the gnarled ram's horn blown on the high holidays with a shiny brass trumpet.

By midcentury, an influx of German Jews, including the first trained rabbis to arrive in America, brought some intellectual and theological heft to these reforms. They were emerging from the ferment of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, in which thinkers like Moses Mendelssohn searched for ways that Jews, freshly emancipated in Western Europe, could embrace the new secular gods of rationality and progress and nation. The key was to let go of 1,800 years of yearning and praying for a return to Zion, and instead root themselves more firmly where they lived. They should stop seeing themselves as a people apart - and certainly not a "chosen" one. Theirs would be a religion like any other.

For Jews in America, this made perfect sense. The reformers began excising the prayers for the messiah and a return to Palestine. One rabbi, dedicating the arrival of the organ at that Charleston congregation in 1841, made the shift away from the diasporic status quo very explicit: "This synagogue is our temple, this city is our Jerusalem, this happy land our Palestine, and as our fathers defended with their lives that temple, that city and that land, so will their sons defend this temple, this city and this land."

"Chosenness" would have new meaning and intention. Since Jews were no longer waiting for the messiah, they themselves would become "a messianic people designated by God to guide the world to its eventual redemption," as Steven R. Weisman writes in his thorough new history of this era, THE CHOSEN WARS: How Judaism Became an American Religion (Simon & Schuster, $30). American Jews would embrace a "high-priestly mission" to act as models of ethical behavior. Action in the world would define them.

By the 1880s, just as the boats loaded with Eastern European Jews were about to start arriving at Ellis Island (turning a community of 250,000 into four million within a few decades), Reform rabbis had profoundly redefined "what it is to be a Jew," Weisman writes, "and what the purpose of a Jew in America should be." When they gathered in Pittsburgh in 1885 to produce a statement crystallizing their beliefs, they went all in on America. ("We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community.") Their role in this country would be to promote a social gospel, "to participate in the great task of modern times, to solve, on the basis of justice and righteousness, the problems presented by the contrasts and evils of the present organization of society."

One hundred and thirty-three years later, this statement still expresses how a vast majority of American Jews think about what it means to be a Jew in this country. To be a Jew is to join the A.C.L.U., to travel to the border and act as a pro bono lawyer for immigrants, to join in the Women's March. It's the part of American Jewish identity that points with pride to the fact that Barack Obama won 78 percent of the Jewish vote in 2008 and beams at Ruth Bader Ginsburg's status as a liberal rock star.

The sociologist Jack Wertheimer dismisses this as "Golden Rule" Judaism in THE NEW AMERICAN JUDAISM: How Jews Practice Their Religion Today (Princeton University, $29.95), lamenting that as a form of religious practice - even with a faith that stresses deeds over beliefs - it represents a slide toward the empty and platitudinous: "A rich, complex and at times contradictory religious system has been reduced to a set of vague slogans - 'Justice, justice, shall you pursue,' 'Made in God's image,' 'Love the stranger' and 'Repair the world.'"

Wertheimer is harsh on this form of Judaism, seeing it as an easy, self-congratulatory way to slap a seal of tradition onto pre-existing liberalism. He's wrong to discount it as meaningless. Some of the most vibrant activity around synagogues every weekend has to do with food banking or raising funds for Syrian refugees. But I do share his assessment that as religious practice, this is pretty thin. It's not hard to imagine a day when American Jews stop thinking about their commitment to social justice as Jewishly inflected and see it instead as just that, a commitment to social justice. What then of the more thickly religious practices, the world of ritual and spirituality?

Most American Jews (the 90 percent who are not Orthodox but belong to one of the liberal branches of Reform or Conservative Judaism or are simply unaffiliated) are in a process of mixing and matching, practicing what Wertheimer calls a "cafeteria religion." "Picking and choosing only those morsels of Judaism that seem personally appealing is the new - and perhaps only - norm among Jews," he writes. It's what explains why the premier Conservative synagogue in Washington, D.C., sponsors a Jewish Mindfulness Center, which includes meditation practices, healing services, yoga, Jewish mysticism classes and immersion in the mikvah (the ritual bath, previously an exclusively Orthodox practice). American Jews have not quite abandoned Judaism - according to a Pew Research Center survey in 2013, a majority still attend a Seder for Passover and fast on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement; at weddings and funerals, people still want something Jewish - but they are being extremely idiosyncratic about it all, sucking out whatever spiritual and personal sustenance the tradition has to offer and spitting out the pits.

The affliction the sociologist Herbert Gans calls "terminal ethnic identity" is a condition of white ethnic groups like Jews and the Irish, who by the third generation of their family's existence in America would, as Gans predicted in a 1979 paper, view their heritage as "more of a leisure-time activity" (like, say, watching "Seinfeld"). By the seventh, "their secular cultures will be only a dim memory." A majority of American Jews in that 2013 Pew survey rated "humor" and "intellectual curiosity" much higher than community and religious practice as indicators of Jewishness. This would put them on the path to terminal. At this rate, American Jews are two or three generations away from being as Jewish as "Irish" people whose Irishness consists of drinking green beer on St. Patrick's Day.

If a revitalized form of Judaism is the counterweight to Gans's predictions, it will have to be much more expansive and inclusive than its current iteration. This is also the assessment of Robert Mnookin, a Harvard law professor, in THE JEWISH AMERICAN PARADOX: Embracing Choice in a Changing World (PublicAffairs, $28), a lucid legal brief of a book that proposes what would amount to a revolutionary (some would say heretical) revision.

It no longer makes sense, Mnookin thinks, to use matrilineal descent, or any descent really, to determine who is a Jew. If you feel yourself to be a Jew, you get to be one. "The 'chosen people' must become the 'choosing people,'" he writes. And it's a strategic move. Jews can't afford to be exclusive - leaving out children with only a Jewish father or a non-Jewish spouse. Why negate them while allowing membership to people who couldn't care less about it? He wants a "Big Tent": "Inside the Tent the table is set with a smorgasbord of Jewish values, music, food, traditions, rituals, spirituality, language, philanthropic causes and connections with Israel. At this table some will nibble; others will feast. But all will have options and none will be turned away." Within the tent, if some want to set up their own purity tests for inclusion in a subgroup, Mnookin is fine with that. But the entrance should be wide.

A push for inclusivity of this sort might even offset the impact of intermarriage. The increasingly high rate of Jews marrying non-Jews (coupled with a birthrate that, with the exception of the Orthodox, is relatively low) is spoken of by Jewish leaders in terms of dread usually reserved for global warming. If the trend continues, the next generation of children born to two Jewish parents will be less than 40 percent the size of the current generation. The generation after that will be 13 percent the size of today's. These are scary numbers for those holding onto the assumption that the future of the Jews is dependent on the number of Jewish babies born to two Jewish parents. But Mnookin thinks that by redefining Jewishness more openly you can actually net a higher number of people who could become invested in the religion. There is even some evidence to back this up. The recent Pew study showed that among respondents with one Jewish parent, millennials were more than twice as likely to identify as Jewish as those over 65. Growing up in a community that doesn't see you as lesser or ineligible might make a difference.

What about Israel? Is it really no longer capable of exerting a magnetic pull on the whole Jewish people? Not really. For hundreds of years of diaspora, Jews, scattered everywhere, had to negotiate between two impulses, universalism and particularism. They did so on a case-by-case, community-by-community basis, balancing their tribal needs with their desire to engage with the world at large. This dynamic has been replaced by a bipolar Jewish world with two centers of Jewish life, each basically representing opposed values. Israel's primary mission is the security of the Jewish people, and its government is beholden to an Orthodox establishment that narrowly defines Judaism (its leaders regularly denigrate Reform Jews, with one recently calling them "a group of clowns who stab the Holy Torah"). For their part, American Jews care primarily about the health and well-being of American society - issues like immigration or human rights or reproductive health. (Israel's actions, meanwhile, especially when it comes to the conflict with the Palestinians, are difficult to understand and often perceived as deeply immoral.)

This schism has impoverished all Jews. Tal Keinan's GOD IS IN THE CROWD: Twenty-First Century Judaism (Spiegel & Grau, $28) is a pox-on-both-houses indictment. Having grown up in a fully assimilated household in America and then moved to Israel to become a fighter pilot, Keinan became disenchanted with both places. He sees two poles of identity and outlook, unique and intransigent, that are destroying themselves by staying so far apart. What American Jews and Israelis need to recapture is the "Wisdom of the Crowd," his altogether too TED-talky phrase for the collective knowledge and decision-making that occurred during the diverse and dispersed period of Diaspora. Without "dogma from above," Keinan writes, the Diaspora "wrestled with its own moral governance. It reached conflicting conclusions and reconciled them over time, incorporating new projections and evolving realities, leaving its members to correct for the winds that prevailed in specific eras - and to choose their own destinations."

By way of getting American Jews to return to this "active struggle between Particularism and Universalism," Keinan offers a few ideas, like giving every Jew in the world a vote for the Israeli presidency, which would turn a largely symbolic post into one with the authority to settle all matters of Jewish identity (like who is eligible for citizenship in Israel - a power now in the hands of the prohibitive Orthodox rabbinate). This is an improbable solution to put it lightly, but it has a worthy aim: to shock American Judaism out of "complacency."

The killing in Pittsburgh made me stop and consider, for the first time in a long time, my own American Jewish identity, what it adds to my life. As much as I enjoyed the feeling of warmth that emanated from the havdala services that closed that miserable Shabbat last month, there was something sad about identity flaring just in these moments of defensiveness and grief. I want a Judaism that also offers positive sources of meaning, for the boundaries between sacred and profane that it creates to enhance and elevate my day-to-day existence in the modern world. And not just mine. I fear without this "added value," to be crass about it, my two young daughters won't have anything to hold onto.

I thought back to the most recent high holidays - a time of the year when my family and I, unaffiliated Jews that we are, end up nomadically wandering from congregation to congregation, always promising that next year we'll finally join somewhere, though we never do.

I attended one service at a Reform synagogue that looked, from the peeling paint, as if it had hit its high point sometime around 1955. The sanctuary itself resembled a theater and the service was performed from a stage, the cantor singing the entire operatic liturgy himself as the audience passively looked on, eyelids drooping, only perking up when a cello briefly joined in. The English prayer book helpfully offered up poems, including one by Robert Frost, which the rabbi read flatly for what seemed like perhaps the thousandth time.

The other experience was with a New Age-y, slightly neo-Hasidic, experimental, post-denominational congregation. There were half a dozen musicians, looking like a raggedy drum circle and including a Palestinian man with an oud (who at one point would offer a Muslim prayer in Arabic). The rabbi, wrapped in a prayer shawl, sometimes completely covering his head, Hasidic-style, used a direct and personal tone, tinged with a rhetoric of self-help. The service was participatory, as raucous as a megachurch. At one point, the rabbi asked anyone who had been "othered" over the past year to come up and participate. Under a canopy of prayer shawls, congregants stood with their arms around one another, swaying.

Between the music, the rabbi's accessible, emotional approach and the sense of engaged community, this second service was strangely more moving than any religious ceremony in recent memory (my daughters were riveted too). I say strangely, because it also felt completely ridiculous, a silly amalgam of plucked rituals and forced feeling. But the ridiculousness was, in its way, hopeful, and allowed me to tie together the two high holiday experiences. Because even though that Reform service - performative, decorous (a cello!), incorporating English - did nothing for me, it had also once seemed ridiculous. To a 19th-century Jew, it must have appeared preposterous - until it wasn't.

Daring ridiculousness may be American Judaism's most important survival tool, the willingness to reach deep and to search both within the tradition and outside it in order to make the religion feel alive. It's a benefit of being a people without a pope. In an essay, "Many Lights, Not One Light," included in a new collection, DEAR ZEALOTS: Letters From a Divided Land (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $23), the Israeli novelist Amoz Oz praises this quality of Jewishness, the "anarchist core, the rebellious gene" that prompts constant interpretation, reinterpretation and counterinterpretation. "I regard blind obedience as a deviation from tradition even when it purports to be the embodiment of that tradition," Oz writes.

For Oz, Israel is the place where most of the ridiculousness - or, as he would put it, "curiosity and imagination" - has played out recently through the construction of a secular Hebrew culture. But what of America, a society for which reinvention is second nature? What better place to work out what Oz thinks is the central quandary facing Jews today: "Does our past belong to us, or we to it?"

American Jews surely know the correct answer to this question. For Oz, the Jewish imperative to remain fresh and relevant is summed up in a line from the Book of Lamentations, "Renew our days as of old." To which I'd only add: Or else.

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American Jews Face a Choice: Create Meaning or Fade Away (Published 2018)

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Nonfiction Five new books touch on American Jewish identity and what will sustain it into the future. Credit... Michela Buttignol When a gunman slaughtered 11 worshipers in a Pittsburgh synagogue on a Shabbat morning last month, American Jews were left with a jumble of intense emotions: horror and fear, certainly, but also an old embattled feeling, centuries in the making.