Researcher finds that people who signed up for Birthright but did not participate became less connected to Israel and their own Jewish identity - but the converse is also true JTA — Len Saxe, a researcher at Brandeis University, has been studying the impact of Birthright trips to Israel since the initiative launched in 1999. Last year, he noticed something unusual in the data. At a rate far outpacing anything he’d ever det... [4210 chars]