Birthright’s First Book

The new Birthright-Nextbook book: Tourist info and then some.

by Sharon Udasin

This winter, Taglit-Birthright trip participants left Israel with a little something extra.

In a joint venture between Birthright and Nextbook, these Israel first-timers are receiving a new book, “Traveling Companion,” a colorful hardback filled with history lessons, personal essays and travel guides — written and edited by Wayne Hoffman, the managing director of special projects at Tablet Magazine. For Hoffman, who worked closely with Barry Chazan from Birthright and Len Small at Nextbook, the goal was to include a sampling of places typically visited on Birthright trips as well as supplemental sites that might pique interests on future visits, and of essays and short literary pieces from Israeli authors.

“I don’t think any other book offers such a broad introduction to Israeli iterature in such a compact space — all the while tying it directly to things that the readers have seen with their own eyes,” Hoffman said. (Not surprisingly, a number of the authors represented have Nextbook connections.)

The project was funded entirely by Birthright, and over 10,000 copies have been printed thus far, according to Ada Spitzer, Taglit-Birthright Israel’s vice president for marketing.

“The idea is that it will become part of our permanent educational material,” she said. Spitzer would not provide a figure about how much money Birthright has invested in this project.

Hoffman went along on a Birthright trip last winter to get a taste of the participants’ experiences. Rather than providing logistical data like hotel names or restaurants, Hoffman focused on making the book an interactive tool for use during the trip.

“The traveling companion is intended to give people a bit of context to understand what they’re seeing, and to help them remember what they saw,” Hoffman said. “I figure that people are ready to learn a bit about Masada when they’re actually at Masada.”  Continue reading…

The State Of The Union

by Sharon Udasin
Staff Writer

Orthodox marriages may be happier than their secular counterparts. But religious unions are rocky enough to concern a team of researchers and rabbis who presented the results of their recent study on marital satisfaction at the Orthodox Union here last week.

“Traditional family values and religious values tend to overlap,” said Eliezer Schnall, an assistant professor of psychology at Yeshiva University, who was responsible for analyzing the data. “But there are also those in this community who are not as happy with their marriages.”

Results showed that 72 percent of men surveyed and 74 percent of women rated their marriages as “very good” or “excellent,” whereas, the overall U.S. population has a much lower satisfaction rate of 63 and 60 percent respectively, according to a 2009 General Social Survey conducted by the National Opinion. Only 13 percent of Orthodox couples rated their marriages as “fair” or “poor.”

Aside from a few subjects from the United Kingdom and Israel, the 3,670 respondents were predominantly North Americans, who had been recruited through Internet promotions and outreach efforts in New York and Los Angeles synagogues.

Among the most divisive issues for unhappy respondents were infertility, at-risk youth, children with disabilities and use of birth control, according to Deborah Fox, the study’s pioneer and program director of the Aleinu Family Resource Center at Jewish Family Services of Los Angeles.  Continue reading…