How a summer camp taught me what it means to be Jewish in North America
by Sandra Fox, a visiting assistant professor of Hebrew Judaic Studies and director of the Archive of the Jewish Left Project at New York University. She delves deeply into the ideologies at the heart of Jewish summer camps in the United States, as well as probing the ways in which the campers , in what she terms the “power of youth,” played key roles in making the camps work.
While her impressive study is concerned chiefly with American Jewish camps, much of what she writes is applicable to Camp Massad and other Jewish camps in Canada, not all of which are Hebrew-speaking. Indeed, while my friends and me, along with generations of “Massadniks” – including our children and now grandchildren – have long maintained that Massad was and is unique in its approach and its inventive programming, Dr. Fox shows how mistaken that assumption has been.
Most camps, including Massad, end each session with a two-day extravaganza called “Maccabia” , in which the campers and counsellors are divided into two teams. At Massad, it was and is an intense affair of sports competitions, high-level arts and crafts, set-building that could rival Broadway, hilarious skits and well-crafted drama and musicals in Hebrew.
at Port Mouton on Nova Scotia’s South Shore, which began its summer program in 1943. At a time when Jews were not welcome at social, sports and golf clubs, when they were not hired for jobs and refused admission to university programs, and when racist property covenants and “Gentile Only” signs were still the norm, camps specifically for Jewish children that served kosher food and offered a Jewish-centred program greatly appealed to Jewish parents.
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