By Manny Frishberg, JTNews Correspondent
By the beginning of last summer, Andy Zimmer knew he was in trouble.
“I had come to the end of my rope in terms of my ability to manage things myself,” said Zimmer, who has struggled for a number of years with chemical dependency and who requested that his real name not be used in this article to protect his personal privacy.
Broke, unemployed and unable to stay sober on his own, Zimmer, 29, was unsure where to turn for help.
“Growing up, in my family, at temple, in the community, [addiction] just wasn’t talked about much,” he said. “It wasn’t talked about at all, actually. You’d think such a big topic would have come up, but it never did that I can remember.”
Zimmer is not alone in this experience. There is a long-standing belief in the Jewish community that alcoholism is not a Jewish problem, and, as a result, Jewish addicts remain an almost invisible segment of the population. For many, this adds an extra challenge to the already daunting task of recovery.
Oddly enough, however, there is some evidence that supports the claim that Jews are less susceptible to alcoholism.
In 2002, it was reported in the monthly journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research that a gene exists that appears to protect against alcoholism. It does this by causing the body to break down alcohol faster and to make the effects less pleasurable. The gene is found in about one in five Ashkenazi Jews.
Unfortunately, the prevalence of the gene does not actually make Jews immune to alcoholism and has no effect on addiction to other drugs. According to Steve Morris, the director of counseling services at Jewish Family Service in Seattle, any proof that addiction is less prevalent in Jews makes the problem that much more difficult to address.
“Even if Jews were isolated in a marginal way — in other words, that the prevalence was a little bit lower, that’s different than ‘We don’t have this problem,’” Morris said.
Morris, who has worked as a chemical dependency counselor for 30 years, was also quick to point out that as Jews have become more integrated into mainstream American society, alcoholism rates in the Jewish community have come close to that of the rest of the country.
At the same time, he said, since there is a social stigma associated with the problem, “people are less willing to come forward until someone makes them aware of the services available.”
It was ultimately Zimmer’s sister who told him about the addiction recovery program at JFS. Pleased to find a local program rooted in the Jewish community, Zimmer signed up, and, through JFS, he received one-on-one counseling, assistance building a résumé and finding a job, and even the occasional meal. He has been sober since July and now works full-time at a bank.
“It’s not that Jews aren’t supportive,” Zimmer said. “Most people are pretty supportive when it comes down to making help available. It’s just that you have to go through the experience yourself to know how it is, and, for whatever reason, that doesn’t seem like something a lot of Jews have done.”
As part of his work with Morris at JFS, Zimmer was required to attend meetings through Alcoholics Anonymous. He said that he was more than happy to get a sponsor and work through the 12 steps, even though AA hadn’t been his first choice when he initially decided to get help.
Twelve-step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous and its corollary Narcotics Anonymous are avowedly nondenominational, relying on appeals to “a higher power” as an oblique reference to God. Still, with many AA meetings taking place in churches, there is a perception in some circles that such programs are inherently gentile, and so “are not really for us.”
A national organization known as JACS (Jewish Alcoholics, Chemically Dependent Persons and Significant Others) offers recovery support groups for Jewish addicts and their families in a number of cities nationwide. However, the only JACS group in the Pacific Northwest is located in Portland and has, according to the JACS Web site, been temporarily discontinued. So for Jews living in Washington State looking to attend a group, AA remains the only option.
Larry, a representative of the Greater Seattle Intergroup of Alcoholics Anonymous, who prefers to be known only by his first name in keeping with AA protocol, insists that, although AA was originally a Christian organization, it has long since distanced itself from its religious roots.
“Everyone who has a problem with alcohol is welcome, regardless of their religion,” Larry said.
He believes that people often use cultural or religious taboos as an excuse to avoid getting help. When an addict is ready to make a change, he said, these concerns won’t really stand in his or her way.
“A lot of people don’t want to do what it takes to get sober. They find excuses wherever they can. I don’t think that’s unique to any particular religious group,” Larry said.
However, Morris sees two sides to the issue of whether there is a need for a specifically Jewish space to deal with alcohol and drug addiction.
“On [the] one hand, I would say it would be [incorrect] to say that Jews are not comfortable in AA. There are a lot of Jews in recovery who go to AA and they consider AA an acceptable, appropriate resource for them,” Morris said. “On the other hand, many in the Jewish community feel the need for a Jewish-specific recovery meeting and many cities have them. I think that it’s sort of a symbolic issue in that I think that there should be a Jewish recovery meeting in Seattle, because it makes a statement that this is a problem that exists within the Jewish community.”
In that spirit, JFS has had an addiction specialist on staff in its counseling department since 1999. Morris was hired for the position in 2002 and has been providing individual counseling to clients and their families for the past five years. He praised the agency for integrating chemical dependency services into their counseling department, which he said is different from what is done in many other places.
“We discover the issue in a lot of people who’ve come forward with depression or anxiety, or struggling with other issues, and it really makes for a more integrated approach,” he said.
In the coming year, JFS plans to increase the resources geared toward problems of addiction and chemical dependency with the help of a grant they are getting from the Kenneth and Marlene Alhadeff Charitable Foundation. Morris said that the organization also hopes to facilitate the creation of a Jewish-specific meeting in Seattle.
“Recovery meetings are started by the participants themselves,” he said. “But I think we could offer them the space here at Jewish Family Service. Again, I think that makes an important statement that Jews are not exempt from addiction problems.”
JTNews Assistant Editor Leyna Krow contributed to this story.