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Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 6 2o20 (Travel) Sigrid Thomsen | Navigating Movement and Uncertainty 159 sign of protest against Israel’s treatment of Palestinians (cf. Stockman 2019). Scholarship has often either focused on Birthright as a “diasporization strategy” (Abramson 2017; Abramson 2019) or on Birthright’s influence on Jewish Americans’ understanding of the Israeli-Palestin- ian conflict (Ben Hagai 2018) and their stance on Palestine and Palestinians (Waxman 2017).7 There is consensus that Birthright was created in the 1990’s “to solve the problem of wan- ing Jewish-American affiliation with the Israeli state” (Stein 2011: 212); Abramson stresses that Birthright “emerged not as a strategy to strengthen Jewish identity but as a way to perpetuate a diasporic identity” (Abramson 2019: 657; emphasis in the original). He argues that, by the 1990’s, Jewish Americans had become so ontologically secure that their investment in Israel, and in the diasporic community, was fading; Birthright was thus seen as a way to reinforce those diasporic ties. This helps explain Sarah’s conflicted feelings about Birthright: while she starts the comic comfortable in her Jewish identity, this identity does not extend to, or encompass, the state of Israel. By creating an “intersubjective,” “active,” and “embodied” encounter with the land of Israel (cf. Abramson 2018: 19), with the physical site itself, Birthright is thus attempting to transform Sarah’s Jewish identity into a diasporic Jewish identity. For Sarah, feeling more connected to the diaspora means that she has to navigate her conflicted feelings about the state of Israel to which, according to Birthright, she belongs as a diasporic subject. Panels and Gutter The medium of comics, with its interplay of words and images, seems a natural fit for a spe- cial issue on the interrelation of images and text in travel narratives. Though Giorgia Alù and Patricia Hill argue that the co-existence of textual and visual elements in travel narratives create “in-between spaces” in which “words and pictures mingle through ambivalent relationships, sometimes of complementarity, but often of tension” (Alú/Hill 2018: 2), this relationship plays out in a specific way in comics. Describing how comics can be used to depict a life narrative such as Glidden’s, Candida Rifkind writes that comics have unique tools and techniques to externally focalise a life narrative. For instance, car- toonists can play with temporality (multiple moments on the same page), irony and disjuncture (words and images do not match), visual style (realistic, painterly, minimal, surreal, abstract, retro, parody, pastiche), visual code switching (from comics to photographs, newspaper clippings, letters, diaries, diagrams, and other signifiers of the “real”), and perspective (focalising what the character sees, remembers, dreams, or imagines). (Rifkind 2019: 70) Comics, then, are always multimodal. Travel narratives in prose may have been conceived first and foremost as text; images accompanying the text may then be based on the text or may be placed alongside it, such as on a foldout page or in an otherwise clearly delineated part of the page or book. In comics, however, no such division is possible, as comics nearly always include both.8 This hybridity between the verbal and visual in comics is described by Hillary Chute when she writes, 7 Janet Krasner Aronson (2017), meanwhile, focuses on the effect Birthright has on the participants’ parents. 8 There are also some examples of comics which consist of panels and images, but no words, such as Shaun Tan’s The Arrival (2007). This is, however, very much an exception.