By Jordan Chandler Hirsch
In the fall of 2006, Adam Rosenfield arrived at the University of North Texas armed with a typical American Jewish upbringing—Hebrew school education and involvement with B’nei Brith Youth Organization. He shared nothing more than a tenuous association with Israel and Jewish nationalism. Indeed, when he began college, his strongest identification with the Jewish people had come from reading the Diary of Anne Frank in public school. With a miniscule Jewish community at North Texas and no surrounding synagogues for miles, Adam expected to live a life unconnected from his Jewish roots.
Just over a year later, Adam is now spearheading a campaign to bring Israel activism to his campus. He reads Israeli newspapers on the web every day. He is seeking a long-term internship in Israel for the summer, and has even contemplated aliyah. What caused Adam’s radical transformation? As he put it, “birthright israel can do that to you.”
Marlene Post, former Chairperson of Taglit-birthright israel North America, defined the program in 1999 as “an outreach to young people who have not been drawn into existing Jewish frameworks and may therefore soon be lost to the Jewish people.” To achieve that lofty goal, an astonishing alliance of Jewish philanthropists, organizations, and the Israeli government combined their efforts to send Jews 18 to 26 on a free ten-day trip to Israel. Now, thousands of buses stream up and down the country every summer and winter, carrying birthright groups from college Hillels, travel agencies, and local communities. Over 3,400 Israeli soldiers accompany the tour groups, bonding with North Americans their age and leading to important American-Israeli interaction.
To date, birthright has sent over 150,000 young Jews on free trips to Israel in less than a decade. But quantity alone cannot measure success. Is birthright forging new appreciation of Israel and the Jewish people? How is it affecting the American Jewish connection to Israel? Is ten days in Israel enough to create a sustainable bond? Has birthright become, as it endeavored, an instrument to recapture those who “might soon be lost to the Jewish people?”
According to Dr. Leonard Saxe, Chair of the Maurice and Marilyn Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis, birthright is exceeding expectations. In June 2006, the Cohen Center conducted a comprehensive polling study of 3,000 participants and 1,000 non-participant applicants (those who applied and were rejected) from multiple trip cohorts. Dr. Saxe’s findings suggest that birthright participants’ scores on questions such as “are you planning to marry someone Jewish,” and “are you planning on raising Jewish children,” are on average 10% higher than those of non-participants—at 62% and 83% respectively.
More, Dr. Saxe found that the “strongest single attitudinal effect of the birthright israel experience is on participants’ sense of connection to Israel.” Sixty-one percent of 2002/3 participants affirmed that they shared a strong attachment to Israel—as compared to only 45% of non-participant applicants from the same year. Considering this evidence, Dr. Saxe believes birthright “has had a transformative impact on young adult Jews’ attitudes to Israel.”
Yet none of these numbers are particularly high for a program meant to prevent intermarriage and inculcate a strong connection to Israel. In his report, Dr. Saxe conceded the effects of birthright on alumni three years removed from the trip seemed to taper off. Indeed, Yossi Katz, an instructor at the Alexander Muss High School in Israel (AMHSI) for nearly thirty years, questions whether birthright is having a meaningful and lasting impact on American Jews. “Right now birthright has that aura about it that it cannot be criticized,” Katz said. While he believes that birthright is certainly a positive experience, he highlights the distinction between positive and meaningful.
Katz’s school specifically targets the same unaffiliated Jews as birthright does, since it is one of a number of long-term (anywhere from six- to twelve-week) Israel programs dedicated to providing a comprehensive Jewish education to high school students. Such schools have suffered a dropoff in applications in recent years because, according to Katz, parents of Jewish teenagers at public schools are opting to forgo a high school Israel experience for their kids in lieu of birthright. “Six years ago, everyone would be asking about security when I would come the US to recruit. Now, frankly, I haven’t had one person address security with me.” Instead, Katz said, “parents are asking why they should spend $7,000 to send their kids on my program when their kids can go for free on birthright instead.” In the minds of both parents and students, Katz contended, birthright seems a free and fast fix to an Israel connection without the need for longer engagement.
In Katz’s view, only longer-term programs can craft a new generation of Jewish leaders. “The most important years to touch a student’s soul are 11th and 12th grade.” On birthright, “bus drivers and hotel operators tell you that they clean up vomit all morning,” while on AMHSI, students are “studying Jewish history from Abraham to Ehud Olmert six hours a day.” Katz argued that birthright is unintentionally competing with AMHSI and similar programs by not opening up to high school students. “Originally, birthright weighed offering every young Jew from the age of sixteen a free round-trip airplane ticket and ten paid days in Israel which could be used on any quality recognized Israel program,” Katz said. “We could use that money to send the student to Alexander Muss or other programs, and it cuts the cost in half.”
In the long run, Katz is convinced that birthright’s last-ditch mentality and “Israel-lite, Judaism-lite” experience will dramatically dilute the American Jewish-Israeli relationship. “If someone proves to me one day that the birthright experience is enough,” said Katz, “then everything I’ve worked for my whole life is a mistake.”
While Adam Rosenfield is pursuing Israel activism and summers abroad in the Holy Land, few can predict what direction his connection to Israel will take when he enters the workforce and settles down. Katz may be right to worry whether birthright’s effect can survive the rest of college, let alone the ensuing years and decades. Dr. Saxe’s admission that birthright seems to lose its ‘momentum’ on participants three years after the trip lends credence to concerns about the lasting effect of a ten-day trip. If birthright’s goal is to serve as an “outreach to young people who… may therefore soon be lost to the Jewish people,” does its program truly provide a framework, a foundation, for its participants? Can we rely on birthright to sustain the future of the American-Jewish relationship?
While birthright is not a magical solution for saving those who might “soon be lost to the Jewish people,” it has filled a gigantic void in the Jewish world that Alexander Muss and other programs could not accommodate. When compared to six-week programs, birthright’s ability to establish a rock solid connection to Judaism and Israel seems tenuous. But birthright is not attempting to cram into ten days what the long-term programs do; it is not meant to achieve the same impact as six-week educational experiences. While the long-term programs and birthright seem to target the same population—unaffiliated Jewish students—they do so at different demographics and different ages. Though it does not obviate the need for participants to visit Israel in the future, birthright does play an invaluable role as a “booster kit” for Jewish young adults—a bridge program that initiates a framework for a connection to Judaism.
To enjoy a lasting impact on the attitude of American Jews towards Israel, birthright should offer comprehensive alumni programming to its participants, above and beyond reunion gatherings and Facebook groups. Indeed, it should consider expanding its own long-term programs for its alumni to return to Israel and receive a more in-depth encounter. Accordingly, Rabbi Daniel Brenner, Vice President of Education for birthright israel, reports that birthright is in the midst of refreshing its infrastructure for returning participants. “When birthright started, there was a feeling that it simply needed to give that ten-day gift to young Jews, and that established institutions could run follow up programming,” Brenner said. Yet those existing organizations did not respond to the challenge effectively. As the number of birthright participants soared, the problem only worsened.
Recognizing the need to build its own community structure, birthright israel brought Brenner on eight months ago to invest in the currently operating ‘post-programming’ efforts—rebranding it as birthright NEXT. While participants returning to colleges can rely on their Hillels, post-collegiate alumni age 22-30 suffer a gap in Jewish life without connections to their local communities. Brenner notes that birthright therefore plans on “investing ten times our current amount” in alumni-related activities in order to enhance the post-programming professionals already on the ground, and empower full-time directors on the ground in ten to fifteen major US cities. Brenner believes that through substantial effort and funding, birthright can help “fill the enormous gap” in Jewish life for young Jewish professionals lacking community.
As birthright embarks on an ambitious program to ensure that participants enjoy extensive infrastructure upon their return, it must navigate difficult waters. It must capitalize on the upcoming opportunities by reinforcing its message. Directors must ensure that the communities they seek to foster amongst birthright participants will eventually link with the broader Jewish community as well. While this task seems daunting, birthright can only achieve its stated goal by working not only to keep alumni connected to each other, but also to non-birthright participants. Only with these challenges in mind can birthright translate its initial impact into a sustainable influence on the American Jewish connection to Israel, and prevent so many young Jews from slipping into assimilation.
Jordan Chandler Hirsch is a Columbia University sophomore majoring in History. He is Editor-in-Chief of The Current (www.columbia.edu/cu/current) and a member-at-large of LionPAC. He can be reached at jch2134@columbia.edu.
