LuAnne Tyzzer's List: Post birthright

• “Tourists, Travelers, and Citizens: Jewish Engagement of Young Adults in Four Centers of North American Jewish Life
• the organized Jewish community has failed at attracting this enthusiastic and turned-on generation of young Jews, leaving them bereft after the high of their journey to Israel.

• although free, was priceless in so many other ways.
• Israel wasn't a place high on my list of travel destinations, and it didn't seem like the safest vacation spot if you just followed snippets in the media.
• connecting with my heritage
• business and entrepreneurship

  • What about others?
    Are these the most popular, secular arenas for post Birthright, young Jews?
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   The goal of Taglit-Birthright Israel, an international non-profit organization founded by a group of Jewish philanthropists, is to reconnect Jewish young people with the historical foundations of their faith.

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• 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.
• Traveling to Israel with a peer group may be inspirational, and having Shabbat dinner with friends might be fun, but these experiences are incomplete. They make people enjoy participating in Jewish activities and having Jewish friends, and they might influence people to feel that marrying a Jew is important, but somewhere along the line Birthright missed a step: Why is any of this important? Why is it important to be involved in a Jewish community? Why is it important to raise Jewish children? Why care about Israel? Most important of all-in a society largely devoid of anti-Semitism-why be Jewish in America today?
   
    All of the programmatic successes are pointless without a raison d’etre. In this sense, Birthright is not a big idea. It is a big, successful program, but it does not offer a compelling reason for people to be Jewish.

  • Duh.
    Is also supported in Millenials I do what I want because I'm talented mentality..
• for the first time feeling that he has a place in the Jewish community, a sense of what it means to be a Jew and why he wants to stay that way, all because of Birthright. We can hardly expect every Jewish young adult to be compelled by one specific reason to be Jewish, but we should expect birthright to at least make serious attempts to cover that ground in a way they aren’t so far.
• But if it’s going to ensure long term viability and success I think Birthright should take two steps.
   
   First, it should fund high school students who are going on organized Israel trips of their own. Katz suggests this in the PresenTense article:
• Birthright needs to sharpen its goal. It needs to ask participants directly what they need to feel that Judaism and Israel are relevant, and it needs to provide that. It needs to ask itself what can make a Birthright trip more effective (hint: it’s not a Birthright Mega-event) and it needs to consider whether alumni programming has any hope of attracting anyone who wouldn’t stay involved anyway.

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• may carry a sense of entitlement about them and have an expectation  of frequent positive feedback.
• expect college to  help launch them to greatness

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  They are group oriented rather than being  individualists
• They prefer egalitarian leadership, not hierarchies.
• They are forming a tight-knit generation
• They dislike selfishness and are oriented  toward service learning and volunteerism.    
• Their focus is more on the world of achievement rather than personal  development.  The Boomer generation made their mark in the humanities  and arts, whereas the Millennials prefer math and science fields. 
• They think multi-tasking saves time and is a smart thing  to do, but aren’t usually aware of the poorer quality of results. 
• They are trying to invite rules and norms back into the  culture.

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• few get involved in their Jewish communities on their return.
• Birthright has 26 different trip organizers, including for- and non-profit companies, which offer an array of ideological options (both Chabad and the Reform Movement offer Birthright trips). With so many options, participants can choose the program they find most interesting-if they like hiking, they can choose Israel Outdoors. If they are or want to be involved with Hillel, they can travel on a Hillel-run Birthright trip.
• the program promotes both firmness and flexibility. Forty percent of the trip must focus on five central themes: contemporary Israel, the narrative of the Jewish people, the values of the Jewish people, arts and culture, and the Jewish Hebrew calendar (most importantly, the Sabbath). Trip providers can choose to fulfill these standards through a variety of activities, though Birthright recommends visiting certain sites for each one. The other 60% of the program is left up to the individual trip providers. Once providers comply with these guidelines and undergo training, they receive funding from Birthright. Birthright employs only a cadre of inspectors to monitor the different groups and ensure quality control.
• For the first time, a significant percentage of young American Jews are having an intensive (albeit short) Jewish educational experience in Israel. But Birthright’s very success in bringing so many Jews to Israel is also controversial.
• The founders of Birthright felt it was their moral obligation to touch the lives of those people whom no one was touching.”
• while Birthright succeeds in influencing its participants’ attitudes toward Israel and the Jewish people, it is less successful in motivating participants to join Jewish communities after the trip.
• the Steinhardt Institute data demonstrate that warm attitudes toward Israel and the Jewish people don’t necessarily translate into actions.
• Given this, the study’s authors conclude that Birthright’s “demonstrated impact on actual Jewish behavior is modest and inconsistent. Although the Birthright Israel experience increases engagement in organized Jewish life on campus, the gain is only partial.”
• Those most critical of Birthright are generally administrators and educators of more traditional, longer-term summer or academic programs in Israel. These programs, which often run from 6-8 weeks, have been around for decades, and include United Synagogue Youth (USY) Israel Pilgrimage, Ramah Seminar, North American Foundation of Temple Youth (NFTY) in Israel, Young Judaea, and Alexander Muss High School in Israel (AMHSI). Directors of these programs say that while the Birthright idea is laudable in theory, it is reducing enrollment in longer-term programs because parents consciously avoid paying $5,000-$7,000 when they can send their children on Birthright for free.
• These educators are concerned about this trend not just because of their self-interest, but because they claim their programs are more substantive and usually focus on the high school years, when kids are more impressionable. In their view, a two-month experience is more influential than a 10-day one: there are more opportunities and more time to tour sites, process feelings, and build community. In a recent article entitled “Birth-Wrong,” Yossi Katz, an educator for AMHSI, wrote that “if I really had my choice, I’d prefer to bring [young Jews] to Israel when they were 16 or 17 for two months of true Jewish education and not wait till all I could give them was too little - too late.
• It may be, for example, that the intensity of the Birthright experience, where every day can be activity-filled and memorable, is actually more influential than a longer program which may seem to drag on. If longer-term Israel programs want to prove their claims, they must start collecting data on their programs according to the same rigorous standards as Birthright.
• And even Birthright’s well-collected data tell only a partial story. Because Birthright is less than a decade old, its level of success will only become clear when its alumni start to marry, have children and raise families. Many Birthright alumni may skip a Hillel program in college but seriously consider marrying a Jew when it comes time to make that choice. As Birthright continues to collect this data, we can expect the picture to become clearer.
• Birthright doesn’t have sufficient infrastructure to network among its alumni, and many participants find it hard to stay connected to their Birthright friends once back in America.
• The other, related, problem is that most Birthright trips are not campus or community-based.
• Building communities at the local level, led by Birthright-age staff, is the answer he’s betting on.
• only tactical successes
• Through all this, there seems to be a line connecting touring in Israel with community-building at home and, ultimately, with furthering Jewish continuity.
• The problem with this approach is that it’s strictly based on experiences. Traveling to Israel with a peer group may be inspirational, and having Shabbat dinner with friends might be fun, but these experiences are incomplete. They make people enjoy participating in Jewish activities and having Jewish friends, and they might influence people to feel that marrying a Jew is important, but somewhere along the line Birthright missed a step: Why is any of this important? Why is it important to be involved in a Jewish community? Why is it important to raise Jewish children? Why care about Israel? Most important of all-in a society largely devoid of anti-Semitism-why be Jewish in America today?
• The winner of Brandeis’s recent big idea contest, Yehuda Kurtzer, might provide an interesting way forward. In his proposal, “The sacred task of rebuilding Jewish memory,” he writes: “The next great step for the Jewish future will be the reclamation of the Jewish past. I believe that the most successful, interesting and engaging programs currently invigorating the Jewish world are seizing upon this idea, and implementing the gifts of the Jewish past in surprisingly progressive and fresh ways.” Kurtzer will eventually publish a book that explains how the Jewish people’s collective past can inform its future. It’s somewhat ironic that the winning big idea is one that focuses on the past, but maybe there’s something to this. At a time when Jewish organizations are not giving American Jews a convincing reason to be Jewish, mining our history for inspiration can be an important part of the process in redefining who we are.

  • Topic of Evolution and Structure?
• American Judaism needs a mission statement. Birthright provides wonderful positive Jewish experiences, increases participants’ feelings of belonging to the Jewish people and attachment to Israel, and may even get many of its alumni involved back at home. But it is up to others, it seems, to answer the more fundamental question of why it’s all important in the first place.

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• Given the impressive  number of informal Jewish educational programs available, the lack of  literature dedicated to this field is of significant concern.
• Looking further  afield it is clear that many of the theoretical underpinnings and practical  applications of other educational contexts resonate with experiential  Jewish education. Three such fields are outdoor education, museum education  and the use of technology in education. By highlighting core components  of these fields we are able to broaden our understanding of experiential  Jewish education and the various challenges which it faces. 
• personal  experience of learning
• learning with the display,  and not necessarily from

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• The literature on play and  sports emphasizes the involvement and engagement of the learner; the joy in the  moment; the immediacy of it all; the positive memory, and the warm associations.

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  'Birthright is changing the Jewish world'

• Haviv Rettig

   

  THE JERUSALEM POST  

   

  Jun. 3, 2008
• "Israel is the greatest  classroom the Jewish people  has at its disposal, and Birthright is succeeding in bringing it to  life," Prof. Barry Chazan, who together with Prof. Leonard Saxe  wrote the just-released Ten  Days of Birthright Israel: A Journey in Young Adult Identity, told The  Jerusalem Post in the  capital on Monday.
• The program's director of marketing, Gidi Mark, said, "We've  made [visiting Israel] a basic component of the Jewish lifecycle, just  like a brit or a bat mitzva. Now it's not just about strengthening Jewish  identity, but it's becoming part of Jewish identity."
• The program looks set for ever  greater expansion. It is being  studied by Armenians, Irish-Americans, African-Americans and even Palestinians  as a model for strengthening diaspora identities.
• For Mark, one of its greatest  gifts is the strengthened sense of confidence participants report after  going home. "Even if  they don't learn everything in 10 days," he says, "they can  still go back to anti-Zionists on their campuses and say to them, 'Don't  tell me what you saw on CNN, I was there.'"

  • They won't learn everything in 10 days, which is exactly why there's a basis for some thought about framing the trip and the experiential learning with a more formal approach before.

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  Inside Israel

    

  
  Jewish Life