How did sleepaway camp become an integral part of American Jewish life? In the decades directly following the Holocaust, American Jewish leaders anxiously debated how to preserve and produce what they considered authentic Jewish culture, fearful that growing affluence and suburbanization threatened the future of Jewish life. Many communal educators and rabbis contended that without intervention, Judaism as they understood it would disappear altogether. They pinned their hopes on residential summer camps for Jewish youth, institutions where Jewish children and teens could socialize, have fun, and experience Jewish culture. Adults' fears, hopes, and dreams about the Jewish future inflected every element of camp life, from the languages they taught to what was encouraged romantically and permitted sexually. But adult plans did not constitute everything that occurred at camp: children and teenagers also shaped these sleepaway camps to mirror their own desires and interests and decided whether to accept or resist the ideas and ideologies their camp leaders promoted. In this lecture, Sandra Fox will explain how a sense of cultural crisis birthed a rite of passage for Jewish children across the United States.

Sandra Fox is the Goldstein-Goren Visiting Assistant Professor of American Jewish History at New York University, and director of the Archive of the American Jewish Left in the Digital Age. Her book, The Jews of Summer: Summer Camp and Jewish Culture in Postwar America addresses the experiences of youth in postwar Jewish summer camps and the place of intergenerational negotiation in the making of American Jewish culture. Fox is also an alum of Eugene Lang College, where she majored in history and minored in Jewish culture ('11).