Is the Center Still Out There?

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Jackie Feldman. Above the Death Pits, Beneath the Flag: Youth Voyages to Poland and the Performance of Israeli National Identity. New York: Berghahn Books, 2010. Pp. xix + 307.Shaul Keiner. Tours That Bind: Diaspora, Pilgrimage and Israeli Birthright Tourism. New York: New York University Press, 2010. Pp. xxv + 261.Jewish educational tourism is one of the most important innovations in Jewish education in recent decades. Programs in which Jewish teens or young (emerging) adults are taken to a foreign countiy in a group together with a closed itineraiy and a guide and staff in order to achieve educational or identity goals have become veiy popular in the past two decades, with many claims of success. To this date 300,000 American young adults have participated in the Birthright tours of Israel. A similar number of Israeli teenagers have participated in trips to the death camps of Poland sponsored (in the mam) by the Israeli Ministiy of Education.The books under review here provide ethnographies of these two programs. Jackie Feldman's Above the Death Pits, Beneath the Flag concerns Israeli youth voyages to Poland, and Shaul Keiner's Tours That Bind concerns Birthright tours of Israel. In many ways the books are similar: each derives from doctoral research and is based on participant observation by the author. In addition to studying the respective programs as academic ethnographers, each author served on the staff of these programs. Both books contain extensive introductions detailing their authors' personal involvement and assessment of their experiences. Such an account is, of course, a requirement in contemporaiy ethnography, inasmuch as we became aware in the 1980s that ethnographic accounts are not recorded but rather constructed and that the ethnographer plays an active role in the construction of such ethnographic data. (I am not sure, however, that such a methodological requirement necessarily means that we have to learn exactly how many times and in what circumstances Keiner broke up and got back together again with his girlfriend/wife.) Both books provide historical, institutional, and educational background to the development of the tours. They also provide detailed ethnographic descriptions of the programs together with thoughtful analysis. Both authors are aware that the programs they study are employed to heighten forms of Jewish and Israeli identification favored by political establishments, and they are also aware that the programs are accused of furthering specific but less stated political agendas.Despite these resemblances, these two books consciously employ two veiy different research paradigms and, in the end, describe two veiy different experiences. For Feldman the Israeli youth voyages to Poland are pilgrimagey; for Keiner, Birthright trips are tourism. To one degree or another, each author is aware of the paradigm not chosen; Keiner, in fact, devotes extensive discussion to why he rejects the construction of Birthright as a pilgrimage - a discussion that is in dialogue with Feldman. It would seem, moreover, that the choice of these respective paradigms not only reflects the proclivities of the researchers but also points to characteristics of the respective programs themselves. As such it opens an aperture to a series of questions concerning contemporaiy Jewish life.Feldman's underlying and explicit assumption is that the trips to the death camps in Poland involve an encounter with transcendent meaning. This premise, he makes clear, derives from is own personal encounters with the death sites of the Holocaust, as the son of Holocaust survivors and from his observations of participants of the youth voyages to Poland. At the end of the preface he formulates this in metatheoretical terms:My attachment. . . leads me to eschew theories that would limit human freedom to isolated points of resistance between massive forces of hegemony. To suspect theories that would explain deeply felt experience solely in terms of relations of knowledge and power. …