I’m always heartened to read about the ever-growing numbers of young people the Taglit-birthright program has brought to Israel. In the latest report, appearing today on Ynet, last summer nearly 20,000 young adults (including 10,000 from 712 colleges across North America) participated. Leading the pack were universities in Michigan, Florida, Indiana, Maryland and Pennsylvania. More than twice as many young people applied than there were places and Taglit has set an not unreasonable target of 51,000 annually by 2013.
I wonder, however, how many of those students were coming to see the country and how many for the promise of sex and drugs (and a little rock and roll clubbing to boot)?
Take a look at the Jewlicious blog’s “Unofficial Guide to Sex on Birthright Israel,” a primer for pre-trip safe sex that appeared earlier this year and, based on comments I’ve heard from those who’ve participated on a Taglit trip, is pretty spot on.
Among the revelations: while making it with an Israeli soldier is tres sexy, watch out – despite their macho demeanor, male soldiers can form surprisingly emotional attachments from what a Taglit gal may have thought was a quickie. As for the women soldiers, compared to the army men they’ve had to deal with, Taglit participates are “soft in the middle and tremendously immature,” writes “Wendy in Furs,” the author of the Jewlicious blog post.
Sex with counselors, tour guides and bus drivers are a definite no-no, Wendy adds, but if you can figure out how to be alone in a shared room, other participants are fair game.
There are also some forthright tips, such as an exhortation to buy condoms only from the large pharmacies rather than the cheap ones sold at the local makolet (grocery store) that are more likely to, um, malfunction.
Wendy ends by adding some sobriety to her irreverent primer. “The vast majority of people participating in Birthright do not have sex on the trip,” she writes. But that headline sure makes for guaranteed reading.
P.S. – there’s now also an unofficial guide to drugs on Birthright on the Jewlicious site. Among its takeaways: there is no right against unreasonable search and seizure in Israel; marijuana in Israel sucks; hashish comes mostly from terrorists in Lebanon; and drug transactions involving tourists don’t usually end well. Stick with the sex, I say.