JustASC

About 7,500 young people gathered near Jerusalem last week for Birthright Israel’s mega-event, and I flew home from Israel last Thursday on a flight containing about 7,200 of them.

Earlier in the week, Rob Eshman, editor of the Jewish Journal of Greater L.A., reminded me of a column he had written a year earlier about the not-so-secret secret of Birthright’s success. Wrote Rob:

But let’s be honest about what accounts for a good part of the program’s runaway success — hormones.

“No one tells you it’s about hooking up with other Jews,” one 20-something participant told me, “but there’s plenty there to make it happen.”

There is no curfew, chaperones who are in some cases only a couple of years older than the visitors and lots of booze.

“What happens among the Diaspora,” one happy birthrighter from Pittsburgh told me, “stays among the Diaspora.”

Rob took flak for comparing Birthrighters to spawning grunions (maybe he should have compared them to herring or white fish), but I can personally attest to the concupiscence of my fellow passengers. Before the kids fell asleep (about six minutes into the flight, and as heavily as cows struck with a stun baton), the chatter all around me was a medley of sexual banter, come-ons, and innuendoes.

Eshman said it best:

Like most Jews in a generation that missed out on the birthright junket, I’m jealous, but supportive. I understand that, as my friend Jon Drucker is fond of saying, Jewish survival is not in the genes, but in the jeans.