Sarah Silverman is promoting her book Bedwetter as part of a Jewish book festival at the American Jewish University in Los Angeles. Birthright, the program that sends American Jewish kids to Israel for free, is piggybacking on the event, and has apparently made a deal with the university to sell a block of seats for it.
Birthright is a heavily-funded Zionist program with two goals: 1, because western Jews now grow up with less and less of a connection to Israel, but the connection to the Diaspora is all that sustains Israel, this connection must be created by any means possible, including this 10-day junket program for wide-eyed people under 26. It often backfires, but it also does succeed; 2, many of the Jews on the trip end up having romances with one another or better yet, with Israeli soldiers whose bases they visit, and this tends to lower the frightful intermarriage rate in the west.
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