The Jews of Summer: Summer Camps and Jewish Culture in Postwar America by Sandra Fox (review)

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• The Jews of Summer: Summer Camps and Jewish Culture in Postwar America by Sandra Fox
• David A. Gerber (bio)

The Jews of Summer: Summer Camps and Jewish Culture in Postwar America. By Sandra Fox. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2023. xii + 285pp.

Informed by personal experience as a camper and extensive research at all levels on the subject of Jewish summer camps, Sandra Fox has written an engaging book on the classic era of away-from-home Jewish summer camping that combines skillful analysis and intense examination of the post-World War II American Jewish experience. The context juxtaposes major threads in postwar Jewish and general American history: the effort to derive meaning from the Holocaust; the birth and ongoing difficulties surrounding the state of Israel; assimilation, growing secularism, and intermarriage; and participation in and unprecedented access to opportunity and consumer culture. Youth cultures founded upon mass entertainments, pop music, and clothing and personal grooming styles are an essential part of the story. Fox makes extensive use of social science, whether conceived within the Jewish communal or the academic worlds, to understand both the functions of camping for children and adolescents and the efforts of adults to bend the camping experience toward group social, political, and cultural ends. Readers will not be surprised to learn that in the light of theories of play and the ever-urgent [End Page 795] nature of Jewish group experience, play has been conceived not only as fun, but seriously purposeful. Camp directors and communal leaders sought to use the summer months to make young Jews more intensely Jewish amid the problematic circumstances of the postwar American diaspora. With two months, usually, in contrast to the week or two of Christian bible camps, Jewish camping seemed to be saying the entire summer was needed to achieve the purposes of salvage, reconstitution, reformation and celebration.

Fox focuses on four types of postwar Jewish camps, coming from distinctive cultural and ideological directions. Descended from the liberationist passions conceived in nineteenth century Europe, Zionist camps had a prewar history but took on an especially vigorous existence after 1948. They fostered intense identification with Israel through furthering Hebrew language learning, loyalty to the Jewish homeland, and a muscular pioneering ethos. Yiddish culture camps, also with prewar origins in varieties of Jewish leftism and the culture of Eastern European Yiddishkeit, entered the postwar era with a special sense of urgency because of the destruction of their Old World demographic, political, and institutional foundations. Neither the ideologically inspired Zionist nor Yiddish camps were indifferent to Judaism (even the Yiddishists found ways to nod to Shabbat), but especially intense efforts at religious cultivation took place at Conservative Judaism's Ramah camps and the camps associated with Reform Judaism. These camps sought to stem the rising tide of secularism and reassert the centrality of the devotional community and the synagogue while maintaining a bend-don't-break willingness to experiment with traditions of Jewish worship to captivate children and adolescents.

Understandably not on the author's agenda, but worthy of attention in their own right, were the privately, often family-owned overnight camps, that in their classic era were run and staffed by Jews for Jewish kids and maintained a Jewish-lite identity but had no Jewish communal purposes. Intensely focused on sports and athletic competition, their purposes were toughening up boys for adult struggles in a society their parents, who were not completely willing to accept the good news that was presented by increasing acceptance of Jews as ordinary white Americans, anticipated would hold them back because of antisemitic prejudices.

A central thread of Fox's narrative well worth the attention of anyone seeking to direct young people for adult purposes, is the ongoing struggle between adult goals and the growing desire of postwar Jewish youth to assert agency in forging identities existentially meaningful in both the Jewish and general American worlds. Adult communal leadership conceived, as it continues to do, varieties of essentialist constructions of [End Page 796] Jewishness, searching for formulae that seemed endowed by tradition, practice, and historical experience with true authenticity, whether it lay in a new homeland, the shtetls of Eastern Europe, or in Judaism. A...