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?”

I was an extremely phobic young child—bees, fire, elevators, lawnmowers, forklifts. My most incapacitating fears, though, and the ones that took the longest to get over, involved dozens of books, videos, and songs, ones that, according to the logic of a symbolic universe I can no longer really explain, included elements of horror. So, for example, Volume 8 in the Sesame Street Library, with its two-page spread on Old King Cole and its introduction to the letter Q, may seem innocuous to the average reader, but its tale of Hansel and Gretel absolutely terrified me.

That’s not actually the weird part—as Bruno Bettelheim could tell you, the whole point of fairy tales is to help children process their fears in abstract terms—but my particular mechanism for dealing with such situations was to a) hide the offending book in some distant corner of the house and b) from that safe distance, reclaim any symbols associated with it as my “favorite things.” So in this case, 8 (as in Volume) became my favorite number (it still is); purple (as in the color of the Count, who appears on the book’s cover) became my favorite color; and so on. I’m sure there’s a proper name for this coping strategy somewhere in the psychoanalytic literature, and I would love to know what it is.

One item in my pantheon of fear was an illustrated guide to the Jewish holidays. I’ve long forgotten the name of the book and nearly everything else about it, but the scary part still sticks in my mind: A full-page abstract image, in the section on Tisha B’Av, of gray smokestacks against a dark orange sky. I must have been about five when I came upon this picture, but while I was too young to make the explicit connection with the Holocaust, I knew a Shoah when I saw one. The book was hidden. And, as my puzzled kindergarten teacher eventually found out, Tisha B’Av became my “favorite holiday.” My mom still calls me every year to remind me.

That Tisha B’Av illustration is still one of the first things I picture when I picture the Holocaust, which in itself later became—well, I don’t want to call it my “favorite genocide,” but it was a historical event I assiduously avoided and just as assiduously obsessed over. In retrospect, it’s almost like my entire psychological mechanism was designed specifically for that purpose. It makes me wonder if the proper psychoanalytic term isn’t, simply, Judaism.

In a survey, I asked my peers to let me know their top 10 Tisha B’Av films. From Camp Moshava to Camp Galil to Camp Ramah to USY to Camp Lavi (and more), these folks spent their summers across the United States, and while their experiences did span religious, political, and cultural backgrounds, they all had one thing in common: Intense Tisha B’Av experiences.

10- Operation Thunderbolt (1977)
9-Hester Street (1975)
8-The Chosen (1981)
7-Paper Clips (2004)
6-The Wave (1981)
5-Exodus (1960)
4-School Ties (1992)
3- Life is Beautiful (1997)
2-Fiddler on the Roof (1971)

And the top of the list is…

1-Schindler’s List (1993)

Other recommendations were Pleasantville, Night and Fog, Cast a Giant Shadow, Eichah, Pay it Forward, The Devil’s Arithmetic and Hotel Rwanda.

There’s nothing like a good countdown to get ready for Tisha B’Av, the day we grieve the destruction of the Temple. To get in a mournful mood, the three weeks prior to Tisha B’Av—known as Bein Ha’Metzarim, or the period between the straits—are marked by a series of fasts and abstinences designed to induce somber reflection. The timing isn’t random: A fast begins on Shiv’ah Asar B’Tammuz, the 17th of Tammuz, the day the walls of the Second Temple were breached by the Romans in 70 C.E. Also, as the 17th of Tammuz occurs exactly 40 days after Shavuot, tradition suggests that it was on this day that Moses descended from Mount Sinai, saw the Golden Calf, and smashed the tablets. While customs vary, it is common to observe the restrictions of the period more stringently the nearer one gets to Tisha B’Av. The final nine days preceding Tisha B’Av are the period of greatest observance.

ANY DOS AND DON’TS?

The three weeks begin with Shiv’ah Asar B’Tammuz, a minor fast day which begins at dawn and ends shortly after dusk. (By contrast, the Tisha B’Av fast day lasts from sundown to sundown.) Throughout the three-week period that follows, Jews refrain from holding weddings and bar mitzvahs, as well as from having other public celebrations, and from buying new clothes. It is also prohibited to play or listen to music, or to get a haircut.

During the nine final days, many Jews refrain from eating meat or poultry, drinking wine, taking hot baths, or wearing freshly laundered clothes. This corresponds neatly with the spirit of the Mishneh, which commands, “From the beginning of Av, happiness is decreased.”

ANYTHING GOOD TO READ?

Special haftarot are chanted during each of the three weeks. Known as the “three of affliction,” these portions from the Hebrew prophets do not correspond to the weekly Torah portions, but instead contain the prophecies of Jeremiah and Isaiah warning of the fall of Jerusalem.

FIVE MORE THINGS YOU CAN DO:

• Take a textual tour of the Temple.
• Relive Moses’ smashing of the tablets.
• Enjoy a healthy diet with some vegetarian recipes.
• Get serious with the prophet Jeremiah.
• Ponder the state of modern-day Jerusalem.

As anyone who has so much as visited Israel in the last six decades knows, the Jewish state is highly caffeinated. Whether they are taking a business meeting in a Tel Aviv café or bonding with brothers-in-arms on a desert dune, Israelis are never without their restorative, sipping the stuff early and often.

But how best to drink it? Herein lies the bitter fight tearing Israeli society apart.

On the one hand are the finjan folk, believers in the beaked, long-handled pot traditionally used to brew coffee by the peoples of the region and also known, with slight variations, as a cezva, a raqwa or an ibrik. No matter what you call it, the principle remains the same: scoop coffee and sugar into the pot, pour water, bring to a boil. Which is where the finjan folk get weird. For coffee to live up to its true essence, any of them will tell you, it must be boiled no fewer than seven times; anything less, and you might as well drink day-old decaf. There is, of course, no evidence to support this theory.

Like most other occurrences of the number seven in Jewish folklore, the myth of the seven boils based more in custom than science. But while this lengthy method of brewing may have little do with coffee, it has everything to do with companionship, assuring that for many long moments, the anticipating drinkers would huddle around the campfire and exchange pleasantries as they watch their drink bubbling to perfection.

Could there be a better beverage for soldiers, guarding remote outposts on long, brisk nights? From the nation’s very birth, the finjan became as much a symbol of the renewing Jewish nation in its ancestral homeland as the Galil assault rifle, the Merkava tank, or the Davidka, the famed homemade mortar that was credited with so many of the Israeli army’s gains during the country’s War of Independence. So popular was the finjan, that Chaim Chefer, the poet laureate of the Palmach, the precursor to the Israel Defense Forces, wrote a poem about the small pot: “The wind blows coolly,” it goes, “the fire flickers, the song is blooming.” Moshe Wilenski, the era’s most famous Israeli composer, put Chefer’s words to music. The refrain is meant to be belted out loud: “the finjan spins around and around and around, the finjan spins around and around.” Every Israeli child knows this song by heart. When Israelis think of the sepia-toned heroism of their nation’s struggle for independence, the country’s finest hour, they think of a primitive coffee-making device.

The Israeli army has changed much since the days of the Palmach, replacing its antiquated rifles with hi-tech weapons, but the finjan is still strong with men in uniform. Every self-respecting fellow reporting for reserve duty—most Israeli men continue to serve between one and three months for at least three decades after their mandatory service ends at age 21—is likely to have, somewhere in the recesses of his dufflebag, a tin full of coffee, some sugar, and a battered finjan.

It wouldn’t have been the first time that coffee was conscripted: legend has it that after the Battle of Vienna in 1683, the armies of the Holy League discovered sacks full of mysterious green beans left behind by the defeated Turks. These, in turn, were awarded to the King of Poland, who gave them to the heroic officer Jerzy Franciszek Kulczycki. As savvy in business as he was on the battlefield, Kulczycki soon realized that his strange beans made for a magical brew, set up shop, and changed Viennese culture forever.

The story, compelling as it is may be, is apocryphal. Vienna’s first coffee shop was opened by a Greek merchant who had nothing to do with the King of Poland or the vanquished Ottoman Empire. But those Israelis looking for suitably caffeinated forefathers could raise a steaming cup to the man known to us today only as Jacob the Jew, an entrepreneur who, in 1650, inaugurated The Grand Café in Oxford, the first institution of its kind in England.

Within a century or so, the lion’s share of financial, intellectual, and social life in the world’s largest empire was discussed in coffeehouses, where—as the Abbé Prévost, the renowned French novelist, famously put it—one had “the right to read all the papers for and against the government,” making coffeehouses no less than the “seats of English liberty.” It didn’t take long for London to sort out its drinking infrastructure: There were separate coffeehouses for nautical insurance agents and coffeehouses for professional wits, tables reserved for Whigs and other tables, a safe distance away, only for Tories.

Which brings us back to that other group of Israelis. Whereas the finjan folk swear by their finely ground Turkish coffee, often laced with cardamom and cooked meticulously over a fire, their nemeses, the espresso people, vow that a cup isn’t perfect unless it was pulled from a chrome-plated Gaggia machine into a pre-heated cup. They often scoff at the very mention of Turkish coffee, still commonly referred to by Israelis of both persuasions as botz, or mud, an eloquent description of the soggy grounds collected in the bottom of the cup.

These men and women see themselves as Jacob the Jew’s true heirs. Not only do they consider their method of preparation far superior to the finjan’s primitive capabilities—after all, what are seven boils compared to more than seventeen bars of pressure pushing water onto tightly packed coffee grounds?—but they are also quick to take pride in their coffeehouse culture at large, a culture of trendy cafés serving dark and viscous espresso shots to a well-groomed clientele that gulps at its leisure, munching on flaky pastries  as it finalizes big business deals. It is a very different culture than the army’s. It is, like England’s coffee houses of old, a culture of commerce and contest, not camaraderie.

Occasionally— could it be any different?—these two worlds collide. Even the staunchest sipper of espresso may find himself holding the finjan’s long handle and counting to seven, and even the most fastidious finjanist may find herself craving a double skim macchiato from time to time. (There is also a third group, consisting of people who drink instant coffee—which, regardless of brand, is referred to in Israel as Nescafé—but with this being a day of atonement and all, we shall spare them the opprobrium they so richly deserve). But the very existence of these two coffee camps betrays more than a mere divergence in personal preferences. It speaks of a schism between the Israel of then and the Israel of now, the nation of fighters sharing a cup and a song and the nation of software engineers negotiating their start-ups, the boundless promise of the land and the strict confines of the city.

Like every other struggle, this one, too, has its apparent victors. As a recent exhibit at Shenkar, Israel’s premiere school of design, demonstrates all too well, when young Israelis think of coffee nowadays they look to the porcelain and ceramic of France and Italy, not the banged-up tin cups soldiers used to carry around. They look more to Alessi than to the Palmach. One student even created an espresso cup resembling a miniature, stout finjan, resting on ceramic stalks reminiscent of flames. The finjan ethos, wild and glorious, was reduced, in this elegant design, to a brilliant and white demitasse. The designs in the exhibition, beautiful as they may be, tell a subtle and sad story: gone are the days when Israelis would huddle together, the wind blowing coolly, the fire flickering, the song blooming, and the finjan spinning around and around and around.

We Jews should’ve known this day was no good when, on it, Moses’s spies came from the Promised Land with reports of a terrible place littered with walled fortresses and roamed by angry giants. Moses ordered his doubting emissaries killed, but the curse of Tisha B’av lived on: the First Temple was destroyed on this day in 586 BCE. The Second Temple suffered the same fate exactly 656 years later, in 70 CE. Sixty-five years after that, in 135 CE, the Bar Kokhba revolt failed, its leader was killed, and its flagship city, Betar, was destroyed. Then, one year later, Jerusalem itself was burned, the Temple area plowed, and the fate of the Jews sealed for millennia. As if further insult was needed, in 1492, King Ferdinand of Spain signed the Alhambra Decree, setting Tisha B’Av as the deadline for all of Spain’s Jews to leave for good.

Coming at the end of the Three Weeks of mourning, which began with the 17th of Tammuz, Tisha B’Av signifies the conclusion of the period known as Bein Hameitzarim, or between the straits, a time of reflection and abstinence from pleasure.

ANY BAD GUYS?

In abundance: All of Moses’s cowardly and faithless spies, with the exception of Joshua and Caleb, who said that the land was good; Nebuchadnezzar the Babylonian, besieger of Jerusalem and destroyer of the First Temple; Titus, Rome’s fearful officer who set flames to the Second Temple; and, last but not least, Ferdinand “The Catholic” of Aragon.

WHAT DO WE EAT?

Nothing. But unlike Yom Kippur, most rabbis tend to be a bit more lenient about fasting, making exceptions not only for those whose lives are seriously at risk but also for the ill and the generally unwell.

ANY DOS AND DON’TS?

Don’ts, mainly. Anything that gives us pleasure is prohibited, which rules out, among other things, bathing, wearing leather shoes, and carnal pursuits. If you thought maybe you’d replace the day’s heavy petting with Torah study—think again. Reading our Book of Books is considered a supreme joy and is therefore forbidden on Tisha B’Av. So is laying tefillin, as phylacteries are referred to as pe’er, or glory, and this is a decidedly inglorious day for the Jews.

ANYTHING GOOD TO READ?

We’re compensated for the day’s prohibitions with two splendid literary masterpieces: the Book of Eicha (Lamentations), which is read in the evening, and the Kinnot, poems of lamentation, in the morning. Taken together, these two are a powerful lesson in mourning. Eicha, while lyrically describing the ruin of Jerusalem, also speaks of a hopeful future, a time when the children of God, chastised, will learn their lessons and return to their former glory. The Kinnot, a vast and changing collection of works written through the centuries, strikes very much the same tone. The most famous author to work in the form was Rabbi Yehuda Halevi, who forever changed the genre’s focus from weeping over the tragedies of the past to looking expectantly at a brighter future. Be sad, these texts tell us, but not for long.

FIVE MORE THINGS YOU CAN DO:

• Secretly rejoice with this uplifting story of one good thing that happened on Tisha B’av, for a change

• Get in the groove with “Eicha,” the hip-hop song.

• Or, for the more traditional, listen to the book-on-tape in Hebrew.

• Ponder author A.B. Yehoshua’s own Tisha B’av meditation on Judaism.

• Start planning for breaking the fast.

Machaneh Yehuda today seems to follow its own rules, to exist in its own world. The day unfolds bereft of any distinguishing attribute. At noon, I stand with a friend on Agrippas Street, across from Etz Haim, in the souk’s main artery. We peer in, through the blistering sun, looking for anything out of the ordinary. Nothing. It is almost bustling.

We are standing in front of a shop called Mania, and Camilla, who is visiting from Tel Aviv, steps in to check out the goods: vodka, scallops, crab, burgundy-tinted salami made of shredded pork and beef, studded with peppers. I ask Anton, the shop manager, whether Tisha B’Av is affecting business. He smiles, and shakes his head. “No, why?”

Talking with him, you’d think the market is a stolid thing, unmoving, untouched by the deaths of the three young men—almost boys—by days of mourning, by anything at all. Of course, the opposite is true, and Mania is proof of it. Who thinks of pork sausage and fresh crab when they think of Machaneh Yehuda?

But the market, in order to remain itself—an artery, a palliative—has always had to stretch and adapt. Today, the Machaneh Yehuda contains Arcadia, the only restaurant in Israel that has won three toques from the premiere French gastronomic guide Gault-Millaut, as well as Shagar, an Ethiopian bistro, not to mention Indian, Turkish, Yemenite, and Moroccan restaurants, hamburger joints, coffee counters, a proper Italian gelateria, an establishment that serves only burekas, and boutiques selling designer clothing.

Camilla comes back out, examines our surroundings once again, and inhales the fine scents emanating from a spice shop’s wares—huge turrets of sweet and spicy paprika, garlic sprouting—and says, “it looks like nothing at all has changed.”

Plus ça change, plus ç’est la même chose. Many of the most radical changes the market has managed to absorb were wrought by its own children. Mania is owned by Dudu Ohana, a third generation Machaneh Yehuda man, who thought it was silly that only Russians should benefit from the new-immigrant, non-kosher customer base. Eli Mizrahi, who owns and runs a restaurant, Tzakho, where you can eat a paté de foie gras that evokes Normandy, or a Buenos Aires-style veal schnitzel with purée that draws Argentines from far beyond Jerusalem’s borders, is second-generation. His brother Yossi still sells roasted nuts and grains at the old family stall.

The souk, like any other institution that wants to survive, must respond to new and different hungers. Camilla and I are starving, but it is not evident what for. We wander up and down the street; nothing calls out. We end up finally at Agrippas 6, the small café that is at the furthest border of what might still be called Machaneh Yehuda, so far out you can hear the noise from King George Street. Noach Chai, the owner, conjures everything there himself, and seems to know everyone walking in. His father and his grandfather ran the place for years and years, when it was still a candy shop. Noach scrunches up his face at the memory: “I gave fifteen years of my life to this place as a candy store,” he says. “Yuck.”

Usually he ends the week with informal jazz concerts for the diners eating pastries and sandwiches at his outdoor tables. But not this summer. No one is in the mood. “The refugees,” he says, meaning residents of the north who have fled to southern safety, “are all in Tel Aviv or are in a bad mood.” Camilla orders his Greek salad, which arrives studded with roasted peppers and walnuts; I take a slice of fresh, crumbly dried-fruit cake, and devour it. I’m wondering what the Lebanese refugees are in the mood for as they flee north, and what is being eaten this noontime in the central market of Beirut.