| Description: |
This dissertation examines the case of Taglit/birthright israel, a ten-day educational pilgrimage-tour that has sent over 28,000 Diaspora Jews to Israel since 1999. Combining archival, ethnographic, survey and sociometric data, this work considers how meaning is produced in pilgrimage-tourism. The question of authenticity – both Israel’s and the travelers’ – is a central focus. Authenticity is found to rest on a notion of a boundary that divides the authentic from the inauthentic, and then proceeds to characterize each of these in terms of idealized conceptions that invariably oversimplify. |
