In actual camp programming, the only vestiges of real Hebrew education were our daily proyekt class, run by the extremely attractive Israeli soldiers familiar to anyone who has attended Jewish camp in the United States. Proyekt really translates to “skip class and avoid eye contact with staff members.” So, the only real Hebrew content of the summer was in the plays that every age group put on. Highlights of my own camp performances include Rocky Horror Picture Show, She’s All That, and The Prince of Egypt, staged with varying degrees of coherence and faithfulness to the original source. In my last summer as a camper, we put on Tommy, which makes surprisingly frequent appearances in the camp repertoire thanks to a truly impressive translation. Israeli theater producers: take note.

I spent one summer as a camp counselor. That year, thanks to our Jewish day school education, my friend Ilana and I were asked to write the script for the play my campers would perform—101 Dalmations. I hope that when I die, I am primarily remembered for my Hebrew version of Britney Spears’  “Toxic,” about Cruella DeVille.

For campers, play performances were among the grand events of the summer. One night, the summer before seventh grade, as I squeezed onto the floor of an unventilated wooden barn directly behind a boy a foot taller than me, I was ready for a magical performance of The Wizard of Oz. I had no idea I was about to experience the most meaningful Hebrew educational moment in my 10 years at camp.

I’ve seen The Wizard of Oz far more times than is healthy, and I spoke Hebrew just about as well as anybody at camp. So, I thought I had a pretty good grasp of the plot. The first act went exactly as I expected. But when Dorothy and Co. finally reached Oz, events took an unexpected twist.

During the Scarecrow’s big moment with the Wizard, the crowd suddenly went wild—or at least the part of the crowd who knew Hebrew. I did not get the joke. I turned to my counselor, bewildered, who generously explained that instead of saying, “I wish for a brain,” the brilliant 14-year-old performer had turned to the Wizard of Oz and said ten li rosh—“give me head”.

So, that emphasis on the Hebrew language paid off after all, as I got a handy lesson in describing the act of fellatio in the holy tongue. Thanks, Camp.

Shifra M. Goldenberg is an arts administrator and freelance web designer.

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In case you don’t know, a Shabbos walk is the term used for the awkward Saturday afternoon strolls taken by Jewish youths across America, essentially hoping to find love.

Whether you were displaying the strength of your three-week relationship or hoping to light a spark with a fresh face, Shabbos walking was an essential ritual. Girls took particular delight in this activity, often preferring to hone their unseasoned matchmaking abilities rather than actually go on a walk. 

To an 11-year-old boy thrust into a militant Orthodox Zionist structure, girls are a source of conflict. You can’t stop who you crush on, but your actions must be displayed in a polite and restrained manner, in concordance with ancient Jewish law.

Sneaking off to the woods to make out was a not even a hypothetical possibility, much less one that ever came to fruition. So you took what you could get, which in my case meant letting my friend Danielle fix me up with her friend Aliza.

Unfortunately, I was already head over heels for Danielle. She was a blonde, blue-eyed Texan who personified the kind of sassy female I had been missing during my first decade on earth.

As a spineless kid who was terrified of getting in trouble, I recognized and cherished her precocious impudence. Her friend was sweet, but all I could see was that she and her parents still hadn’t figured out that her glasses covered most of her face.

Although in my head I turned this Shabbos walk down a hundred different ways, Danielle’s unbridled excitement at setting us up coupled with my lack of even a whiff of testicular fortitude meant this walk was indeed going to happen.

I imagined leaving the walk in the middle and sprinting to my friend to confess my feelings. Instead, I told myself that taking a walk with her friend would be the best way to stay close to her. I was really that naive. 

We decided to meet near the far goal of the boy’s soccer field. This was intentional, as trying to find this rather nondescript person in a general area set against a sea of blue and white (required garb for Friday nights and Saturdays) would have been near impossible.

The beginning of the walk was reminiscent of some ancient Japanese ritual—few if any words were exchanged between a ‘shidduched couple,’ but instead of bowing to one another, we set a quick pace in a desperate attempt to ease the tension.

By the time we realized there was nothing to say, we had traversed a good portion of the camp and I was still looking sheepishly at the ground (there’s a reason they call it a Shabbos walk and not a Shabbos talk).

In this particular instance there was no hand holding or even laughter, only mumbled conversation drowned out by the young cat-callers expertly perched around the camp (needless to say, there were plenty of boys who took great delight in jeering others to cover up their own insecurities about not having someone to go one a walk with. At least this is what I told my young, startled self).

I hate to say it, but all I could think about was how much I wish my impertinent friend with the shiksa goddess looks was standing next to me instead of my date. After what felt like weeks, we finally parted (girls and boys campuses were universes away).

While I was relieved that I had completed this fabled act, I held onto the dream that the next one would be Danielle. Or anyone who I had even a remote interest in kissing.

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It was my final summer (a little late in the game, frankly, to start thinking about Jesus—a delay likely rooted in my Semitically-oriented Long Island upbringing or general ninth grade disregard for things not directly impacting me or my BFFs), which meant our play was performed during visiting day, to the presumed delight of parents who had shlepped up to the Adirondacks to endure a day—or two, depending on how prolific you were—of poorly navigated sailing jaunts, tennis drills, and an inevitable ceramics class. An odd choice of musical, perhaps, for a camp (mostly) full of Jewish girls, but in those days there was no High School Musical to fall back on.

I auditioned because I thought it would be fun for my parents to watch me on stage. They had never made any indication to suggest that was the case, but theatrically ahead I forged.

I should make it very clear that I have a less-than-stellar singing voice, a generally uncomfortable stage presence, and very little idea of what to do with extremities like arms and hands in public spaces.

Regardless, I was cast as Priest Three, a partially-named character with many more lines than Priests One and Two. I know this because the piano player noted the discrepancy during one of our priest-only rehearsals.

At our all-girls camp, a single french braid, tucked into a pageboy cap or maybe a cowboy hat, signified that a character was male. I had the (debatably) good fortune of being able to tuck my french braid into the conical black construction paper hat my character wore, which while not as stately as Caiphus’ certainly did the trick.

As my family likes to retell it, my lines mainly consisted of “Yes he did I saw him too,” sung varyingly in an awkwardly deep voice or an unsustainably high pitched lilt. I’m pretty sure I had other lines, though I am finally able to admit that most of them probably sounded a lot like that one. If I’ve learned anything from The Voice—other than that I would do terribly on The Voice—it’s that sometimes you just need to be true to yourself as an artist. Or be less pitchy.

I hadn’t considered the impact my theatrical debut (and the wretched VHS tape documenting it) had on my intellectual development until I enrolled in a Classical Judaism course in college. When we got to the part about the rabble rousing and the carpenter king, I realized somewhat sheepishly that the bulk of my understanding of Jesus could be hummed, sung, or recited—either way it all definitely rhymed.

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From its beginnings more than a century ago (the Oxford English Dictionary traces the term’s first use to 1909), camp has formed an important part of gay culture and, from the 1960s onwards, has helped to make gay culture more accepted by mainstream society. It is both a celebration of the frivolous, and, in its fashion, a subversive attack on the seriousness of the high modernism that it originally grew out of.

Sontag defined “the ultimate Camp statement” as “it’s good because it’s awful”—camp takes pride in failure, particularly in the garish or melodramatic. It’s a deeply visual sensibility, one that privileges extravagance and strives for the extraordinary.

Camp is sentimental, open, and “generous.” As a way of life, it represents “the theatricalization of experience.”

Since this is Camp Week at Jewcy, I thought I’d take a look at the campiness of camp. The two words aren’t just homonyms. In fact, there’s a great deal about Jewish summer camp that is camp. (To distinguish between the two, I’ll use the acronym JSC to refer to Jewish summer camp.)

One might even argue that camp is the defining aesthetic of JSC, at least at the liberal, reform Southern California JSC where I spent a few formative summers.

Life at my JSC was defined by skits, chants, cheesy songs, drama, pageantry, homoerotic humor, cabin cheers filled with elaborate innuendo—all things that are indelibly camp. Moreover, as your goyische friends may jealously testify to, JSC is a place of sexual curiosity, self-questioning, experimentation, even cross-dressing (often for the purposes of a skit or theatrical production).

During this period, it can seem like one’s sexual and gender attitudes are in a continual flux, and indeed, many campers are themselves androgynous, unformed; in Sontag’s view, “the androgyne is certainly one of the great images of Camp sensibility.”

JSC is suffused with an air of constant performance that is unmistakably camp. We cheer loudly for the smallest successes, we over-gel our hair and strut demonstratively for our camp crushes, we write and perform in knowingly silly skits and belt out parodies of the season’s hit pop songs. We invoke film quotes to show our pop culture savvy (The Big Lebowski was the sacred text during my stint at JSC), and we code sexual references and flirtations into our everyday speech.

We are always on, always performing. Sontag wrote that camp “is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater.” JSC, then, may be seen as one vast proscenium, where the inherent drama of adolescence is amplified to the nth degree, making dandies of us all.

In “Notes on Camp,” Sontag claimed that “Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative, that is, in the truest sense: they are creators of sensibilities. The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.” These two forces collide at JSC, where we pray daily and learn how to be custodians of Jewish history while also cajoling a friend to steal and try on a girl’s bra, because it seems strange and daring.

JSC is both Wet Hot American Summer (itself an example and document of camp) and “The Conversion of the Jews.” At Camp Hess Kramer, which I attended, this collision is emblematized by the camp’s six-foot tall Menorah—an object at once intrinsically holy and, because of its exaggerated size, unintentionally absurd. (Sontag would label it an example of “naive camp.”)

Sontag was never wholly in favor of camp. In her original essay, as well as later in her career, she worried that camp’s lack of aesthetic seriousness could also be accompanied by a lack of moral seriousness. Yet that is what makes this sensibility so well suited to JSC. For campers, it is a time to be unserious, free, to loose the shackling anxieties of adolescence, even—or especially—if that means risking embarrassment or failure.

“Camp discloses innocence,” Sontag tells us, “but also, when it can, corrupts it.” This can be interpreted as a comment on camp’s ethics, but I think it’s something less pointed—a description of a tendency, a habit of being. At Jewish summer camp, whether our parents know it or not, we come to shed our innocence, to be complicit in our own corruption and adolescent awakening. And we do it—whether we know it or not—by way of camp, the camp of camp.

The post Culture Kvetch: The Campiness of Summer Camp, A Summer-Long Pageant appeared first on Jewcy.

The summer before eighth grade, buzz had been building across camp after it was announced that Blue Fringe would be performing. At the time, the band represented an anomaly to the moribund American Jewish music scene. “Blue Fringe,” Tablet Magazine’s Liel Leibovitz wrote in 2005, “is bridging the gap between rock culture and religious faith.” Their sound was edgy enough for us kids to enjoy, and their lyrics were acceptable enough to pass the camp’s religious litmus test.

We loved Blue Fringe. Their songs echoed off of the wooded bunk walls every Friday when the camp cleaned before Shabbat. Nothing like this concert had happened before and people were excited.

The concert took place in the biggest building we had. The place resembled a big barn on the outside, with an A-frame roof, gray walls, and a stage inside. Wooden floors, stained a deep, scuffed brown, were worn from years of shuffling and shuckling during prayers.

It was those floors that gave the place its life: on Friday nights when we would all dance around the bimah, they bounced lightly up and down with the rhythm of our feet.

The night of the concert, the barn was filled with campers, guys and girls separated by a mechitza down the middle of the floor. When the band came on, the place exploded with pre-pubescent screams that I imagine are currently reserved for only the Jonas Brothers or Miley Cyrus.

As they struck their first rock chord, the guys in my section, we began to dance.

This was not the hora circle-dance of Friday night prayers, but rather something of a primordial mosh pit. I remember Blue Fringe’s sound filling the barn and willing myself to jump.

Everyone around me was doing the same. The floor undulated beneath our feet—up and down, up and down. As we surged toward the front, elbowing each other for a better view, our jumping became more electric.

Ever the neurotic, I glanced nervously at the bouncing floor, which seemed to roll a bit too quickly. It had withstood a lot until now, I reasoned to myself. So I continued to jump.

Then Blue Fringe played one of their more popular tunes, and the crowd really went crazy. We danced even harder, and this time the floor started bucking. As I felt the floor groaning beneath my feet, I was suddenly sure I was going to die.

With one last groan, the floor started sinking—it really started sinking—and I thought, this is it. I was going to die at Camp Moshava in Indian Orchard, Pennsylvania, right on the cusp of my high school years, and Blue Fringe’s Jewish rock and roll would be the last thing I would ever hear.

The floor sunk and sunk and sunk. That’s when the dancing finally began to ebb, and the adults intervened. They cut the sound and ordered a hasty retreat.

As we were ushered out, a big wave of relief spread over me. Looking back over my shoulder, I saw the pockmark our dancing had created on the floor. A fifteen square foot dimple, perhaps two feet lower than the rest of the floor at its center point, where I was sure I had been standing just moments earlier.

It was obvious that I was never in any real danger. A few scrapes, maybe, but death? Probably not. And yet, every concert that I’ve been to since has been measured against that one. So far I’ve been unable to recapture that singular, energizing terror that can only be felt at the presumed onset of death by music. Thank you Camp Moshava. Thank you.

David Fine is editor emeritus of the Columbia Current. He tweets at @DavidFine.

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Also, make sure to check in with The Roll, where our editor, Stephanie Butnick, will be blogging from Birthright Israel with some Tablet Magazine writers. She has elected to cover the ‘Birthright Israel After Dark’ beat, so it should get pretty interesting. It is an especially good day for an El Al jaunt to Israel, since it’s falafel day over there.

Happy camp week!

The post Introducing Camp Week on Jewcy appeared first on Jewcy.

Early on I noticed an obvious need for late night sweets. My bunkmates and I would purchase Peanut Chews, frozen Rolos and Snickers at our camp’s canteen, but when we returned to our bunk, our collective sweet tooth was still wanting. I purchased a few snacks at the next canteen visit and instead of eating them there and then, I smuggled them into the bunk, locking the chocolate bars in my trunk, out of reach of the counselors. I did the same the following week.

I’m not sure if it was David or Nick who first said they could really go for a Snickers, but I recall leaning over to one of them, saying, “I can make that happen.”

That’s how I became the bunk’s sugar dealer. I made more canteen visits, learned how to leverage other campers’ Nerf balls and magazines for their canteen credit, and even had my parents bring me candy on Visiting Day.

Business boomed so fast that I signed up for extra woodshop sessions to build a box with a secret compartment so I could flout the camp’s no-food-in-the-bunk rules in plain sight. I was unstoppable, at least for a short while.

The candy business, it turned out, was untenable. My business model was too easily replicable and soon everyone was hoarding snacks in sock drawers and bunk rafters.

The following summer I stumbled upon a better business opportunity when a counselor commended my impeccably tidy cubby, a consequence of my mother’s recent decision to no longer do my laundry coupled with my compulsive Virgo tendencies.

“I’ll give you a dollar to organize my cubby,” my friend Ben said just before visiting day, offering four times the price of a typical candy sale. His socks and underwear were strewn all about, his jeans were always covered in melted chocolate. He couldn’t possibly pass cubby inspections without me. Could I even say no?

Max, Elan and Asher requested cubby service too when they saw how Ben’s cubby had transformed. I was the go-to man, hired before cubby checks and clean laundry returns.

I banked nearly forty-seven dollars by the summer’s end, all with the intent to spend it at Dorney Park, an amusement park in Allentown, Pennsylvania where the camp took us on the final week. I spent some of the loot on funnel cakes and churros, I recall, but kept my eye on the prize: winning a mini-basketball with the logo of the “it” NBA franchise at the time at the Basketball Free-Throw booth. The slightly ovular rims of the hoops were no wider than the ball’s diameter, so only a perfectly angled shot could go in.

I won! It wasn’t easy. I tried fifteen, maybe twenty times, whatever it would take. The extra cash came in handy. Back at camp my basketball was a point of pride for the remaining few days, a display of vanity akin to a luxury car today.

Had I continued on at socialist camp, I’m not sure where I would be today or if my entrepreneurial spirits would have been appropriately nurtured. I do know for certain that had I not been there that summer, I never would have had a basketball to hoard for years and eventually dump in the trash when my parents sold the family house. Yes, at Nah Jee Wah I truly learned the value of capitalism.

Jeffrey Yoskowitz is a freelance writer in Brooklyn and the editor of Pork Memoirs. He remains an entrepreneur, having moved on from candy and laundry to gefilte fish and pickles as co-founder of The Gefilteria.

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