Search results for: Birthright

Taglit-Birthright Israel has brought hundreds of thousands of diaspora Jewish young adults on tours of Israel. Drawing on data from a large-scale program evaluation, we ask how the program affects participants’ feelings of homeland attachment and political views on contentious homeland issues. North Americans who traveled to Israel with Taglit between 2010 and 2012 were surveyed together with a comparison group of applicants to the program who did not participate.

When we were developing JCC Association’s Statement of Principles in 2012, we knew that if we were to help JCCs and their members lead engaged Jewish lives, then Israel needed to be at the heart of what they do. We didn’t want them to just pay lip service, incorporating Israel into a weeklong focus at some point, but rather to weave its essence throughout their programs, events and activities. But how do you put Israel into the very air of a JCC when so many staff to which that task would fall have never set foot in the land? To that end, JCC Association’s Israel Center, working with Taglit-Birthright and Amazing Israel, our tour provider, put together a trip for young Jewish communal professionals, so that they could experience Israel firsthand and bring it back to their JCCs.

Emily Comisar discusses a recurring question. How we get Birthright Taglit participants to feel a sense of responsibility to the community, to engage in it in whichever way is most meaningful and make it a more welcoming place for a rising generation of young Jewish adults? At a recent professional conference, she gained some insights about this question.

This first-of- its-kind academic conference to be held at Brandeis University on May 23-24, 2012, will explore what scholars, practitioners, and policy makers have learned and can learn from Taglit-Birthright Israel, the largest single educational program in the Jewish world today. The goals of the conference are to expand the number and variety of scholars and public policy intellectuals engaged in the examination of Taglit, to explore Taglit as a social experiment in educational innovation, and to review and integrate current knowledge on a wide variety of substantive issues.