For many, it's still a rite of passage. But it's more contentious now than ever.

"Israel isn't what you see in the headlines," one Instagram ad read.

"Run around Tel Aviv with us!" read another.

"Even though there's a war going on, we're still here, we're still enjoying life," read a third.

All were part of a promotional campaign this year for Taglit-Birthright Israel -- more commonly known as Birthright -- a program that offers free trips to Israel for Jews between the ages of 18 and 26. Birthright's operations halted after Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas militants kidnapped 251 people and killed 1,200 Israelis, 815 of them civilians. In the year since, Israel has responded to the attack with a cataclysmic bombing campaign and invasion of the Gaza Strip, a territory that Hamas overtook from the Palestinian National Authority in 2007, in a devastating war that has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians and continues to spread throughout the Middle East.

Less than 100 days into the war, though, the Israeli tourism company reinstated Birthright. In January, it welcomed 350 new participants -- 80 percent of whom were American -- and thousands have traveled to Israel for the trip since then. Participation dipped this past summer by 12 percent compared with 2023. But almost 14,000 young adults participated in the program after it restarted this year, according to Birthright spokesperson Arik Puder, despite -- or in some cases partially because of -- Israel's wars against Hamas and Hezbollah.

Dead Sea swims, drinking at nightclubs, and hanging out with Israel Defense Forces soldiers are still essential components of most trips, which differ in itinerary depending on the tour theme and provider. But all trips under the umbrella of Taglit-Birthright Israel currently avoid Israel's borders with Gaza and Lebanon, and participants now hear live testimonies from Israeli survivors of Oct. 7 and visit Hostages Square. (In a statement to Slate, Puder said it's "crucial" for as many people as possible to "bear witness and contribute to tourism" in the country.)

Some young Jews have been motivated by the Oct. 7 attacks to visit Israel. Others see reinstating Birthright during the war as an oblivious move -- or have come to view the program itself as unconscionable.

In partnership with the Israeli government, Birthright has long been controversial for its stated aim of "transforming the Jewish future." But as Israel fights its deadliest war since the nation was founded in 1948, Jewish American young adults -- who make up the majority of Birthright trip-takers -- are more polarized on the program than ever before.

Birthright was born out of "a crisis in the Jewish world," the company's website says.

Nearly 25 years ago, billionaires Michael Steinhardt and Charles Bronfman led a team of Jewish philanthropists to tackle the dilemma of Jews' "steadily drifting away from their heritage."

In response, they founded Taglit-Birthright Israel in 1999, taking Jewish young adults from across the world on a 10-day tour of Israel. To this day, the guided trip is all expenses paid, with "no catch," and about 70 percent of the 850,000-plus Jews who have participated come from the U.S. (The U.S. has the largest Jewish population in the world outside of Israel.) Funded by some 40,000 annual donations via the Birthright Israel Foundation, the program has contributed $1.5 billion to Israel's economy, according to its website.

But the program has been under fire for years by Jewish activists who claim that the trips are tantamount to propaganda, erasing the experiences of Israeli Arabs and Palestinians living under blockade in Gaza and Israeli occupation in the West Bank. Liberal Jewish organizations including J Street U and the activist movement IfNotNow have for many years pushed for changes in the itinerary that would include Palestinian perspectives and address the history of the occupied Palestinian territories. (IfNotNow has called for boycotting Birthright in the past, though it has since altered its approach.) Other activists have staged sit-ins against Birthright presentations at college campus Hillels and have demonstrated outside Birthright's headquarters, in New York.

Since Oct. 7, though, denunciations of Birthright have intensified.

"I think it's just grotesque to market [Israel] as a playground for Americans to come have a fun 10-day vacation," said Matan Arad-Neeman, IfNotNow's press director, who is Israeli American. "Hundreds, if not thousands, of Israeli families are still reeling from the deaths of their loved ones." He called the program "unconscionable."

Birthright spokesperson Puder denies that the program is one-sided in its perspective of the region. "We spend a lot of resources to show a balanced account of history and welcome an open dialogue," Puder wrote in an email to Slate. "We are an educational organization that encourages its participants to ask questions and form their own opinions."

Many supporters of Birthright argue that the function of the trip is not to educate participants about Palestine. They celebrate the program for reinvigorating an Israel that is battered in spirit and infrastructure, as well as for offering support to Jewish young adults coping with spikes in antisemitism across the country since Oct. 7.

Isobel Tworetzky, 23, joined one of the first Birthright trips after Oct. 7, departing for Israel on Jan. 5 of this year. After the attack on Israel, Tworetzky said, she felt "so scared to be a Jew."

The protests that were taking shape at Bryn Mawr College, where she graduated this year, felt explicitly hateful and anti-Jewish. The U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights even opened a Title VI investigation into discrimination at Swarthmore, which is in a consortium with Bryn Mawr. More than 100 similar investigations are in motion at other colleges and universities nationwide.

Birthright seemed like Tworetzky's lifeline -- the only antidote to all the anger and vitriol she was absorbing.

Her group visited Mount Herzl, a cemetery in Jerusalem where fallen soldiers are buried, and they were accompanied by six IDF soldiers. Shortly after arriving at the cemetery, she recalled, one soldier collapsed in tears. He confronted for the first time the headstone of a dear friend who had died while fighting in Gaza, he told the group.

The sobbing soldier had been excused from combat for a few days so he could attend Tworetzky's trip and talk about his friend to the cohort of 37 visitors. He had not been able to attend his friend's funeral. The trip did not include a similar visit with a Palestinian grieving a friend or family member killed in the war.

The soldier's intense reaction moved Tworetzky, who said what he was feeling, she was "feeling as well."

After about 10 days in Israel, Tworetzky felt "stronger" and ready to go back to college in Pennsylvania. Birthright, she said, braced her to dismiss disapproval from her peers for her geopolitical views, as well as what she believes had been an abrasive, pro-Palestine climate on her campus the previous semester.

"I'm going back tomorrow and not giving two shits about what other people think," she said in a phone call in April. "I'm a Jew, and this is what we do: We fight back against oppression.

"On Oct. 7, my heart left my body," Tworetzky added. "I found it again, in Israel."

Jonathan Izrailov, 19, also attended one of the first Birthright trips after Oct. 7. The teenager, who is from Queens, initially signed up "to understand why people are hating on the Jews" and left Birthright feeling "closer to God" and buoyed by a new sense of purpose. Instead of scrolling on social media a world away, being in Israel on the ground felt empowering. Harvesting crops at an Israeli farm that lost its foreign field workers when they fled home after the war began -- a new Birthright activity for post-Oct. 7 participants -- made him feel useful.

Shortly after returning to the U.S. in January, Izrailov left his job as a cook and sales rep to fly right back to Israel the next month. He joined two others from his first trip to volunteer more than four hours a day at understaffed cooperative farms.

Another January participant, 26-year-old New Yorker Nissin Steinberg, said Birthright for him was like "group therapy in front of 40 people."

"A guy that's already an adult doesn't really make friends that quickly," he said. "I kid you not, I made a friend with every single one on that trip, and it's a friend who I'm gonna have for life."

His Birthright trip, which departed Jan. 4, felt as if "someone took a flashlight and shined it" on him regarding his notions of Israel and "the true history behind it."

Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial museum, was especially moving to Steinberg. He recalls an engraving on a stone at the end of the museum that read: "Never again."

"Here we are again," he said about the Hamas attacks on Israelis. "We're finally putting down our foot and not letting it happen again."

For every Jewish young person who is comforted by their Birthright experience, there are many who are looking back on their trips in their early 20s with horror.

Elana Ross, 27, attended Birthright in 2017 but said there's "no way in hell" she would go today, knowing what she now knows about Israel's government and the war in Gaza. She believes that Birthright "is a strategic tool to get people to support Israel" that "only shows you things that you might want to see."

"It is absolutely insane that people can go and party in Israel and still take shots when there are soldiers over in Gaza dropping bombs," she said.

Ross is from a "very Zionist community" in Cleveland. She sang the Israeli national anthem at her Jewish Day School functions. But her views began to change after she befriended a Palestinian and learned in college about the Nakba, or the permanent expulsion of more than 750,000 Palestinians from their homes by nascent Israeli forces from 1947 to 1949. After attending a photo exhibit put together by Breaking the Silence -- an organization of IDF veterans who seek to end Israeli occupation in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip -- Ross now considers herself fervently anti-Zionist.

Eating "falafel that's really delicious," she said, can't erase "the apartheid and violence" that underlies Israel.

Joni Gore, a 30-year-old from Silicon Valley, said that it was Birthright itself, which she attended in 2014, that seeded her metastasizing disapproval of the state of Israel.

Gore said attending Birthright initially seemed like a "natural extension" of her upbringing, which had involved Jewish sleepaway camp, Hebrew school, and college Hillel. Instead, she left Birthright feeling as if she had been brought there "to colonize Israel, to procreate with IDF soldiers, and reestablish the Jewish population."

The closest her trip came to talk of Israeli occupation, she said, was when they passed the West Bank barrier, where a sign warned that entering for Israelis was illegal, and that doing so was dangerous. When she asked her trip leaders about it, all they said was that that was where the Palestinians live. Gore remembers the sign as racist and dehumanizing.

Gore began looking for more information. She read the founding documents of Zionism and devoured books like Rashid Khalidi's The Hundred Years' War on Palestine. With every word read and conversation had, Gore inched further and further from supporting the state. Today she views Birthright as a mechanism to garner "support [for] the demolition of Palestinian homes and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, in not-so-explicit terms."

Since Oct. 7, there has been a dip in Birthright participation -- but not enough to conclude that the program has meaningfully changed. Perhaps that's because, at the end of the day, no matter the widening politicization of the experience, it's still an all-expenses-paid trip abroad, offered to young people at the beginning of adulthood. Whether Birthright becomes less popular is still an open question, but even a devastating war hasn't diminished its appeal.

Ben Wallace, a 27-year-old Pittsburgh native who went on Birthright in 2016, is still a proponent of the program, even though he sees a clear "agenda."

"They want you to move to Israel, make Aliyah, and contribute to the Israeli economy directly," Wallace said. Or they "want you to stay in America, build a career, become wealthy, become a professional, become a person of influence in business or politics, and have a pro-Israeli sentiment."

Regardless, he doesn't think Birthright's ulterior motives are achieved.

At a fireside rehash on the last day of his trip, Wallace recalls, the guides asked participants "pointed questions" like: "Do you feel more Jewish?" and "Do you feel more connected to Israel?"

He remembers his cohort saying no.

"We joked, we partied, we drank," Wallace explained. "I don't know what they were really expecting from us, and I could see in their eyes they were a little bit disappointed."

These days he coaches a Jewish basketball team for middle school-age kids. When the tweens ask him if they should go on Birthright, he says yes, but that they should do their best to "understand the context" before they sign up. That's because, Wallace said, "nothing in life is free."