Why Birthright Israel can't work

Benjamin Netanyahu's plan to subsidize travel to Israel for American Jews can't work.

By Samuel G. Freedman

Nov 23, 1998 |
Each time Temple Neve Shalom in central New Jersey has celebrated a bar or bat mitzvah in the last dozen years, the worship service has included a ritual found nowhere in the official liturgy. Following the readings from the Torah and the prophets, the rabbi has presented a $500 voucher good for travel to Israel to the 13-year-old newly welcomed into the realm of Jewish adulthood. That money has been raised by the congregation itself through an annual concert.

But while Rabbi Gerald Zelizer has presided over this ceremony with perhaps 250 young men and women, only 50 or so have ever put the gift certificate to use. In his congregation and so many others across America, the day of bar or bat mitzvah often marks not a deepening of religious or communal commitments, but liberation from them. And Israel, far from being the unifying talisman for American Jews, contributes mightily to the tensions renting them.

For precisely such reasons, the new program to underwrite a free trip to Israel for every American Jew aged 15 to 26, announced last week by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is destined to fail. Netanyahu talked about the program, dubbed "Birthright Israel," as he addressed the general assembly of the Council of Jewish Federations, the major annual gathering of North American Jewish leaders. The Israeli government has promised to commit a major share of the $300 million budget for Birthright's first five years, with the remainder being paid by individual philanthropists and the Council of Jewish Federations.

No observer of Jewish life can question the impulse to strengthen ties. American Jews, intermarrying and assimilating at an ever-faster pace, have grown increasingly, demonstrably distant from Israel as anything more than a symbolic homeland. Diaspora in America -- with its prosperity and pluralism -- has become preferable to the physical danger and political and religious infighting in Zion.

The Birthright venture, however, starts with a dubious premise: that lack of money is what stops American Jews from visiting Israel. In fact, American Jews are notably prosperous. The 1990 National Jewish Population Survey found that American Jewish households earned an average of $50,000 annually, compared to $38,000 for non-Jewish ones. More tellingly, Jewish households with children made an average of $80,000 -- equivalent to $100,000 in current dollars.

Even so, only one-third of American Jews have ever visited Israel. More of them, it has often been estimated, have been to Italy.

Money, then, plainly is not the decisive factor. The causes of the breach between American Jewry and Israel can be found in both nations and across the religious and ideological spectrum, and they resist a mere financial solution.

Next Page: Zionism is secular

• View blog reactions