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A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
Welcome to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Virtually. My name is Alex Weiser. I'm the Director of Public Programs of yivo, and we're really pleased to have you here with us for the celebration of Sandra Fox's new book, the Jews of Summer Camp and Jewish Culture in Post War America, which is available on YIVO's online store. And I encourage you to pick up a copy of. And we're really pleased to have Sandra Fox and Felicia Cramer with us. Sandra Fox is the Goldstein Goren Visiting Assistant professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University and Director of the Archive of the American Jewish Left in the Digital Age. And she's the founder and executive producer of the Yiddish language podcast Vibratite, a feminist podcast in Yiddish. Felisa Kramer is the Jewish Telegraphic Agency's editor in Chief, and Prior to joining JTA in 2020, she was a founder and editor at Chalkbeat, the nonprofit news organization covering education. She's a graduate of Brown University, and she lives here in New York with her husband, who is a rabbi. We're really pleased to have the both of them for this conversation, but before I hand it over, just a very brief word about Yivo. For those that may not know Yivo. Yivo is a very special place for the celebration and contemplation of Jewish history and Jewish culture. We have a library and an archive with over 23 million documents and over 400,000 books, some of which were used in the research of the book that we're discussing today. So we're very proud to feature it. And researchers from around the world use these collections. And we do a variety of public programs like this and classes, especially with Yiddish language and literature, to bring the world of those collections to life. And we do exhibitions and all sorts of things. So if you're new to Yivo, hope you'll come back. And if you're not new to Yivo, thank you for being with us and being part of our community. Without further ado, I want to hand it over to Felisa and Sandra. Thank you so much.
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A
Thank you, Alex. And hi, everyone who's here. So, Sandy, the last time I saw you was a few days ago at your book launch. You were preparing to get mach married to a longtime friend, a camp friend, at your book launch event, which was an immersive role play experience that allowed people who are there to explore, recreate some aspects of their camp experiences, explore them, probe them, understand them in new ways, challenge their memories, and I think it was a remarkable event and one that really honored the book that you've just put out. I also have available. Sorry, it's Blurred Available where books are sold, including Yivo. And so I'm really excited to speak to you a little bit more about the book here. And to everyone who's listening, do use that Q and A function. There'll be a chance I'll take a look at that and I will make sure to elevate your questions as they come, but also in a Q and A portion at the end of this conversation. So thank you for being here. And, Sandy, I think if you just maybe I'll just note that I interviewed you at a very high level for very basic level for JTA to introduce
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C
our readers to your book.
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A
We'll go into more detail here today. And I don't know that I've ever gotten more responses to a story, to something I've published than I did about our conversation.
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C
Really.
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A
American Jews really like to talk about their camp experiences. And they. And we see this in our, you know, in our chat right now, where you went to camp and when you went there, for many American Jews who did go to camp is a defining piece of their American identity. So I'd love for you to just open things up by, you know, telling us a little bit about why that is, why do American Jews like to talk about camp? And why was camp so active in your own. In your own identity that it. That as you emerged into scholarship, it became the thing that you focused on?
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C
Thanks. Yeah, thanks for the question. That's remarkable that you got so much response. It's so funny because I know that camp strikes such a chord because it did for me, and that's why I did this project. But on the other hand, I've been working on this for. Since 2013 in one shape, in one way or another, largely, you know, in this very quiet, scholarly, in the archive, at my computer way. So it's sort of exciting and overwhelming and surprising, even though it shouldn't be, that it does bring this, you know, bring so many people together. It brings a lot of interest. It brings about a lot of nostalgia and emotions for people. I think that comes from the fact that people go to camp in their most formative years. And there's something about the experiences of our childhoods that stick out to us long after, even though they become very blurry. And that's also a very interesting thing about it. Being a historian of the period, you know, people having memories of things going one way, archives saying the Other. And you know, that's up to me to figure out and interpret. But I think it has to do with the fact that people go at that, that really tender moment in their lives with their, where they're identities are being formed, they're figuring out who they are. And I think one of the things that keeps people nostalgic about camp is just that I should say not everyone liked camp. We can get into that too. But for those who liked camp or who found some kind of comfort in it, I think there's something really relaxing about the idea of a time in your life where everything was planned for you or you just were dropped somewhere and for a month or eight weeks, everything about that, what happened in some way, shape or form was, was scheduled. I think a lot of adults are actually nostalgic for that. The kind of like not needing to make a decision about what you do at every hour of the day and, and the fact that this was mostly recreational helps. But yeah, I think people are nostalgic for all kinds of reasons. It depends what kinds of camps they went to, how heavily educational they were, what kinds of Jewish communities they were from. So for people from the south or other parts of the US where there are fewer Jews in their local communities, camp can be very, very meaningful and comforting to just be surrounded by fellow Jews. Whereas people for the north, from the Northeast, who might not have the experience find other reasons that they love camp. But I'm, I myself am still sometimes surprised by, by the reception because I've just been in doing this in a very like slow, or not slow, I mean normal for a scholar, but just sort of this paced out way largely on my own. And it's so nice to kind of invite people in with the publishing of a book.
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A
So maybe you could just. Probably folks here haven't yet read the book since it came out last week, though I'm sure they all will. And if you could just kind of catch everyone up on what was the project, what was the scope that you set out to do? How did that change? What process did you undertake? And if you want to get into those high level takeaways, that would be great too.
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C
Sure. So the trajectory of the project is kind of, it has a lot to do with the trajectory of my own life. I'll admit. When I first entered graduate school, a lot of my interests were in how American Jews utilized Israel or symbols of Israel and Zionism to teach Jewish identity to children, or how children and youth kind of, of gravitated to those visions of Israelis or Halutsiyut, pioneering Zionist to find their own ide. Their own identities in America. And then I got into Yiddish and was starting to kind of question my own upbringing in a Zionist youth movement and sort of the Israel centrism of my own Jewish knowledge and my Jewish identity. I grew up in Young Judea. I have a lot of positive things to say about young today in terms of the leadership development I gained from those experiences. But one of its downsides for me personally is that the educational program is. Is so focused on Israel, or at least was. I don't think it actually is anymore, but in my time was so focused on Israel that that was at the expense of other topics, just Judaism or Diaspora Jewishness. And so starting to get into Yiddish because I had to take a Yiddish exam for my PhD program. I didn't expect to fall in love with Yiddish and become so involved in the Yiddish cultural scene today. But I did. And as I was coming to that phase of graduate school where I had to take a dissertation topic, I was starting to mix my interest in how. How Jewish education functioned in America historically. The history of childhood and youth more broadly has been something of interest to me. It's a very. It's a pretty small field. It's a very difficult thing to study the history of childhood, or not really of childhood, the history of children. Because children don't leave behind that many archival sources. So I. I'm into that particular challenge. And then just being an American Jewish historian more broadly. And I realized at first I had a lot of resistance, the idea of studying camp. Cause I was only, I don't know, 23, 24 at the time. So I was a couple years away from my last summer working at camp as a unit head as America, we called it in Young Judea. But I came around to understanding that if I want to look at all of those different cultural forces and really focus on the experiences of American Jewish youth and children, the best place to do that was the summer camp. Because it's just totally immersive, a totalizing experience. There are great sources that really point to the experiences of children and teenagers themselves. And I realized that to remove it from my personal experience. First of all, I was not going to study the time that I went to camp, which was the late 90s and 2000s, because I'm a historian. And that's too recent, although becoming less and less recent with each passing year. But that was too recent. And I would be studying a much larger array of camps now. Not all the camps. I know people who Will read the book and say, wait, you didn't talk about this camp. You didn't talk about that camp. There are a lot of reasons I talked about the camps I did. Some of them are reasons having to do with kind of the overall argument of the book and what kinds of camps fit into that. Some of them have to do with what camps left behind, robust archives. And not all do or did, but that by looking at this wider array of camps, I would be looking at things that had nothing to do with my own experience and be able to have that removed. And also, I just really realized by looking at archival sources how similar camps were. I don't want to collapse all. All of them into one big, you know, I don't know. Mass there. There are differences. But a lot of the literature on camping up until now or up until pretty recently was a lot of. A lot of the books were about or articles were about one particular camp. Like, here's an article about Ramah in the first 10 years. And here's an article. Here is a group of essays about how Bonin drawer. Great things, absolutely fabulous work had been done. But what if I could just write something that actually traced this as a broader phenomenon, not looking at any one camp as particularly special, but looking at the entire swath of them as a broader American Jewish phenomenon. So that's what this book is really doing. It's really looking at the details of everyday life, the things that motivated people to create these camps, and the ways that the generations, you know, kind of were in. Were in relationship with each other. They conflicted. They at times coalesced under certain ideas. And really drawing out both that experience of the top down, how adults envisioned camps and wanted them to be, and how they planned them out and the bottom up, how campers and teenagers and young counselors shaped them in their reactions, their behavior, their decisions to accept or not accept the ideology with their educators. So that's how it developed.
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A
And I think that, you know, one of your kind of the principles you're starting with, or maybe it's a conclusion actually, is that, you know, American Jewish summer camps have always been kind of a crucible in which broader anxieties about who we are as Jews and what our future might look like get negotiated and performed. And I'd love for you to kind of take us through what are the anxieties that might have been shaping all of the experiences of the campers here that maybe campers wouldn't necessarily know in their own experience, but was present?
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C
Yeah, well, American camping in General, not just Jewish camping. It comes out mostly from the Progressive era when reformers want to take children out of the cities, out of the kind of industrialization and the muck of urbanization, and bring them to nature where they can breathe free and boys will learn how to be boys and learn how to be masculine because they're not in these sort of feminized modern environments. And girls will be pure. And there's kind of all of these elements that, that are of that particular moment of kind of the turn of the century. And Jews are, are swept up in that particular trend. You have camps affiliated with settlement houses, with other kinds of Jewish philanthropic organizations. Some camps for middle class Jews who had been in America for longer. Oftentimes, you know, a rabbi would take a group of boys out to nature for a couple weeks. And that was a similar trend in Christian denominations as well. The period I study is really where camps have already become what we think of them as is sort of modern with their own, you know, with buildings and bunks and all this kind of infrastructure. They're in permanent campsites for the most part. Whereas before that, before kind of the 20s to the 40s, there's a period in the 30s where things kind of get bad because of the Depression. But between the 20s and the 40s, camps start to modernize. They purchase land and become more permanent in their sites. And in the post war era, Post World War II, that's when Jewish educational camp really launches itself. So there are, there were Jewish camps of educational varieties in the 20s and 30s, which I do talk about. The Zionist movement started some camps earlier. Yiddish schools had camps. But even those camps become steadily more ideological and educational and professionalized in that post war moment. And you have the baby boom as well. So you know, many, many people here are probably part of the baby boom generation. They're are just more children, you know, there are more children around, put sent to these camps. And so my book looks at is how these camps were responses to various trends and anxieties of those post World War II years. So of course a lot of these things are positive, right? You have Jews having more opportunities, more upward mobility, less anti Semitism, a chance to join the middle class. Like really Jews are at that point catapulted into the middle class suburbanization. All these very nice, you know, these, these very nice trends, but they actually create for, for American Jewish leaders a ton of anxiety about the future. I don't think the day to day Jew living in suburbia is necessarily experiencing the same degree of fear about the future of the Jews as some of the leaders that my book looks at. But those are the people who create summer camps, who run American Jewish education more broadly. And what they, what they fear is that children and teenagers will not learn how to be, quote, unquote, authentic Jews or good Jews or ideal Jews in these new comfortable suburbs. That there's something just inherently not authentically Jewish about that experience because it didn't look like life on the Lower east side or in the shtetl or like life was started, starting to evolve in Palestine and later Israel, and so educational Jewish camps. And I'll just say my book focuses mainly on Reform camps, conservative camps, meaning camps of those movements, and Zionist and Yiddish summer camps. They basically are created to be solution to those communal ills caused by assimilation, by affluence and by comfort. Not that they're not comfortable, of course. You know, they have these new modern bunks, they have more money than they did before, but they're created in this reaction to, to these fears about the future. And so while they all have their own ideologies and their own ways of shaping camp life to reflect those ideologies, they're all created basically out of this same impulse. And so that's what, that's what the book is about, kind of how that impulse shaped camp life. It looks at the differences between them because there are huge differences, obviously between Zionists and Yiddishists in particular. Reform and Conservative Jews take a different path to get to sort of being more and more Israel centered and more and more Zionist over time. But the book really traces how those broader trends in American Jewish life took shape within the actual lived experience of camp.
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A
And then how did those anxieties, I guess, shift over time? And what you talked, we talked before about kind of some of the big changes that you documented in the decades that you studied. And I feel like that would be useful for everyone here to hear about.
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C
So the first part of the question is what?
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Yeah, that initial anxiety of are we getting too comfortable in the suburbs? Gave way to other related anxieties as the decades went on and American Jews were ensconced in those suburbs and new concerns got raised. And I think your book makes the case that the camps then evolve alongside, alongside and in response to the evolving anxieties. And so hearing about the, the change in those anxieties and then what changes you were able to document in camps, I think would be really useful.
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C
Yeah, so, I mean, the anxieties remain similar throughout the kind of 50s through the 70s to some extent. But they get heightened in the 70s as rates of intermarriage start to go up and as do start to notice those rising rates. So one of the things I traced in this book, in the chapter that inevitably a lot of people will skip right to in the kind of sex and relationship chapter, is how fears of intermarriage started to enter the camp milieu and shape the camper culture and the sort of the top down culture also around sex and romance. So the book really looks at how these rising fears of interfaith relationships, the, you know, which comes about because Jews have more access to becoming colleagues with friends with non Jews that kind of attaches itself to a pre existing camp culture that cultivated, you know, summer flings and, and love and romance and makes that culture part of the ideological project. So as opposed to Christian camps, when I've spoken to scholars of Christian camps where sometimes they turn a blind eye, but sometimes they also actively try to prevent camper hookups and sexual relationships, what I found was that Jewish camps mostly did not attempt to curb them. In fact, often created opportunities for those romances and relationships to flourish in kind of the effort to make camp life a model for the life that they hoped their future. You know, these future Jewish adults would lead that having the experience of dating trilogies at camp would amount to taking a kind of a take home message that that is the way to live as a Jew. So that's one example of how concerns in American Jewish life change shaped Jewish camps. I don't know if there were other ones that you specifically want me to get to.
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A
I think you spoke a little bit about this moment where there was a shift in the way Israel became present at camp and that that wasn't the same throughout all of this time. Obviously.
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C
Yeah, this really surprises people because I think people don't necessarily realize that, I mean Zionism became a more American Jews largely started to support Zionism in pretty mass numbers after the Holocaust. In response to the Holocaust is sort of okay now. Yes, now, now we see a need for this. But nevertheless, not all of the movements were totally the same when it came to Zionism or felt necessarily that Zionism or Israel should be like kind of a central part of the American Jewish educational agenda. So I found some really interesting sources from Reform camps that expressed ambivalence about that agenda in the 1950s and 1960s. And also things that said, well, we shouldn't fly an Israeli flag because we don't, we're not Israeli, that's not our privilege to do, you know, these Were there were different kinds of messages about, you know, how, how people should relate to Israel and kind of the. Even the flag, which is, you know, just part of the everyday morning experience of camp. And raising a flag, what flag do you raise? Is an interesting way of getting to where people were ideologically in different times. Camp Rama was really focused in the 50s, 60s on Hebrew and Hebraism, not really Israel and Zionism. I didn't find a lot that was about Israel and Zionism. It was about Hebrew as a, as a mode of Jewish culture. And that Hebrew is important so you can understand Jewish text, but not so you can necessarily relate to Israel. That started to change post 1967 as American Jews became much more attached to Israel, much more. They started to look towards Israel more and more towards for their identities. And what I found was Jewish camps became more and more similar. Coming up to that point and beyond in terms of how they related to Israel, because especially in that moment in the late 60s, you have this sort of desire on the part of young people to relate to their ethnic heritage. I mean, in terms of all, actually all people like civil rights and the hippie movement. This is something that sweeps America. And Israel provides a locale for finding that Jewish identity that doesn't have to do with the Holocaust, that doesn't feel like something that may be painful to look at. And so these camps become more and more similar. They're not the same, but they become more and more similar in their focus on Israel. One example of that is some of the concepts from Zionist camps that I can track back to the 20s, even like having kind of preparation camps, programs where kids sleep in tents and are pretending basically role playing, that they're going to move to Palestine and later Israel and join the kibbutz movement. Those programs began in Zionist camps and were kind of mainstays of those camps all the way through. I don't know actually if any of them still have them. I know my camp got rid of it before I got there. So 2001 was about, I think the last year they had that program mostly because it was chaos because they didn't have counselors and they had a lot of sex and drugs, you know. But the Reform and conservative camps also adopt similar programs, I believe in the 60s. So it just shows that there's. There's kind of this coalescence around Israel. And, and now what's interesting and we. I don't want to get to the present too fast because I am a historian and I don't study the present. But now what's interesting, I think American Jewish camps are in a place of having to reassess and figure out the relationships to Israel once again. And I'm hoping that my book can model the fact that camps have always been both attached to this idea of camp tradition, that nothing shall ever change. We should sing the same songs and do the same things. And they're actually constantly in motion, they're constantly changing, they're constantly in. In conflict with tandem with forces outside of camp and within, which makes them,
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A
you know, perfect reflections of American Judaism in like ways. I want to dig in to the Yiddish camps specifically in a second, but there's been a bunch of great questions in the Q and A. I want to encourage folks to drop questions that you do have. There are several questions here that are really kind of informational or historical that I think you could probably answer would help everybody here. Questions about. You're describing the impulse by which the camps got started. How did they actually get the money and the land? Was there a movement or a fund supporting this or was it more organic? And then there are also a set of questions about how families determined whether to send their kids to camp, which camps to go to. Was there advertising? Was it word of mouth?
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Just great, great question.
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A
How did the camps come to be and get filled with kids?
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C
So the camps received money from their umbrella movements. That is another thing that's special about this book in terms of not special, it's something about this book is that most, actually pretty much all the camps I put place major focus on came out of other movements. So Young Judea camps came from Young Judea. The Ramah camps came out of jts, the Jewish Theological Seminary. The Reform camps came out of the Union for American Hebrew Congregations. So all of those movements would have some sort of fundraising and funds for their camps. They also charged fees. Of course, people did not go to camp for free, although there's a long history of having scholarship funds. And that is basically how they funded themselves. I don't study private for profit camps so much. And that's partly because of. You have to create a boundary around this somehow because you can't study all of them. But also most of them did not leave behind robust archives and they just don't necessarily fit into this exact same picture. And then the other camp, the other question was about how parents chose campsite. Great question. Not something you get a lot of in archives. And of course, most of the parents of this generation have paths. So I did not interview parents. But what I do know from talking to campers and from just, you know, assessing things in the archives, a lot of the kids went to a camp that was associated with a movement their parents were associated with. So if your parents were active in the workman circle, now the worker circle, you would maybe go to one of their camps. If your parents were in Hadassah, you'd go to Young Jedea. If you went to a Reform temple or a Conservative synagogue, you might go to your most local Reform or Conservative camp. So that's how some of them chose it. But also other times it definitely was kind of random. Like you would talk to someone and say, where are you feeling your kid does camp this summer? Oh, okay, I'll do the same thing. I mean, I know from personal experience that I grew up with a friend who grew up a Yiddishist with Bundest parents who were not particularly Zionist and ended up at a Zionist summer camp because that's where her friend from school was going. So it's not always a thought out ideological decision. On the case of parents, and parents, of course, want to send somewhere that send kids somewhere where they have a. Where they're going to be safe and have a. It has a good reputation. So, yeah, that. Those are the two answers I'd give.
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A
And then just several people have answered, asked a little insistently. So let's give the answer. Will someone who gets the book find a list of all camps that you're mentioning, a map of their relationships? Or if folks are very interested in reading about their own camp, do they have to read the whole thing to find those mentions?
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C
I can just say which camps are mainly in it, but unfortunately there is no list or table. I really advocated for one, but the press didn't want to do one, which is a shame. But I mean, I can tell you that the camps that are in this book primarily, and there's mention of other camps primarily, are the Ramah camps, Camp Sedgwin, Camp Mossad, the Young Judea summer camps, the Reform summer camps. And did I say Ramah already? Yeah, I think I did. And other Zionist summer camps like Habonim and Hashemer of the Year. So that that is the, the main purview of it. But the this, the first chapter is basically a history of Jewish camping more broadly and it contextualizes it within American and American Jewish history. So I think that that is relevant to everyone. And I think what I would say is that buy this book anyway and challenge yourself to find similarities and differences between your camp experience and the ones that I'm writing.
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B
About.
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C
Because I think one of the temptations is to always think about the camps we went to as utterly unique. No one did the thing we did at camp, blah, blah, blah. Well, some things are pretty unique. But the more I studied this and also just preparing for this insane party I did last Thursday night, which was kind of like an immersive experience of being at camp for three hours, is that a lot of camps did a lot of the same things, how they shared that information. It's very interesting. I never really got to the bottom of how so much of this, you know, how much cross pollination. Pollination was possible. There were conferences for camp directors and stuff. But that doesn't totally explain how all Jewish camps or many Jewish camps would have the same song, mocking announcements or, you know, where these little things came from. But I think my point is that I would encourage people to read it even if the camp you went to didn't. Doesn't appear as central because you will still find yourself and your experience, I think, represented, and it will still teach you something about how your camp came to be.
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A
And there's also a question about Orthodox camps and, you know, where. Where do they stand in the book?
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C
Great. I. I'm so happy someone asked that. Orthodox camps are in the book to some extent. So Orthodox camping, as there's kind of two phases. Orthodox camping. The first phase was in the 20s. Some camps that were not per se, sponsored by Yeshiva University, but kind of approved by Yeshiva University began to take shape. These were largely private camps that followed the laws of Kashrut and kept. Kept Shabbos, had prayers every day, but they were largely recreational. There wasn't a large Jewish educational component to them. It was just like going to any other sort of mostly recreational camp with Jews, except more Orthodox and the telekhic kind of everyday rituals. And then you have. In the period that I primarily studied, the 40s, 50s, 60s, a lot of. First of all, modern Orthodoxy is not totally. Has not come into its own. At that point. Orthodoxy looked very different. It's hard to really even imagine this. But, you know, anecdotally, people who went to schools like Yeshiva Flatbush, the girls would wear shorts a lot in the summertime. It was a very different modern Orthodox. And so a lot of the Jews who identified with this burgeoning thing called modern Orthodoxy went to other camps that affiliated as pluralistic. So Camp Massad was pluralistic, but kept Shabbos and kosher and everything to a pretty high standard and had kids that identified as traditional or coming from Orthodox backgrounds. And there were other camps like that that were pluralistic and had Orthodox camp kids within them. Even Camper Ma also had kids that were sort of in this sort of new category of the emerging modern Orthodox. And then a lot of the camps that exist today that are modern Orthodox began in the 60s. Also, there were Zionist Orthodox camps that unfortunately do not have robust archives. They're not included, sadly. So the Orthodox camps are sort of mentioned in the beginning of the book and. And talked about at the end of the book. They're. They're. They're outside the timeline of the. The books. The. The book's focus in a certain way. But it's also very interesting the way that they're outside of it. Orthodox families are not concerned about assimilation the way that more liberal Jewish families are, so they just don't follow the same timeline. But they're definitely, really, really interesting. And I hope there will be more research on them as those camps hopefully create better archives.
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A
And then I think you left off at least one camp from your list.
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C
Please tell me, because I'm sure I
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A
did Camp Hem Chef, which.
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C
Oh, I should Yida, but I didn't. Yeah, you're right.
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A
And then I think their archives are housed at yivo. If I am, you are correct. And so why don't. Why don't you tell us a little bit about kind of. It sounds like Yiddish camps were even, you know, were more understudied prior to this project. What you. What you learned digging into them, and maybe if you could even describe a little bit your experience in the YIVO archives and what you pulled out of it.
- [34:08]
C
Sure, yeah. So the two Yiddish camps I put the most attention on are Camp Boybrick and Camp Hampshire. I know there are people from both camps in the. In the chat, so. Hello, everyone. These two camps are very interesting to look at kind of together because there's a lot of similarities there and a lot of differences. Boybrick began in the 1920s as part of the Sholem Aleichem Folk Institute, which had a folk shul, a Yiddish day school, in. In New York, started by a man named Leibish Lehrer. A very. He wrote a lot of stuff about Yiddish and Yiddish education, and a wonderful educator, from what I understand from people who. Who knew him. Camp Hempsch was started in the 19. In late 1950s, 1959, I believe. I think people can correct me if I'm wrong. 1959, by Holocaust survivors who'd come to America and wanted to give their children as close as possible to their kind of experience. In Eastern Europe, an understanding of the Bund and the sort of Yiddish culture and character of Eastern Europe before the war. So Boybrook is very interesting because in the beginning of its history, much like these Orthodox camps I talked about, there were Yiddish and Jewish cultural elements, but it was much less central than later on. As Yiddish starts to decline as an everyday language of American Jewry, Weiberg's ideology around Yiddish becomes more and more obvious because suddenly they're up against this assimilation problem and are looking for ways to get American Jews, you know, and their children kind of on track with Yiddish culture once again. Hamshi is different because it's established later and it's established by, you know, Holocaust survivors who are more attached to this, this culture, but are still raising their kids in either cities or suburbs where they're not around other Yiddish speaking families. Most kids at Hansech did not actually know how to speak fluent Yiddish from home. They might have heard it, but it was the language that they're parents spoke in private about, as the cliche goes. And so those two camps were really special for me to study because well a, no one's really put any attention on them before because they were in comparison to Ramad Z camps, UAZD camps, so small. They didn't have like a national movement behind them or multiple location. They, they were pretty much ignored, especially their post war history. The idea that these camps still existed, I mean Hampshire only existed post war, but the idea that Yiddish camps still existed after 1945 had not been a feature of the literature on American Jewish camping very much. And they are so crucial in kind of my book's argument about these similarities. Right. Like to be able to trace that educators who could agree on very little else about the future of the Jewish people, Yiddishists and Zionists for instance, or Yiddishes and Reformed Jews, totally different outlooks. Right. But they're all using the summer camp in remarkably similar ways. So it was like, it was very, very important to me to be able to place emphasis on them and they deserve it. Their, their archives are also fabulous. One of the upsides of studying camps that already closed is that sometimes they have better archives because they, they close their doors and they have to put their stuff somewhere. So Camp Boy Brick, Camp Hempshift, Camp Massad for instance, those camps have really good archives because they closed at some point actually all around the same time. 1980. Ish. And their archives are really great. The YIVO Experience Study, to look at that stuff at Yivo was some of the best times of my research. Honestly. Camp HEM in particular, has a really fun archive full of documents written by campers themselves. I think the kinds of things a camp study camp left behind for future people to study said so much about what they thought was important. And finding an archive full of camper newspapers, little letters that they wrote, I don't know, just all sorts of things that actually came from campers was, as a historian of children and youth, I mean, drastic, as we'd say in Yida. It's just absolutely awesome. And Boybrick's archive is also extremely interesting and traces that 1920s through 1970s period so beautifully. So I encourage people, if they're in New York to go take a look at this stuff.
- [38:45]
A
And so what, what happens? 1980, a big, you know, a big moment for camps to close. The camps that you studied.
- [38:52]
C
Yeah.
- [38:53]
A
In your book, what was going on then? And was that. Was it one force acting on everybody or were the different camps experiencing different.
- [39:01]
C
There were different things going on and one fourth at the same time. So one of this, one of the things is that in the 70s, you have, the baby boomers are growing up and they're no longer camp age. And there's actually just fewer children. So there's a big crisis about Jewish camps or declining in the 1980s, but a lot of it appears to be there just aren't as many children and there are too many beds for the amount of children that there were at the time. So you have fewer children to go to the camps. You have the. The price of air travel becomes more accessible to Americans. And so instead of going to a Zionist camp, maybe you actually go to Israel. That's, you know, also a threat to these Jewish summer camps. And then the Yiddish camps in particular face the problem of just a declining segment of American Jewry that relates to the Yiddish culture of pre war Eastern Europe or even just turn of the century, you know, early 20th century America. And so those camps really, really suffer. The registrations plummet. And I think Camp Mossad closing also shows something very important about American Jewry. Camp Mossad was the camp, the Hebrew, the a Hebrais camp that focused most on trying to get kids to actually speak Hebrew. And it worked to some extent. But the idea of kind of the Hebrew speaking summer camp or the Yiddish speaking summer camp, it never really fully works. And it loses any last segment of the population that's interested in this for their children or children who are interested in this. That's already. That's very much gone by that period. Mossad also closed. They say, I mean, people say about it, because as modern Orthodoxy became more of a defined segment of the American Jewish population, there wasn't an audience for that pluralistic but traditional thing that Mossad was doing. Orthodox families become more. This is confusing. They become more conservative. But about things that would be related to camp. Right. Like boys and girls spending time together doing certain things, or girls wearing shorts. Like, these things start to change, and Mossad can't really keep up with the changes or figure out what it's all about. So there are a bunch of things that are happening in the late 70s, early 1980s that make camps struggle. And the ones that survive are the ones that have the most robust parent organizations, Basically.
- [41:30]
A
There's a question about. That dovetails neatly with what you were just describing about the camps that closed versus the camps that evolved. And did you see examples of camps that were affected by these phenomena the same degree and shifted to accommodate new campers or changed their mission or dropped something that had been important to them? Is that something that you were able to. What did you learn. What did you learn from the archives about how camps survive this moment?
- [42:00]
C
Yeah, I think the camps that were able to adapt to, for instance, the fact that language speaking fluent Yiddish or Hebrew at camp was not something that most American Jewish kids or their parents were interested in. The camps that adjusted to that with the least angst are the ones that survived in a lot of cases. So in the Yiddish arena, that would be like camps like Kinder Ring and Kinderland, which still exist today, and take some elements from this history of Yiddish socialism or communism and maybe use a couple Yiddish words here and there. But they aren't trying by any means to teach kids fluent Yiddish, and they haven't for many, many decades. So I think that. And those camps were already giving up on that in the late 60s, I think. I mean, it's been. Their archives are also relatively small, which makes it hard for me to make generalizations. But those camps adjusted towards this kind of Yiddish cultural, general, Jewish leftist perspective earlier. And the RAMA summer camps are another good example of camps that for a period were kind of trying to be like Mossad with the Hebrew immersion, that they weren't getting kids who had the background from a home to. To pull that off, and they had had to kind of shift away from that. So Ramah has a lot of elements of Hebrew still today. They put on, you know, Hebrew plays and there's a lot of Hebrew singing and there's still Hebrew learning, but there's no effort to make kids fluent in Hebrew. They've Put their efforts elsewhere. And they've done that for. For many, many decades. And that's one of the things that's allowed them to survive. Yeah, I think that basically camps have had to survive and evolve, you know, evolve in order to survive. And they are continuing to do that through the present in all sorts of different ways that are very interesting.
- [43:46]
A
All right, keep those questions coming. We have time for a few more. But you just kind of described Sandy a change or die kind of almost a negative way of understanding how changes might have happened. I think in your book, you also argue that camps, even the ones that disappeared, the Yiddish camps that disappeared, played a big role in kind of introducing America to the way Yiddish is experienced by lots of Jews today as a cultural signifier, where you have the words, but you don't speak the language the same. I think you make the case that the same is true for Hebrew. Can you talk a little bit more about that? About how what you saw as what you concluded. How you concluded that the camps are shaping kind of the way language is experienced in American Jewish communities today?
- [44:41]
C
Totally. Well, I would say that a great book, if you're interested in how Hebrew has changed at camp and how it functions today. It's called Hebrew Infusion by Sarah Benora, Sharon Avni, and Jonathan Krasner. Highly recommend it. If you're interested in that history, I'll speak more to the Yiddish element, which is, yes, of course, I could look at this history and say, oh, this is horrible. The Yiddish camp's closed. That whole Yiddishist agenda is dead in America. But it's not dead in America. And it's very clear to me, as someone who studied this history and is involved in Yiddish cultural production today, that a lot of the people who were carriers of Yiddish culture and heritage into the present, who are those carriers, went to these camps. I can name them, but that will, you know, that's okay. I'm not going to name them. But there are a lot of Yiddish teachers, Yiddish cultural productors who came from Camp Hemscheck and Camp Beibrig, for instance, or Camp Kinderling, Kinder Kinderland or Kinder Belts or Kinder Ring, all the Kinders. And that's been that their influence, the kinds of the Yiddishism they acquired, whether that was through spoken Yiddish or just a love of Yiddish as a symbol, as a. As a cultural paradigm that has been passed on to generations after them through their work. So without these camps, I would argue American Yiddishism as we know it today, the kind of robust and always growing cultural production of mostly a lot of young people who've come to Yiddish not from speaking it with their parents, but from learning it at college or afterward. That is, I think these camps are to thank for that. So I do not think of their failure, their closures as failures, but rather the whole story as part of Yiddish's contemporary success. The fact that there are still people interested in Yiddish in America is linked directly to these camps and their efforts and the youth organizing that they spurred afterward. So that is about Yiddish. Yes.
- [46:39]
A
And is there anything, I mean, I know your, your book is history, you're a historian, but is there anything you're able to share about what you know about the state of Yiddish at American Jewish summer camps today?
- [46:50]
C
Oh, I don't think there's really a state of Yiddish at American egg Jewish camps to talk of today. But I wouldn't be surprised if someone from my generation, from our generation, makes it happen because there are a lot of people raising their kids in Yiddish. Like anecdotally that the son of someone who went to Camp Hempshire, whose whole family, whose all of his, like, aunts and his uncle went to Camp Hampshire, is now starting a Yiddish speaking, like a Yiddish immersion daycare, nursery school thing in Riverdale. Eventually those kids will be looking for a camp. It will probably not be that there are enough kids to buy a campsite and, and like run a program, because that's, it's also just the, the economics of all this is we're past the point of people being able to buy camps. I think, like, that's, that's actually a. It would be remarkable, but I don't think it happens that much anymore. But, you know, is it possible that people who are raising kids in Yiddish will approach a very progressive Jewish camp and say, we would like to run a Yiddish immersion program at your camp and let's try it? I think it's absolutely possible and I, I look forward to seeing what happens.
- [47:58]
A
Keep those questions coming. We're getting into. There's so many.
- [48:02]
C
I just, I know it's crazy.
- [48:05]
A
There's so many memories. There's a couple near death experiences. Oh my God, there's just so, it's so rich there. So thank you all for sharing your own experiences here. And then I'm starting to get some questions that really, that really, you know, mine, mine, that space. Here's a question from someone and I'm curious. My oldest is about to go to camp for the first time. Did you find in your research that certain personalities of children acclimated and enjoyed Camp more than others? Or did you also find records of kids who hated camp? And what can you tell us about who does well in these songs?
- [48:45]
C
I don't think I can tell you anything about the type of person who does well or doesn't do well. I can tell you about what camps thought the type of kid, like, the best type of kid was for camp. But that I. I definitely saw things from campers who hated camp because the only letters home that appeared in the archives were letters that kids wrote to their parents saying, I hate camp. And then the parents sent it to the camp director. And so that's how it ended up in the archive. So I have some great letters from kids who hated camp and said, please pick me up. I want to go home. Um, I think that that's. That was the challenge of this book in some ways, was how do you talk about. How do you get to the kids who hated camp? Like the people who answer the call to do an oral history about camp, largely the people who are the most passionate. So I had to really dig to find people who had ambivalence about camp or didn't really like camp. I'll say, like, I made an effort to speak to gay and lesbian adults who at the time were in the closet at camp. And they. Obviously not obviously, but they did have complicated experiences at camp. Being gay or lesbian and not being able to come out or not being able to figure out their sexualities in that very kind of intensely heterosexual heterosocial dating scene. But, yeah, not everyone liked camp. And that is a. That's a. I think the way that my book tries to deal with that is partly that, like, it's not a pro camp book. This book is not a celebration of camp. It's a. It's an analysis of camp. I don't take the perspective of someone who's nostalgic and rosy in her own love of camp. I did like camp. I really liked camp. I love camp. But that's not really the perspective you're necessarily getting here. It's not anti camp either, but I'm trying to stay some degree of neutral. And that's because this. It was. This was not a fun place for everyone. There was homesickness, there was bullying, there were. There was sexual harassment. Like, it's not. It's not just positive. And because camp people who talk the most about camp tend to love camp, that those experiences often don't have a
- [50:47]
A
way of getting in lot of chatter about color war. Is that a unique Jewish camp experience? Is that Cut across all camps and cuts across all proportion of the archives is filled with color word documentation.
- [51:02]
C
Good amount of color documentation. Not as much as Tisha Bov, I will tell you. Tisha Bov, which gets a whole chapter in the book, has way more. It left a lot more paper behind, I think, than. Than Maccabia or Color War or Hampshire, whatever your camp called it. But a good amount about Color war. And the book has. Has a lot about color war. Also. Someone asked. I want to just address this. I think it's a really good question. What constitutes a robust archive? I mean, great question. Some camps have literally one manila folder full of stuff left and some camps have 50 boxes of stuff. So I can't give the camp that. That unfortunately only left us one manila folder. The kind of attention that camps that had 50 boxes. But it's a great question because unless you do archival research, you don't. I think I didn't understand until I got into it just how insanely varied the amounts of stuff you were going to get were. So that is a challenge. Right? You want to give. Sometimes I wanted to give a camp attention and they just don't. Didn't have the archives.
- [52:05]
A
I think we're coming to a last call for questions. I'm scanning to see if there's any big ideas missed here. It sounds like any of us who get happy letters home should immediately send them back to the camps to ease the work of future historians who are plumbing those archives.
- [52:24]
C
I love that.
- [52:25]
A
I do see some other questions about finances. Nancy Waxtein is on the call and says she was the head of the Settlement House Federation in New York City for many years and that the camps run by the Settlement House had to give up or that the settlement house had to give up summer camps because of the rising cost of insurance.
- [52:42]
C
Absolutely.
- [52:43]
A
And that in turn, costs have risen sharply for. For families, as I think a few folks here have noted. I guess I'm curious what you saw in the period you studied about costs and how those were managed and what
- [53:00]
C
might have been learned from that Rising cost of camp is another reason that I forgot to mention about why a lot of camps closed in the late 70s. The needs, the demands for different kinds of very expensive insurance became more and more the. The state accreditation, just various forms of accreditation and, and insurance and health department checks. Like all of this made camp more. More of an expensive enterprise. And then also you just have like the inflation of the 1970s playing a role. So, yeah, that's why I said it would be very unlikely to see a New Jewish. There are new Jewish camps, and I don't really know that much about how they happen. I know there's funding in the Jewish community to build some kinds of innovative new new camps or camps taking place on previously owned campsites. Because buying land is just not what it was when people were buying land. You know, I think like, at least the mythology in my camp was that they bought the parcel of land, which is huge, for like $18. I'm sure that's not true, but it was low and now it's not low. So the finances today are very, very, very different.
- [54:05]
A
Is there anything you want to share about your book event that surprised you might surprise folks here in the room today.
- [54:14]
C
What surprised me, I think the. The most popular room was Tish above, which sounds really weird. It. I want to be clear. Basically the idea was to mimic a whole month of camp in one night. And so there were various stations around the synagogue. We had it at a. Congregation Bethlehem. There was Yiddish and Hebrew singing at various times, a Hebrew immersion room, a Yiddish immersion room, arts and crafts, all sorts of activities. But because the book has a whole chapter on Tisha Bab, I wanted Tisha Bub to be represented. And basically I wanted the idea of just sort of these recreational spaces where kids are having fun. But then suddenly there's this day on the calendar where everyone is really supposed to be sad. And that the Holocaust, which is so recent at the time period I study is, Is ever present. Right. It's. It's actually on everyone's minds to some extent. But it's just this one day is when there's this opportunity to memorialize it. So I thought, well, okay, like how do we make that happen in February? And my friends made an amazing kind of play script happen based on play scripts I found in archives. And it was really popular. And I think, you know, of course it was funny to celebrate or not celebrate, to pretend it was Tisha Ba of this thing that usually happens in July or August, in February. But I think people got a lot out of it because it was really bringing up that dissonance between the recreation and the education and the. The ever presentness of the Holocaust on people's minds at that time. So I think that was a nice surprise with just how popular that room was. Yeah.
- [55:56]
A
And of course, the theater's room was overflowing at all times. I think we've come to the end of our hour. This was an amazing conversation. I really appreciate all of the memories and recollections and conversation that I'm watching attendees, and I think I see in some of that a continuation of the conclusions in your book that American Jewish summer camps are constantly absorbing the anxieties and worries that American Jewish communities have and changing in response to that. And I've seen some notes about camps growing more inclusive, for example, in recent years of children who may have different kinds of disabilities or needs. At your event, I spoke to someone who works for a network of camps who described a pretty massive undertaking to bring mental health services to camps right now, given the teen mental health crisis that's unfolding in the United States. And so I think there's going to be ample material for a sequel by you or by another 10 years from
- [56:58]
C
now, maybe sometime in the future.
- [57:00]
A
Everyone fill those archives. But thank you so much, Sandy. Thank you to Yivo for hosting this talk and for having the archives that enabled the book to be creating this conversation to happen. And thank you to all of you for being here.
- [57:13]
C
Thank you, Felissa. Thank you, Yivo. So much fun. Sam.