Above the Death Pits, Beneath the Flag: Youth Voyages to Poland and the Performance of Israeli National Identity, and: Ten Days of Birthright Israel: A Journey in Young Adult Identity (review)

Leaving one's normal milieu can have various consequences. As Peter Berger avers, exposure to others and other things can result in pluralization of the modern social environment, which then may challenge taken-for-granted certainties, and "the different cultures [one] encounters in his social environment are transformed into alternative scenarios, options, for his own life."¹

Travel to other places may thus undermine one's beliefs and even their very identity. On the other hand, exposure to others, especially when they are explicitly defined as "others", can strengthen one's beliefs and one's identity. Travel to foreign countries frequently has the impact of strengthening one's national identity. Numerous students related to me over the years how traveling abroad made them feel more American. They became more conscious of how American they were and frequently felt much more positive about that.

Likewise, in our studies of American aliya, Kevin Avruch and I have both found olim reporting that, whereas in the U.S. they defined themselves as Jews and, indeed, they went on aliya because they place primary emphasis on the Jewish component of their identity, when they are in Israel they become much more conscious of themselves as Americans. They find themselves being defined and defining themselves as Americans or "Anglo-saxim".²

The two books under consideration look at how travel is used as a mechanism for strengthening identity. One tells the story of Project Birth-right (Taglit), and its impact on the Jewish identity and connection to Israel of its participants. The other analyzes the trips to Polish death camps by Israeli youth and their impact on the Israeli and Jewish identity of the participants.

Although they share a common denominator, the two books are very different. They are written from different disciplinary perspectives—Saxe and Chazan write from the perspectives of sociology of education, whereas Feldman writes from that of sociology of tourism; Saxe and Feldman write as enthusiastic developers of Birthright whereas Feldman writes as a critical skeptic; Saxe and Chazan are able to present empirical evidence of the success of Birthright, whereas Feldman's objective is not to evaluate the youth voyages per se but to analyze their role in the meanings of the Holocaust in Israeli society and culture as well as Jewish collective memory. Finally, Saxe and Chazan write as senior scholars, whereas Feldman's book reads very much like a doctoral dissertation.

In the Eastern European trips, the travelers are not there to see a society but, rather, what had been and is no longer. The objective is to see the cruelty of the other and the precariousness of one's own on "alien" soil. Feldman argues that the trips are deliberately contrived by Israel as a re-enactment of Jewish history and the transformation from death in Poland, which represents the Diaspora, to survival and growth, which is most clearly represented in Israel. Every aspect of the trip is designed as a process in which the participants are manipulated by all of their senses to initially experience themselves as victims, then survivors, and ultimately witnesses for whom Israel is the only response to the Shoah.

Feldman suggests that, as they mature, some who had gone on the Poland voyages may angrily recall their trips as manipulative, that the pictures and stories of the death camps that they were shown and told were contrived fictions that attempted to give false meaning to them. Thus, the trips may end up weakening rather than strengthening Israeli and Jewish identity. Some have suggested that, in any case, the impact of the trips on identity is short...