Leaving Home Together: The Impact of Travel in Jewish Peoplehood Education for Israeli and American Teens1

AbstractThe connection between Jews in Israel and the United States is being reshaped by unprecedented global population movement concomitant with almost universal access to transnational communications. An emerging educational paradigm focuses on transnational Jewish peoplehood and the development of mutual understanding and appreciation of the unique contours of Jewish identity and life in Israel and the Diaspora. This paper utilizes data from a multi-year study of a secondary-level school twinning initiative to explore the impact of the program component of travel on student outcomes such as connections to peers, attachment to Israel or American Jewry, and feelings of Jewish peoplehood. The paper discusses dynamic tensions put in motion through travel within a peoplehood intervention. These include the balance between comfort and discomfort as teens navigate the disruption inherent in international travel, the juxtaposition of common heritage and significant cultural differences, and the exploration of multiple attachments to homeland, diapsora and peoplehood.IntroductionContemporary life is characterized by unprecedented global population movement concomitant with almost universal access to transnational communications, phenomena that are reshaping the relationship between homeland and diaspora communities. In just one decade the global rate of migration rose from 120 million in 1990 to 175 million in 2000 (Ueda, 2007). One in every 35 persons worldwide is an international migrant and in 2002, 175 million people outside the country, in which they were born (Waters, Ueda, & Marrow, 2007). This rapid proliferation of multiple diaspora communities combined with the increasing availability of global mass media and communications has changed the significance of place itself and with it the role and centrality of homeland in diaspora identity. In contemporary globalized society co-religionists or co-ethnics in multiple parts of the world can have direct and immediate transactions allowing them to share the same lived independent of the places where they are situated (Giddens, 1991). The connection between Jews in Israel and the United States can no longer be understood without an appreciation of the implications of these trends of global migration and communication for individual and collective experiences of connection and belonging.The classic model of diaspora is one centered and dependent on connection to homeland; the diasporic population derives its identity and purpose from the homeland regardless of distance in terms of space or time (Safran, 1991). The biblical Jewish exile to Babylon following the destruction of the First Temple is often cited as the prototypic diaspora experience signified by an ambivalent relationship with the host country (Kalra, Kaur & Hutnyk, 2007; Cohen, 1997). The metaphor of the solar system has been used to describe the idea that satellite diaspora communities revolve around the homeland as the center and source of their identity (Levy, 2001). The author Salman Rushdie captures this understanding of diaspora identity in relation to homeland when writing of his life as an Indian in London: It's my present that is foreign, and that the past is home, albeit a lost home in a lost city in the mists of lost (Rushdie, 1991, p. 9). In marked contrast, growing access to transnational communications has fostered the emergence of diasporic public spheres in which hybrid forms of intellectual and cultural production, informed by material from the homeland, but not wholly dependent on it are created (Appadurai, 1996). Flows of media, culture, resources and influence are shifting from unidirectional to multidirectional between homelands and diaspora communities and between multiple diasporic communities of the same homeland (cf. de Leeuw & Rydin, 2007; Wuthnow & Offutt, 2008).The meaning and centrality of the Israeli homeland for Jewish identity is also undergoing revision. …