I'd like to start off by stating, just to get it out in the open and then get over it a little bit, that the term birthright make me very uncomfortable. Birthright is the English name of an organization funded by three groups; philanthropists, the state of Israel, and Jewish community groups. The idea is to send young Jews on a ten day tour of Israel "in order to diminish the growing division between Israel and Jewish communities around the world; to strengthen the sense of solidarity among world Jewry; and to strengthen participants' personal Jewish identity and connection to the Jewish people" (http://www.birthrightisrael.com/site/PageServer?pagename=about_main). While not all of Birthright's self descrtibed mission offends me, the English name makes me red because it assumes that Jews have a birthright to the land of Israel which I think is both melodramatic and dangerously presumptuous. By the way, the Hebrew name for the program is "Taglit" (meaning "discovery") which is far more benign.
Birthright is the funding organization that "accredits individual Trip Organizers to run their programs and sets down the basic guidelines, standards and security policies by which Trip Organizers must operate. There are over 20 Taglit-Birthright Israel-accredited Trip Organizers running programs this session from North America..." (http://www.birthrightisrael.com/site/PageServer?pagename=about_main). The organizers come from a range of perspectives, from religious to secular, from right to left, from outdoorsy to urban, etc etc. The trip organizer that I went with, Israel Experts, describes itself as a pluralistic trip and it does lean left. Our trip, thank goodness, was only for people 22 and older.
The staff for the trip was as follows: a few behind the scenes Israel Experts staff who create the tour schedule and made arrangments, a professional Israeli tour guide who was essentially responsible for all of the educational content of the trip (within the guidlines of Birthright and Israel Experts), a medic who was with the group at all times carrying a backpack with bandaids and advil and a rifle with the safety lock on, the bus driver, and two staff members who counted heads, arranged food for the vegetarians and attended to administrative details. I was one of two staff members. In exchange for my work I recieved the free plane ticket and free tour. My co-staff member was a guy who was born in America but has lived in Israel since he was three.
As the only member of this staff group that started the tour off in the states, I organized everyone in Newark by myself and all thirty nine of us flew together to Ben Gurion airport. I tried to be enthusiastic but aside from the basic disagreement I have with the premise of birhtright, I am also a naturally kind of shy person in big groups. Needless to say, noone is going to give me a "birthright staff member of the year" award.
I don't think I'll get "birthright shit starter of the year" award either. I tried to take a gentle approach toward convincing the participants to be humanists before being nationalists. Acting as a radical didn't seem like it would appeal to the group. Most of the participants were urban professional types. Already my farmer-ness and lack of make-up probably struck them as waaaaaay out there. I didn't want people to think of peace and empathy as hippi values that they could reject off hand. I tried to encourage people to understand how to connect to Israel and be critical of it at the same time. The truth is though that I'm not a terribly charismatic leader so I don't know how effective I was.
Luckily, our tour guide was both charismatic, knowlegable and extremely left wing (for an Israeli). Wow, what a relief!!!!!
More to come...
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