Rabbi Daniel S. Brenner, who directs one of the largest post-birthright programs in North America, begs to differ.

The JPost published a short letter from him. I’m publishing the full text (which he emailed me).

Post-birthright programs, he says, are “invisible” beside the thousands of birthright buses crisscrossing Israel. But they’re there, and they’re huge.

Birthright Israel’s Post-Trip Doubling Effect

Rabbi Daniel S Brenner

In his opinion piece on December 30th, 2009 Haviv Rettig Gur writes regarding Taglit- Birthright Israel “these connections are wasted if they are not directed at new Jewish experiences back home.” He ends the piece with a short question: “Where’s the follow-up?”

The work of “follow-up” is not as apparent to the public eye as the sight of hundreds of Taglit- banner buses on Israel’s roads. But since I have the pleasure of working with a young staff who have succeeded in providing new Jewish experiences to over fifty thousand Taglit-Birthright Israel alumni in North America during the past year, I have the opportunity to see the follow-up every day. Here is one example:

In 2009, the total number of Taglit-Birthright Israel North American trip participants for 2009 was just shy of 19,000. In the last few months, we have worked with volunteer leaders from those buses to host over 12,200 young adults for home-hospitality Shabbat meals in North America. 93% of our NEXT Shabbat meals involved some or all of the core ritual elements of Shabbat. More importantly, we found that nearly every volunteer felt that this was a positive Jewish communal experience and wanted to host again and get more involved in their local community. By the end of 2010, volunteers from this group of 19,000 trip participants will have hosted over 30,000 young adults for a NEXT Shabbat event.

This particular program is one of four areas of focus for Birthright Israel NEXT that begin on the trip and flow naturally into involvement post-trip (the others being Hebrew language learning, deepening the Israel connection and encouraging community involvement). In addition to the Shabbat program, Birthright Israel NEXT runs ulpanim for young adults in ten North American cities, works with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs through local consulates in select cities to deepen ties to Israel, and has involved thousands of post-college young Jewish adults by partnering with local Jewish and Israel-focused organizations (we linked up with thirty-two such organizations in the last year). It is through these four areas (and through many partners) that we are on track to involve 100,000 young Jewish adults in our programming in 2010.

These figures do not count the “ramping up” of programs from our on campus partner Hillel and from our colleagues at MASA, two organizations who have certainly devoted significant energy to “Birthright follow-up” in the last two years. Nor do they include the work of forward-thinking Federations, like the CJP in Boston, that have adopted new models on campus that are delivering follow-up success.

Gur asks the right questions, but I would like to offer a counter-analysis. Those young adults who go on Taglit-Birthright Israel trips and then get involved in Birthright Israel NEXT or with campus-based partners are actually doubling and in many cases quadrupling the overall impact of the trip. In our programs, we see young Jewish women and men come off of their Israel trips with a spark of energy that causes them to reach out to their friends (most of whom have not gone to Israel) and involve them in Jewish life. As a result they are transforming their social circles and injecting Jewish content and Jewish experiences in ways that they never did before. Our job at NEXT is to work within these social circles and to provide critical initial steps that will help grow sparks into new commitments. Those commitments, however, ultimately require the active engagement of young adults by the entire Jewish community. We hope to partner with many more community-based organizations, both established and emerging, as we continue to grow.

Although it is often unseen, Taglit-Birthright Israel participants are quietly transforming their generation in North America and every Jewish organization has the potential to benefit from their renewed passion for Israel and for Jewish life.

Rabbi Daniel S. Brenner
Executive Director
Birthright Israel NEXT

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Reading CNN and a Guardian opinion piece today, I realized why the Masa story generated such interest: The response to Masa was being read, and written, as a blowback against Israel from Diaspora Jewry. It is a crisis in which Israel itself, rather than a handful of educators at Masa, is the target of criticism. Now that’s a whole new level of interesting, no?

CNN writes that:

Critics say this campaign ultimately exposed what is sometimes seen as the disconnect between the Jews of Israel and their counterparts around the world: the assumption that Israeli Jewish authorities are the only ones to determine what is truly Jewish.

I assume “critics” means me, and yes, I thought it reflected the disconnect between Israel and American Jewry.

But why is the disconnect described as “the assumption that Israeli Jewish authorities are the only ones to determine what is truly Jewish?” That could fairly be said about Sephardi Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar’s end-run around American Orthodox conversions – but about Masa?

If anything, the Masa campaign was a bunch of Israelis saying what they believed Americans wanted to hear! I know firsthand that they are still reeling from shock at the response of large numbers of American Jews.

As for the Guardian, its Comment is Free section printed a fascinating and slightly disturbing piece by one Dimi Reider subtitled “A controversial ad focusing on the ‘assimilation’ of Jews fails to accept the reality that you don’t have to be Israeli to be Jewish.”

There’s that Israeli cultural hegemony rearing its ugly head yet again.

It begins – true to form – with an exposition on the ideological errors of Zionism:

The crux and core of Israel’s existence is realising the project of auto-emancipation; in other words, to emancipate Jews in what in the late 19th century appeared to be the bright future of territorial nationalism. The means to that was establishing the Jews as a distinct nation, rather than a culture or a faith present in a variety of territorial nations; and endowing this nation with its own territorial sovereignty.

Today, 112 years after the first Zionist Congress, there are at any given time more Jews outside Israel than inside it, despite murderous ethnic cleansing in Europe, forced-emigration ethnic cleansing in some Arab states and the very real, modern antisemitism that most Jews in the diaspora continue to experience. In other words, many Jews still don’t see their Judaism as a package deal with an Israeli passport or residency.

…

Even the argument that migrating to Israel is the only way to keep your identity rings strange, because Jewish identity is often a lot more pronounced when living among non-Jews – both in a desire to maintain identity and in the give-and-take with other people, other cultures and other creeds.

All this is not recognised by the ideology behind the ad. Even though most Jewish cultural strands – Talmud, Hassidism, Yiddish, Haskala and Zionism, to name a few – were born in constant friction and interaction with the non-Jewish world. People-fishers such as the Journey Project see 2,200 years of Jewish diaspora as a historic error that needs to be forgotten and bulldozed as we go back to our “normal” state of purist nationhood.

…

Mixed marriages, rather than decline of antisemitism and exclusivist nationalism, are seen here as the reason for the ever-dwindling Jewish migration to Israel, our main resource against the “Arab demographic threat”.

…

It’s worth noting that life for a mixed family in Israel is very difficult – not only because the education system and society is intolerant towards non-Jews, but simply because acquiring citizenship and legal rights for non-Jews is unbelievably complex, even if their partners are Jewish Israelis.

The ad was hastily scrapped less than a week after it was launched; Jewish Agency chairman Natan Sharansky needed few reminders that a third of his home constituency, Russian-speaking Israelis, are either partners or products of mixed marriages of the kind targeted by the ad.

Where to begin? The only reason there are more Jews outside Israel than inside is, well, America – which accounts for some 80% of the Diaspora. There’s a good reason for this: Just about every other Jew in the world was either killed during the 20th century or, if they were a bit luckier, became Israeli. With the minor (demographically) exception of Britain and a handful of tinier communities, Zionism was unfortunately accurate in predicting – and readying for – the near-total ethnic cleansing of Jews from Africa, Asia and Europe, whether (before Israel) through genocide or (after Israel) through expulsion and flight.

Even France, today the third-largest community of Jews in the world, is largely composed of North African refugees fleeing into a country emptied of its Jews by the Holocaust – hardly a stinging critique of the Zionist narrative.

So I hope Reider can forgive the Zionists their skewed perception of the Diaspora – Israelis are more or less the last major Jewish population to survive the Eastern Hemisphere’s 20th-century purges. Only in the English-speaking world did Jews survive without the Zionist movement having to rescue them.

As for the ideology behind Masa, of course, Reider is extrapolating wildly and irrelevantly. Visiting Israel has a profound effect on Diaspora Jewish youth – even those who are not deeply connected to Jewish religious and cultural life. Study after study has shown that birthright israel, for example, has a strong positive effect on Jewish affiliation across the board – whether religious, cultural, ethnic, you name it.

And he can rest easy: these newly-affiliated young people almost never make aliya. (I explain why here.)

So if aliya is the goal of programs like birthright or Masa, they have failed miserably. If they see “Jewish diaspora as a historic error” then they should shut down, because the net effect of their work is to strengthen it.

As for Sharansky’s “home constituency,” the vast majority of these would likely support the ad enthusiastically. They do not tend to share the profoundly individualistic structure of identity Reider seems to espouse, and most say they’d prefer to convert into the Israeli Jewish collective. The fact that they can’t is another agony-filled story of rabbis and intra-Orthodox competition which is best left for another day.

As for Israeli society’s intolerance toward non-Jews – I’ll generously put that comment down to Reider’s British milieu. It seems it’s hardly possible to get published in the Guardian without at least one throw-away comment about Israeli racism.

To sum up, the Masa fiasco has been a particularly fascinating canvas on which different kinds of Jews have painted their particular pictures. For Americans, they have lashed out at the misunderstanding of the assimilation problem, which calls for outreach and education, not, as the ad suggested, national mobilization. For the Israelis, most of whom have never given Diaspora identity much thought, it’s been a lesson in the simple fact that massive Diaspora Jewish civilizations exist. For CNN, it’s been a crisis ripe for MSM-style misunderstanding. For at least one British Jew, it’s been one more instance of Israeli state aggression and cultural hegemony.

Hey, on matters of Jewish identity, to each his own, right?

By the way, it’s worth noting that the anger at Masa was hardly universal. To describe “assimilated” Jews as “lost” is a legitimate statement of values, especially if the ad makes explicit that they are lost “to us,” to the community. It’s not as though they will burn in hell for leaving the church, just that they will not be Jews in a generation. Is it so wrong for an educational program to take its cues from American Jewry and set about trying to reverse that?

Discuss.

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American Jewish youth are “assimilating,” American Jewish leaders keep complaining. Somewhere, Masa executives heard the oft-quoted, outdated and vague notion that about half of American Jewry are “leaving the fold.”

This conventional wisdom is the product not only of the 1990 National Jewish Population Survey, which seemed to suggest a 50 percent intermarriage rate among American Jews, but also of research by the likes of Prof. Steven Cohen, who speaks of “half” of American Jewry “distancing” itself from the Jewish community, and another “half” growing closer and stronger in their Jewish affiliation, though he refers to broad identity trends rather than numerical facts.

In any case, that sense that half is “lost” and half is “safe” amounts to the only thing most Israelis, even those dealing with the Diaspora, actually know about American Jewry.

Faced with such a clear and agreed-upon crisis, they reacted in a quintessentially Israeli way. They mobilized.

And, spectacularly, demonstrated a reality I have come to know well from the past few years of following the research conducted by my father, Rabbi Ed Rettig of the American Jewish Committee: The Jewish world does not appreciate and fully understand the vastness of the cultural gulf that divides the two largest communities, Americans and Israelis, which together constitute 80% of all Jews. Perhaps it is time to begin to question what, as communities, we really know about each other.

One of the best demonstrations of this breach comes in the form of Israel experience programs like Masa.

You can’t argue with the data of surveys by the likes of Cohen, Prof. Leonard Saxe of Brandeis University and others showing the profound changes wrought on young American Jews by a mere week-long bus tour of Israel. But no Israeli policymaker can offer a good explanation for what, exactly, is happening to those young people. What is it about Israel that makes young Americans, who are utterly and proudly American and sometimes only conditionally Jewish, react so positively? Americans, too, are befuddled by this gap. Americans fund and encourage their children to go to Israel by the hundreds of thousands, but rarely consider clearly and rationally why a mere ten days in a foreign country can so affect the identity and lifelong affiliation of an ordinary 19-year-old.

Here’s a theory: Israeli society has a profoundly different and deeply moving way of defining the very notion of Jewishness.

Israelis are a product of their heritage and experience. The vast majority of Israelis hail from countries untouched by the Protestant Reformation and the identity-shifting aspects of modernity. In both Eastern Europe and the Muslim world, religious identities are fundamentally collective and couched in familial terms. Meanwhile, for 60 years incessant wars and hostile borders have added an element of collective fate to that Middle Eastern and East European structure of identifying.

It is that organic, rooted nationhood, a radically different notion of what it means to be a Jew from anything Americans have ever experienced, that so impresses young American Jews, and makes programs such as Masa and birthright Israel transformative experiences for Americans. The vast majority do not become Israeli or adopt Israeli identity structures, but do seem to come away with a more complex Jewishness; an understanding that there are aspects and layers to Jewish affiliation which they had not experienced before.

American Jews, too, are products of their broader environment. Like their surrounding culture, they are radically individualistic, believing that the source of authentic identity, of religious authority and of life decisions, lies within the individual. Where Israelis are profoundly Eastern in the overarching structure of their Jewishness, Americans understand identity in radically individualistic and essentially American ways.

Thus, faced with what they believe to be a genuine crisis, the Israelis went about solving it the way Israelis solve everything from Arab invasions to water shortages to poverty – by national mobilization. Assimilation, Israelis believe, is fundamentally a problem to be solved through collective action, not identity education and personal affiliation.

The total worldwide Jewish population “is on the verge of negative growth,” warned Masa CEO Ayelet Shiloh-Tamir at the launch of the controversial ad campaign last week. “We want Israelis to view assimilation [in the Diaspora] as a national strategic problem,” she added bluntly.

For Americans, it is hard to hear the campaign as anything more than a denial of individual autonomy and personal authenticity. The core assumptions behind the campaign seem, in an American cultural context, appalling.

The commercial that started this whole thing

It is particularly interesting to note how knowledgeable American Jewish observers characterized their discomfort. For the Forward’s JJ Goldberg, the imagery of subway and railway stations – where the “Lost” posters are seen hanging – were reminiscent of the Holocaust.

Esther Kustanowitz, a well-known blogger in the Jewish blogosphere, had this to say.

“But I have to tell you, that as an American citizen and – up until almost a year ago – a longtime New Yorker, I can’t look at those ‘missing’ flyers without thinking of 9/11 – those flyers, hanging in many locations all over Manhattan and beyond, were at once symbols of hope that someone who was missing was ‘only missing,’ and a denial of the reality that most of the missing were actually dead. Invoking that image to refer to people who are not dead, but presumed ‘lost to Judaism’ because they ‘married out,’ seems somewhat inappropriate.”

Perhaps it was their unique sensitivity as veteran writers, or perhaps their long familiarity with Israeli society, that allowed both Goldberg and Kustanowitz to sense the underlying assumption behind the ad campaign that accounts for another fundamental dividing line between Israeli and American Jewish culture – the importance and sanctity of sacrifice.

In a country with so much experience of loss, where every generation has had its own war, where every Israeli knows personally a casualty of war, where there truly are enemies at the gates, the ideal of sacrifice strikes a deep chord in the collective consciousness. Just compare the somber and sacred Yom Hazikaron to the “Happy Memorial Day Weekend” banners festively festooning the entrances to American malls. Sixty years of relative peace have stripped away personal grief from American national commemoration. Loss and grief do not form, as they do in Israel, part of the basic identity of most Americans.

One Israeli friend said he saw in the posters not “missing persons,” 9/11 victims or Holocaust victims, but war dead. The music of the television spots evoked Israeli war documentaries; the age was right; and the ethnic mix – Americans, Russians, French-speakers of North African origin – suggested the kind of casualty list you would get from an army as ethnically diverse as the IDF.

Had I been asked, I would have advised against this campaign. But now that it’s been aired, perhaps it’s time for the two communities to do something other than shout across the breach.

Any conversation about assimilation and continuity inevitably invokes some of the fundamental pillars of communal identity. For Israelis, that almost automatically means collective action, sacrifice and loss. But for Americans, those noble values translate into an imposition on the autonomous, sacred self.

Speak to the heads of Masa and you’ll discover real bewilderment and resentment at being forbidden by unfathomably sensitive Americans to express some of their most intrinsic values as Jews. They are right.

Speak to the Americans, whose existential crisis is indeed assimilation, but who understand this as a call to fashion new worlds of personal meaning and individualistic affiliation, and you’ll find real anger at the callous Israeli attempt to define who is “lost” and who is “found.” They’re right, too.

Friends, the experiences of birthright and Masa show that these two communities, blended, strengthen each other. But first we must come to terms with how incredibly different they really are.

Let’s talk about it.

This article can also be read here.

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