The Israel Connection and American Jews (review)

In late 1999, the first of dozens of El Al 747s landed at Ben Gurion Airport carrying North American young adults about to embark on a ten-day educational program in Israel. The participants—mostly college students—had been given the trip as a free "gift" by birthright israel (Taglit in Hebrew), an organization supported by a group of philanthropists, the government of Israel, and Jewish communal organizations. David Mittelberg, author of The Israel Connection and American Jews, was not the progenitor of birthright israel, but his monograph makes clear why the program was needed and why it is has been so successful.

Mittelberg was raised in Australia and came to Israel in 1965 on a youth leadership program. As he describes it, Israel taught him how to be "modern and Jewish." He made aliyah in 1972, choosing to settle at Kibbutz Yizreel. He is a sociologist and was former head of the Institute for Research of the Kibbutz and Cooperative Idea at the University of Haifa. In recent years, he has been involved as a researcher and teacher in establishing mifgashim (encounters) between Diaspora and Israeli youth.

The Israel Connection and American Jews is both a research monograph and an essay on the meaning of Jewish identity for Diaspora Jews. Mittelberg analyzes several sources of data about U.S. Jews to draw a portrait of their impact of engagement with Israel. He draws from the 1990 National Jewish Population Survey, the 1991 New York Jewish Population Survey, the 1995 population survey of the Boston Jewish community, and longitudinal data from Oztmanikim (participants in Project Otzma, a postgraduate Israel experience). The data are woven into a larger fabric of the history of relationships between Diaspora Jews and Israel and sociological concepts of ethnicity and identity.

Mittelberg's thesis is that an encounter with Israel can serve as a critical force to strengthen the Jewish identity of American Jews. An educational experience in Israel, he maintains, "connects American Jews to their past, to Israel's present and. . . to the future well-being of the Jewish people" (p. xiv). In the tradition of empirical social science, he develops a conceptual framework explicating why an Israel trip should affect identity and then provides empirical data to support his contention. Mittelberg succeeds in his basic mission of providing a plausible explanation and supporting it with evidence. But his analysis is probably better informed by his keen sense of observation and his experience as an educator than it is by formal sociology.

Underlying Mittelberg's conceptual analysis is a fundamental observation about contemporary life in the United States - personal freedom and choice would appear to be our universal religion. As a consequence, religious and ethnic identities are not monolithic. Jewish identity, in particular, takes on a variety of forms and perhaps changes over the life course. At one end of Mittelberg's continuum, Jewish identity is symbolic—a person recognizes his/her heritage, but it plays little role in either day-to-day life or key decisions. At the opposite pole are those for whom a Jewish identity is the essence of their lives. Thus, for example, even though haredim (ultra-Orthodox Jews) may live in the Diaspora, for most purposes they maintain physical boundaries between themselves and other Americans. The number of patterns of Jewish expression are dizzying and constantly evolving, perhaps even more so in the wake of a resurgence of antisemitic and anti-Israel incidents.

If we accept that religious and ethnic identity are the result of a choice, where then does Israel fit in and what is the role of experiences in Israel? Here, Mittelberg seems to rely on his experience as a long-time shaliach (emissary) to Anglo-Jewish communities and as a teacher. He maintains that Israel provides a concrete way to connect Diaspora Jews to their heritage. Israel provides a raison d'être for Jewish fund-raising and organizational efforts and provides a...