1.

Record Nr.

UNISA996247977903316

Autore

Kelner Shaul

Titolo

Tours that bind : diaspora, pilgrimage, and Israeli birthright tourism / / Shaul Kelner

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New York, : New York University Press, 2010

ISBN

0-8147-4918-6

0-8147-4842-2

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (288 p.)

Disciplina

338.4/7915694

Soggetti

Tourism - Israel

Heritage tourism - Israel

Jews - Travel - Israel

Jews - United States - Identity

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Preface -- 1 Deploying Tourism -- 2 Striking Roots -- 3 Contesting Claims -- 4 Consuming Place -- 5 Collapsing Distance -- 6 Encountering Community -- 7 Locating Self -- 8 Building Diaspora -- Methodological Appendix -- Glossary -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- About the Author

Sommario/riassunto

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.