Content area
Full Text
Many Jews grew up believing that Jews are not alcoholics. Some still believe it. Yet "Jeremy," a funny, energetic, white-collar professional and married father of three, is a recovering Jewish alcoholic in Atlanta, Georgia. He remembers his dad saying with conviction that "Jews are not drunkards," even though his father would drink every day after work.
"I can remember him pouring Cutty Sark into a big glass of ice. And often, he'd fall asleep. We used to marvel that my father could sleep anywhere," Jeremy, 41, recalls now.
Jeremy says his father thought he could deny his alcoholism for two reasons: He didn't become drunk easily and he was Jewish. And Jews, of course, don't drink, he insisted.
"I remember hearing that and putting it in my psyche for a very long time," he says.
But some Jews not only qualify as alcoholics - Jews are addicts of every stripe. As Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) commemorates its 75th anniversary this year, Jews show up in meetings from Knoxville to New York to Los Angeles.
"As the Jewish community has been fully Americanized, it can no longer delude itself into believing that phenomena like alcoholism and drug addiction have not entered the community," says Rabbi Kerry Olitzky, executive director of the Jewish Outreach Institute in New York, an organization reaching out to unaffiliated and intermarried families, and author of several books on Jewish spirituality.
Olitzky defines an alcoholic as someone for whom drinking has become the most important thing in life. "The main issue of addiction is a hole we're trying to fill by a particular poison of choice. We think it's going to work, filling up that hole to make us whole again."
As director of Jewish community programs for Jewish Board of Family and Children's Services in New York (JFCS), Jonathan Katz is involved with an international support program, Jewish Alcoholics, Chemically Dependent Persons and Significant Others (JACS). The network encourages Jews and their families from all parts of the globe to get on the road to recovery in a nurturing Jewish environment; promotes knowledge and understanding of the disease of alcoholism and chemical dependency in the Jewish community; and serves as a resource center and information clearinghouse.
Katz tells The Jerusalem Report that...