I'm not saying that the walls aren't still closing in below, but I thought this post made for an excellent contrast.

Quality content Heebie (and NickS), well done!

I kept waiting for the interviewee to talk about Mrs. Maisel, but it never happened.

I'm officially pissed at AIPAC, if whoever defines success is keeping track of that.

That's a great interview. I never went to a full session of Jewish summer camp, but I was pretty involved in the synagogue youth group when I was in high school and they often had events at the regional Conservative camp in California so I went there a few times and met a lot of people who had gone there and were really into it. Her description rings true to the aspects of the camp experience I saw through that indirect lens. Other aspects, like the role of Tisha B'Av, were new to me but fascinating.

Hold on. There are Jewish people?

Not as many of them as everyone thinks.

This seems mostly focused on conservative camps. The ones my family went to were actively socialist.

Hot take CTY is the best Jewish summer camp going.

This seems mostly focused on conservative camps. The ones my family went to were actively socialist.

She says both

The camps my book focuses on are camps with intensively ideological, educational, nationalistic missions -- the Jeweyist of the Jewish camps, not "Jew-ish" camps, which are their own totally legitimate thing with a whole other story that someone should write a book about.

and

Jews embraced coeducational camping faster than gentiles, largely because the progressive, socialist, and radical camp leaders that led the move towards mixed gender camping were, in many cases, Jews.

Someone in comments links to a book about radical summer camps: http://cup.columbia.edu/book/raising-reds/9780231110457

My wife went to a Nerd Fitness camp last year; it was in GA, rented from a Jewish summer camp for a week off season. It was nice to hear everyone taking the requests to only bring kosher food, etc., seriously -- and one of the best experiences of her life, so I'm biased towards anything that contributed to such a good experience.

My husband and I are goys but my son goes to a Jewish preschool. I thought it would be more Jew-ish but it turns out it's Modern Orthodox. It's funded by the city so technically they can't do Shabbat during school hours but sometimes they do it in extended day. Probably about 60ish% of the children are Jewish of various levels of observance and most of the teachers are young Dominican women. Anyways my son is now bugging me about going to Jewish summer camp and I'll probably send him next year. The school has an official Israeli liaison but so far no overt Zionism in the classroom, or at least none that my 4 yo tells me about.

This was interesting! Thanks, NickS!

I went to a Jew-ish camp one summer when I was 12-ish.
I don't remember any Jewish education/Zionist propaganda at all except maybe that song about if Hitler had a girlfriend, why can't I?

Not sure about the politics of sending my son to Jewish camp but the other goyish children go so it seems like the camp doesn't mind. It's affiliated with the community center that runs the preschool.
My sister's husband is Conservative and feels very strongly about Jewishness has a religious/ethnic identity but also married out. He'd probably be offended if you called him a bad Jew. They don't have kids so I guess it's a moot point. His sister married a Jewish man and has Jewish children but she's gone 110% into celebrating Christmas to the extent she's incorporated Hanukkah into Advent. Her husband, parents and my BIL all think it's pretty weird.

Not sure about the politics of sending my son to Jewish camp but the other goyish children go so it seems like the camp doesn't mind. It's affiliated with the community center that runs the preschool.
My sister's husband is Conservative and feels very strongly about Jewishness has a religious/ethnic identity but also married out. He'd probably be offended if you called him a bad Jew. They don't have kids so I guess it's a moot point. His sister married a Jewish man and has Jewish children but she's gone 110% into celebrating Christmas to the extent she's incorporated Hanukkah into Advent. Her husband, parents and my BIL all think it's pretty weird.

I went to the second type in 9, but there was a one week session where we overlapped with one of the crazy Zionist ones and we spent a lot of time making fun of them. Except once we almost drowned a couple of their kids by accident.
I did the same calculation in OP, two years of my life there.

His sister married a Jewish man and has Jewish children but she's gone 110% into celebrating Christmas to the extent she's incorporated Hanukkah into Advent.

That's hilarious. How does she deal with the dates changing each year?

So, sleepaway summer camp in Texas seems fraught, as best I can tell. There seem to be two types: subsidized by religious Christians, or aimed at extremely wealthy Christians. There is a family story about my DFW cousin who begged to go to camp with his best friend. He came back crying and terrified one week later, believing that his parents and all of us were all going to hell. They said it took a couple weeks to get him to let go of the fear.

We've mostly settled on YMCA camps, which are a tad Christian, unsurprisingly, but I just debrief with the kids, and we have to discuss navigating Christianity all the time already, so it's fine. FINE.

We did contemplate sending Hawaii to a fancy expensive camp that her friend goes to. We went as far as to put her on the waitlist. We're quietly letting it expire without pursuing the interview portion that comes next because I'm finding this whole process so revolting. Plus it's way more expensive than even de-worming 3 cats.

We both went to sleep away camps- my Jewish one much more fancy and expensive and hers which was a basic municipal-supported organization- but for our kids we settled on a mid-cost no religion private camp. The kids seemed to like it so far.

I saw a Jewish National Fund sticker on a Mercedes-Benz.

17: You might appreciate the following Slate article about whether or not to coach basketball for a conservative Christian kids' team in Atlanta: https://slate.com/human-interest/2023/02/christian-youth-sports-coaching-dilemma.html

I went to French immersion camp (how Canadian) but like 10, it was at a Jewish camp and we ate Kosher all week.

8: I went to that! Two years. In between its name changed to IAAY. I'm not Jewish and I didn't notice over-representation of Jewish kids at the time, but in hindsight I believe it.

I only ever went to Boy Scout camp. A kid got bit by a snake and it was his own fault because he picked the snake up.

IYKWIM

19: A little voice inside your head said, "the food here is terrible, and the portions are too small"?

20: That article is amazing.

24: I was thinking more something like, "A yente's voice in my head said, 'you can never go goy, you can never go goy'"

I love how there are so many Jewish camps that they rent them out to other groups when they're not in session. I hadn't realized that was a thing until now but it's delightful.

The only thing worse than sleepaway camp is sleepaway camp that can't serve beefaroni because it's no kosher.

Why wouldn't it be Kosher? Just don't sprinkle with cheese.

Our camp was kosher when I first started going in the mid 80s, and gradually became less so over the 10 years I went. For a while during cookouts you had to know to ask for the secret slices of cheese hidden under the table to put on your burger. By the end cheeseburgers were a regular option. I don't think they ever went to pork though.

The vast universe of Jewish summer camps includes options at all levels of kosher observance, including the time-honored standby of pretending to keep kosher while secretly cheating.

29: It still needs to be slaughtered properly. I doubt Chef Boyardee has a shochet on contract.

Canned pasta isn't even edible.

Reflecting on 20, I'm a little protected from that world generally, because of the buffer of Hispanic Catholicism in Heebieville. Maybe that's why the summer camp world - which skews heavily white - seems so shockingly steeped in it, to me.

De nada.

I doubt Chef Boyardee has a shochet on contract.

If their chefs are drawn from the Boyars, almost certainly not.

I remember having the same fear as in 17.1 inflicted on me and I didn't even have to go to a Christian summer camp for it.

I have many stories and traditions from my camp and I wonder how common they are to camps in general or if we were really weird in a lot of ways. One is that during overnight canoe trips we learned vulgar songs to sing while paddling that I later learned (in the age of Google) were military march cadences. I'm curious what the connection was- some staff member with a veteran relative?
Speaking of rentals, my camp was the set for Meatballs.

16
I believe that if Hanukkah falls during Christmas it gets mostly shunted aside, or they do something small after.

You can always find time to attack a Syrian.

How do I know horny levels around here have dropped precipitously? We're 40 comments in andthis article was published about two weeks ago and no one has yet to link it.

I was raised Catholic but went to Jewish summer camp for many years after two miserable experiences at other camps (one a sleepaway, the other a day camp). It was run by the YM/YWHA and was wonderful. There was a tween and then teen travel camp. Basically one week was spent in the NY area going to beaches, or stuff in NYC, or amusement parks in NJ (including the infamous Traction Park, I still have the scars to show for it) and the other would be a week in DC, or Toronto/Montreal, and the like. And yes, the hookup culture was very real and great. There was especially a lot of activity during the travel weeks. I don't envy the counselors who would be looking frantically for couples whenever we got to stay in dorms of colleges and universities. They were very easy to give the slip.

It was a very secular camp, mostly or all I think, reform Jews, and while there was some Zionist content it was fairly light.

Some Conservative Jews too, come to think of it.

38 We mostly learned songs like Barnacle Bill the Sailor.

41 Oh, now I feel a fool, she wrote the Slate article I linked (an excerpt from her book) and links it an the substack. Serves me right for not reading TFA.

I have many stories and traditions from my camp and I wonder how common they are to camps in general or if we were really weird in a lot of ways. One is that during overnight canoe trips we learned vulgar songs to sing while paddling that I later learned (in the age of Google) were military march cadences.

I think that's probably pretty common. Even before I became a child soldier (or to be precise a child sailor), learning anti-aircraft gunnery while standing on a box in order to reach the Oerlikon triggers, I was going to Scout camp and singing "He Ain't Gonna Jump No More". Also IIRC a mildly scatological version of "You Cannae Get To Heaven On Roller Skates". Repeatable line: "You cannae get to heaven/ in a biscuit tin/ 'cos a biscuit tin/ 's got biscuits in".

We only had .22s.

11: most of the teachers are young Dominican women

Affiliated with the French reconciler of Albigensians, or the Caribbean island? Or both, I suppose.

44: NRTFA is a time-honored Unfogged tradition. I have thought of a marvelous analogy, but it is too large to fit into the margins of this comment.

46: That's why ajay's people won the War of 1812.

I failed spectacularly at the camp hookup thing, being pretty nerdy and unattractive. In fact it led to a funny reversal of the normal situation- my first year as a staff member (17) I was driving some 15 year old girls in the motorboat and they asked about whether I had a girlfriend. (Were they flirting? I doubt it.) Wanting to seem cool I told them the name of a girl from my HS that I had a crush on but was in no way my girlfriend. My camp was in Canada, so yes I lied to some Canadian girls about having an imaginary American girlfriend.

They were in a motorboat with an American, so they were probably just trying to reassure themselves that you weren't a serial killer.

47.last Yes, of course.

49 My first hookup was the only other Catholic (or Christian of any kind) at the camp. After a few weeks we went our separate ways. Some of the guys did pretty well but most it seems did not. I recall a number of the latter bunch telling that stupid joke that starts "how can you tell when a Jewish girl has an orgasm..." and I was like, guys, you've got it completely wrong.

45: we sang both of those!

||

They physically occupied a local church that Pope John Paul II wished to return to Ukrainian Greek Catholics. The beneficiaries of their action, Roman Catholic Carmelite monks, then proceeded to destroy the church's dome on the grounds that its "eastern" shape destroyed Przemys´l's "Polish" skyline. Here again religion is subordinated to modern nationalism, and common early modern civilization is obscured rather than revealed. The Habsburg-era dome was in fact modeled not upon an eastern basilica (or an igloo), but upon St. Peter's in Rome.

I went to the Catholic Youth Organization sleepaway camp a couple of times. Among our songs:

I was CYO born
And CYO bred
And when I die
I'll be CYO dead
Rah rah for our camp
Rah rah for our camp
Rah rah for CYO

47

The latter. But maybe also the former, I haven't inquired too deeply.

In my HS all the cool kids were in a B'nai B'rith youth program, they would wear blue hoodies that said Herzl in white letters on the back. There was a very elaborate point system for blow jobs, I don't remember much except that you got double points if you blew the son of a rabbi. I would hear all the updates in Monday morning English class.

That is about as different from my high school experience as it is possible to be without aliens landing.

55.2 Why couldn't I have been born the son of a rabbi?

Because blow jobs don't make babies?

Because oral sex wasn't invented yet and birth control not available to high school students, instead of talking about who was having sex with who, you'd just have to wait until the pregnancy showed.

Does everybody know the joke about the difference between poverty and a Jewish wife? I don't think I learned that one at my Jew-ish camp. I probably wouldn't have understood it then, anyway.

Sex on Shabbat is a double mitzvah!

Wait? The guy who asked me if I wanted to do a mitzvah was hitting on me?

Only if he asked about a double mitzvah.

62, 63: That's only if it was Shabbat. If it was any other day, he was hitting on you.

Apparently a Florida principal got fired for showing sixth grade kids a picture of a marble penis without sending home a note to the parents first.

Did the parents want to be offered a chance to see the penis too?

That story is so amazing because it was literally a Simpsons episode thirty years ago.

History repeats itself, first as farce, second as tragedy.

I think that in southern evangelical contexts, a male who looks as fit as "David" codes as homosexual even if you can't see what's below the chiseled abs.

I read somewhere that some count wiping your butt carefully as dangerously close to playing with yourself, but I chose to regard that as satire.

That story is so amazing because it was literally a Simpsons episode thirty years ago.

I can't be the only one who thinks it's disturbing how much Simpsons political satire from 30 years ago has characters doing things that are as or even less insane than what some of the actual politicians, especially on the right, do today.

If you look at 60s comedy, they did lots of jokes about "President Reagan."