Laura Yares, Michigan State University and Sharon Avni, Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY

“Emma,” a young Jewish woman who we met in 2019, didn’t belong to a synagogue. She didn’t have a Jewish partner. She didn’t observe Jewish rituals regularly. On most surveys about religion, she would not seem very engaged with Judaism.

But as Emma talked about what she did in her free time, a very different picture began to emerge. She visited Jewish websites and enjoyed listening to Jewish music. She read books about Jewish topics and had recently attended a retreat for young Jewish adults to learn Torah while also doing yoga.

She was highly invested in learning about Judaism, but she explored her identity without joining traditional institutions.

Most major surveys about religion ask whether someone belongs to a congregation, how often they attend services, whether they pray regularly and whether belief is important in their lives. Those measures help identify broad shifts, like the growing percentage of Americans who are religiously unaffiliated: the “nones.”

But many Americans’ religious lives, like Emma’s, are not disappearing; they are moving away from membership of traditional institutions. To understand what religion looks like in 21st-century America, researchers may need to ask different questions.

Learning through art

As scholars of Judaism and education, we have been exploring how people learn about religion beyond traditional places like synagogues, Jewish schools and summer camps. Between 2019 and early 2023, we spoke with hundreds of people and explored different leisure time activities to discover what people learn about Judaism and Jewishness through cultural arts.

We interviewed dozens of audience members at Jewish-themed shows on Broadway, such as “Leopoldstadt” and “Parade.” We attended Jewish concerts and asked attendees what they learned. We explored how social media communities offer spaces to talk about different Jewish topics, like what fans learned about ultra-Orthodox Judaism from watching the television show “Shtisel.”

Our research revealed that there is a vibrant ecosystem of people learning about religion in their leisure time. Through the arts, both Jews and non-Jews encounter Jewish history, Jewish religious practices and representations of Jewish communities.

Screen and stage

Most people we spoke with told us that they felt meaningful connections to Judaism during activities that would rarely appear on a standard religion survey.

“Joan,” an unmarried woman in her 50s from Connecticut, told us that she was deeply invested in Judaism, but felt that synagogues and Jewish community centers were not welcoming to single people without families. Instead of joining a Jewish institution, she watched Jewish-themed TV shows and movies on Netflix, and joined social media communities to chat with other fans.

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“Luis,” who lived in Boston but was born in Argentina, was a Sephardic Jew, a group that traces their ancestry and traditions to Jewish communities who once lived in Spain and Portugal. His wife was Ashkenazi, meaning her ancestors came from Central and Eastern Europe. She considered herself secular, and so the couple joined the Worker’s Circle, a nonreligious Ashkenazi institution rather than a synagogue.

Yet Luis loved deepening his knowledge of Sephardic culture, and he often attended concerts of music in Ladino, a Sephardic language related to Spanish, with other Sephardic immigrants.

For Joan and Luis, these activities were not peripheral to their Jewish lives. Rather, they were central avenues for learning and community. We interviewed hundreds of Jews who told us that cultural experiences were opportunities to reflect on Jewish practices, explore questions of belonging, connect with family histories and find friends with common interests.

New questions

Some aspects of these patterns were distinctive to Judaism. Historically, many Jews have understood Judaism to be a cultural world, and not only a theological tradition. Learning about cultural dimensions of Judaism has long been part of Jewish education.

The broader phenomenon of informal learning, though, extended far beyond a single tradition. Across America, increasing numbers of people learn about religion through media, cultural productions and digital networks. Christians may study biblical themes through podcasts, online discussion groups or religious influencers. Muslims may participate in online learning communities that connect believers across the world.

The challenge for religion researchers, then, is not simply to determine whether engagement with religion is rising or falling. Rather, it is to develop more nuanced ways of understanding how people explore religious themes and practices, beyond traditional institutions. Only then can we more fully understand how contemporary Americans actually live their religious lives.

Laura Yares, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Michigan State University and Sharon Avni, Professor of Academic Literacy and Linguistics, Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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K. Chad Clay, University of Georgia

In the lead-up to the 2026 midterm elections, how is the U.S. government performing in terms of human rights? Listening to politicians, it can be difficult to know.

On one hand, some have pointed to a number of potential human rights abuses committed by the U.S. government inside and outside its borders in the past two years.

On the other hand, while marking the United States’ 250th anniversary this year, President Donald Trump called the country “the home of freedom,” “the land of liberty” and “the most extraordinary, most exceptional, most incredible nation ever to exist on the face of the earth.”

“We’re doing better now than we’ve ever done before,” he said.

So which is it?

According to many of the human rights data sources available, the U.S. lags behind most other high-income democracies – countries that are both members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and classified as high income by the World Bank. The U.S.’s poor performance spans civil and political rights, such as the right to be free from torture and the right to political participation, as well as economic and social rights, including the rights to health and food.

In fact, the U.S. has been a relatively poor performer across many of these rights for quite some time, regardless of the political party in power.

Even accounting for the U.S.’s prior poor practices, however, new data from the Human Rights Measurement Initiative shows that in 2025 the country’s civil and political rights performance deteriorated even further.

As a human rights scholar who has been measuring human rights practices for 20 years – and as one of HRMI’s co-founders – I believe this data raises serious questions about the United States’ commitment to human rights.

How are rights practices measured?

Governments rarely publish accurate information on their own human rights abuses, so the task of measuring them typically falls to advocates and scholars.

Historically, most international measures of civil and political rights have depended on public reports from the U.S. State Department, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch or news organizations.

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However, these reports cannot cover every human rights violation that experts know about, especially in countries with low government transparency or high levels of repression.

Thus, data produced using those sources will show fewer abuses than those that have actually occurred and will be more accurate about some places than others. Further, the Trump administration has changed one of the most important sources of human rights information, the U.S. State Department’s Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, to contain more bias in favor of the administration’s foreign allies and less information on human rights abuse overall.

Since 2017, HRMI has used a different approach. Recognizing the problems with public reports, we collect information directly from researchers for human rights organizations, human rights lawyers and others, asking them about governments’ practices across several rights and using a statistical model to assess their information and ensure that the resulting metrics are comparable across countries. The result is a robust dataset that includes information previously missing from public reports.

Today, HRMI’s civil and political rights dataset covers 62 countries, with more added every year.

How does the US compare?

According to the Human Rights Scores dataset, which uses publicly available information to score more than 190 countries on physical integrity rights – such as the rights to be free from torture, killing, forced disappearance and political imprisonment – the U.S. never ranked higher than 81st from 2001 to 2021 or higher than 109th from 2010 to 2021.

Indeed, from 2003 to 2021, the United States’ score was either the worst or the second-worst every year among high-income OECD member states, which include the United Kingdom, Japan and New Zealand.

The Human Rights Scores dataset has not been updated past 2021, but HRMI’s data collected since that time suggests that the pattern has continued.

Among the six high-income OECD countries on which HRMI currently collects data, the U.S. has been the worst performer for physical integrity rights since 2017.

It has also frequently been rated as the worst performer on “empowerment rights,” or the rights to assembly, association, opinion, expression, political participation, religion and belief.

What changed in 2025?

Even starting from this poor position, the U.S.’s civil and political rights practices dramatically worsened in 2025. HRMI measures nine civil and political rights, and the U.S. significantly worsened on eight of them.

These were not small changes. Measured against every significant change HRMI has recorded since 2017, the U.S. showed the largest decline ever observed for the right to be free from forced disappearance and for the right to freedom of religion and belief.

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The U.S. showed the second-largest decline ever observed for the right to be free from arbitrary or political arrest and for the right to opinion and expression.

The U.S. also showed major declines in the rights to be free from torture and extrajudicial killing, and the right to political participation – that is, the right to participate in one’s government via free and fair elections, to take part in public affairs and to have access to public service. U.S. scores likewise fell in the right to assembly and association, which are, respectively, the rights to peacefully gather in public or private and to form or join groups and organizations.

What caused the scores to fall?

Human rights experts raised several issues that led to these declines. For instance, the U.S.’s worsened scores for the rights to be free from arbitrary detention, disappearance and torture were tied to the expanded use of practices such as incommunicado detention and warrantless arrest by ICE and other immigration-related agencies.

While several killings occurred during ICE operations in 2025, the worsened extrajudicial killing score was also tied to the country’s use of airstrikes against boats in the Pacific and Caribbean, which caused the deaths of at least 123 people in 2025 alone.

Other changes enacted in 2025 contributed to large declines in the U.S.’s rights scores, including crackdowns on anti-ICE demonstrations and government pressure on universities, including limits on free speech and class subjects.

Last year also saw threats to television networks over political expression, restrictions on mail-in voting, state measures targeting American Islamic organizations by labeling them “foreign terrorist organizations” and an executive order focused on eradicating “anti-Christian bias.”

While current HRMI data does not yet cover 2026, early indicators are not promising, with continued abuses by ICE, further killings in international waters and allegations of attempts to use government powers to punish critics.

K. Chad Clay, Director, Center for the Study of Global Issues (GLOBIS); Associate Professor of International Affairs, University of Georgia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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U.S. News & World Report has released its 2026-2027 Best High Schools rankings, giving families a fresh, data-driven snapshot of top-performing public, charter, and STEM high schools across the country. The new edition evaluated about 27,000 eligible public high schools, with nearly 18,000 schools ultimately ranked at national, state, and local levels.

At the state level, Massachusetts again led the nation, with 47% of its high schools landing in the top quarter nationally. New Jersey followed at 44%, with Maryland close behind at 43%. Metro-area results also highlighted standout regions with high concentrations of top-ranked schools, including San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, California (60%), McAllen-Edinburg-Mission, Texas (59%), and Milwaukee-Waukesha, Wisconsin (56%)—each with the highest shares of ranked schools placing in the top 25% nationwide.

Charter and STEM schools were a major storyline in the 2026-2027 release. While California (96) and New Jersey (50) led the nation in the number of ranked STEM schools, charter schools claimed 23% of the national top 100. U.S. News pointed to Arizona’s BASIS charter network as a key example of that performance, noting it secured three of the country’s top five STEM schools and placed 12 campuses in the overall national top 100.

U.S. News said the rankings are based on six performance indicators, including state assessment achievement, graduation rates, and college readiness measures such as AP and IB participation and performance. The methodology was implemented with RTI International using data from the 2023-2024 school year.

Source: U.S. News & World Report

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