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For one group of friends separated by geography, a single Israel experience builds lifelong bonds
When Ashley Inbar of Portland, Maine, got married in a traditional Jewish ceremony at the Jamaican beach resort of Ocho Rios in early January, there were five very special names on the guest list.
Just half a decade earlier, they were all complete strangers.
But then they met in Israel on an unusual Birthright trip geared toward “older participants” — those ages 27 to 32 — and forged bonds that have only grown over the years. When that 2018 trip drew to a close, six of them resolved to hold annual in-person reunions, despite the vast geographical distances that separate them.
“Pretty much right when we got home, we started planning to meet up somewhere,” said Inbar, who heads fundraising for the Jewish Community Alliance of Southern Maine. “Our first trip was to Denver, then we traveled north to Redstone, Colorado, and stayed for the weekend. As soon as we end one trip, we start planning the next one. We see each other as often as we can, and we talk every day through group chats on Instagram.”
The tight bonds established by the six friends — Inbar, Tim Campbell, Max Staplin, Carly Herbst, Simon Muller and Jared Glassman — are part of the goal of Birthright Israel, which seeks to offer participants a “life-changing experience.”
While forging bonds between Diaspora Jews and Israel is the main purpose of the trips, which are given to participants at no cost to them, the 10-day Birthright experience also aims to strengthen both participants’ Jewish identity and their connection to fellow Jews (including Israelis). Countless long-lasting friendships and romances that started on Birthright have blossomed into marriages and Jewish families.
From Inbar’s group five years ago, the vast majority of participants are still in touch, she said.
“There were 38 of us, and our entire group got along really well,” Inbar said. “We were all at similar places in life, and all of us already had careers. Even today, 95% of us are still connected through social media.”
During the pandemic, when the six couldn’t meet up in person, they held biweekly Zoom chats where they’d talk for hours on end, playing games and discussing the ups and downs of their lives — including engagements, illnesses, deaths of family members and job promotions — as well as their shared memories of their Israel experience.
Ashley Inbar, third from right, with her Birthright friends celebrates her January 6, 2023, wedding on the beach in Ocho Rios, Jamaica. (Courtesy of Ashley Inbar)
The group also stayed in touch with the Israeli security guard, Gal, who escorted them on the trip. Gal video-chats with the group at times of conflict in Israel to share his experiences on the ground — and at other times to practice his English. “He just became an integral part of our collective experience, and I think it was as impactful for him as it was for us,” Inbar said.
Staplin, 36, a franchise attorney in Philadelphia, says the 2018 Birthright trip was one of the best experiences of his life. While the tours to the Dead Sea and Masada were amazing and the vibrancy of Tel Aviv unforgettable, he said, what remains with him most are the friendships he formed during those 10 days.
“We’d stay up till 1 a.m. every night talking. We knew then that we’d be friends for the rest of our lives,” Staplin said. “We decided to have a reunion every year. The first was in New Orleans, then the next year we visited Ashley in Maine. As we were figuring out where to do the next reunion, Ashley got engaged.”
Since 1999, more than 800,000 young Jews from 68 countries have visited Israel on free 10-day trips offered through Birthright, known in Hebrew as Taglit (Discovery). The vast majority were 18 to 26, but from mid-2018 until recently some 13,000 Jews in the 27 to 32 age bracket got to visit Israel as well, according to Noa Bauer, Birthright’s vice president of global marketing.
Now that the pandemic has ended and trips to Israel are back in full force, the organization is seeing its highest demand ever and can’t accommodate all would-be participants without raising additional funds.
“Given the limited spots, we went back to the original age group of 18 to 26,” Bauer said, “though we did allow those who missed out during Covid to participate this past summer as a last chance even if they aged out during the pandemic.”
On Inbar’s trip, the cohort of older Birthright participants included two married couples and several people with children, including her.
Visiting Israel at an older age made all the difference to Glassman, a 36-year-old firefighter in New Orleans. He cited “a much higher maturity level” as one of the advantages of doing Birthright when he did.
“At 18 or 19, I wouldn’t have appreciated it as much,” Glassman said. “Everyone on our group really wanted to be there. In my case, as a young adult, I became much closer to my local Jewish community. I’m a pretty active member of my temple, Touro Synagogue, so when Birthright opened that slot for my age group, it was almost like it was meant to be.”
Staplin said that what really stood out from his experience was the 360-degree view of Israeli life and history that the Birthright trip gave him – not something he could have gotten on a typical vacation.
Six participants of a 2018 Birthright Israel trip gather for their annual reunion in 2022 in New Orleans, Louisiana. (Courtesy of Ashley Inbar)
“The most meaningful part was gaining an understanding of what day-to-day life is like in a country with so much history but still in the middle of so much conflict in present times,” he said. “Watching the people of Tel Aviv just going about their regular work days despite the announcement of the largest rocket attacks in years. Taking a bus ride through the middle of nowhere to Masada and learning about what happened there centuries before America was discovered, and then seeing the daily struggles of the Bedouins the next day. Going from the Western Wall to the Mahane Yehuda Market. Eating schnitzel in a kibbutz and then eating fancy Thai-fusion food at a restaurant in Tel Aviv.”
Herbst was 32 when she went on Birthright. Until then, she said, her travel priorities were to visit countries other than Israel, even though her older brother had gone on Birthright and had a positive experience.
“I wasn’t that interested at the age when you’re supposed to go,” Herbst said. “But our group had a different perspective. We weren’t looking just to get a free trip. Even my Jewish identity was certainly different for me in my 30s than in my 20s.”
Now 37, Herbst works in business development at a New York City tech startup.
“For me, what’s special about Israel is the enduring history of religion, and not only of Judaism,” she said. “Even seeing how strong of a presence Islam and Christianity has there was really fascinating for me. There’s no other place in the world where you see that.”
Muller, 37, grew up outside Rochester, New York, and was supposed to go on Birthright in his mid-20s. But a month before his planned trip, Muller lost his job after the congressional office where he was working in Washington, D.C., suddenly closed. He never got around to rescheduling the Israel trip, and then he aged out.
Nearly six years later, he said, he got an email that Birthright was doing a pilot program for older Jews.
“It was just before my 32nd birthday, I didn’t know anybody else,” Muller recalled. “It was a shot in the dark. I had low expectations.”
The trip turned out to be one of the milestones in his life.
“I found people I really clicked with,” said Muller, now an international trade consultant in Seattle. “We all live in different places and have different interests, but Birthright really bonded us. It’s been a wonderful experience.”
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Georgetown Newspaper Editorial Board Accuses Israel of ‘Genocide,’ Calls for Divestment
Georgetown University students on March 23, 2025 in Washington, DC. Photo: Andrew Thomas via Reuters Connect
A Georgetown University-affiliated student newspaper last week issued an editorial which argued that the school has been “complicit in Israel’s genocide,” describing the world’s lone Jewish state as an illegitimate entity that should be isolated.
“There is no doubt in the mind of The Georgetown Voice‘s Editorial Board that Israel has been committing genocide in Gaza,” proclaimed The Georgetown Voice, an alternative, far-left publication founded in 1969. “There is no critical mass or breaking point at which elites — including the administrative elite at Georgetown — will suddenly reform their conscience.”
The editorial board condemned what it falsely labeled as Israel’s “decades-long settler colonial project and apartheid system” and appeared to blame the entirety of the Gaza conflict on Israel while absolving Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group that started the war with its Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of Israelis, of wrongdoing.
“We must ask ourselves why every person in Gaza or the West Bank does not elicit the same righteous anger (and frenzied whitewashing or bigotry and divisiveness) that erupted after the assassination of Charlie Kirk,” the paper charged, referring to the American conservative activist who was assassinated in September. “While some — certainly not all — members of Congress have half-heartedly called for a ‘pause’ in the violence at some point, the vast majority of them were simultaneously voting to arm Israel.”
The editorial continued, “The morally bankrupt acts of our representatives made Americans complicit in this genocide. That should enrage and galvanize something in all of us. Sadly, at Georgetown, that’s not what we see.”
Capping off its philippic, the Voice broadsided the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) — accusing the civil rights organization of “anti-Palestinian advocacy” and drifting “rightward … under the leadership of current CEO Jonathan Greenblatt” — and calling for Georgetown’s divestment from Israel on the grounds that Israel is an “apartheid regime” in the same mold as Afrikaner-dominated South Africa until the 1990s.
“If the school gives any weight to the values it claims to represent, it will reconsider its rejection of the divestment referendum from last spring and move to cut all ties with Israeli and Israel-supportive institutions immediately,” the Voice concluded, hinting at the expulsion from campus of Jewish groups such as Hillel and Chabad. “We do not say this lightly; taking action is challenging; however, in the face of such atrocities, there are no excuses for inaction.”
The Voice is not the first student newspaper to promote anti-Zionism while curating facts, sources, and quotes to confect a negative image of Israel.
In 2022, The Harvard Crimson, the official newspaper of Harvard University, endorsed the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement, which seeks to isolate the world’s lone Jewish state on the international stage as a step toward its eventual elimination.
“BDS remains a blunt approach, one with the potential to backfire or prompt collateral damage in the form of economic hurt. But the weight of this moment — of Israel’s human rights and international law violates and of Palestine’s cry for freedom — demands this step,” it said. “As a board, we are proud to finally lend our support to both Palestinian liberation and BDS — we call on everyone to do the same.”
At Georgetown, anti-Zionism may be fostered by foreign influence in the form of exorbitant donations.
According to a report published in June by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism Policy (ISGAP) — titled, “Foreign Infiltration: Georgetown University, Qatar, and the Muslim Brotherhood” — Georgetown University has received over $1 billion in funding from the Qatari government over the last two decades. The 132-page document revealed dozens of examples of ways in which Georgetown’s interests are allegedly conflicted, having been divided between its foreign benefactors, the country in which it was founded in 1789, and even its Catholic heritage.
“The Qatari regime targets Georgetown due to its unrivaled access to current and future leaders. Over two decades, that investment has paid off — embedding Muslim Brotherhood scholars and narratives deep within the American academic and political culture,” Dr. Charles Asher Small, executive director of ISGAP, said in a statement on the report. “This masterful use of soft power is not only about Georgetown. It is how authoritarian regimes are buying access, narrative control, and ideological legitimacy — and too many universities are willing sellers.”
The ISGAP report called on policymakers to take action now and prevent the university’s becoming any closer to a country whose ideals may threaten US interests and ideals.
“It is time to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. As we saw, pro-Hamas antisemitism in the US has moved from rhetoric to outright terrorism on the streets of Washington,” Small said, referring to the antisemitic shooting of two Israeli embassy staffers in May. “Just three miles from the site of the murders outside the Jewish Museum, Georgetown has been the center of a 50-year indoctrination campaign aimed at infiltrating the highest echelons of US society with murderous antisemitism.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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‘Hamas in a Suit’: Melanie Phillips Says the US Must Stop Treating Qatar as an Honest Broker
British author and journalist Melanie Phillips speaking at the National Conservatism Conference in Brussels, Belgium in April 2024. Photo: Nicolas Landemard / Le Pictorium via Reuters Connect
The war against terrorism will never end “until the West stops pretending Qatar is neutral,” according to British author and journalist Melanie Phillips.
The prominent commentator told The Algemeiner that Doha’s patronage of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas and its influence on Western media and universities are among the many reasons not to trust the Middle Eastern monarchy.
“Qatar is Hamas,” Phillips said in a conversation on the “J100” podcast with host David M. Cohen, the CEO of The Algemeiner. “It sponsors Hamas, it shelters Hamas, it protects Hamas’s leadership.”
Speaking from Jerusalem, Phillips called Qatar’s role “the great unspoken scandal” of modern diplomacy, describing how the regime has bankrolled Hamas while posing as a mediator in negotiations with Israel over the Gaza war.
“You can end this war tonight,” she said, “by doing what should have been done long ago: throw Qatar overboard.”
Negotiations have hit several hurdles in recent weeks to halt the advancement of last month’s Israel-Hamas ceasefire, including the refusal of the terrorist group to disarm in accordance with US President Donald Trump’s pace plan for Gaza.
Despite Qatar’s support for Hamas and far-reaching financial entanglements within American institutions, the US has designated the country as a major non-NATO ally and committed, via executive order, to defend it if attacked.
For Phillips, the danger runs deeper than money or politics. “It’s Hamas in a suit,” she said. “A power that wears respectability while advancing terror by other means.”
Since 2012, Doha has housed Hamas’s political bureau and funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into Gaza, often with Western approval. Simultaneously, it has built vast soft-power influence, financing Al Jazeera, sponsoring academic programs on Middle Eastern studies, and endowing think tanks and universities across the West.
That dual role, Phillips argued, has distorted the world’s moral compass. “You cannot be both patron and peacemaker,” she said. “That is moral incoherence masquerading as strategy.”
She connected Qatar’s reach to what she called the “eighth front” of Israel’s war against Iran’s terrorist network including Hamas — the cognitive front, where perception and truth are under siege. By funding educational and media institutions that frame Israel as the aggressor, Phillips said, Doha helps export the same ideological rot that excuses terrorism.
“You cannot build coexistence on a curriculum of hatred,” she warned. “And you cannot defend civilization if you reward the people funding its destruction.”
Cohen noted that Washington’s posture toward Doha remains contradictory. “You can’t confront a sponsor of terror,” he said, “while treating it like an ally at the same time.”
Phillips concluded that lasting peace requires more than military victory — it demands confronting the global enablers that dignify extremism. “If the West continues to pretend Qatar is neutral,” she said, “then Hamas will never truly be defeated.”
The full conversation — “The Eighth Front Is the Mind” — is available now on “J100” via Apple Podcasts, Substack, and YouTube.
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Australia Lists Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard as State Sponsor of Terrorism
Commanders and members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps meet with Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Tehran, Iran, Aug. 17, 2023. Photo: Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
Australia has listed Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a state sponsor of terrorism, Foreign Minister Penny Wong said on Thursday, following an intelligence assessment that it had orchestrated attacks against Australia‘s Jewish Community.
Australia in August accused Iran of directing two antisemitic arson attacks in the cities of Sydney and Melbourne and gave Tehran’s ambassador seven days to leave the country, its first such expulsion since World War II.