Section archive - Israel Education

Israel’s first “smart” hiking trail, under construction between Tiberias and Beit Sheʽarim National Park in the Lower Galilee, will bring hikers back in history to the Second Temple period more than 2,000 years ago, when the Great Sanhedrin — the supreme Jewish authority of sages – was active in this region. Hikers will have access to an innovative augmented reality-based smartphone application that will virtually reconstruct heritage sites, integrate virtual guides for children along the route and bring to life prominent scholars such as the four rabbis mentioned in the Passover Haggadah.

I felt it was imperative to examine how students and teachers, representing the full spectrum of American Jewish life, confront controversial issues related to Israel. In my doctoral research, I had the privilege of observing the teaching and learning of controversial issues related to the Arab/Palestinian-Israeli conflict in three different American Jewish day high schools (Modern Orthodox, Conservative and Community

Israelis departing Ben-Gurion International Airport last week delivered 2,500 Purim gift bags to Jews around the world as part of a project in memory of Gil-ad Shaer, Naftali Fraenkel and Eyal Yifrach. The three Israeli teenage boys were kidnapped and murdered by Palestinian terrorists as they headed home from their West Bank yeshiva in June 2014. The project, The Jewish Connection, is an initiative of a non-profit organization founded by the boys’ parents to further and strengthen the international Jewish solidarity demonstrated during the weeks between the boys’ kidnapping and discovery of their bodies.

The study of diaspora policies in political science, international relations, and political geography has moved away from conceiving diasporas as bounded entities to conceptualizing diasporas as a process to be made. One body of literature maps different strategies employed to bond diasporas to their country of origin, while another body of literature pays specific attention to diasporic identities and the ways such identities are reproduced and constructed abroad. This article seeks to bring these two literatures together by focusing on homeland tourism as a diasporization strategy, i.e. the construction, reproduction, and transmission of diasporic identity. Through the case of Taglit-Birthright – a free educational trip to Israel offered to young Jewish adults – the article identifies the specific mechanisms and micro-practices used in order to transform Israeli territory into a Jewish homeland, reproduce the narrative of dispersion, and demarcate group boundaries.