Skip to main content

Birthright happens

A few people were talking on Sunday about Birthright Israel (and, within my family, bickering a little about who went, didn’t go, didn’t find out about it until they were 24; whatever).

One person mentioned that the goal of the program was to encourage aliyah from North America, and I suggested – hee, hee, I’m such a rude guest – that the goal might not be aliyah so much as creating intelligent FIRST-PERSON advocates for Israel, wherever they end up living.

It’s one thing to hear about a country on the news, and entirely a different thing to see it as part of a peer group.

So I just remembered – two days later, out of the deep blue ether of my mind – a story one of my sisters told me about a female friend of hers who went on Birthright and came home happily paired up… with the girl of her dreams.  Both my sister and her friend seemed to think there was something coyly subversive about that; subverting the establishment agenda. 

Not yielding her budding sexual identity to two weeks (or however-long) of propaganda; I guess that was the point.

But, thinking about it now, I wonder how subversive her coming home with that “nice Jewish girl” actually was.

I think they fell right into the Birthright agenda… if you see that agenda as normalizing Israel.  Internalizing Israel, living Israel.  Living life in Israel, falling in love in Israel, and maybe, by extension, falling a little bit in love with Israel.  Being yourself – in Israel.

The picture of Israel you get from the news is all, “Flotilla!  Gaza!  Wall!  Rockets!  Apartheid!”  The picture of Israel most teens – most people have – rarely includes such mundane yet extraordinary things as buying a  slice of pizza, going to the bathroom, (l’havdil!) falling in love.

Even falling in love with a person of the same sex.  Yes, in Israel, that happens.  Life happens. 

Once you’ve been there, you can never again deny Israel… the way you might if all you’d seen was the news.  I sure wish they’d had Birthright when I was that age.

Comments

  1. Even as someone who always had a strong Jewish identity, and as someone who had been to Israel (although not on an organized group with peers), I was blown away by my Birthright experience. It changed many, many things for me (and for the husband, then fiance, as well).

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I love your comments!

Popular posts from this blog

לימודי קודש/Limudei Kodesh Copywork & Activity Printables

Welcome to my Limudei Kodesh / Jewish Studies copywork and activity printables page.  As of June 2013, I am slowly but surely moving all my printables over to 4shared because Google Docs / Drive is just too flaky for me. What you’ll find here: Weekly Parsha Copywork More Parsha Activities More Chumash / Tanach Activities Yom Tov Copywork & Activities Tefillah Copywork Pirkei Avos / Pirkei Avot Jewish Preschool Resources Other printables! For General Studies printables and activities, including Hebrew-English science resources and more, click here . For Miscellaneous homeschool helps and printables, click here . If you use any of my worksheets, activities or printables, please leave a comment or email me at Jay3fer “at” gmail “dot” com, to link to your blog, to tell me what you’re doing with it, or just to say hi!  If you want to use them in a school, camp or co-op setting, please email me (remove the X’s) for rates. If you just want to say Thank You, here’s a

Hebrew/ עברית & English General Studies Printables

For Jewish Studies, including weekly parsha resources and copywork, click here . If you use any of my worksheets, activities or printables, please leave a comment or email me at Jay3fer “at” gmail “dot” com, to link to your blog, to tell me what you’re doing with it, or just to say hi!  If you want to use them in a school, camp or co-op setting, please email me (remove the X’s) for rates. If you enjoy these resources, please consider buying my weekly parsha book, The Family Torah :  the story of the Torah, written to be read aloud – or any of my other wonderful Jewish books for kids and families . English Worksheets & Printables: (For Hebrew, click here ) Science :  Plants, Animals, Human Body Math   Ambleside :  Composers, Artists History Geography Language & Literature     Science General Poems for Elemental Science .  Original Poems written by ME, because the ones that came with Elemental Science were so awful.  Three pages are included:  one page with two po

Are Jews an "underrepresented community" in children’s publishing?

I applied for a writing award yesterday. I'm not going to get it, but that's not what I wanted to share with you. Here's what I wanted to share. This box:   I stared at this box for a long, long time. And then I decided not to check it. Even though I believe people like me truly are underrepresented, we probably wouldn’t fit the definition in other people's minds. Why? Well, because we're European. Because we are white. Because as everybody knows, Jews control the media. (do we???) If anything, some people say, Jews are over -represented in publishing. And yet. Some definitions are careful not to include people like me. Like this random definition from the State of California which defines underrepresented for some very specific business purposes as: "an individual who self-identifies as Black, African American, Hispanic, Latino, Asian, Pacific Islander, Native American, Native Hawaiian, or Alaska Native, or who self-identi