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The Jews of Summer: Summer Camp and Jewish Culture in Postwar America

Mar 5, 2024 | 2:30 pm - 3:30 pm

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Robert Seltzer Lunch Lecture Series

The Jews of Summer: Summer Camp and Jewish Culture in Postwar America

Presented by: Sandra Fox, 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

In this lecture, Sandra Fox explains how a sense of cultural crisis birthed a rite of passage for Jewish children across the country. The Jewish communal obsession with camping began in the decades directly following the Holocaust when Jewish leaders anxiously debated how to preserve and produce what they considered authentic Jewish culture. They pinned their hopes on residential summer camps for Jewish youth. 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.

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 came out last year with Stanford University Press. In addition to her research, Sandra is the founder and executive producer of the Yiddish-language podcast Vaybertaytsh: A Feminist Podcast in Yiddish.