INTRODUCTION
Concern over intergenerational ethnic continuity—with members of minority groups seeking to ensure that youth become invested in and committed to religious, cultural, or ethnic identities—is long-standing and inherent to group boundary formation (Barth Reference Barth, Martiniello and Rath2010). In recent years, this concern has been particularly pronounced in the North American Jewish community, with socialization and retention of Jewish young adults emerging as one of its central philanthropic preoccupations. Often prompted by demographic concerns over out-marriage or declining rates of ethno-religious affiliation, as Sarna (Reference Sarna1994) writes, the “continuity agenda” has become—in the language of a Jewish education official—“the most complex and far-reaching that the North American Jewish community has ever taken on” (p. 55).
This focus on Jewish continuity largely emerged as overt discrimination toward Jews in North America waned. Organized efforts to preserve Jewish continuity thus appeared as Jewish integration proved ever more successful (Cohen and Fein, Reference Cohen and Fein1985)—a success which required new tools for managing community identity and intra-ethnic ties. Central to this was a reliance on the language of community survival: threats to the physical survival of Jews from anti-Semitism were now replaced with a concern over community survival wrought by declining affiliation and the potential “vanishing” of American Jews in the process. As Peter Novick (Reference Novick1999) argues, Jewish “acceptance came at a price,” and it was now assimilation and the “absence of hostility to Jews that was threatening” (p. 184) to the community's ties, size, and survival.
This concern over Jewish continuity provides us with an important insight. How communities manage threats to their existence, and the collective identity of their members, can be intimately tied to the strategies adopted in the face of discrimination. Indeed, in the case of Jewish continuity, the narratives for managing concerns over assimilation were deeply influenced by the legacy and experiences of anti-Semitism, such that as Cohen and Fein (Reference Cohen and Fein1985) describe, North American Jewry's understanding of itself as under threat was not discontinuous with its perception of the threats it faced as Jews, although now perhaps those threats were conceived of as internal rather than external (p. 87; Novick Reference Novick1999).
The most significant program to emerge from this agenda is Taglit-Birthright Israel (taglit means “discovery” in Hebrew). Since 1999, Taglit-Birthright Israel has provided over 250,000 free ten-day trips to Israel for Jewish young adults from over fifty countries, and principally from the United States and Canada. Among the goals of the program's founders is to build a “joyous renaissance” of Jewish life, to respond to assimilation concerns, and most centrally to build and sustain Jewish identity among new generations of youth. Individual tours and programs are tailored to diverse needs and interests by a range of Jewish organizations worldwide who receive Birthright funds: yet, the emphasis across all tours is to build Jewish continuity by highlighting and making salient the role of the State of Israel—and meeting young Israeli Jews of their age—for young Jews worldwide (Gerstenfeld Reference Gerstenfeld2005; Saxe and Chazan, Reference Saxe and Chazan2008).
In and of itself, the idea underlying Birthright was not new. Travel to Israel had long been part of the experience and community-building of diasporic Jews, and available data indicate that such travel indeed has the potential to reinforce existing religious and community affiliations among Jewish youth (Saxe and Chazan, Reference Saxe and Chazan2008, pp. 9–10). Birthright Israel, however, was designed to also reach out to those young Jews with weaker ties to the Jewish community and to Israel. As we explore below, Taglit-Birthright Israel is not the only program of its sort; though Birthright is certainly the most prominent and active example, several diasporic communities in Europe and North America now engage in formal “homeland tours” to draw new generations of young adults in contact with their roots or ascribed homelands.
An array of research has been generated around Taglit-Birthright Israel. By nearly all accounts (though Sobel Reference Sobel2003 offers a different perspective), the program has been successful in achieving its planned goals among participants. Existing research indicates that compared to when they began—and also compared to nonparticipants who applied but didn't attend—Birthright participants indeed return with a greater sense of collective identity, engage in a greater number of community-oriented and cultural practices, and anticipate remaining more closely affiliated with other Jewish community members. As Saxe et al. (Reference Saxe, Sasson, Hecht, Phillips, Shain, Wright and Kadushin2011) in a recent program evaluation of Birthright conclude, “participation in Taglit-Birthright Israel alters the trajectory of Jewish identification and engagement,” and in the process “has the potential to transform, not just individuals, but the community at large” (pp. 21–22).
There is long-standing research in social psychology that can help us to provide insights into the success of programs such as Taglit-Birthright Israel in producing collective identity. We know from this research that individuals are motivated to view their in-groups as positive, and as distinct from other groups (Tajfel Reference Tajfel1981; Tajfel and Turner, Reference Tajfel, Turner, Worchel and Austin1986); as Kelner's (Reference Kelner2010) ethnography of Taglit-Birthright Israel demonstrates, these tours work to emphasize participants' Jewish selves over alternative elements of their identity, such that “tourists find themselves able to situate not only the country they are touring in terms of them but also themselves” (p. 182).
Yet while these psychological processes of otherness and sameness are surely at play in these tours, we demonstrate in this paper that the collective identity that is produced is also reliant on, or attended by, an intense mobilization of the emotions of group participants. This is what Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (Reference Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Goldberg, Heilman and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett2002) calls the emotional itinerary of youth tours to Israel, through which feelings of Jewishness and community are taken up as elements of identity. That an array of emotions is at stake is present throughout the literature on Birthright—whether in research on the camaraderie participants experience with the peers they meet, memories and photographs of their experiences, the thrill-seeking during the trip, the introspection with which participants grapple, or the intensity with which these youth experience the geography and historical sites of “mythic Israel” (Ben-Yehuda Reference Ben-Yehuda1995; Kelner Reference Kelner2010; Sobel Reference Sobel2003). Indeed, as Kelner (Reference Kelner2010) argues, it may be that generating intense positive affect is precisely what drives the success of these tours and the group identification with Israel which they foster (p. 65; Kelner Reference Kelner2003).
This paper attends directly to the emotional work that underlies collective identity formation (Cerulo Reference Cerulo1997). Through focus groups with Birthright participants, we find that these tours engage participants in the question of how they should affiliate as Jews and how they can participate in forging this collective identity across Israel and the diaspora. Yet the link between the emotion they experience and the collective identity they forge is not solely attributable to the intensity of positive emotion that participants experience. Drawing on Smelser's (Reference Smelser1998) sociological analysis of ambivalence, we find that collective identity is forged in these trips precisely because they engage and mobilize competing sets of emotions from participants, who experience dimensions of closeness and distance at once—indeed, it is precisely through this powerful push and pull of emotion, and how participants come to make sense of these emotional polarities, that participants come to affirm and invest in a specific form of collective Jewish identity. We conclude by articulating how a sociological study of these processes and their expression, or how individuals work through what Smelser calls “opposing affective orientations,” can be incorporated into a sociological study of how group solidarities and collective identities are affirmed.
HOMELAND TOURISM
There is abundant research on how personal identity—and with it, the identity of a nation—are created through travel and tourism. This research turns on the effects of memorials, heritage sites, or commemorations for individual engagement and identification (Bruner Reference Bruner1996; Clarke Reference Clarke, Clarke and Thomas2006; Holsey Reference Holsey, Markowitz and Stefansson2004; Osborne Reference Osborne2001; Poria et al., Reference Poria, Butler and Airey2003; Wessendorf Reference Wessendorf2007) or for generating state narratives and collective mythologies (Ben-Yehuda Reference Ben-Yehuda1995; Vinitzky-Seroussi Reference Vinitzky-Seroussi2009). There is also abundant research on pilgrimage, often focused on identifying and understanding the spirituality of the journey (Coleman Reference Coleman2002; Hammoudi Reference Hammoudi2006).
Often inspired by this research, more specific work has built up around homeland tours: this work focuses on organized homeland trips developed by diasporic or national communities, as a lens through which to view the transnational production of ethnic and national identity. Across countries and homeland tours, three broad themes have emerged from this research: 1) these tours often achieve their intended goals, in that participants indeed experience a reconfiguration of their communal and religious practices, frequently including stronger filiative bonds; 2) while an official narrative of sameness across borders is often presented on these tours, through their encounters participants from both the diaspora and the homeland also become increasingly attuned to differences that distinguish them from each other; and 3) homeland tours provide participants with a sense of their ancestral roots and ethnic identities, but equally serve as opportunities to work out their place within diasporic settings.
Building collective identity on these tours occurs at several registers. For example, Andrea Louie's (Reference Louie2004) study of Chinese homeland tours finds that the tours are powerful precisely because they are “so carefully planned” and provide participants with an emotionally intense journey (p. 80). Participants focus on understanding and documenting their family histories; as Louie (Reference Louie2003) writes, some go on to become activists, and many describe their experiences with “a decidedly mystical and romanticized, yet personal tone” (pp. 753–754) such that the program was “powerful precisely because it involved the whole group's participation in supporting these individual explorations [of identity]” (p. 756). Similarly, in his study of Philippine Homeland Tours, Marco Garrido (Reference Garrido2010) demonstrates how young Filipino Americans experience a sense of elation in those moments when they successfully “pass” as Filipino on these tours, how participants then come to internalize a moral obligation to help those in the Philippines, and how these youth learn to carve out an identity as activists through which they develop “claims of belonging to both places” (pp. 190–196).
These often emotional responses of belonging do not mean that participants, or their local hosts, go on to adopt a primordialist understanding of identity. Mainland Chinese, for instance, come to question whether those overseas remain culturally Chinese, given the differences in habits, language, and expectations for personal relations. For their part, as Louie (Reference Louie2000) reports, Chinese American youth “coated with insect repellant looked out of place in the villages” and kept largely to themselves—so that at times in these encounters “they just shake hands, pat each other on the shoulders, and take pictures” (pp. 657–658). Filipino Americans experience similar displacement, while also playing what Garrido (Reference Garrido2010) calls “authenticity games” (p. 187) by being critical of the Phillipines as both “too” American and underdeveloped at once. Indeed, participants on tours to South Korea or to China are at times uninterested in embracing the tours' narratives of progress and economic success of homelands, identifying instead with either the traditional or “difficult pasts” (Kim Reference Kim2003, p. 241) with which they are longing to connect (Louie Reference Louie2004).
Evaluations of Taglit-Birthright Israel have demonstrated across an array of measures the program's success in producing collective identity and in-group solidarities. For example, compared with their peers who applied to the program but did not attend, longitudinal evaluations indicate that program participants are more likely to feel connected to Israel and to be able to explain the Israeli political situation; to engage in Jewish communal institutions following the tour; to expect to marry endogamously; to have positive views of Israel's successes, and to be less likely to define it as a country beset by strife; to engage with Israeli news directly; to have spouses who have converted to Judaism when they have non-Jewish-born spouses; and to place importance on raising their children as Jewish (Saxe et al., Reference Saxe, Sasson, Hecht, Phillips, Shain, Wright and Kadushin2011; Saxe and Chazan, Reference Saxe and Chazan2008). Also notable is the durability of these effects, with differences between participants and nonparticipants still discernible nearly a decade after participation. Furthermore, at least on some dimensions the tour seems to have a greater effect for those with less organized Jewish backgrounds—for instance, differences in connections to Israel become most pronounced for those with the least extensive background in Jewish rituals prior to the tour (Saxe et al., Reference Saxe, Sasson, Hecht, Phillips, Shain, Wright and Kadushin2011, p. 10).
Ethnographic work to date on Taglit-Birthright elucidates that the process of forming collective identity relies heavily on affect and emotion. Echoing other work on homeland tourism, most critical for Birthright participants is their exposure to “mythic Israel” and the emotional content that participants bring to these sites. Kelner (Reference Kelner2010) documents the collective effervescence produced by the tour, arguing that Israel becomes central to participants as a “summarizing symbol” of the excitement and the social experience of the tour rather than through any specific attribute of Israel itself (p. 200; Kelner Reference Kelner2003). Kelner demonstrates that participants experience a deep sense of community with the thousands of other participants they encounter, lose themselves in the excitement and youthful exuberance produced by the tour, and then come away with memories of the geography and spiritual moments to which they were exposed. As Kelner et al. (Reference Kelner, Saxe, Kadushin, Canar, Lindholm, Ossman, Perloff, Phillips, Teres, Wolf and Woocher2000) indicate, “Birthright Israel succeeded in touching the hearts and souls of participants when it tapped core American Jewish symbols by showing them the heavenly Israel of their dreams—an ancient, beautiful land rich with religious meaning and the history of the triumphs and travails of the Jewish people; the land their parents lobbied for and gave money to; the land their grandparents dreamed of and great-grandparents prayed for. The other, earthly Israel—the Israel of Bauhaus architecture in Tel Aviv, malls and McDonald's, and in the poet Amichai's words, ‘a man who's bought fruit and vegetables for his family’—was of passing interest but largely irrelevant, in spite of the best efforts of the trip organizers” (p. 29).
What Kelner's (Reference Kelner2010) work demonstrates, then, is that a specific cognitive and emotional positioning of Israel as a homeland—rather than as an everyday home—is core to the moral meaning through which Birthright participants develop their collective identity. Israel comes to occupy a symbolic position within diasporic Jewish cultural practices, and participants gain a sense of their symbolic and material attachments to Israel and to Jewish community life—all while affirming their differences from everyday life in this land (p. 204). For Kelner, this becomes the core of the homeland experience: “Programs like Taglit bring diaspora Jews to Israel as co-ethnics, yet from passport control to the mifgashim [encounters] and in many other situations throughout the trip, they reinforce tourists' awareness that they are engaging the country as foreign nationals. Alongside this, however, these programs call travelers' attention to their own feelings of otherness in the countries where they live, and generate feelings of ownership, belonging, implication, and responsibility to a country where they do not” (p. 200). The result is that belonging occurs both in the homeland and the diaspora, “affirming a form of belonging that is constituted by multiple rootedness and multiple otherness” (p. 200).
Yet despite attending to the role of emotion, existing research on Birthright and homeland tourism generally tends to purify feelings of inclusion and exclusion from one another, and pays little attention, as a result, to the complexity of emotion that participants experience on these tours. As we will highlight below, we find that Taglit-Birthright participants express various axes of emotional polarity throughout the course of their homeland tour, such as glory/fear, attraction/repulsion, and belonging/rejection. And indeed we find that these volatile emotions are produced both during the encounters on these homeland tours, and through idealized expectations of how they anticipated feeling while on the trip (Kemper Reference Kemper, Stets and Turner2006; Taylor Reference Taylor2009).
Our findings of emotional complexity fit squarely with Smelser's (Reference Smelser1998) sociological conception of ambivalence. By bringing psychoanalytic processes into the study of social structures, he emphasizes that emotional ambivalence—rather than a univalent set of preferences or a certainty of emotions—is fundamental to the social world. As Smelser (Reference Smelser1998) argues, ambivalence is a “powerful, persistent, unresolvable, volatile, generalizable, and anxiety-provoking feature of the human condition,” through which we always “hold opposing affective orientations toward the same person, object, or symbol” (pp. 5–6). Only the rarest of opportunities, such as what Smelser refers to as “odysseys,” vacations, summer camps, finite experiences with beginnings, durations, and ends, can provide temporary relief from ambivalence. And at first blush, Taglit-Birthright appears precisely Odyssean, as the following itinerary from Shalom D.C. (2010) suggests:
Wednesday June 7: Ascend to the top of the Golan Heights, and enjoy coffee at an overview of the Israel/Syria border. Learn about relations with Syria, and the ongoing tensions on Israel's northern border. Then hike along a stream in the Golan, an important tributary to the Sea of Galilee. Learn about the historic significance of the geological intricacies of the Golan. Next stop: the Hula Nature Reserve, where you will learn about Israel's effort to preserve the natural beauty of this important ecosystem. Then move on to a Druze village where you will enjoy a meal of pita, falafel, humus, and other foods while learning about the secretive Druze society living in the hills of the Galilee. That night: head South, wake up with a morning exploration of the Negev Desert on the back of a camel.
The univalent nostalgia and sentimentality usually expressed by those who partake in odysseys was not to be found in our study. Indeed, homeland tours are much more emotionally demanding, and in our findings and the literature to date they succeed precisely by heightening rather than resolving the ambivalence of everyday life and the demands and politics of identity. On the tours, individuals are faced with questions about their relative commitment to group membership, their adherence to and exercise of collective identity. Faced with emotional polarities such as glory/fear or belonging/rejection, individuals seek to resolve the ambivalence they experience, at least temporarily. In the context of group life, Smelser indicates that individuals may seek this resolution through “exit,” “voice,” or “loyalty”—yet whereas Smelser provides comparatively little detail on how individuals pursue these strategies, we find that Birthright participants seek to resolve these conflicting emotions by taking up a collective identity that invests in a strong symbolic relationship to Israel along with a parallel and complementary affirmation of their diasporic Jewish identity.Footnote 2
As we develop this account below, we want to stress that not that all participants experience each of these emotional polarities. Our point is instead that this ambivalence provides an emotional intensity to the homeland tour that underpins the collective identity participants adopt. As we explore below, this intensity moves at an often dizzying pace for participants. As Stets (Reference Stets2010) writes and sociologists of emotions point out, emotions “can move from negative to positive, and back again to negative, in rapid succession and within a matter of minutes” (p. 276). By attending to how participants experience these intense and anxiety-producing emotions, we explore how they manage this experience by forging both a symbolic relationship to Israel and a reaffirmation of their diasporic Jewish identity.
DATA AND METHODS
This paper is culled from a larger research project focused on Taglit-Birthright tours to Israel, engaged in by faculty members at the University of Toronto and at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, that investigates the knowledge effects of this homeland tour and their implications for identity. Our research includes focus groups of young Canadian trip takers, interviews with young Israelis who accompany the tours, and analysis of tour itineraries.
The current paper draws exclusively on focus group data involving sixty participants from the greater Toronto area who attended a Taglit Birthright trip in the last five years. Focus groups took place in Jewish community centers, and the homes of faculty researchers and research assistants during the period from summer 2008 to fall 2010. Focus groups were co-led and facilitated by graduate research assistants and faculty, using a small number of questions designed to enable participants to discuss what was most salient for them about the trip. Focus groups lasted two hours, enabling most in the group to respond to the questions and develop dialogues among themselves. Participants reflected on their most vivid memories and best and worst experiences during the ten-day tour. They were asked to discuss their impressions of Israelis and to reflect on how the Israelis they encountered might have viewed them and their peers. Discussions often also included participants' perceptions of the purpose of Taglit-Birthright tours as well as what they encountered and understood of contemporary Israeli life, culture and institutions, racial and ethnic diversity, and political conflict and contestation in Israel. Focus groups were recorded, transcribed, and coded for recurrence of themes.
Participants' narratives indicated the significance of sequence, progression, and the trip's orchestration of emotions, leading us to see the analytic significance of temporality in the development of initial desires for belonging in Israel, gradual understandings of differences between themselves and Israelis, and conclusions about interdependence between diasporic and Israeli Jews. While much of homeland tourism research is ethnographic and captures emotions in the moment of encounter, our research investigates recalled emotions and the sense-making individuals build around them. Such sense-making after the fact allows us a deeper accounting of the emotional process as it relates to collective identity formation and the durability and evolution of feelings. Studying this durability of emotion allows us to study collective identity by tying the memory of past experiences to present and future roles—thus allowing us to understand, in Wagner-Pacifici's (Reference Wagner-Pacifici2009) terms, how participants forge an identity by knowing “what is ahead and what is behind, what is close up and what is far away” (p. 707). Life after the tour becomes a comparative and grounded lens, through which to read and complicate initial feelings and observations.
THE IDENTITY ROLLER COASTER
From our data we hypothesize that these tours are experienced as identity roller coasters, with participants' Jewish identity going through a metamorphosis as the tour progresses. This begins with an overwhelming ideology of belonging and global Jewry reflective of Geertz's (Reference Geertz1963) idea of “primordial ethnicity” (p. 109). As they embark on their trip, tour takers experience euphoric unity, and embrace Israel's salience for their Jewish identity. We then document the ways in which they experience a process of differentiation, based on distinctions they observe between their everyday life and life in Israel. This process of differentiation occurs on multiple terrains: the male participants experience a sense of rejection by their Israeli peers; participants begin to view Israeli life through perceptions of development and privilege; and the trip itself becomes understood as a tourist enterprise. As the tour culminates in its final events however, it offers participants a new way in which to make sense of these competing identities through the concept of labor—most notably, the labor of diasporic Jews in maintaining a Jewish homeland and Jewish culture. Taken together, this narrative interrupts the notion of effortless ethnic belonging and provides a deeper understanding of the commitment required for intra-ethnic group identification and attachments.
A SENSE OF BELONGING
Birthright participants uniformly described the experience of landing and disembarking from the plane in Israel to a chorus of “Welcome home!” Israel, they were told by tour chaperones, was theirs by right of birth—their legacy, past, and future homeland. The experience of being met with such adulation and assurances of belonging was moving to these young people who imagined what it was like to arrive in Israel fleeing for their lives and escaping persecution. Over the next several days, tour guides took them to light candles at the beach, to stroll through the Old City of Jerusalem, to dance at holy sites of Jewish prayer and continuity, climb Masada at sunrise, and take mud baths at the Dead Sea. Some recalled kissing the tarmac upon arrival, moved by the ideas of belonging and safe haven. Others were readily amazed by Israel's natural beauty. They ogled Israelis whom they reported finding sexy, strong, and uninhibited, particularly those in uniform. They ate falafel, bought earrings—literally and figuratively consuming (Comaroff and Comaroff, Reference Comaroff and Comaroff2009; Sheller Reference Sheller2003) the country they were told was theirs by right of birth.
Tour takers described initially feeling emotionally overwhelmed by this sense of belonging and the power of place. One of our focus group participants told of being overcome with emotion at the Western Wall, one of the holiest Jewish sites, which participants found particularly moving at night on the Jewish Sabbath, illuminated by candles.
Male: I felt just like really overwhelmed. Feeling that like my grandparents will be really happy that I was there…. And I made it all the way to the front, too. There's like this old Jewish guy talking and I was like, Oh man, I kind of like want to go to the front. He said, “Do it. Go to the front now. Haven't you done that at a rock concert?” I was super overwhelmed when I got there. It's kind of weird. I just enjoyed a lot of things about the land.
Another participant responded sympathetically to his reflection:
Male: I felt like a huge sense of just being a different person there. Like, I felt you could really feel who you were which sounds very like sort of cliché and weird.
Participants commonly described this sensation at the beginning of the tour, adopting the notion of instant physiological and spiritual belonging in Israel.
Female: I just thought it was amazing that when I landed there I just immediately felt like I belonged. I mean just I've never been there before and you just get this experience, even though the whole ten days like you feel like it's yours. It's not really but you feel immediately like you belong there.
Significantly, these reflections signal the analytic purchase of attending to recollected feelings, and also the utility of Smelser's (Reference Smelser1998) conceptualization of ambivalence. Expressions of belonging are coupled with a reflexive analysis of how unusual the trip takers found this emotional experience of automatic inclusion. As the above quotes demonstrate, participants understood their feelings to be intense, and were overcome (or “super overwhelmed”) by the polarity through which they experienced Israel with apparent ease while it remained discontinuous with their life beyond.
This dual sense of instant belonging and discontinuity was reinforced by trip takers' perceptions of Israel's social homogeneity. Many highlighted how Birthright tour guides emphasized that everyone they saw out of their tour bus window was Jewish: the garbage man, the taxi driver, the museum guard, the nightclub DJ, the bank teller. Familiar with being in the minority and negotiating this difference, the blanket Jewishness appeared an amazing comfort and relief.
Female: I thought, it was just interesting seeing Jewish people everywhere.
Female: Yeah.
Female: Yeah.
Female: Like there's a certain familiarity in a lot of like just Jewish faces and it was weird to me, especially, I went to the University of _____ which doesn't just have that many Jewish people so just coming right out of school where there's not many Jewish faces around and then just being in a restroom [and thinking] like, “That girl looks like my cousin.” And that looks like someone I know,” and it's just really weird to be surrounded by Jewish faces.
Being in Israel is linked in this participant's mind, then, with inhabiting a familiar space associated with family and the celebration of Jewish holidays, not part of everyday life.
The trip reinforces this sense of Jewish belonging by introducing participants to Israel's military accomplishments: “By what labor does this country remain Jewish?” the tour implicitly asks and answers. On most tours, participants meet soldiers who fought in battles, visit barracks, look at borders, and “bask in the reflected glory” (Cialdini et al., Reference Cialdini, Borden, Thorne, Walker, Freeman and Sloan1976, p. 366) of Israelis whom they imagine as “possible selves” (Oyserman et al., Reference Oyserman, Bybee, Terry and Hart-Johnson2004, p. 131). This allows participants to embrace Israel's victories as their own:
Male: The only thing I hadn't seen before which I thought was really cool was bunkers in the north that we went into. Actually seeing where they fought the battles, I think the Six-Day War. I am not sure. That really meant a lot to me because I never really saw where they fought. I know they won.
Participants described feeling an increasing claim to land, military, architecture, and history of Israel as they toured Israel, identifying this feeling as different from how they felt in Canada.
Male: Exactly! There's something different about it. You're not fighting for, I mean, if you're like the Canadian Army and the American Army, you're not fighting for necessarily the right reasons, you know, the right concerns, whereas the Israeli Army is there for survival. Like those people are the line between order and chaos to some degree, you know. So I find that I have way more respect for them …
Participants' reflections on viewing the gravesite of a nineteen-year-old soldier at Mount Herzl, where Israel's soldiers are buried, illustrate their feelings of primordial connection, as the following quote suggests:
Female: Yeah, and we're all nineteen. I'm like “we're all alive standing here and looking at this man's grave for no reason.” Like he shouldn't have died but like it was a huge awakening like boys were crying, girls were crying, everyone was crying and we all just sat there in like silence like no one even said anything. We just looked at this man's grave and we're like, “This is crazy, it's like mind blowing.”
These initial experiences produce euphoria and identification in trip-takers, who describe feeling emotionally overwhelmed by nature, military monuments and cemeteries, and religious/spiritual sites. The result is a deep emotional connection through which participants experience a “huge awakening” that, but for fate, their own lives could have turned out very differently.
DIFFERENTIATION AND THE LIFE COURSE
As the trip unfolds, however, the daily life of the tour shifts this initial sense of euphoria and of being “overwhelmed.” Soldier peers join the trip in what is called mifgash, or encounter. The encounter reveals more starkly that Israelis have in fact been inhabiting and making a life on the land that trip takers have come to feel is in some sense theirs now too.
Ironically, Birthright happens during university and just after it, at precisely the point in the life course when Israelis and Canadians begin to diverge most in their lives because of mandatory Israeli military service. This difference produces enormous respect by Canadian trip-takers. As one of our participants noted:
Female: For me, a fascinating thing with the Israeli soldiers is the pride that they have and you ask them, do you want to be in the army? And of course they do. They don't even think twice about it. It's their life. It's their rite of passage.
When manifested in the form of barracks and war memorials, this masculinity provided a symbol that was attractive to trip takers, perhaps because a central expression of anti-Semitism is derision of Jewish men as emasculated (Biberman Reference Biberman2004). Tour participants thus recuperate masculinity vicariously, and many described feeling the urge to themselves join the Israeli army. And indeed, Israeli soldiers invited Canadian youth to join them in these experiences. As one trip-taker recounted:
Male: They made a meeting program for us when we were are the Bedouin tents and they pretended like we were in the Army and they came and like turned you around and put black paint on your face and said, “Put your running shoes on and get in line,” and I remember that they made us carry a stretcher and we carried people on top of it and like, they would teach us like how to carry on our shoulder. And like, I remember running … and like we're going to kill ourselves. They're like, “This is how we live. This is what we do. These are our drills. Join us,” and like we just. I remember it was so late at night and we just all ran and the only thing was the moon and we just ran in the desert.
Yet this life-course moment also has the effect of exaggerating difference in the minds of trip-takers, with feelings of shared glory and respect bumping up against feelings of impotence and exasperation. As the trip progressed, the centrality of militarization in Israeli life became an important source of differentiation. The Israeli soldiers, equipped with guns and uniforms, were not inclined to share their hard-earned masculinity with their Canadian male peers. Informal interactions included: Israeli soldiers telling Canadians they didn't have the right to speak Hebrew until they had served in the army; soldiers taking Canadians through initiation rituals similar to those they report experiencing in the army, quickly exhausting and outpacing their Canadian peers; soldier peers successfully garnering interest from Canadian women on the trip, sometimes with trip-takers' love interests or girlfriends; and soldiers unsubtly interrupting conversations with Canadian men to pursue these encounters. As one participant expressed:
Male: The only people we really got to speak with were the soldiers; I sort of developed a friendship with them. But then a girl would walk by the conversation was … his eyes would follow her and it was just like pointless.
Men in particular discussed feeling that they could not compete with their Israeli peers, and indeed did not have access to that very form of masculinity or physical strength:
Male: She would pull him into the picture with us. She was like in love with him. I think she was using him to make me jealous.
Male: Uniform?
Male: Yeah, uniform.
Male: You can't fight that.
The women in our focus groups were split on the soldiers' treatment of women—while some appreciated the opportunity and attention offered, others found the objectification of women irritating.
Female: I kept in touch with my soldier. “We will protect you. Don't worry about it.” It's like it was nice to have like big huge men with guns.
Female: Yeah but it's also like just different culture, you know, like you want to try out something different, something that is not, you know, what you see every day when you come home. Why are you laughing?
Conversely:
Female: I had weird experiences. Like when we had the Mega Event. There are like random soldiers that are supposed to be on duty but like trying to kiss me and I'm not kidding. Like I was sitting there and he's like taking pictures of me.
Female: The soldiers [on my trip] were disappointed that the group wasn't as attractive as they had hoped.
Reflection on these experiences in the focus groups led participants to talk about Israelis as participating in a culture distinct from their own:
Female: We didn't really get into details with our soldiers to be honest. Like we had a good time with them and they're different people, and, you know, to talk to someone from a different culture is fun but I don't think we got into like the personal stuff.
Female: They must think we're spoiled Canadian brats.
Female: We were connecting over shared age more than Jewishness because the cultures were so really different.
The discussion in our focus groups mirrored the progression of emotions participants experienced on the trip. As dialogue progressed, comparatively uncomplicated expressions of awe and belonging gave way to critique and social distancing, and the sense of belonging became one of rejection. Canada was posited as an orderly polite place with more affluence and opportunity, and Israel a chaotic, unsafe place with poverty and decaying streetscapes. They noted with incredulity that upper-middle-class Israelis lived in apartments; that natural resources (such as water and electricity) had to be conserved; dogs and feral cats roamed the streets; random violence occurred; beggars abounded; social order and manners were absent; streets were dirty; and that large Orthodox families often lived in impoverished conditions.
In describing these observations, participants referenced other countries they had visited as tourists where they witnessed similar markers of the absence of privilege.
Male: Some of the dogs there are like stray dogs. It really broke my heart, I swear. I love dogs, you know, it's just like, it breaks my heart to see them on the side of the road like that. Like you recognize that in Cuba.
Male: One thing that struck me was like garbage everywhere. It's much dirtier than Canada and people would not think twice about throwing stuff on the street or whatever. And people were a lot more pushy in lines and stuff. If you don't pay attention, someone would bump in front of you.
In addition, when they saw what was involved in maintaining a Jewish state, their own inclusion in Canadian society appeared preferable—preferable to serving in the army and living in a state of danger, and preferable to living with comparatively less economic affluence. In this way, the process of differentiation reinforced their identity not only as diasporic Jews but as Canadians.
Female: I think that one thing I realize is that I like my life in Canada, like I don't like the feeling that I guess maybe it's part of the guns but it's just the culture like, but I don't want to be ruled by metal detectors. Like maybe I'm obviously spoiled to live here, you know, we're lucky. We have all this great freedom and safety and maybe we're deluded, who knows but I like it. I'm really really proud to be Canadian basically.
Male: The economy is terrible. There's beggars like everywhere. You go to Jerusalem like there were tons of beggars.
Female: I'm not saying they live poorly, but they don't live rich either. They say it isn't easy like there's tons of people who don't have cars, who don't have the funds to even take the bus or do certain things, go and get a coffee around the corner.
Male: Like I lived here like most of my life and then I guess if I move to Israel now I probably would live more of my life there than here but I'm just used to it here and like it here. I would never move anywhere else. Regardless of Israel, I would never move to the U.S., Australia, Asia. I just like Canada like the … just I don't know, there's no place like it really.
Male: This is the best country in the world
Male: There's benefits if you get sick, too!
As the above quote suggests, these perceptions of difference may not be accurate: Israel, like Canada, has socialized medicine; Canada, like Israel, has urban decay and poverty. Yet many focus group participants pointed to this arc in the ten-day trip in which they came to feel foreign in Israel, coinciding with their growing cognizance that the trip was coming to an end. This tip against Israel's similitude was often paired with a new cognizance of their Canadianness.
Yet even the reclamation of Canadianness did not resolve their ambivalence. Their Canadian peers now inspired feelings of both interconnection and alienation. Participants complained their peers hogged the seats on the bus and were spoiled, packing innumerable suitcases full of clothes and refusing to carry them to the bus each morning. Others found their Canadian peers weak and lazy, apt to complain, unable to keep up with the tour schedule and hikes. Still others conveyed with dismay stories of young men who drank too much, had tantrums or ran away and had to be found and sent home. The following discussion among two focus group participants who attended the same tour exemplifies this concern:
Female: Someone almost got kicked off our trip because he got so drunk and he stumbled in the forest in the desert, and the Bedouin had to carry him back.
Male: He's lucky the Bedouin saw him stumbling away because he wandered into the desert in the middle of the night.
Female: He also tried to climb Masada fast and ended up getting very sick and had to take the elevator down.
Even as they were faced with one another's more unattractive flaws, participants were simultaneously immersed with messages about endogamy, and “having Jewish babies” for demographic survival. In focus groups, participants also recounted their belief that tour guides had promised a free wedding to any couple that met on the tour. A paradigmatic example of the attraction/repulsion dichotomy, these messages produced no more emotional equilibrium than the demanding prospect of moving to Israel.
MAKING SENSE AND FORGING THEIR ROLE
Through two major experiences—the “Mega Event” and the Holocaust Museum—the trip offers participants a way to forge a new identity that bridges their diverging experiences and disparate emotions.
The Mega Event usually occurs on one of the final nights of the trip, when all the trip-takers convene in a stadium for concerts, films, and speeches by Birthright funders and Israeli politicians. Trip-takers described how the utopian feeling of home and safety with which the tour began was replaced by a chaotic meeting of global Jewish unity, in which they were introduced to Jews from other countries and struggled to display feelings of interconnection with them (Argentina, Cuba, Russia, and so on). Israeli singers performed, and prominent philanthropists came to tell the young people that while they had freedom from payment for the trip, they did not have freedom from responsibility and must invest in Jewish culture and Israel, in Jewish values and traditions. On other tours, the President of Israel, Shimon Peres, took the stage and conveyed, “We really love you” to the audience of young people. He said, “We don't have too many Jews, and we are short of Jewish young people on which our future depends. It's difficult to be a Jew. But it is great to be a Jew. Ours is a new love affair, a new chapter in Jewish history” (Birthright Israel 2012).
Participants understood these events as asking them to step up as adults and support Israel, whether ideationally or financially. In our focus groups, participants reckoned with this mandate and what it meant to them. These discussions, occurring towards the end of the focus groups, were often the most heated and contested. Participants grappled with what it meant to be accountable to Israel. For some, it meant traveling to Israel, supporting the tourist economy, and giving charitable contributions to Israel, while others felt this was not optimal, but all that could be expected of diasporic Canadian Jews who did not have the courage to move to Israel, as the following quotes suggest:
Female: So why shouldn't they be happy to see their people come in from whatever country they're coming from and spend money in their land? Why not? We're not unwanted. We're wanted.
Male: But I feel like that's what it is because a lot of the participants come back and, you know, they lead their comfortable North American lives and they're not going to make aliyah [moving to Israel] that because it takes a lot to do that. So part of it is, yeah, you know, you make a little investment now, then hopefully when they make it, which a lot of them probably will make enough money to donate whatever they can afford. Later on, that money is going to come back to the economy.
Facilitator: What do you think the point of the trip is? What kind of message should you take from it?
Female: Send money to Israel. Seriously like we need your support and either like come here and like help us or send money like do something to give back.
Male: The duty should be if you can help Israel and you can help the Jewish people in general, and keep the place going because it's obviously struggling, do it, right? … but money is money. It helps and makes you feel a little bit better about yourself that you're not necessarily going and killing yourself over there, or fighting or not fighting, or going to work there, maybe if that makes you feel better fine….
Others expressed a sense of duty in broader terms:
Female: Now I actually follow with the news. Before, it was sort of like distant and I didn't really feel any connection with it and now, if there's ever an article I'm flipping, I see Israel in it, like I have to read the article. Like I just feel like I care a lot more and it means something now. Whereas just before, it was another country where there were Jewish people but like it was just like another country. So, yeah. I think I definitely pay a lot more attention now and just like I feel like I should know what's going on in terms of world events in particular, what's going on in Israel.
Male: For me, anyway, it wasn't so much that my connection to Israel was because I love the country and the beautiful architecture or the landscape and everything like that but more because you know your people kind of depend on you not backing away from Israel.
In this way, they embrace the unity of Jews through inscribing a segmented and privileged relationship for themselves within it. In this final step, Israel becomes a connection that has become present and concrete in their lives: participants feel that they are welcome, they begin to watch news about Israel, and internalize a sense of duty to supporting the country. And yet it is also physically apart, a place to which they are not moving, but one which they may always regard as a potential home. As one participant articulated:
And so I kind of like left with that message. We're like … my grandparents are Holocaust survivors and they always have like engraved it to me, you need Israel otherwise we're going to hell. And so like I had that coming and I think that should be one of the message that you're taking away, but I think also like here's a place you can call home or like a second home or whatever and you can come you can get another passport if you want just by showing up on our soil.
Participants described partying into the night after the speeches and fanfare in ways encapsulated by the Durkheimian (Reference Durkheim and Swain1964) notion of effervescence.Footnote 3 What jarred participants was that, on many tours, the next morning the chaperones roused the revelers, put them on a bus, and sent them to visit the Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem (the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority). An orchestrated “morning after,” this final destination functions as a not particularly nuanced cautionary tale about why Israel and Jewish life must be invested in and defended. Because they were tired or feeling the remnants of the late-night party, focus group participants reported with considerable remorse being half awake, laughing, and joking around, even in the presence of Holocaust survivors who told their stories of being in the concentration camps and losing their family, friends, and communities. Many participants reported seeing Yad Vashem shortly before flying home. Despite their exhaustion, the message amplified by the trip concerning the relationship between Israel and the Holocaust—and its relevance for their present identity—is not lost on them. As the following focus group exchange attests:
Female: Why is someone giving all this funding?
Male: Well, why? I'll tell you why—we have to learn the importance of Israel because if something like the Holocaust ever happens again, do you think the world is not going to turn on the Jews like they did? Like you got to learn to love that country because guess what, when the world turns on you, you're fucked!
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
These Birthright tours, and homeland tourism more generally, rely on globalization and the ease of travel associated with it to produce transnational forms of belonging through new identity experiments. Older generations have long sought to manage how young people think about the ethnic groups and practices into which they have been born, but few have had the resources of current homeland tours—whether to Israel or elsewhere—to frame ideas about belonging, inclusion, exclusion, assimilation, and cultural preservation. Participants' reflections indicate they believed they were undertaking an “odyssey” of the kind Smelser (Reference Smelser1998) theorizes, in which ambivalence is held at bay: the trip is free and brief, belonging is automatic, and they enjoy a shared sense of community throughout the tour.
It is important to note that being organized on a large scale does not appear to have prevented emotional engagement. This may be because unlike heritage tours generally, homeland tours across different countries do not turn on discovering a longed-for “authenticity” by community members, but instead on building transnational connections, emotional ties, and future-oriented obligations. Indeed, the very size of the Mega Event helps to drive, rather than forestall, emotional connection. The result is that in Birthright as in other homeland tours, deep emotional intragroup commitments and narratives are successfully produced. Yet what we learn through this research is that this achievement does not occur through an uncomplicated assertion of in-group belonging. Far from taking part in an odyssey in Smelser's (Reference Smelser1998) terms, participants experience a breadth of emotions that range from the sense of promise of primordial attachments and ownership of a homeland to anxieties and competitions when tasked with building concrete relations with their Israeli peers. These engagements produce both connections and insecurities in trip-takers who imagine their lives may not be as authentic or meaningful as those of Israelis, and who feel guilt about the labor Israelis perform to ensure a homeland for global Jewry. These anxieties are resolved with the adoption of a diasporic gaze that identifies Israel as both present and distant: finding a role for themselves as community members who can provide normative and financial assistance to Israel from afar (and thus recuperating a sense that they can make meaningful and independent contributions to this relationship), trip-takers come to adopt the view that Jewish identity and connection with Israel will require work on their part.
This reflects the management of ambivalence that Smelser (Reference Smelser1998) directs us to investigate. Rather than uncomplicated primordial attachments, it is the specter of anti-Semitism and the cyclicity of Jewish persecution that engages Canadian participants to “learn to love” Israel and one another for survival. Ultimately, the work of intragroup relations and the specter of discrimination against Jewish people lead participants to ponder how, rather than whether, to affiliate as Jews. This pondering is identity labor, a complex set of psychological, emotional, and social processes that allow people to determine a place for themselves and a method for enacting it. In his classic work on stigma, Goffman (Reference Goffman1986) notes that individuals of stigmatized groups often experience “identity ambivalence,” through which they oscillate in the degree to which they identify or distance themselves from in-group members (pp. 106–108); here, we find that this identity labor allows participants to carve out a demarcated role for themselves within the group.
This emphasis that participants place on group survival is particularly important in the context of Taglit-Birthright's concerns over Jewish assimilation. The trip provides a set of emotional experiences that generate group affiliation by emphasizing threats to group survival. And indeed, the importance of affiliation for group survival is articulated through multiple registers during the trip: in particular, young participants enjoy emotional highs of connection with other group members, while also emotionally engaging with the history and threat of Jewish persecution as central to their developing commitment as Jews. Critical to this process of group affiliation, then, is that the question of Jewish survival in the face of assimilation remains inflected with an historical understanding of anti-Semitism, and the framework for managing assimilation persists even after overt discrimination is overcome. In other words, experiences with discrimination can have a long-lasting effect on community anxieties (Cohen and Fein, Reference Cohen and Fein1985); indeed, assimilation then emerges as a later problem to which communities channel these concerns through homeland tours and related strategies of group-identity building.
These are deep moral lessons that masquerade as uncomplicated fun. It is precisely the emotional drama produced by Birthright trips that engages participants to make strategic and guided choices about how to live an ethnically authentic or advantageous life. Whether to affiliate as a Jew is replaced by the question of how they may affiliate. While trip-takers have some sense that the tour involved a substantial amount of ideological messaging in which they were asked to do more than simply appreciate a sunrise and eat falafel, that the trip was free strikes them as a fair trade. This is surely reinforced by the timing of the Taglit-Birthright trip. Just as young people are individuating from their parents and being introduced to a more nuanced and complicated understanding of the world in the course of university study and outside world observation, the tour reintroduces the contours of group boundaries, affiliation, and obligation. This road map may offer participants emotional and mental relief after their exposure to such an unsettling panoply of choices concerning what it means to live a moral, accountable, ethnic life. Ironically, while the tour promises the romantic ideal of ethnic belonging, it in fact prepares young people for a more pragmatic, utilitarian, and presumably adult set of understandings of the obligations of ethnic belonging, obligations which strike the majority of them as eminently fair.
