Jewish Educational Interventions in an Era of Diversity: Birthright Israel’s Impact on Participants from Different Religious and Cultural Backgrounds

Abstract Ensuring that Jewish educational initiatives address the growing diversity of the US Jewish community requires, in part, understanding the background characteristics of participants and how a given educational program affects the trajectory of Jewish engagement for those with little, moderate, or a substantial amount of prior Jewish education and experiences. The present paper undertakes this analysis using the example of Birthright Israel. First, using latent class analysis, we develop a data-informed typology for classifying different religious and cultural childhood experiences of American Jewish young adults. We then examine the extent to which each group in the typology is impacted by participation in Birthright Israel, using an analytic approach that compares pre- and post-trip responses for both individuals who participated in Birthright Israel and a comparison group of those who applied but did not participate. We find that for some measures, Birthright Israel has a significant impact on participants with a variety of background experiences, while for other outcomes, Birthright Israel’s impact is concentrated among those with the least exposure to Jewish life.