The Jews of Summer:
Summer Camp and Jewish Culture in Postwar America
Read an excerpt in Slate here, and my guest essay in the New York times here.
In the decades directly following the Holocaust, Jewish leaders anxiously debated how to preserve and produce what they considered authentic Jewish culture, fearful that upward mobility and suburbanization threatened the integrity of Jewish life in America. Many communal educators and rabbis contended that without intervention, Judaism as they understood it would disappear altogether. In their searches for solutions, postwar Jews came to see residential summer camps as panaceas to their communal ills, constructing their programs with an eye towards collective transformation.
Their fears, hopes, and dreams about the Jewish future inflected every element of camp life, from how they organized time to the languages they taught to how campers engaged with one another romantically and sexually. But adult plans did not constitute all that occurred during the Jewish summer: children and teenagers shaped these sleep-away camps to mirror their own desires and interests, too, in their everyday decisions to accept or resist the ideas and ideologies their camp leaders promoted. Through a focus on the lived experience, The Jews of Summer reveals how a culture in crisis birthed a rite of passage, and how the generations clashed and converged on their paths towards creating new forms of Jewishness for their historical moments.