Twenty-five years after its founding, Birthright Israel has become a rite of passage for Diaspora Jewry, bringing over 900,000 young adults from 70 countries on its iconic free 10-day visit to Israel.
But when Birthright first announced in 1999 that it was going to offer free trips to Israel for young Jews 18 and over, most people didn’t get it.
“People thought that it was a ridiculous idea from the get-go,” Birthright CEO Gidi Mark told The Times of Israel. “Why were we giving out free trips? What kind of educational impact could we have? There were a lot of questions and a lot of criticism.”
After a quarter century, most Jews now get it: As many as 20 percent of American Jews aged 18–46 have participated in Birthright, and nearly 30% of Jewish parents had at least one child participate, according to a 2020 Pew Research survey.
Birthright Israel is now a powerful presence in the Jewish world, particularly in the United States, where an estimated 70-80% of participants are based.
It’s an experience that many call life-changing and a wake-up call for Jewish identity, even as detractors criticize it for failing to promote a more nuanced narrative of Israel’s history.
What is clear is that the program has far-reaching impacts on Diaspora Jewry.
“We have conducted dozens of studies and written nearly 100 papers and reports, and the data shows it very clearly,” said Leonard Saxe, head of Brandeis University’s Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies, who has been researching the impact of the trip since its founding, through Birthright funding. “The simple summary is that Birthright has an enormous impact on participants in both the short term and the long term.”
A long-term longitudinal study conducted by the center shows that the resonance of a Birthright trip can still be measured 20 years after one has completed the program.
“The experience puts people’s entire lives on a different trajectory of engagement with the Jewish people and Israel, particularly for those who marry Jewish,” said Saxe.
A program born of intermarriage
The concept of a program that would bring young Diaspora Jews to visit Israel was hatched in the mid-1990s by then-Labor MK Yossi Beilin after he began to worry about the continuity of American Jewry.
This was a common fear at the time, after the 1990 National Jewish Population Survey revealed that intermarriage rates had spiked to an unprecedented 52%, noted historian and author Pamela Nadell, who is a professor of Jewish studies at American University.
“There was a pervasive sense at the time that intermarriage would spell the end of the American Jewish community,” Nadell said.
Beilin presented his idea to the Jewish Agency and other bodies, who rejected it as being too costly and unrealistic. Later, he approached philanthropists Charles Bronfman, who had funded teen trips to Israel in the 1980s, and Michael Steinhardt, a Wall Street investor passionate about Jewish continuity. Both were unconvinced at first, but after much deliberation, the two provided the funding that allowed the program to go ahead in the summer of 1999.
Participants on the first Birthright trip in December 1999 describe it as a transformational experience, and not just because they spent 10 days partying, hiking, and hooking up with other Jews on someone else’s bill. Several people who spoke with The Times of Israel through the help of Birthright said it opened their eyes to a new world of possibilities.
“That trip was a profound experience, and I came home from Israel with a new sense of what community means,” said Houston resident Rachel Strauss, who was a 19-year-old student at Michigan State University in 1999.
Strauss grew up in a strongly Jewish home, but “didn’t connect with Israel emotionally” when she heard about the free trip to Israel at the campus Hillel. She is now an activist and donor for numerous Jewish causes.
Adam Pollack, who was studying at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania at the time, said the trip gave him his first exposure to different types of Jews than those he’d met growing up outside of New York City.
“When I understood that I was gay in my teens, I thought that meant I didn’t have a place in the Jewish world,” said Pollack, who now lives in San Francisco and works at a Jewish nonprofit for interfaith couples. “But on Birthright, I got exposed to all sorts of inspiring Jews and learned that there was more diversity in Judaism than I knew about. I loved partying on that trip and experiencing the sights and sounds of Israel, but more importantly, I had the sense that there was space within Judaism for me for the first time.”
Pollack is married to a non-Jewish man and has worked in leadership positions in Jewish organizations his entire career. He believes his success is a testament to Birthright’s ability to impact Jews living outside the standard community bubbles.
“Birthright’s goal from the beginning was to reach young adults who are not connected with Jewish community life,” Kelner said. “That’s why, by design, Orthodox participation on trips is much lower than their representation in the population. In a sense, Birthright’s ‘ideal’ candidate for a trip would be the unaffiliated child of intermarried parents.”
10 days to make a match
The most recent Cohen Center report, published in February, shows that non-Orthodox participants in Birthright are 49% more likely to marry Jews than those who don’t take part in the program, at a rate of 55% compared to 37%.
While some have charged that Jewish engagement shouldn’t be judged by intermarriage rates, Saxe says the data show that marrying Jewish sets a tone that influences all subsequent decisions.
“The marriage effect is very important,” Saxe said. “It is much easier to remain engaged if your spouse shares the same interests.”
For Birthright alumni with Jewish partners, the data shows a higher likelihood that they will have a strong relationship with Israel, celebrate Shabbat and Jewish holidays, be members of synagogues, serve as lay leaders in Jewish organizations, and have Jewish friends. Children are more likely to be raised Jewish, more likely to have had a Jewish circumcision or naming ceremony, and more likely to be enrolled in formal and informal Jewish education.
Birthright participants who marry non-Jewish partners also show far greater likelihood than non-participants to have a strong connection to Israel, have more Jewish friends, send children to Jewish early childhood programs, and celebrate a bar and bat mitzvah for their children, the research shows.
Overall, 84% of Birthright Israel alumni raise their children exclusively Jewish, regardless of their spouse’s background. They are 122% more likely than non-participants to celebrate their child’s bar or bat mitzvah, and twice as likely to feel very connected to Israel even many years after their trip, the report said.
Transforming individuals
While intermarriage rates can be measured, the most significant impacts of Birthright are personal and can’t be captured in statistical abstracts, noted Shaul Kelner, associate professor of sociology and Jewish studies at Vanderbilt University and the author of “Tours That Bind: Diaspora, Pilgrimage, and Israeli Birthright Tourism.”
“Surveys like [the recent Cohen report] give you the averages but wash out the intensity of how transformative the Birthright experience is,” Kelner said. “Birthright creates Jewish leaders.”
“In my work, I’ve read more than 1,000 applications from people applying to rabbinic school and other Jewish professional programs, and Birthright is a key part of the narrative that many of the people tell about their Jewish journeys,” Kelner said. “If just two people on every tour bus have a life-changing experience that makes them want to be a community leader, we are talking about tens of thousands taking on leadership roles.”
While different forms of “heritage tourism” can be powerful forces in shaping identity, pilgrimage to Israel always had a unique power for Diaspora Jews, noted Jewish historian Nadell.
“Many people travel to the country where they once lived, or their parents lived, in order to reconnect with their roots, but many Americans who have never been to Israel still see the Zionist narrative as a strong part of who they are,” Nadell said.
“The story of Israel’s rise from the ashes of the Holocaust is a powerful inoculation against antisemitism that has worked, by and large. The success of Birthright is taking that narrative and transmitting it to the next generation,” she said.
Opposition and criticism
Birthright has been criticized for presenting a one-sided view of Israel, avoiding discussions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Palestinian claims to the land, and promoting a narrative that glorifies Israel and encourages immigration. Others disparage an environment that often encourages trip participants to seek romantic encounters, in fulfillment of Birthright co-founder Steinhardt’s tongue-in-cheek wish that alumni would get together and “make Jewish babies.”
From 2017 to 2019, the Jewish anti-Zionist groups Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow campaigned for Jews to boycott Birthright and encouraged participants to walk out during their trips to protest the lack of a Palestinian perspective. Other protests by progressive Jewish movements have gained popularity since, particularly in the aftermath of the war Hamas launched against Israel on October 7, 2023.
This growing polarization has impacts even on Birthright participants who identify strongly with Israel, noted David Barak-Gorodetsky, head of the Ruderman Program for American-Jewish Studies at the University of Haifa.
“In recent years, we see that more students are hesitant to take a public stand on Israel, preferring to keep a low profile,” said Barak-Gorodetsky. “This is evident in the way some participants avoid posting photos or publicly acknowledging their trips on social media. Directors at Hillel and other organizations say students are more muted about their trips, sharing their experiences privately but avoiding public engagement.”
In addition, he said, there has been a noticeable rise in “disenchantment” narratives — videos and articles where past participants claim that their Birthright experience backfired, leaving them feeling misled. “We don’t have any concrete data on their impact, but they have gained traction online,” he said.
Saxe noted a different, unintended phenomenon negatively affecting Jewish students on US college campuses.
“Because of the war, and also because of COVID, there aren’t as many people participating in Birthright trips anymore, and that means there are fewer engaged students defending Israel on campus,” he said.
While Birthright’s numbers had grown consistently every year before the coronavirus pandemic, peaking at 50,000 participants in 2019, that trend came to a halt when the world shut down in March 2020. In the shadow of the Gaza war, just 20,000 came in 2024.
“Many students on campus today were in high school when COVID hit and never got to go on an organized Israeli trip and experience that connection firsthand,” Barak-Gorodetsky said. “It’s quite possible that the dialogue on many college campuses might be different now if there were more students who had gone on Birthright. There is evidence that alumni are much more likely to respond when someone says something totally wrong or ridiculous about the situation in Israel.”
Educating about Israel
Sara Yael Hirschhorn, senior researcher and lecturer at the University of Haifa and author of a book on American Jews and the Israeli settler movement, has a different criticism of the program: Birthright does not do a good job of teaching participants about Israel.
“One of the questions we ask about Birthright is, ‘Could you achieve the same results by locking people in a cabin in the Poconos for 10 days?'” Hirschhorn said. “Why go to the trouble and the expense of bringing people to Israel? It depends on the goal of the program. If the answer is that we want people to be more knowledgeable about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and be more engaged around these issues, then it’s not clear that they are achieving that goal.”
The data shows that participants exhibit only a slight increase in knowledge about Israel, “not as much as you’d think after spending 10 days in Israel,” Hirschhorn said.
Not everyone agrees. To Vanderbilt’s Kelner, Birthright is a big part of why American Jews remain connected to Israel in the first place.
“Birthright was created precisely at a time when Jews were worried about a growing distance between the world’s two largest Jewish communities,” Kelner said. “Investing money in this program at this scale was a strong statement that Israel was important to American Jews, and that it wanted to maintain the connection.”
“Can you imagine what would have happened if they decided not to invest? There would be much less understanding between the two communities today,” he said.
Representing the Diaspora to Israelis
Birthright doesn’t just teach Americans about Israelis. The program’s role as a bridge between communities goes both ways, Barak-Gorodetsky said.
“For many Israelis, Birthright is arguably the most visible symbol of Jewish American presence in Israel,” he said. “Israelis don’t know about the federations or American Jewish organizations. Buses full of American students have become a very clear symbol of the Jewish-American connection to Israel.”
That hasn’t always had such positive connotations. “Since the 1950s and ’60s, there has been a perception — strengthened by skits in the comedy show Eretz Nehederet — of Americans as being kind of superficial, coming to Israel for fun, not really aware of the complicated situation here,” Barak-Gorodetsky said.
“But since the beginning of the war on October 7, 2023, something has changed,” he said. “For many, seeing buses of students here at a time when many tourists are afraid to come serves as a sort of counterbalance to the news stories of rampant antisemitism on US college campuses. The fact that Birthright has now started bringing people to volunteer in Israel helps to balance the message people get when they see Jewish organizations holding anti-Israel protests.”
Birthright recognized the value of personal interactions between program participants and soldiers from the very beginning. All Birthright trips include mifgashim (Hebrew for encounters) with IDF soldiers and young Israeli professionals, some of whom accompany a group throughout their visit. Studies have shown these to be some of the most impactful parts of the experience.
“Connecting Diaspora youth with their Israeli peers has proven to be a key part of the formula,” said Saxe, the demographer. “Allowing them to form relationships with Israelis and cultivate deeper experiences makes a big difference.”
As valuable as personal meetings between American Jews and Israeli soldiers and students are for the Birthright experience, they also serve as an entry point for many young Israelis to develop relationships with their US counterparts for the first time, Barak-Gorodetsky said.
“A typical story could be, ‘I was on a Birthright bus, got to know American Jews, and then I worked at a camp in America and spent a few years in the States working as a representative of the Jewish Agency.'” Barak-Gorodetsky said. “It’s a formative experience for both sides.”
Changing realities
Birthright has updated its programming in recent years in response to changing needs, particularly due to the Gaza war, said Elias Saratovsky, CEO and President of the Birthright Israel Foundation, who was brought in to lead the organization’s US fundraising efforts in September 2023.
Shortly after the war started, Birthright created a new program for people wishing to volunteer in Israel. That has proven to be successful, with 9,000 arriving to help in 2024 and another 10,000 expected this year.
“We started this program as an experiment because we wanted to help,” Saratovsky said. “Jews aged 18-50 can come for seven to 14 days, and we place them at farms, logistical centers, army bases, helping displaced families. It’s been a mix of Birthright alumni looking to reconnect with Israel and people from outside who want to help with the rebuilding of Israel.”
Meanwhile, Birthright hopes to get back on a growth trajectory this year and bring 33,000 participants to its 10-day program. Assuming the security situation clears up, it wants to bring as many as 200,000 people by 2029, Saratovsky said.
Meanwhile, Birthright has been expanding in other directions as well. In 2022, Birthright began offering extended 6- 10-week internships in Israel for college students after it merged with Onward Israel, previously a Jewish Agency project.
Another program, Birthright Excel, is a highly selective leadership program where participants engage with Israeli changemakers in business, technology, and public policy. This summer, 160 will begin the intensive program, out of 1,000 applicants, Saratovsky said.
Birthright has also undertaken a five-year greening process in which it will integrate sustainability into its programming, offset carbon emissions from trips by planting trees, and offer environmental education “green” modules on its trips. And last year, Birthright brought in a group of 12 volunteers, all on the autistic spectrum or with other non-physical disabilities, in a first-of-its-kind visit.
Financing the vision
All of these programs require massive influxes of funding. The organization raised a record $85 million in 2023 and brought in many new donors during 2024, Saratovsky said.
“We have around 40,000 donors across the US, making contributions of different sizes,” Saratovsky said. “We have over 1,000 donors who give over $10,000 a year, and 18 donors who give more than a million dollars a year. Sheldon and Miriam Adelson have been our most generous donors, with the Adelson family giving more than half a billion dollars since our founding.”
Approximately 67% of its funding comes from individual donors, with another 27% from the Israeli government and 6% from Jewish federations and the Jewish Agency, Birthright has said.
All of this comes on top of the initial seed investments made by Michael Steinhardt and Charles Bronfman at the beginning of Birthright’s journey. Bronfman, now 93, announced earlier in February 2025 that he had committed an additional $25 million toward the creation of a new endowment fund for legacy donors. More than $80 million in funding has already been committed by 100 donors, Saratovsky said.
Birthright has much more room for growth still ahead, says Birthright CEO Mark.
“It is extremely satisfying looking at what we have accomplished, but I believe there is much more we can do,” Mark said. “We are only at the beginning of our mission,” he said.
