Certain American Jews qualify for an all-expenses-paid trip to Israel, under a program called Birthright Israel, courtesy of a handful of Jewish philanthropists, the Israeli government, and Jewish charitable organizations.

About 6,000 young Jews from the United States, Canada and elsewhere have been flown to Israel in the last month for a 10-day trip explicitly intended to change their lives.

The purpose of the program, involving secular Jewish teenagers and young adults, is to connect them to their history, culture and peers and thereby halt the high rates of intermarriage, assimilation and drift among Americans and other Diaspora Jews. This program will be in force the next five years. It is a $210 million marketing campaign intended to sell Jewishness to Jews.

The American melting pot worked beyond our wildest fears." Said Richard Joel, president of Hillel, the college campus Jewish organization.

Birthright is a response to slow the intermarriage trend that began in the late 1960s. Some studies have found that just over half of American Jews were marrying non-Jews.

The romance that once bloomed between American Jews and Israel has cooled in the past generation. Israel –prosperous and powerful- has shed the underdog’s image that lured American Jews to Israel by the thousands as tourists, volunteers and immigrants in the 1960 and 1970s.

The program offers the young participants a variety of options: science courses, internships in Israel, software exploring Jewish genealogy. Special offers on concerts, magazines, plants and Jewish seminaries. Computer jocks were invited to study in Israel’s own Silicon Valley north of Tel Aviv; travel agencies offered cut-rate return visits to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Elsewhere were classes on Jewish sex, Jewish history, Jewish mysticism, Jewish wine, Jewish ecology, Jewish leadership and Jewish business opportunities. It clearly had made an impression.
"Being here in this building, in any room, in this city, where most of the people around me are Jewish –not being a minority- it’s just really great," said Zivan, a student from Fairfax, studying marketing at Virginia Tech.

The main sponsor of Birthright are, Charles Bronfman, cochairman of Seagram Co., and Michael Steinhardt, who made a fortune as a Wall Street money manager. Both are leading Jewish philanthropists in North America. They persuaded the Israeli government and Council of Jewish Federations to contribute $70 million, and recruit a dozen other philanthropists to chip in $5 million each.

The program rules are simple. Anyone who is Jewish and has not traveled previously in a group to Israel is eligible. Most of the "winners" for last month’s trip were chosen by lottery. 4,000 were from North America and 2,000 from South America, Europe and the former Soviet Union. "I am trying to make Jews," said Bronfman.

However, Birthright is coming under attack. In Israel, where 220,000 people are jobless and the gap between rich and poor is widening some politicians say the program is a waste of money. Others say that it is a junket for the affluent youngsters, a well intended quick fix that simply will not work.