Hebrew Infusion: Language and Community at American Jewish Summer Camps

Abstract

The words and melody of the song still come through strong and clear in the radio of my mind. B’nai Re’im anachnu yadua l’kulam . . . (“We are B’nai Re’im; everyone knows it . . .”) I didn’t know what these words meant, and I have no memory of being taught their meaning. As a Kibbutz camper at Camp Swig in the 1980s, it was a sign of true belonging that I could sing the words loud and clear. I wore that accomplishment with pride. It was only later, as my Hebrew fluency improved, that I was able to piece together the meanings of the words to the song. Hebrew Infusion: Language and Community at American Jewish Summer Camps by Sarah Bunin Benor, Jonathan Krasner, and Sharon Avni uses stories much like my own, as well as historical, ethnographic, and sociolinguistic methods to examine the ideologies and pedagogies of Hebrew education in the American Jewish summer camp setting. They uncover and analyze two models of integrating Hebrew into these primarily Englishspeaking environments: infusion and immersion. The authors define Hebrew infusion as a “socialization process” in which the goal is for campers to develop “feelings of connection” to Judaism and to being Jewish “through the use of Hebrew . . . as the emblematic language of the Jews and Judaism” (p. 3). The goal of Hebrew immersion, on the other hand, is for the campers to develop fluency and competency. In contrast to other recent books about Jewish summer camps, which provide an analysis of the environmental landscape of the American Jewish camp system (Sales & Saxe, 2004) or are studies of specific camps in particular (Cohen & Kress, 2010; Lorge & Zola, 2006; Rothenberg, 2016), Hebrew Infusion offers a distinctive and focused study of one aspect of Jewish summer camping. In this way, Hebrew Infusion is similar to, yet more extensive than, Reimer’s recent research on Shabbat-at-camp (Reimer, 2018). This approach provides the reader with a deep understanding of the purposes, goals, and pedagogies of Hebrew education in the camp setting and offers readers opportunities to extrapolate the findings to consider how they may apply to other Jewish educational settings. The first section of Hebrew Infusion presents historical case studies of models of Hebrew infusion and immersion in early American Jewish summer camps. Cases were developed by examining archival documents, photographs, and artifacts and via interviews of individuals who worked at or attended these camps. Early Reform movement camps—particularly the Union Institute in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, and Camp Saratoga in Saratoga, California—offer cases of Hebrew infusion. These camps incorporated Hebrew words and phrases, songs, prayers, signs, and place names into the camp culture to cultivate “identification and belonging . . . connecting campers with their heritage, the state of Israel, and the camp community” (p. 49).