Journal Article

Ethnographers and History

KELNER, SHAUL

2014

Overview

Before he addresses that, however, Vilnay's initial concern is to \"recover roots,\" to use Yael Zerubavel's turn of phrase-to assert historical continuity between contemporary practice and the Jewish past.2 Vilnay's first chapter is given over to consideration of the bibli- cal pilgrimage festivals and to later Jewish travel writings in the land of Israel, such as r. estori ha-Parhi's 1322 Sefer Kaftor va-Ferah and r. Moses Cordovero's accounts in Sefer Gerushin of sixteenth-century kabbalistic excursions in the environs of Safed.3 In writing Tours That Bind: Diaspora, Pilgrimage and Israeli Birthright Tourism4, an ethnography of the state-sponsored tours that have brought more than 300,000 Diaspora Jews to Israel since 1999, I knew well that Vilnay's perspective was widely shared among educators engaged in the enterprise. [...]this would also have been misleading. [...]although the ethnography studied Birthright Israel, the history I traced looked beyond Birthright to newer innovations in the Israel-experience field, such as Kivunim, a travel program that uses Israel as a base of operations from which Di- aspora Jews go forth and explore the Jewish historical experience across europe, asia and north africa.

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Subject: Diaspora / Education / Field study / History / Jews / Social change