Birthright Women Marry Later, Tend To Wed Jews
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
New research shows that participants in Taglit-Birthright are inclined to marry later than their Jewish peers. Professor Leonard Saxe of Brandeis University, who presented the finding Wednesday at a conference in Jerusalem, said that this tendency to delay marriage was apparently linked to a desire to find a Jewish partner for life, which, in many cases, could involve a longer search.
“We had seen evidence of this before, but now we are pretty confident that it is a trend,” Saxe, director of the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis University, told Haaretz. “The most obvious explanation is that the Taglit experience makes these people want to look for a Jewish spouse.” As part of an ongoing research project to assess the long-term impact of Birthright, Saxe has been following a group of 3,000 graduates of the program in recent years. Most of them are today in their early thirties and participated in Birthright sometime between 2001 and 2006.
His findings were presented at a two-day international academic symposium devoted to Taglit that is being held at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. It is the first conference in Israel to be held on Taglit-Birthright, a program that over the past 13 years has brought more than 300,000 young Jewish adults to Israel on free 10-day trips.
Saxe’s latest findings show that participants in Birthright have a 31 percent chance of being married by age 28, while non-participants (a group comprised of young Jewish adults who expressed interest in participating in Birthright but never followed through) have a 39 percent chance. By age 30, Birthright participants have a 40 percent chance of being married, while non-participants have a 49 percent chance. And by age 34, Birthright participants have a 59 chance of being married, while non-participants have a 68 percent chance.
For more go to Haaretz
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