Ten Days of Birthright Israel

Ten Days of Birthright Israel

Author: Leonard Saxe

Publisher: UPNE

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 9781584655411

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The remarkable story of Birthright Israel, an intensive ten-day educational program designed to connect Jewish young adults to their heritage


Tours That Bind

Tours That Bind

Author: Shaul Kelner

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2010-04-01

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0814748422

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Winner, 2010 Association for Jewish Studies Jordan Schnitzer Book Award 2011 Honorable Mention for the American Sociological Association Culture Section's Mary Douglas Prize for Best Book Since 1999 hundreds of thousands of young American Jews have visited Israel on an all-expense-paid 10-day pilgrimage-tour known as Birthright Israel. The most elaborate of the state-supported homeland tours that are cropping up all over the world, this tour seeks to foster in the American Jewish diaspora a lifelong sense of attachment to Israel based on ethnic and political solidarity. Over a half-billion dollars (and counting) has been spent cultivating this attachment, and despite 9/11 and the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict the tours are still going strong. Based on over seven years of first-hand observation in modern day Israel, Shaul Kelner provides an on-the-ground look at this hotly debated and widely emulated use of tourism to forge transnational ties. We ride the bus, attend speeches with the Prime Minister, hang out in the hotel bar, and get a fresh feel for young American Jewish identity and contemporary Israel. We see how tourism's dynamism coupled with the vibrant human agency of the individual tourists inevitably complicate tour leaders' efforts to rein tourism in and bring it under control. By looking at the broader meaning of tourism, Kelner brings to light the contradictions inherent in the tours and the ways that people understandtheir relationship to place both materially and symbolically. Rich in detail, engagingly written, and sensitive to the complexities of modern travel and modern diaspora Jewishness, Tours that Bind offers a new way of thinking about tourism as a way through which people develop understandings of place, society, and self.


Birthright

Birthright

Author: Alan Gold

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2015-08-04

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 1476759871

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The dramatic fight for modern Jewish statehood forms the backdrop of this second book in the Heritage trilogy, a series of epic political thrillers set in Jerusalem. Following Bloodline, in which Bilal and Yael raced to thwart a terrorist plot in modern-day Jerusalem, Book Two travels six decades into the past and introduces Yael’s grandparents: Shalman, a freedom fighter turned peacenik archaeologist, and his young, beautiful wife Judit, a refugee from the horrors of Stalin’s USSR. As WWII draws to a close and the truth about Hitler’s genocide emerges, the need for a permanent safe haven for the Jewish people takes on unprecedented urgency. But the path to statehood is anything but clear. Throughout Palestine, Arab and Jewish forces battle each other and the British for supremacy in a nightmarish environment riddled with hatred and suspicion. A plot to fashion the fledgling Israeli nation as a puppet of the Soviet Union—undermining Israel’s future as an independent nation—rests upon a handful of committed Jewish Communists, led covertly by Judit. Meanwhile, in a parallel storyline going back to the darkest recesses of ancient history, Shalman’s ancestors flee the grisly Roman occupation of Jerusalem, witness the glories of the Islamic renaissance in Baghdad, and endure the rampages of the Crusaders. Set in one of the most fraught regions in the world and spanning centuries, this pulse-pounding, timely thriller centers on a turning point in the inexorable conflict that still rages today.


Jewish Pride

Jewish Pride

Author: Michael Steinhardt

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2022-10-18

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 1637580037

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Michael Steinhardt left a stellar career on Wall Street and spent the next three decades launching revolutionary philanthropic programs like Birthright Israel and OneTable that offer a proud, rich future for the next generation of secular American Jews. What are the keys to a proud Jewish life? Part memoir, part manifesto, Michael Steinhardt’s Jewish Pride offers a compelling vision for a rich, rewarding future for Jews in America and around the world. From his middle class beginnings in Brooklyn to a spectacular Wall Street career, Steinhardt understood that apathy and assimilation were threatening the Jewish future in America. Meanwhile established Jewish institutions were failing in the urgent task of strengthening secular Jewish identity. Using his own capital and the wisdom and connections he’d gained in his successful business career, Steinhardt recruited partners, focused on data and results, and even got the Israeli government to help launch the revolutionary Birthright program. By turns provocative, inspiring, revealing, and outright hilarious, Jewish Pride captures its author’s unique personality and outlook and offers honest talk about the Jewish world today, along with a bold prescription for revitalizing Jewish life in the future.


Tours That Bind

Tours That Bind

Author: Shaul Kelner

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0814748171

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Winner, 2010 Association for Jewish Studies Jordan Schnitzer Book Award 2011 Honorable Mention for the American Sociological Association Culture Section's Mary Douglas Prize for Best Book Since 1999 hundreds of thousands of young American Jews have visited Israel on an all-expense-paid 10-day pilgrimage-tour known as Birthright Israel. The most elaborate of the state-supported homeland tours that are cropping up all over the world, this tour seeks to foster in the American Jewish diaspora a lifelong sense of attachment to Israel based on ethnic and political solidarity. Over a half-billion dollars (and counting) has been spent cultivating this attachment, and despite 9/11 and the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict the tours are still going strong. Based on over seven years of first-hand observation in modern day Israel, Shaul Kelner provides an on-the-ground look at this hotly debated and widely emulated use of tourism to forge transnational ties. We ride the bus, attend speeches with the Prime Minister, hang out in the hotel bar, and get a fresh feel for young American Jewish identity and contemporary Israel. We see how tourism's dynamism coupled with the vibrant human agency of the individual tourists inevitably complicate tour leaders' efforts to rein tourism in and bring it under control. By looking at the broader meaning of tourism, Kelner brings to light the contradictions inherent in the tours and the ways that people understandtheir relationship to place both materially and symbolically. Rich in detail, engagingly written, and sensitive to the complexities of modern travel and modern diaspora Jewishness, Tours that Bind offers a new way of thinking about tourism as a way through which people develop understandings of place, society, and self.


Resurrecting the Jew

Resurrecting the Jew

Author: Geneviève Zubrzycki

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2022-09-27

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0691237239

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An in-depth look at why non-Jewish Poles are trying to bring Jewish culture back to life in Poland today Since the early 2000s, Poland has experienced a remarkable Jewish revival, largely driven by non-Jewish Poles with a passionate new interest in all things Jewish. Klezmer music, Jewish-style restaurants, kosher vodka, and festivals of Jewish culture have become popular, while new museums, memorials, Jewish studies programs, and Holocaust research centers reflect soul-searching about Polish-Jewish relations before, during, and after the Holocaust. In Resurrecting the Jew, Geneviève Zubrzycki examines this revival and asks what it means to try to bring Jewish culture back to life in a country where 3 million Jews were murdered and where only about 10,000 Jews now live. Drawing on a decade of participant-observation in Jewish and Jewish-related organizations in Poland, a Birthright trip to Israel with young Polish Jews, and more than a hundred interviews with Jewish and non-Jewish Poles engaged in the Jewish revival, Resurrecting the Jew presents an in-depth look at Jewish life in Poland today. The book shows how the revival has been spurred by progressive Poles who want to break the association between Polishness and Catholicism, promote the idea of a multicultural Poland, and resist the Far Right government. The book also raises urgent questions, relevant far beyond Poland, about the limits of performative solidarity and empathetic forms of cultural appropriation.


The Social Scientific Study of Jewry

The Social Scientific Study of Jewry

Author: Uzi Rebhun

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 0199363498

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This volume of Studies in Contemporary Jewry directs its searchlight on the social scientific study of Jewry. Its symposium consists of 11 essays that discuss sources, approaches, and debates in different complementary fields of demography, sociology, economy, and geography. Taken as a group, the essays cover the major areas of Jewish life today in Israel, the United States, Europe, and Latin America.


The New American Zionism

The New American Zionism

Author: Theodore Sasson

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2015-04-08

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 1479806110

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Argues that, for supporters of Israel, there is good news and bad news - and that at the core, we are fundamentally misunderstanding the new relationship between American Jews and Israel.


Billionaires in World Politics

Billionaires in World Politics

Author: Peter Hägel

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-12-07

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 0192594168

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Billionaires in World Politics shows how the privatization of politics assumes a new dimension when billionaires wield power in world politics, which requires a re-thinking of individual agency in International Relations. Structural changes (globalization, neoliberalism, competition states, and global governance) have generated new opportunities for individuals to become extremely rich and to engage in politics across borders. The political agency of billionaires is being conceptualized in terms of capacities, goals, and power, which is contingent upon the specific political field a billionaire is trying to enter. Six case studies explore the power of billionaires in their pursuit of security, wealth, and esteem. The chapter on security analyzes Raj Rajaratnam's relationship to the Tamil cause in Sri Lanka, and Sheldon Adelson's transnational electioneering in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Regarding the economy, the book studies how the Koch brothers' political protection of fossil fuels is affecting climate change mitigation, and how Rupert Murdoch's opinion-shaping is valorizing conservatism across borders. The chapter on social entrepreneurship and esteem examines the role of Bill Gates in the governance of global health and George Soros's attempts to build open societies as a 'stateless statesman'. An analytical conclusion evaluates the prior findings in order to address three major questions: Is it more appropriate to see billionaires as 'super-actors', or as a global 'super-class'? What is the relative power of billionaires within the international system? What does the power of billionaires mean for the liberal norms of legitimate political order?