Dr. Sandra Fox – Jews of Summer

Dr. Fox’s talk will look at American Jewish culture in the decades following World War II, when American Jews climbed the socioeconomic ladder, left urban enclaves for shiny new suburbs in droves, and experienced more social mobility than ever before. But while their new status afforded them many benefits, communal leaders feared that these postwar comforts threatened the vitality of Jewish life in America as they understood it. Projecting their anxieties onto youth, Jewish educators, rabbis, and lay leaders from across the ideological and religious spectrum — Zionist, Yiddishist, Reform and Conservative alike — came to see the immersive, totalizing experience of sleepaway camp as uniquely powerful solution for their communal ills. At the same time, campers and staff members clashed and converged, their intergenerational negotiations shaping postwar American Jewish culture both inside and outside camps’ gates. In this talk, Dr. Sandra Fox will discuss the fantasies that drove the establishment and growth of educational Jewish camping, how educators’ high hopes for camping shaped the lived experience, and how campers responded to these efforts, impacting discourses surrounding Jewish identity, practice, language, nationalism, and intermarriage for decades to come.