Page - 158 - in >mcs_lab> - Mobile Culture Studies, Volume 2/2020

158 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 6 2o20 (Travel) Sigrid Thomsen | Navigating Movement and Uncertainty by scholars such as Mimi Sheller and John Urry (cf. Sheller/Urry 2006). What is particularly useful about Mobility Studies when thinking both about travel literature and about comics depicting travel is the field’s capacious understanding of mobility, which includes both a wide variety of mobilities and a focus on how these mobilities intersect both with large structures and with individuals’ lives. Looking at Glidden’s comic through a Mobility Studies lens makes it possible to differentiate between different mobilities in the text: In addition to Sarah’s journey from the U.S. to Israel and to her travels around Israel with Birthright, our focus is also pulled to the “regimes of mobility” (Glick Schiller/Salazar 2013)5 surrounding such acts of mobility, such as the way her Jewishness is probed at the airport in New York. Importantly, however, Mobility Studies includes both physically observable movements and “imaginative travel, vir- tual travel, and communicative travel” (Sheller 2014: 793). In a recent article, Noel B. Salazar expands on imagination in mobility when he writes that “imagination is an embodied practice of transcending both physical and sociocultural distance” (Salazar 2020: 773), thereby not only highlighting the simultaneity of imaginative and material aspects of travel, but the importance of the former in transcending the latter. In order to tease out the mobile in How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less, I will focus on three aspects of the comic: firstly, on the panel structure; secondly, on Glidden’s use of watercolors; and thirdly, on Glidden’s use of certain visual affordances of the medium — that is, possibilities opened up by the medium of comics — such as the inclusion of fantastical elements and a playing with size. In carving out the way different mobilities are navigated and negotiated in this comic, I will point out how the interplay between image and text can mediate an experience of travel in a way that is at once focused on the processual and highly site-specific. Before turning to my analysis, I will briefly give some background to Birthright Israel. Birthright Birthright Israel, also known as Taglit, is an organization which offers fully funded trips to young Jews in the diaspora, aged 18 to 32. On their website, they state that “Birthright Israel aims to strengthen Jewish identity, Jewish communities, and connection with Israel and its people” (Taglit Israel). The program is especially eager to foster an engagement with Israel for young Jews who do not already have a lively connection to their Jewish identity or to the state of Israel. The trip, of which there are different versions — along with the original Birth- right trip, there are ones geared toward Orthodox Jews, ones with a focus on nature, ones that are medically accessible, and ones for LGBTQ participants — has become “a rite of passage for American Jews” (Stockman 2019).6 Despite the official credo being that “[t]he Birthright Israel journey is committed to a culture of open discussion and dialogue about all issues: iden- tity, geopolitics, religion, and Jewish life” (Birthright Israel website), there has recently been increased critique of it, and, in recent years, some participants have walked off the trip as a 5 In their writing about “regimes of mobility,” Glick Schiller and Salazar point us to the role certain actors, espe- cially state actors, play in shaping how mobility and stasis are conceptionalized (cf. Glick Schiller/Salazar 2013: 196). 6 Indeed, the program could also be seen as creating, in the term Arnold van Gennep coined in his work of the same name originally published in 1909, a rite de passage for its participants. Although Birthright is open to young Jewish adults from other countries, as we see when Sarah’s group encounters a Russian Birthright group in the comic, it is American Jews which form the largest group.