Andrew Silow-Carroll writes that the Jewish group was partly moved to action by this summer’s news that four Jewish summer camps had signed exploratory leases with gas companies that may lead to actual drilling pending the outcome of meetings between the governors of New York, New Jersey, and Philadelphia.

The website of Jews Against Hydrofracking speaks to the concerns raised by these meetings: “As you may know, several Jewish summer camps have signed leases to allow drilling on their land. The water supplies of 15 million people in the Northeast will be at risk if the Delaware River is polluted by drilling waste. Bans on hydrofracking have been proposed in New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio. Important decisions about hydrofracking will be made in the coming year.”

Delaware River, A Religious Rallying Point As Drilling Decisions Approach [Examiner]
Frack-tious [New Jersey Jewish News]
Fracking Comes to Jewish Summer Camp [Forward]

•Four Jewish summer camps in the Poconos have signed contracts with gas companies licensing the environmentally destructive practice known as “fracking.” [Forward]

• Maybe Israel and Turkey can make up over their shared love of circumcision. [JPost]

• The World Conference of Science Journalists was held in Doha, Qatar. So clearly there had to be controversy about a U.S.-Israeli citizen appearing on a panel. [Science Insider]

• Andrew Silow-Carroll takes up one of my biggest pet peeves: Namely, writers who turn the nouns bar mitzvah or bat mitzvah into verbs. We don’t do that, thank you (and yes I’m sure I have at some point). [Just ASC]

• Ten Bastille Day articles from the Forverts. My favorite is Abraham Cahan’s. [Forward]

A Tennessee-based sculptor wants part of the fallen Anne Frank tree. He hopes to use it to create the second-most beautiful artistic monument to Anne Frank ever.

Pine Forest and its brother and sister all-boys and all-girls camps (they’re in the Poconos) are faring okay financially, but camp director Mickey Black—grandson and son of the founder and longtime director—finds himself beset by (to give a partial list) the rising cost of everything; an economic downturn that threatened to lower enrollment; a litigious atmosphere that requires extra vigilance, stress, and (again) money; a digitally dependent generation of campers; and a résumé-obsessed generation of parents for whom, as Black puts it, “It is not enough anymore to just go to camp to have fun and make friends and improve independence and self-esteem.” He adds, “Some parents want actual takeaways. They want to see skills, achievements, patches and certificates.”

That the Bobos in Paradise want to ruin even summer camp was by far the most infuriating and depressing part for me to read (I desperately wanted to blame this on the Boomers, but most of them have already sent their kids to camp; are these new helicopter parents members of—gasp—Generation X?). And what made me happiest was to learn that there are still places like Pine Forest, where the old rules apply: “No swearing or bullying. No cellphones, iPads or Internet. Parents can call twice and visit once.” Camp is about highlighting all the wonderful parts of childhood that must necessarily disappear when age makes them no longer wonderful (which is why single-sex camps are best, but I digress). Knowing that fewer camps understand this—and that the ones that do are expensive enough to make them the preserve of the upper-upper-middle class and up—is depressing.

This article is fruitfully read against parenting columnist Marjorie Ingall’s defense of Zionist summer camp published last week. “If American Jewish identity is to be something more than silver-and-blue wrapping paper instead of red-and-green wrapping paper in December,” Marjorie wrote, “Zionist summer camp can be a parent’s best ally.” I’m thrilled that Marjorie has found this. But I also swear that my time at Camp Winaukee, a Jewish-in-everything-but-name, family-run (sorta—don’t get me started), century-old camp in New Hampshire was integral to my conception of an American Jewish culture that definitely consists of more than Hanukkah presents. Here, the Pine Forests and Winaukees and Firewoods are getting squeezed in yet another way. It is not so difficult to pass on specifically Jewish tradition if you are all explicit about it. But how is a thoroughly Jewish yet insistently non-sectarian institution—whether a camp, or even, say, an online magazine—to deny itself the crutch of ideology and still carry the flame forward into an ever more melted pot?

When S’Mores Aren’t Enough: The New Economics of Summer Camp [NYT]
Related: In the Zionist Camp [Tablet Magazine]

Each summer for the past several years, my family and I have left our home in Jerusalem and come to Clayton, Ga., to spend the month at Ramah Darom. My husband works in Jewish education, and I am an at-home freelance writer with kids, so we have the flexibility to come, as we did earlier this month: my 14-year-old stepdaughter disappearing into her bunk and our 2-and-a-half-year-old twin boys becoming camp mascots. We serve as yoatzim, advisers. During the day, we take on a variety of roles, including helping counselors support their campers, speaking to parents with questions, and working with kids who are having problems. We get to know campers on a very different basis than their counselors, hearing all their frustrations, from losing a water bottle and a bad PMA—that’s a personal mental attitude, as coined by bunk 31—to homesickness.

Why do we do it? My husband and I each have intense memories of being campers when we were kids. But many people have those memories and don’t necessarily want to relive the experience. There is a pragmatic element—our work here offsets the costs of my stepdaughter’s camp tuition—but we also wanted to give back to the informal Jewish educational system that was so vital in forming our adult selves. And we had a real desire to live in the enveloping, kibbutz-like atmosphere that is summer camp.

It’s odd being a grown-up at camp. This is a community in which there are more than 600 people at any given time, most of them age 16 and under. We’re imposters in this world of tweens, teens, and young adults. About 250 of them—the staff—are mostly around 20. Two decades older, I’m socially invisible to them. When I attempt to make a casual, friendly comment to a counselor I pass in the dining hall or at the pool, they forget me as soon as our exchange is over. I, however, tend to obsess about our conversation, reviewing what I said and they said. (Do they like me? Did they laugh?) And then, eventually, I remember: I’m more than 20 years older; I don’t care what they think.

But some of the joys an adult finds at camp would never have occurred to me as a kid. There’s no cooking, no food shopping, and no laundry. It’s like having a rustic country house, complete with beetles in your room, with access to a pool and a lake nearby but without the upkeep. There are even blackberries growing on bushes behind the cabins and small countryside villages to explore on our days off.

At the eight Ramah overnight camps that are the camping branch of the Conservative movement, families like mine have almost always played a role in the camp’s attempt to create a vibrant Jewish community. “There’s a perception of summer camp being a Lord-of-the-Flies kind of place,” says our camp director, Geoffrey Menkowitz. “But Ramah in general and Ramah Darom—in inheriting the culture of the camp and steering it—pushes against that notion and tries to create a more realistic type of community that’s not just for kids.”

The campers see this community all around them. They get more than a glimpse when I’m changing my kid’s diaper in the girls’ dining hall bathroom and they still want to hang out with my boys. They feel our personal connection when I speak to a sibling trio and remind them that I went to camp with their father, 20 years ago. And I’m grateful for my fellow parent-friends; when I have to leave my kids at the breakfast table to grab a quick chat with a counselor, I know that they will make sure they don’t destroy the place before I get back. It’s a community that, even with all the beetles and Bieber, I wouldn’t want to be without.

Jessica Steinberg is a freelance writer based in Jerusalem.

Glover might find even weirder the ways in which some Jewish summer camps address the Holocaust.

Camp Stone, a Zionist Orthodox camp in Western Pennsylvania, part of the Bnei Akiva movement, might be the most direct. It possesses an unusual set piece—a cattle car, constructed to look like a World War II relic, which the camp dedicated in 2009. The car was the brainchild of Yehuda Rothner, the camp director, and rests on train tracks built from German parts, circa World War II. Sitting on the periphery of the campground, the car contains exhibits created by campers 12 and older; one group hung butterflies commemorating the Terezin poem, “I Never Saw Another Butterfly.” The wooded area around the monument is designed for quiet introspection. The railway tracks, Rothner notes, lead off into the forest, into nowhere. “The lesson of the unit,” he explains, “is that senseless hatred leads into the abyss.”

Yet even if the tracks lead nowhere, the kids’ thoughts are guided in a specific direction. A sign leading to the railcar reads “M’Shoah L’Tekumah,” from Holocaust to rebirth. According to Rothner, that rebirth is the founding of the State of Israel. “Machaneh Stone has one of the highest aliyah rates of any camp,” Rothner says of his alumni. “That’s where they realize that [Israel] is where they need to be.”

At Camp Sternberg in Narrowsburg, N.Y., my summer home for nine years, the Holocaust was invoked on Tisha B’Av, a day of fasting that commemorates the destruction of the Temple. Many former campers recalled watching a Holocaust film to occupy us until the fast was over, but Sternberg’s purpose was not simply to pass the time; the camp leaders wanted us to cry. Specifically, they wanted us to shed tears for the widows in ancient Jerusalem that we hear about in Eichah, the scroll of Lamentations we read on Tisha B’Av. Since the destruction of the Temple was too distant an event for us to connect to, we were told to think about all the calamities in Jewish history, specifically the Holocaust. “If you can’t cry for the destruction of the Beit HaMikdash, then think about the Holocaust,” we were told by camp counselors as we sat on the tarred floor of the gym. “That wouldn’t have happened had the Beit HaMikdash not been destroyed.”

If Sternberg presented the Holocaust as a continuation of Jewish history, then Camp Shomriah takes the opposite tack, emphasizing youth action and responsibility. Shomriah, with locations in Perth, Ontario and Liberty, N.Y., is part of HaShomer HaTzair (“youth guard”) movement, founded in 1913. (Mordechaj Anielewicz, leader of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, was a member.) On Tisha B’Av, Shomriah campers watched reenactments from tragic eras in Jewish history, ending with the Shoah and the refrain, “Never Again.” Karen Isaacs, 25, a Jewish educator who attended Camp Shomriah into her teens, recalls being told to pretend that the campers were being held captive by the Nazis. “You’re in the Warsaw Ghetto, what are you going to do?” she says the kids were asked.

The campers sensed that one answer was preferred. “You know before you started the simulated conversation that the people who were right were the people who decided to fight back,” she said. At Shomriah, you didn’t want to be the camper who hid in an attic.

Some are skeptical of Holocaust education at summer camp. “It’s interesting that we’ve created these utopias where people belong,” says Rabbi Avi Katz-Orlow, education specialist at the Foundation for Jewish Camp. “But what Holocaust education is reminding people is that we don’t belong in a place.” He wonders if some educators are using the Holocaust because it can be “expedient to say how Jews died as opposed to working with you to figure out how a Jew can live.”

Camp Tawonga, in California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains, takes a more integrated approach. The Torah scroll the camp uses during Shabbat services is originally from Czechoslovakia and was stolen by the Nazis. At the start of each camp session, the origins of the scroll are explained to the campers as they sit in an outdoor amphitheater, and the wide-ranging conversation opens up to talk about the history of the trees of neighboring Yosemite, and the Tuolomne River, which runs through the campus, and then back to the history of the bimah, on which rests the rescued scroll. “Using this Torah as a Torah was much more meaningful than looking at it as an artifact in a museum,” said former camper and staffer, Dave Castle, 30.

And, ultimately, what matters is what the campers take away from their summers. Akiko Yonekawa is the former director of Southern California’s Camp Alonim, which doesn’t teach about the Holocaust. “I don’t think Holocaust education asks campers anything about themselves. It asks them to identify with people from the past,” she said. “What does it mean to be 12 on the West Coast?”

On the Bus
by Jordana Horn, Camp Eisner

I first went at age 10. I was the rookie who made the mistake of packing books (to read for fun!) rather than eyeliner or bras. I should have shown up at the bus wearing a shirt that said “Pariah.”

I drove to the New York City street corner where the bus would pick us up with my parents. I was very nervous, knowing no one, and was trying not to cry. My parents told me to go put my stuff on the bus and then I’d come off and say goodbye to them. I got on the bus and put my bag down on a seat. I went back to the front of the bus.

“No one gets off the bus once they’re on the bus,” the head counselor said, in a weird riff on Ken Kesey‘s “Either you’re on the bus or you’re off the bus.”

“But I didn’t know that rule.”

“Now you do,” he said, and went back to looking at his clipboard.

My parents protested, but it was no use. The head counselor, Hitler-in-training, wouldn’t budge: I was on the bus. I sat in my seat, looking out the window at my parents on the sidewalk. I was trying my best not to cry like a baby. But snot was coming down my face. It wasn’t working out. These people were assholes. This was a huge mistake.

I thought things couldn’t get any worse. But they could. At that second, the loose tooth I’d been wiggling for weeks decided to come out, emerging with a geyser of blood. With snot and blood coming down my face, I went to the counselor to beseech him if not for mercy then at least for a tissue. “I told you, sit down,” he said before I even opened my mouth.

I went back to my seat, bawling, blood cascading over my lips and chin and onto my shirt (which, I guess, was as good as wearing a shirt that said “pariah” after all).

Needless to say, no one sat with me. The bus doors closed, and we were on our way.

Now get this: I’m sending my kid to a Zionist summer camp. For the second summer in a row.

How did I get from point A to point B? (And at a time when Zionist camps are—shall we say—less than popular in certain parts of the Internet, no less!)

It started with a lot of research—I wasn’t going to send my precious Jewish snowflake to just any overnight camp. First, the camp had to be Jewish. That was non-negotiable. Research shows that Jewish camps are a superb way to cultivate a kid’s positive feelings about his or her Jewishness. According to the Foundation for Jewish Camp, 66 percent of Jews who attended Jewish camps considered their Jewish identity “very important,” as opposed to 29 percent of those who never attended a Jewish camp, and Jewish camp alumni are 90 percent more likely to join a JCC than their non-Jewish-camping compatriots. Sure, we might make a methodological argument that the kind of kids who are sent to Jewish camps are predisposed to feel better about Jewishness than those who aren’t, but let’s just go with this: Camp is way more delicious than shul or school. I stole a first kiss behind the chadar ochel (mess hall), performed in Hebrew plays, sang my heart out in Hebrew during zimriya (songfest), competed fiercely in that terrifying nighttime game where were issued passports of actual Holocaust-era Jews and had to flee our Nazi counselors to freedom on the tennis courts. (Trivializing of tragedy? Perhaps. Indelible? Certainly.) I have camp friendships that are hugely meaningful to me nearly 30 years later. Camp Ramah in New England filled me with far more warm feelings and sense of Jewish community than anything else I experienced in childhood.

But I wanted my own young children to go to camp close to New York City, where I live. (I am a Jewish mother; I live to fulfill the stereotype of being neurotic and smothering.) But when I started looking for Jewish sleepaway camps in a two-and-a-half-hour radius from the city, I found a terrifying amount of princessery, camps filled with unnervingly sophisticated, spoiled kids with Shabbat dresses more expensive than my entire family’s wardrobe. I found parents who ignored cell-phone bans and sent contraband candy to camp elaborately hidden in tennis-ball canisters. When I asked for other spoiled-campers stories online, my Facebook page lit up. I heard about camps with “no bottled water” policies, because parents were sending so many cases, some camps ran out of storage space. I heard about girls so obsessed with straightening their Jewish hair and worrying about how they looked in a bikini that they flatly refused to swim. I heard about pale pink Shabbat shoes with spike heels (to be worn in the grass and mud!). I heard about kids packing enough technology (iPods, iPads, handheld gaming systems) to rival the contents of J&R and enough jewelry to rival Tiffany. My friend Dan reported overhearing the following exchange:

Camper 1: “My dad works for the largest blah blah blah in the country.”
Camper 2: “Your dad works for somebody?”

Perhaps worst of all, in poking around campers’ online message boards, I found kids saying approvingly that their camps were beloved by cool kids like themselves, but weren’t enjoyed by geeks.

Do you know where these vile youths don’t go? They don’t go to Zionist camps. Zionist camps like the one at which we’ll be dropping my daughter this week, Zionist camps that embrace geekery. Her camp makes kids do chores. It does not have spiffy bunks or a lake. The kids dress like shlumps. They are unspoiled and lovely. The camp has a super-strict anti-bullying policy. It is haimish. It felt like family immediately.

When I got married, I had a very DIY wedding in the woods. We counted on friends and family pitching in. Do you know who the most helpful and spirited were, by far? My cousins who went to Habonim Dror Moshava, a socialist Zionist camp that stresses the values of kibbutz: shared labor, cooperation, social justice, and a cultural love of Judaism. Some of my family members failed to do the weensy minor tasks I asked of them, but my cousins were whirling dervishes of chopping, grilling, serving, clearing, singing Birkat Hamazon. When I grabbed my cousin Abe, mayim-stepping by with a plate of veggies, to say thanks, he grinned, “No worries, cuz. Socialist Jew camp. It’s what we do.”

Now, would I be uncomfortable if Josie’s (and soon to be Maxie’s) camp was advocating dehumanizing Palestinians and supporting tikkun olam only if it applied to Jews? You bet. Camp has a privileged place of kid-centric-ness, away from parental eyes, so I cannot say for sure that my child was not subjected to Clockwork Orange-like brainwashing sessions about the evils of intermarriage. But given that the camp’s own literature discusses the values of diversity and pluralism, and that it is not affiliated with any particular branch of Judaism, I’m guessing no. There are attractive Israeli counselors there, yes, but I’m guessing their perspectives on Palestinian statehood vary from hard left to hard right, just like actual Israelis do. At Josie’s camp, social action is a huge part of the curriculum: The kids research different charities—not all Jewish—and decide which ones to support. They do volunteer work. Josie came home singing “Ani v’ata n’shaneh et haolam”—you and I will change the world—and she meant it. I am a world-class mocker of things, and I don’t think that childhood sentiment is mock-worthy.

The upshot: If American Jewish identity is to be something more than silver-and-blue wrapping paper instead of red-and-green wrapping paper in December, Zionist summer camp can be a parent’s best ally.

Last year, Josie returned from camp as joyful as I have ever seen her. She belted out the songs I’d sung at my own camp. Her Hebrew had improved by leaps and bounds. She made us Israeli salad, refusing all offers of assistance, dicing tomatoes and cucumbers into tiny pieces. It took her 45 minutes. (We learned to plan ahead when Josie was making Israeli salad.)

The Zionist camp Josie attends fosters what I think is a particularly American sort of Zionism, one that says that Jews are a people defined by both religion and ethnicity. It isn’t boosterish. It allows for nuance. Even an 8-year-old can understand nuance. And even an 8-year-old can understand Jewishness is more than demanding an Elsa Peretti Star of David necklace for your bat mitzvah, because everyone at camp has one.

Meet Ezra, the 12-year-old son of my friend Jeff Kress. Jeff is chair of the Department of Jewish Education at the Jewish Theological Seminary and co-author of the book Building Learning Communities With Character: How to Integrate Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning. Ezra is a cheery, funny kid who has familial dysautonomia, a Jewish genetic disease. It affects his sensory and autonomic nervous systems—which control swallowing, body temperature, pain and heat perception, the regulation of blood pressure, and the ability to produce tears.

When Ezra was 7, Jeff and his wife, Adena, learned about Camp Simcha Special, a camp run by Chai Lifeline for kids with genetic diseases. They signed up Ezra, even though they were concerned. “He was in much less stable medical condition than he is now,” Jeff told me recently. “We were constantly going to the hospital. We couldn’t believe the camp could care for him. We assumed we’d max out the services they could provide. But each child has his own counselor, with whom you meet before camp to go over treatments, and Ezra’s counselor that first year was an Australian guy named Avi with this total can-do attitude—think Crocodile Dundee from yeshiva. Whatever we said about Ezra’s medical needs, he’d say ‘No worries!’ At first we thought it meant ‘I’m not actually listening to you!’ But he was. He was amazing.”

In addition to one-on-one counselors, Camp Simcha Special has a full 24-hour medical staff, an on-site ambulance, and an on-call medevac helicopter. The camp provides a visiting petting zoo, a zip line, and an annual helicopter ride. “I’m the only member of the family who’s been in a helicopter!” Ezra crows to his parents.

In the outside world, Ezra’s speech can be hard to understand, and it’s a challenge for him to make friends. But at camp, his best buddy since day one has been another kid with the exact same symptom profile, the same kind of feeding tube, the same oxygen pump. “Camp is his chance to have his own private jokes and independence,” said Jeff. “It’s his time not to have Mom and Dad hovering all over him all the time. What happens at camp stays at camp.”

And at camp, Ezra has blossomed. “His first summer, he was still easily overwhelmed by noise,” Jeff recalled. “We had to sneak him into camp through the back entrance, because all the people and tumult were too much for him. He couldn’t be in the dining room during meals because all the riotous singing and simcha dancing were too much for him. Now, six years later, we take him right into the main entrance, and he’s immediately surrounded by dozens of guys wearing clown costumes, chanting his name. Now, the kid who couldn’t stay in the dining room gets up on stage in front of the whole camp, with a live band, to do a dance of his own invention, the Ezra Dance, and the whole camp does it with him.”

The camp’s spirit of inclusion, Jeff noted, extends beyond denominational rifts. “Professionally, I look at pluralistic organizations,” he said, “and I am amazed that this one really is nondenominational. The people who run the camp may be more toward the right-wing side of Orthodoxy, but there’s no agenda, just caring for kids. There’s a universalist message—respect your family and be a good person and be nice to guests and thank you, Hashem—that kind of thing. That’s what he’s taking home. The camp is really fueled by ruach-y music and wild, raucous fun.”

Camp lasts two weeks, but it boosts Ezra’s spirits for the entire year. And it’s completely free to families. (In thanks, Jeff does regular fundraising marathons for Chai Lifeline, which pays for everything. You can donate here.) When Ezra has his bar mitzvah, this year, his counselors will there.

Kids like Ezra with intense medical concerns need their own camps. But other special-needs kids do well in mainstream camps. So it’s great that Jewish parents today have a variety of options. Every Ramah camp has some kind of program for kids with disabilities. Camp Yofi at Ramah Darom in Clayton, Ga., includes a family camp for kids with autism and their parents and siblings. There’s also Camp Yaldei, a stand-alone camp in Quebec for kids with developmental delays and neurological disorders; Round Lake Camp, a camp for learning-disabled kids, in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Lake Como, Pa.; Camp Morasha Yachad, for kids with developmental disabilities, in Lakewood, Pa.; Camp HASC, the Hebrew Academy for Special Children’s seven-week camp in the Catskills for mentally and physically handicapped children and adults. And Chai Lifeline runs a second camp in addition to Camp Simcha Special, this one for kids with cancer; it can even deliver on-site chemo.

One of the very first special-needs options was the Tikvah Program at Ramah in New England, which just celebrated its 40th anniversary. Back in 1970, when educators Herb and Barbara Greenberg presented their proposal to accommodate campers with special needs to the National Ramah Commission, most camp directors turned up their noses. They worried that allowing mentally or emotionally disabled kids in camp would be upsetting for the “normal” kids. They fretted that enrollment would suffer. But one director, Donald Adelman of the Ramah in Glen Spey, N.Y., stood up. “He said, ‘This is exactly what Ramah should be. I insist on having it,’” recalled Howard Blas, the program’s current director.

Tikvah took off. Now Ramah in New England, which took over the original program from Glen Spey, offers inclusion bunks (in which special-needs and typical kids live and play together), stand-alone bunks, and a vocational training program for older kids and adults. There are bunks with entrances that can accommodate motorized scooters, barrier-free bathrooms, paved roads that won’t make a wheelchair break an axle. For special-needs kids who aren’t well accommodated in other Jewish settings, camp is an opportunity to live a joyous, immersive Jewish life for a few sweet weeks.

I recently chatted with a 23-year-old camper named Sam Busis, who is on his eighth Tikvah Program summer. “I was scared when I came here at first,” Sam recalled. “But everything is wonderful! I can’t pick a favorite thing. I have friends from all over that I only see when I’m here. I work with little kids. I’ve worked in the guesthouse and the kitchen and I liked that, too. I love swimming in the agam—you can cool off and have fun. But my favorite thing has been the Tikvah Israel trip. I loved Jerusalem. The city was really pretty. I bought a tallis.”

Sam’s mother, Judith Beck, director of the Beck Center for Cognitive Therapy and Research, in suburban Philadelphia, laughed when I told her of Sam’s enthusiasm. “The camp’s been amazing for him,” she said. “We’ve seen him grow in social skills, independence, and a can-do attitude. It’s both nurtured and pushed him a little bit. Going to Israel with Howard was one of the most meaningful experiences of his life. They visited a facility for kids with disabilities, picked vegetables on a kibbutz, visited an archaeological dig—wonderful things that expanded the camp experience. And Sam always liked having a mainstream buddy—they connect kids from the Tikvah program with typical campers. It’s great for the typical campers to see the Tikvah kids as people. There’s a level of acceptance that’s really great.”

I think back to my own Mesozoic experience at Ramah in New England, when immersion and mainstreaming weren’t as common. I remember some boys mercilessly teasing one Amitzim (“brave ones,” the special-needs group) camper. At night, they’d try to goad him into bellowing “Shmira!” (“Guards!”) because with his speech impediment, it came out “Shmiwwa!” The boys found this hysterical. Need I say it wasn’t funny? Need I say I don’t think this would happen today?

Both my daughters—one with special educational needs, one without—will be in immersion classes this year. As I type this, they’re at a JCC Camp in Wisconsin with a special-needs program. As I dropped them off at the bus stop this morning, a boy with Down syndrome, wearing headphones, was singing off-key at the top of his lungs. Josie smiled, “Mikey really likes to sing.”

Ramah doesn’t worry about scaring away parents of nondisabled kids any longer. “Do we tell parents when there will be a Down syndrome kid in a bunk?” asked Blas rhetorically. “Well, would you tell kids in advance that there’s a camper who was adopted from Korea or who has two mothers or that there’s a counselor with 10 piercings? Our community includes lots of people. That’s a good thing for everyone. Accepting differences is great—it helps you accept kids who aren’t pretty, who are overweight, who come from other backgrounds.”

Indeed, the evidence is mounting that living and learning with special-needs kids is good for everyone. Recent research shows that kids without disabilities learn tolerance; kids with disabilities develop greater social skills. Blas pointed me to some as-yet-unpublished research conducted by the National Ramah Commission on 100 fifth- to seventh-grade campers at his camp. Fifty-eight percent agreed or strongly agreed that “experiences with campers from this camp’s special-needs program has made me a better person,” and 63 percent agreed or strongly agreed that “experiences with campers from this camp’s special-needs program will carry over into other areas of my life.”

How Jewish a value is that? Kids like Josie, Sam, and Ezra can all benefit from attending camps serving special-needs kids. Society wins. How much more could anyone ask from summer?

Scenario No. 1: Child keeps whining at parent to play Ga-Ga (Israeli dodgeball), but the temperature outside is approaching that of the planet Mercury.

Survival strategy:

1.  Distract child by sending him outside (alone) with a shovel to build Ga-Ga pit.

2.  Encourage child to play-act a game of Ga-Ga in air-conditioned home, using athletically minded Polly Pocket dolls as stand-ins for sweat-prone humans.

3.  Teach child about the power of the people by having child write letters to Nintendo demanding imminent production of Ga-Ga for the Wii. (Strategy will fail, thus providing the child an important lesson in democracy.)

Scenario No. 2: Child will not stop doing rikudiah (Israeli dance festival) dances in living room, causing trauma to cat.

Survival strategy:

1.  Hide iPod.

2.  Take child to community pool. Suggest child perform rikudiah dances underwater for extra aerobic benefit.

3.  Announce that the family is converting to whatever religion is in the movie Footloose and that dancing will heretofore be considered sinful. Hang framed photo of a vengeful John Lithgow on wall.

Ping Zhu

Scenario No. 3: Child will not stop lying on couch and moaning about missing camp friends.

Survival strategy:

1.  Have child write letters. (Parent should attempt to keep sarcasm out of voice when pointing out that in the previous four weeks child was not nearly so eager to write to her own parents, whom she has known for eight years.)

2.  Have child use telephone. (Parent should insert earplugs before handing child telephone, lest parent’s hearing be permanently damaged by lunatic chanting of Adah [age group] cheer at increasing volume.)

3.  Remind child of future Shabbaton reunion opportunities.

4.  When child demands immediate visit with friends or child will never ever come out of room or eat ever again, remind child that we do not negotiate with terrorists.

Scenario No. 4: Child (still lying on couch and moaning) refuses to do camp laundry or assist in household chores.

Survival strategy:

1.  Establish nikayon (cleanup) system similar to that of camp. Give child daily cleanliness score; promise ice cream for non-filth achievement.

2.  Tell child it is now color war (Maccabia) and her team will lose to the Blue Team if they do not clean up. Penalty for losing Maccabia is confiscation of Silly Bandz.

3.  If child does not comply, eat ice cream tauntingly in front of ice-cream-less child while wearing all her Silly Bandz.

Scenario No. 5: Child suddenly wants to do Birkat Hamazon (after-meal prayer) after every meal.

Survival strategy: Pray! This survival strategy has worked for our people for generations. Who are you to argue?

Her camp, like mine back in the day, offers t’filah (prayer), omanut (art), sports, chofesh (free time), swimming, weekly sending of Shabbat-o-grams and attendant social anxiety: How many will I get? If I send one to That Cute Boy, will he think I like him That Way? Do I want him to? What is the encoded meaning of this particular Shabbat-o-gram? Could I possibly parse it more if it were the Talmud?

For many of us, sleepaway camp is the first sizeable chunk of time away from parents. It’s a taste of adulthood. Nikayon, daily cleaning time, was the first time I really scrubbed a sink or swept an entire floor. Because camp means building a society in miniature, in which kids have more independence and power than they do back home, friendships there seem more vivid, more intense–a lifetime poured into a concentrated month or two.

But some things have changed. My parents sent in a two-page form and bam, I was a camper. I, on the other hand, filled out some 60 pages of documents about Josie, including a “social media policy” in which our entire family had to pledge not to defame the camp on Facebook or Twitter. Today’s camps ask so many questions about our children’s mental health, it’s as if our tweens are applying for jobs with the CIA. And as I wrote a few weeks ago, the world outside of camp is far more connected today. When kids head for the machaneh, they leave behind a million ways to chat, extensive online universes and multi-player games, gazillions of TV channels. Writing and receiving letters rather than email feels quaint now.

But I chose the camp I did because the kids and the camp’s values seemed like throwbacks in the best way. I want the feeling of a bungalow colony, not a country club. I want Jo to have the experience I did. Of course, every generation is a little different…

	Me: Walkman the size of a brick		Josie: iPod Nano
	Me: On the Walkman, “Don’t Stop Believin’,” by Journey		Josie: On the iPod, “Don’t Stop Believin’,” by the cast of Glee
	Me: Flowers in the Attic (Goth-y vaguely Victorian trashy lit)		Josie: A Series of Unfortunate Events (Goth-y vaguely Victorian decent lit)
	Me: Asthma inhaler		Josie: Asthma inhaler
	Me: Bug repellent with enough chemicals to defoliate a small island		Josie: Hippie herbal insect repellent with organic catnip oil, organic rosemary, and organic lemongrass
	Me: Shabbat outfits consisting of flowered Gunne Sax dresses		Josie: Shabbat outfits consisting of flowered Hanna Andersson dresses
	Me: armfuls of rubber Madonna “Goomie” bracelets		Josie: armfuls of silicone Silly Bandz (modeled by Maxie because Josie is away at camp)

When Josie’s generation enters a sylvan, bunk-dotted landscape, they’re entering a more retro world than we did. But I think they need it even more.

Josie, 8 years old, is going to overnight camp for the first time this year, which has made me reflect on my own experiences as a child at Camp Ramah in New England. I loved the lake, the trees, the pine-fragrant bunks adorned with the vintage scratchitti of long-ago youths who’d presumably left camping behind for cholesterol-lowering drugs and the raising of future campers of their own.

I grew up in a different era, an age before cell phones and personal computing devices. In an era before MTV’s Unplugged, we were perpetually unplugged. As a kid in a small city, I rode my bike all over the neighborhood. I lounged with my friends in Swan Point Cemetery on weekends. We spent hours, unsupervised, in various garages and basements.

My own kids’ childhood is very different. They’re in organized activities all the time. They don’t roam like free-range fowl throughout the city. For Josie, one of the most fascinating things about this year’s marvelous Newbery-winning children’s novel When You Reach Me was its portrait of a latchkey kid on the Upper West Side in the ‘70s; in a book that deals with time travel and foretelling the future, the most astonishing detail for my kid was that the protagonist got to walk around New York City alone.

The most significant difference between my kids and me, though, is that they can’t imagine being unwired. I showed them a picture of Gordon Gekko holding his then-super-futuristic cell phone in the movie Wall Street, and they asked if it was a giant walkie-talkie. Josie recently quizzed me about Superman: What was a phone booth, and how did he change clothes in it? When I tell her we had to stand up and walk over to the television to change the channel and that we only had telephones attached to walls, she stares at me as if I’m speaking Urdu. I showed her Atari’s Pong, the antiquated video game we played on my TV growing up; she thought I was playing a joke. All you could do in this “game” was move a line, slowly, up and down, as a single dot ricocheted in slow motion around the screen? This was once considered fun? Josie and her friends play Toontown and Wizard 101 together, visually rich, hugely complex, multiplayer games with their own elaborate universes. They make plans to “meet” each other on weekends in digital glens and seven-story buildings in their avatar forms.

A couple of summers ago we visited friends in Fire Island. Eyeing my iPhone, an 8-year-old girl said, “Which generation?” I told her it was the earliest version and she rolled her eyes. “I want the new one, but my mom isn’t psyched for me to break my current contract,” she said airily, as bored as a Kardashian. “I’m totally getting it, though.”

So, is today’s sleepaway camp—with its lake, trees, cabins, chadar ochel, and drama and crafts bungalows looking exactly as they did generations earlier—an artifact, an artificial construct belonging to an earlier time, like some New World version of a Roman Vishniac photo? Is it ridiculous to expect kids to give up their iPods, handheld computer games, Facebook, Twitter, IM? Can we really trap them in this historical setting, like bug-spray-scented, cell-phone-less flies in amber?

My answer: We not only can; we should. Kids need unplugging. I’m no Luddite or technophobe, and I was among the snarling parents who objected when Mayor Michael Bloomberg went on his rampage to ban cell phones in schools after September 11. But in the summer—the last vestige of carefree childhood in a high-pressure, high-connectivity world—kids should be forced to interact face-to-face with each other, with their counselors, and with a sylvan world. It’s one of the last great communal spaces for kids.

Every camp has its own rules about the use of technology, of course. Some allow cell phones but let kids use them only right before Shabbat or right before bed. Others allow iPods in the bunk only. (In my day, at rest time, we were allowed our giant, awkward Walkmans that seemed the height of techie cool.) But whatever a camp’s written rules, compliance varies. One Jewish website is rife with whispered tales of texting in bathroom stalls.

“Each camp’s culture is different, of course, but for most part the undergirding value is that camp is a place in which community is built in real time and real space,” says Rabbi Eve Rudin, director of Camp Excellence and Advancement at the Foundation for Jewish Camp. In other words, al tifrosh min hatzibur; don’t separate yourself from the community. The real community, not the virtual one. “When you’re plugged in to your headphones, you’re separated from the world around you,” Rudin says. “There can be appropriate times in the camp day to be separate and quiet—reading a book in your bunk, writing a letter, listening to music. For some camps, then, an iPod is acceptable. But we generally don’t encourage families to send valuables to camp.” Camp, she adds, should be a place where all kids start on equal footing, but “the reality is that parents don’t always want to abide by it.”

Ah, there’s the rub. Is connectivity really so important to the kid, or is it really about the needs and anxieties of the parent? For most kids, camp is a time to be in a completely kid-centric, immersive environment. Kids adjust to camp culture. They learn the camp rituals and songs (speaking of which, OyBaby’s new CD, We Sang That at Camp, is hilariously awesome). They fold themselves into the tradition; they don’t expect the tradition to adapt to them. But parents can be more obstructionist than helpful to the process. I’ve heard stories about camps with no-outside-food policies in which parents smuggle food in care packages, hidden in tennis balls. Websites like bunk1.com and campregister.com help parents stay connected to their little darlings 24-7. In my day, we had to write home twice a week, and we could line up to use the pay phone outside the mercaz. And we walked uphill to the archery range, both ways.

There’s no doubt that camp is Good for the Jews. Research shows that teenagers report greater levels of connection to Judaism at camp, and campers are significantly more likely to send their children to camp themselves when they grow up. According to the Foundation for Jewish Camp, 66 percent of Jews who attended Jewish camps considered their Jewish identity “very important,” as opposed to 29 percent of those who never attended a Jewish camp. Jewish camp alumni are 50 percent more likely to join a synagogue and 90 percent more likely to join a Jewish community center than their non-camp fellows. And camp’s world-unto-itself mystique is part of what makes it so indelible. There’s something primal about the physicality of it all, the intensity of friendships forged at camp. Movie nights feel more special when media is a rarity. Romance feels more thrilling. Shiurim feel less like school when they’re held among pine needles. You can’t Facebook that stuff. Well, you could, but feh.

Study: US Youth Differ in Perception of Jewish Identity [Ynet]

Any other time of year seems tailored for exile. Autumns, for example, are much better in New York than they are in Tel Aviv, the city in which I was born and which I left, not without considerable pain, in 1999. Back there, on the coast of the Mediterranean, all of autumn’s tenderness is crushed by the long reach of summer’s clammy hand. Leaves changing colors? That earthy smell singeing the nostrils with the first gusts of brisk air? Forget about it: in Tel Aviv, you can still lounge on the beach in December.

Similarly, winters are largely absent as well, and springs are like short and furious arms races, with each month rushing the next into the escalation of summer’s inevitable heat. Come June, however, there’s no better place to be than Tel Aviv. As humid as the city is, as humming with the discontent of sweating, heated souls, the first Hebrew town in modern history was really for summer born.

Growing up, my friends and I would start our summer mornings running around on the beach, playing matkot —a popular beach game played with two paddles and a rubber ball that makes a frightful thwacking sound—and eating lemon popsicles before lying down for a nap. A few hours later, our skins roasted and our heads dazed with sun, we’d amble over to one of three or four nearby cinemas to catch a silly action film, then rush to the local burger joint to soothe our gurgling stomachs. Greasy, sunburnt, and wildly happy, we’d return home late in the evening. I’m many years and thousands of miles removed from those glorious summer days, and yet I still miss them terribly.

It was with much interest, then, that I read recently about some Israeli children spending their summers not in similar pleasurable pursuits but by building settlements on the rocky hills of the West Bank. As I reported earlier this week, “Youth for the Land of Israel,” a new non-profit organization, is offering Israeli youth a summer stint on the hills of Judea and Samaria where they can learn about the importance of our ancestral land and partake in its settling, government strictures and international condemnations be damned.

Reading the committed campers’ accounts, I was stirred by feelings of admiration. Unlike myself at their age, these ideologically driven youth could return home at the end of a sizzling summer afternoon and say that they had done something to further their beliefs. They sacrificed their idle days—a teenager’s most precious resource—for the greater good. Their voices pealed with conviction, with the kind of clarity that is ours in abundance when we’re young—and that grows ever dimmer as we age.

Shlomit Amitai, 16 years old, a counselor in the settlement camp, was quoted as telling her young charges that the Zohar, the sacred book of Kabbalah, teaches us that the land of Israel is like our collective mother. “Just like you would dress your mother’s wounds,” she said, “empty land is a wound we need to dress by settlement.”

It is probably useless to tell Ms. Amitai that the Zohar, so mighty in its mystical force, was traditionally available only to scholars 40 and older who’d reached a level of mastery in Judaism’s earthly foundations before being allowed to travel to its more ethereal realms. I’m not so far removed from my own youthful years to remember that there’s nothing teenagers like less than being preached to by didactic dunderheads; but if I could, I would suggest to her and her friends a better book to read this summer: Deuteronomy.

They wouldn’t even have to read the whole thing. This week’s parasha is enough. It’s short, and it’s as heartbreaking as anything in literature. It’s Moses’s farewell speech. Weary and elegiac, the dying leader, done retelling the past, speaks to his people about the future.

Me, says Moses, I won’t make it to the Promised Land. But you will. And, once there, you will mess things up.

“When you beget children and children’s children,” he prophesies, “and you will be long established in the land, and you become corrupt and make a graven image, the likeness of anything, and do evil in the eyes of the Lord your God, to provoke Him to anger, I call as witness against you this very day the heaven and the earth, that you will speedily and utterly perish from the land to which you cross the Jordan, to possess; you will not prolong your days upon it, but will be utterly destroyed. And the Lord will scatter you among the peoples, and you will remain few in number among the nations to where the Lord will lead you.”

But things, he continues, aren’t all grim: this terrible exile, Moses concludes, will reawaken Israel’s appetite for righteousness, the people will once again keep the laws of the Torah and worship the Lord, and He, in turn, will redeem them and return them to their ancestral home. The saga of Israel will have a happy ending after all.

This story is often taken by biblical scholars to be a bit of a retroactive rewrite, the work of post-exilic scribes wishing to fortify the faith by peppering the story with premonitions, supposedly authentic, of the doom that is to come. But as is so often the case with scripture, reality’s concrete details are eclipsed by a grander, eternal meaning: Moses’s story is not some sliver of Jewish history, but a warning that is, has always been, and will always be timely.

To those who revere the land above all, seeing it as a wounded mother (somewhat of a graven image there, some might say, the bleeding and martyred woman), Moses’ story couldn’t be more relevant. Jews, it reminds us, have had Hebron and Jericho and Shechem once before. They were long established in the land. And, doing evil in the eyes of the Lord their God, they speedily and utterly perished from it. They returned again, once again transgressed, once again perished, once again returned. It’s not for lack of territorial sovereignty that Jews had suffered terribly, not for forfeiting a holy hill or a sacred wadi. The answer to our suffering lies not in the soil but in the soul. This summer, may we all listen to Moses, and believe him when he tells us our true, eternal, and only strength lies in justice, in compassion, in love. By now, we know all too well what happens when we ignore him.

Instead of a Summer Camp by the Beach, The Girls Came To Settle [Ha’aretz, in Hebrew]

More importantly to me, it provided some diversion from the grim duty at hand. My mother and I were heading toward a more proximate version of terra incognita, the summer camp where my sister Carol was being driven to despair. On this day, my mother would decide whether to accede to Carol’s pleas and bring her home.

Within days of Carol’s arrival at the camp two weeks earlier, we had received a string of desperate letters from her. There was, of course, no email then, no cell phones, no lenient rules about campers calling home. There were only those letters, coming day after day, filled with capital letters and exclamation points, the pages all but spotted with tears.

After enough of them, my mother could no longer ascribe the problem to homesickness. Besides, Carol had gone through a month at a different camp the previous summer without the slightest pangs. So my mother tried replying to Carol with advice for making friends, and she also placed a call to the camp’s owner, asking her to intercede.

None of it helped. The letters kept telling their tales of torment and ridicule—the cracks about her looks and her walk, the flashlights beamed at her sleeping eyes to force her awake. The camp director, evidently in response to my mother’s call, sifted through Carol’s footlocker, only to inform my sister that her clothing wasn’t up to par, as if to say the persecution was entirely justified. It was at that point my mother resolved to drive up and see for herself.

I went along only on the pretense of moral support. In fact, I felt complicit in Carol’s harrowing summer. On the day our family had dropped her off at a Westchester mall for the camp bus, my father got uncharacteristically lost making the last few turns. I’d been a reluctant party to this errand, and the prospect of any additional delay that kept me away from my friends and our daily Wiffleball games put me in the mood to punish.

As everyone in the family knew too well, Carol was a fragile soul. At 13, she was already five-foot-ten, full-breasted, and having her period. Maybe if she had been confident and assured, her early development would have been an asset. But she was epileptic, too, prone at unpredictable times to slip into petit mal seizures that we delicately called “spells,” and the rest of the time rendered vague and phlegmatic by the barbiturates that were medicine’s blunt instrument against her disease. So what could have been precocious allure came off as insecure gawkiness.

Most of the time, as the older brother, I had readily upheld our family code to protect her. Short and toothy, motormouthed among boys and tongue-tied with girls, I had enough anxieties of my own. The morning of the camp departure, though, I took aim. The latest of my sister’s indignities was a set of braces, and something in the metal turned her teeth an algae color. It happened only in a slender strip along the metal, invisible to any casual eye, but of course Carol imagined it being gaudy as neon to the world.

“Green teeth,” I started chanting in the car. “Green teeth, green teeth.” My father took a hand off the steering wheel to try to swat me into silence. Out of his reach in the back seat, I kept up the mantra, until Carol broke into sobs. By then we were finally at the mall, and the bus was ready to leave. The last I saw Carol, climbing aboard, she was still weeping.

By the morning of Apollo 11 and Zager and Evans, it was two weeks and a couple of days later, and my mother and I were pulling into the camp’s entrance. The owner met us and escorted us to Carol’s bunk. There she waited, along with her tormentors, who apparently had been summoned for the occasion.

I only needed one look at those girls to intuit what had happened. This camp was a Jewish camp, not in the sense of being operated by a denomination or a Zionist group, but in the de facto sense that most of the kids were Jews from New York’s prosperous suburbs. The girls had tans, and gleaming black hair, and tight bodies in their tennis whites.

My sister and I had always felt both inferior and superior to kids like that. We’d grown up in a Jewish family with radical yichus—grandparents who’d been anarchists, a father who marched in May Day parades, a mother who rejected her conventionally religious upbringing. We prided ourselves on knowing the lyrics to Tom Lehrer songs and subscribing to I.F. Stone’s Weekly.

The dividing line we drew wasn’t one of class, exactly. My father, to his own surprise, had grown into a successful capitalist with a company that designed and manufactured microbiology equipment. If anything, his financial success made us more adamant about not defining ourselves and our Jewishness by bank account and tax bracket and address. Being Jewish was about having politics, a certain kind of politics.

But faced with the reality of Jewish kids from the Five Towns or Millburn or Scarsdale, kids with social ease and fashionable clothes, my sister and I shriveled. Instead of disparaging their vapidity and materialism, we envied it. Or at least I did. A lot of times, I wished I could trade my class consciousness for a talent at flirtation. I wished I’d been one of those boys welcomed into the sanctum sanctorum of spin-the-bottle on the bar mitzvah party circuit.

As if they had been warned or prepped about our visit, the girls chatted amiably with Carol, making the summer’s woes seem nothing but typical camp pranks. I could see the insincerity of their show in about three seconds. I could also see, to my shock, those girls looking attentively at me.

I realized it was the sunglasses. The sunglasses, sea-green lenses and golden frames, were the only cool thing I owned, all the more so because they stood in on sunny days for the black horn-rim spectacles I normally wore. I dated my incompetence with girls to the day in sixth grade when the optometrist informed me I was near-sighted. All the camp girls knew, though, was that these sunglasses looked sort of like the ones Peter Fonda wore in Easy Rider.

I could have told those girls to leave my sister alone. I could have put my arm around her shoulder. I had this brief, flickering moment of status with her foes; they might actually have listened. Instead, I stayed silent, feeling that rare intoxicant of female interest in hapless me.

The visit ended and Carol walked with my mother and me to the car and we took stock. The girls didn’t seem so bad, my mother offered. Maybe things would work out now. Life is about getting along with all kinds of people. Carol didn’t press the case about going home. And, again, I said nothing on her behalf.

A couple of days later, the next letter arrived, every bit as heartbreaking as the rest. There was just one new twist on the degradation. Carol wrote us that, after my mother and I had driven away, one of the girls said, “You’re brother’s so cute. What happened to you?”

Neither my sister nor I remember if she was back home in time to see the lunar landing on July 20, 1969. We can only recall that our mother fetched her, so broken, sometime before visiting day.

A few months ago, I was sleeping in a hotel room when the clock-radio went off at four in the morning. Through my grogginess, I became aware of the sound of a song. It was “In the Year 2525,” and all the memories of that day at camp flooded back into my brain. On this day, the 40th anniversary of Neil Armstrong’s “giant leap for mankind,” I do not think of humanity’s capacity for achievement and wonder and transcendence. I think not of being stellar but oh so earthbound.

Samuel G. Freedman, journalism professor at Columbia University, is the author of six books. This is his first article for Tablet Magazine.

*For inspiration check out this not-quite-haiku from Tablet’s resident rhymester, written circa age 10:

Haiku About Freedom

I like to be free
You can do what you want
You can study Torah

UJC Taps Silverman as New Executive [JTA]

Set at a Jewish summer camp called Camp Lakeside, “Aaron Gold” features a ceramics instructor, Werner Samuelson, who’s not your typical counselor. He’s in America because “the Germans had chased him from his studio in Southern Austria” in 1940, and has accepted a job that means “nine weeks with a hundred screaming boys” only because his ceramics shop in Philadelphia verges on bankruptcy. When Lionel Steinberg, the camp director, offers Werner a job, he calculates that “with six hundred dollars”—his summer salary—“and a little luck, he could give the shop one last try.”

The imbecility of the kids grates on Werner even more than he had expected; the one exception is eight-year-old Aaron Gold, “bony, underfed, and a little tired looking” with “thin yellow hair like tinsel.” While most boys roll clay into pancakes or baseballs, Aaron sculpts an armored knight. So taken is he with ceramics, and with the pleasures of solitary labor, that he skips swimming lessons with Lefty Schulberg, an ex-pro basketballer and the camp’s official meathead, in contradiction to the Lakeside philosophy: Lionel reminds Werner that “if there’s one thing we don’t want here, it’s one-sided kids”—every camper must attend swimming class and finish a sculpture to display on visiting day. “Parents want something for their money.”

Aaron sculpts slowly, though, and as the parents’ arrival looms, all he’s constructed is a “headless-armless knight.” Under pressure from Lionel, Werner completes the knight himself and fixes up a title card, “A KNIGHT FIGHTING A DRAGON, by Aaron Gold.” Aaron’s displeased: “You ruined him,” he bawls, and runs off into the forest. Werner, defeated by the struggle between Aaron’s artistic temperament and Steinberg’s demands, packs his suitcase, forfeiting the six hundred dollars and probably dooming his shop.

Exiled from his home alongside an entire generation of European Jewish artists and scientists, Werner has every reason to sacrifice his ideals in pursuit of a paycheck. And he does try to play by Steinberg’s rules, if only briefly. He’d rather starve, he decides, than continue to stand between a young talent and his development. If Roth’s story has a moral, it could be expressed in the exasperated tones of an aspiring artist rejecting the suggestion that he apply to law school: “No way am I going to sell out!” It’s not surprising that Roth wrote “Aaron Gold” just after college.

What’s incredible about the Alfred Hitchcock Presents adaptation of “The Contest for Aaron Gold,” first broadcast in the show’s sixth season, is how much screenwriter William Fay and director Norman Lloyd could preserve of Roth’s story of Jewish suffering and art while appending a perfectly Hitchcockian finish.

Of course, a couple of significant edits were necessary. Whereas Werner is an Austrian refugee, the show’s protagonist, Bernie Samuelson, was played by a young, resolutely American Sydney Pollack. The actor and future director was in his mid-twenties when he took the role, while Werner must be at least in his late thirties, as he was an established potter in Austria fully fourteen years earlier. And the TV show never mentions Europe or the Germans.

Featuring a survivor of Hitler’s Europe would not have been unprecedented on a show like Hitchcock’s in 1960: As Jeffrey Shandler pointed out in While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust, the short plays exhibited on popular “drama anthology series” like Philco Television Playhouse, Matinee Theatre, and Playhouse 90 throughout the 1950s occasionally incorporated refugee characters, with examples including Paddy Chayefsky’s “Holiday Song” and Thelma Nurenberg’s “The Refugee.” Fay and Lloyd just couldn’t figure out what the weightiness of a refugee’s struggles had to do with summer camp, so they cut out Samuelson’s traumatic past, though the omission makes his job anxiety seem excessive.

Furthermore, barring the unconvincing possibility that Fay, Lloyd, and Hitchcock somehow missed this crucial detail from the source material, the trio wrote in an extraordinarily gruesome joke, albeit an inside one for readers familiar with the written story, in the episode’s frame. Introducing “Aaron Gold,” Hitchcock mentions that he has locked his ceramics instructor in a kiln. In the episode’s conclusion he pours out a small pile of ashes—his instructor’s remains—into a vase he’s fired.

Aside from those tweaks, the episode remains quite faithful to the original: Much of the dialogue is reproduced verbatim, and the tension builds identically, as the ceramics instructor finds himself trapped between Aaron’s excellent but slow artistry and the camp director’s insistence that the sculpture be done in time for visiting day. In this case, the statue isn’t headless; rather, it has only one arm. Bernie, like Werner, finishes Aaron’s work, and the boy, witnessing the result, flees into the woods crying. The episode doesn’t conclude with Samuelson packing his bags, but with an inevitable, unexpected twist (spoiler alert). As the audience wonders why Aaron would be so distraught by his instructor’s well-meaning assistance, Aaron’s father walks into the studio; like the incomplete knight, he has only one arm.

This minor revision transforms the Aaron in Roth’s story—a young artist dedicated to learning his craft no matter how long it takes—into an unimaginative realist. Roth’s story tells us a little something about art and commerce, while Hitchcock merely gives us the shivers.

The Hitchcock version of “The Contest for Aaron Gold,” in other words, dramatizes the original’s precise point—at least if we read it as a commentary on its own afterlife. Roth’s story, like the sculpture, was the product of a precocious talent; Fay, a veteran magazine hack, appended the minor missing piece that would turn a sincere literary work into slick commercial fiction. Like Werner, Fay was not disloyal to his source material; he conserved the tension, the setting, and the razor-sharp dialogue and, like Werner, he never denied credit to the author. Yet he did what was necessary to transform “The Contest for Aaron Gold” into something salable to Hitchcock’s audience and sponsors. The result aired on October 18, 1960, eight months after Roth received the National Book Award for Goodbye, Columbus, and it’s possible that in watching it, the young author may have felt a little like Aaron, staring at his “ruined” knight.

With one difference: By the time Hitchcock’s “Aaron Gold” debuted, Roth, still in his mid-twenties, was already more cynical than little Aaron, or even Werner, about the demands of commerce on art. He wouldn’t run for the woods; he’d already walked away long before.

In 1957 and 1958, Roth wrote biting appraisals in The New Republic of two flashy adaptations of classic Ernest Hemingway novels. He lampooned The Sun Also Rises (1957), starring Ava Gardner and Tyrone Power, by reviewing it in the form of a Hemingway parody (“Until they get to Spain it is a bad conversation piece. It is very slow until Spain”). A few months later he dismissed David O. Selznick’s A Farewell to Arms (1957) as “a spiritless, silly, and . . . embarrassing movie,” noting that Hemingway’s novelistic achievements would be “impossible . . . for a camera to convey.” Long before producers started banging on his door, before Richard Benjamin became Neil Klugman and Portnoy’s Complaint fetched $350,000 for its film rights, Roth had concluded that movies were irrelevant to his literary work, a notion made explicit years later when he told a producer, who had asked him what sort of involvement he wanted to have in the film adaptation of The Human Stain, that all he cared about was that the check cleared.

Uncannily, Robert Benton, the director of The Human Stain, echoed Roth’s relatively unknown story, published five decades earlier, when he remarked to a reporter that “a novel is like a piece of sculpture . . . You can only reproduce parts of it using the parts of it that are the most meaningful.”

Like most summer camps, Sloane Crosley’s had its share of mix-and-match rituals, from early morning prayers to evening flag-foldings and late night bonfires. Some were meant to evoke Native American tradition, while others could be best described as patriotic, paganistic, or simply bizarre. It took a while for Crosley to realize the dominant stream in this cultural and ideological mishmash was actually Christianity.

Adapted from her new essay collection, I Was Told There’d Be Cake, Crosley’s story looks back at the summer she began to question the camp’s underlying faith—and her own.

Illustration by Katherine Streeter.

Tomorrow will be November 1, 1940, and we will be in the city of Lodz, which was invaded by the Nazis last September. Two-thirds of us are Polish Jews, living in the ghetto. The remaining third are Polish “officials” or German SS guards. The challenge, for the Jews, is to escape deportation.

We are handed yellow stars and strands of plastic beads that will double as currency. We are given purple, ink-smudged maps of camp on which everything has been renamed. All the Hebrew names are gone: My bunk, formerly called Machon, is the Polish Passport Agency. Bunk Alonim is the bank. The kitchen is the town’s desecrated synagogue and is entirely off limits. The old canyon fire road is the Polish border.

My name is gone too. We are handed ID cards, and I am no longer Lizzie Lenthem, 15, of Topanga, California, but Anya Ossevsheva, 28, of Lodz. I have four kids. I have a long aquiline nose and a hard unsmiling mouth. I look nothing like me.

We are told: “You will have to make it across the Polish border by sundown.” We are advised to try the official routes first. We will try to trade our pathetic beads, acquire visas, masquerade as goyim, charm guards into letting us stow away on a train to Zurich or a boat to Buenos Aires. How will we do this? Who among us has money? Who doesn’t? Bobby Z. won’t say. “Go to the bank. Try the passport office,” he says. “You will see.”

We are told: “The wood between the girls’ and boys’ camps is Central Europe; the goal is to move beyond it, past the fire road, to the old tennis courts, to America.” The guards will try to prevent this—the soccer field will be used for round-ups—but if you have the proper papers, there is nothing they can do. Bobby Z. says: “Do not enter the synagogue; do not try to trade real goods or real money; and do not, I repeat, do not try any funny business, or you’ll never leave this camp, let alone Poland, again.” Any of these rules can change at any time, we are warned. We are told all this, and the next morning we are sent on our way.

Except I don’t go on my way. What do I know? I am the newcomer. When I was a kid, I once asked an old woman on a Santa Monica beach if the numbers tattooed on her arm were her phone number. I spent last Yom Kippur with my Filipino boyfriend, making out in the parking lot of the Wendy’s on Pico, eating bacon double cheeseburgers. The only reason I’m here is that my mother (Israeli, atheist) wants to piss off my father (Bostonian, Presbyterian), who is six months behind on child support. She sent me here so she could “rejuvenate,” she said. Where’s the rejuvenation in steaming off wallpaper and installing new bathroom tiles? That’s all she seems to do these days, ever since she got the house in a settlement from Richard (her “soon-to-be-ex,” as she now calls him). I haven’t answered a single one of her letters since I’ve been here. But one thing I do know is this: Malibu in 1991 just isn’t Lodz during the war. And I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

We are forced up and out of our bunks before the summer sun has warmed the air or dried the dew on the clumps of yellowing grass, and the basketball court we assemble in is buzzing in the bluish morning light. A small group settles down on the blacktop, just inches away from Bobby Z., all anxious and excited. They’re kids like Leslie Epstein and David Margolis, who are always offering to lead one of the million prayers that I still don’t know, sending those stupid Shabbat-o-grams back and forth to one another, or saying, “You haven’t been bat mitzvahed?” as if I’m some kind of alien. They cup their IDs in their hands. They have already pinned on their stars.

Then there are the boys in loose flannels throwing mock layups into the sagging basketball net, and a knot of languid lip-glossed girls in little white shorts and tanks, who don’t seem to notice the cold, stretching out their legs, exchanging looks. A girl with a great smear of purple eyeshadow is braiding Jill Simon’s long lush hair; Jill is drawing a bunch of daisies on her knee. In front of them, in a bright pile of shifting colors, are their IDs and stars. There’s no way they’re going to put them on until they have to.

This is the difference between cool and not cool here: who wears the stars and who doesn’t. And this is just one of many reasons I can’t stand this Jew-camp hell, which everyone else has been coming to since they were fetuses, practically. I am sitting behind the basketball net, away from everyone else, just as I’ve been doing all summer. In order not to look for Rafi, whom I look for far too often, I am staring at the distant, hay-colored hills. Rafi is a madreich, a counselor for the little kids, a guitar-playing junior from Santa Cruz, with sleepy silvery eyes and a mass of jet-black curls. You’d think everyone else would be after him too, that all those lip-glossed girls would try to sidle up to him during meals, but they don’t, and it just proves all that they don’t know.

“You’ll have an hour here in the ‘town square,’” Bobby Z. tells us, slicing his fingers through the air to form quotation marks. “You can trade items with one another, you can look for family members—it will be easier to get across as a unit than alone.” His wide bearded face breaks into a grin; nothing in his look lets on that his camp is in decline, that parents now prefer Ramah or Wilshire Boulevard camps to Shalom. “You must wear your star and ID at all times. Failure to do so will jeopardize your chances of obtaining a visa.”

“Fascist,” I hear a low voice say. It is Kron, with her crazy red hair and dozens of black rubber bracelets wallpapering her pale wrists, the closest thing I have to a friend in this place.

“You’re lucky to be here in America. All of us are. For just one day we’d like you to pretend otherwise,” Bobby Z. concludes.

Names are being called out: “Rosie Glass, Wolfe Gootman, Lev Levy.” People are milling about, searching for family, grabbing their friends. I am doing none of this. I am not interested in finding Anya’s husband. In my family (my real family, my only family, that is), marriage is a burden not a boon, and one that the women of every generation have worked hard to shake off.

A boy with a moon face comes by. “Have you seen Helen Markowitz?” he asks. I study him for a moment. He should be at the other end of the basketball court, where people really care about this stupid game, where counselors are pointing out wives and distributing extra safety pins and tips on how to make it to the promised land.

“Helen is dead,” I say.

His face shifts colors, from pink to purplish red—I see it happen.

“Dead?”

For a second, I feel bad—I mean, I don’t even know him—but I continue. “Of course, she’s dead. You’re dead, she’s dead, Anya Ossevsheva is dead too,” I say, thrusting my ID in his face. “It’s only a game.”

He looks at me and scowls. “Thanks a lot.”

I smile. “You’re welcome.”

“Bitch.”

“Asshole.” ]]> http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-life-and-religion/70536/how-to-make-it-to-the-promised-land/feed/ 0 http://www.tabletmag.com/podcasts/3010/summer-lovin/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=summer-lovin http://www.tabletmag.com/podcasts/3010/summer-lovin/#comments Mon, 30 Jul 2007 04:25:12 +0000 Laurel Snyder http://www.tabletmag.com/?p=3010

CREDIT: Random pictures from camp by Rick Harris; some rights reserved.

With August upon us, it seems appropriate to tip our hats to a venerable summer institution: sleepaway camp. From our archive, we bring you Laurel Snyder’s interview with Eric Simonoff, who edited an anthology on the subject. From 1975 to 1985, Simonoff packed up his books, clothes, bug spray and bathing suit and headed to Camp Harlam in the Poconos. Lugging the books was for naught; at camp, he found himself transformed into a popular kid occupied more by ice cream socials and coed sleep-outs. His Sleepaway: Writings on Summer Camp, a collection of 20 stories, essays, and poems, looks at the joys and perils of bug juice and bunk living.

Have a camp story of your own? Leave a comment.

Okay, pop quiz. It’s summer of 1963. What are the hottest pop songs on the charts? You’re probably thinking Elvis, Chubby Checker, Frankie Valli. Sure, they’re up there. But even hotter was a number rarely remembered these days, except around a campfire: “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh.”

That’s not the only Allan Sherman song that enjoyed widespread popularity. Yet today, his music receives scant attention. With the release of a six disc box set put out by Rhino Records, Jesse Green decides to revisit Sherman’s songbook, and to offer some interpretations for his meteoric rise and fall.