Unsettling Birthright: American Jewry and Colonial Identity Politics on Birthright Israel.
Goodfriend, Sophia L.
2016
- Since the inaugural Birthright Israel tour in 1999, over 500,000 young Jewry, that majority white Canadian or United States citizens, have toured Israel alongside Israeli peers on a free 10- day trip throughout what is framed as their “ancestral homeland.” Borne out of my experience as a participant-observer on Tufts Hillel’s Birthright Israel trip, “Unsettling Birthright” is critical analysis of ... read morea tour cast by its founders as an “apolitical” exploration of “Jewish identity” and “Israeli culture” in the present. I utilize ethnographic research, historical analysis, and anti- colonial cultural theory to identify Birthright Israel as a cultural conduit for colonial identity politics—an educational regime that codes a Zionist settler identity among participants. My work traces the production and reception of this identity—historicizing Birthright Israel within transnational histories of Jewish settler colonialism, delineating zones of contact between Birthright’s claims to the land and Palestinian histories of ethnic cleansing, and underscoring how the violence of settler colonialism compromises the Zionist identity participants are made to claim. My work thus delineates the unstable and contradictory mechanisms through which Zionist settler colonialism is constructed, transmitted, and reinforced transnationally in the present. Ultimately, my analysis opens up space for alternative notions of Jewishness, rooted in notions of diaspora and cohabitation rather than exclusive nationalism, to be articulated.read less
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