It seems that this is a Backbone idiom. If you update the view, you have to call delegateevents to make sure that all the new elements have their events wired up correctly. The convention is that this be done in render methods so I'm going to move the call back to the original location. I wonder if there are other Backbone places where we aren't doing this correctly in our render methods. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11073877/delegateevents-in-backbone-js