A Place of Our Own: The Rise of Jewish Camping (review)

Jewish camping has long been identified as one of the most successful methods for imbuing and strengthening Jewish identity. The blend of emotional and intellectual stimulation, the independence, the outdoors, and the sense of experiential Jewish living has helped promote the Jewish camping experience as a remedy to stultified, institutional associations that so many have of Jewish life today. It is a wonder that, with the success of camping, the movement in America is only abut 120 years old; Jewish camping surfaced only slightly later with Camp Lehman, founded in 1893. A Place of Our Own tells the fascinating story of American Jewish camping as an emergent trend in the early twentieth century, both as a critical response to the industrialization of America and as a way to acculturate a largely immigrant population.

The anthology marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Olin-Sang-Ruby Institute to commemorate "the rise and development" of Reform Jewish camping. But the book offers us much more, and, consequently, the book's sub-title does not tell the whole story. While the volume does have articles that deal specifically with Reform camping and with the Olin Sang-Ruby Institute and memories of this specific camping experience, its greater value is in placing these specifics within the history of the Jewish camping experience generally. Readers who purchase this book expecting a narrow focus will be pleasantly surprised. Other readers who may benefit from its articles, however, may not have realized its breadth when looking at the cover.

Gary Zola, one the volume's editors, begins the anthology with a very clear and helpful introduction to American camping, placing Jewish camping within that context. If you have ever wondered why many older, private, and nonprofit Jewish camps bear Indian names, Zola examines the influence of Native American culture on the early camping movement. As original inhabitants of the land, Native Americans sanctified and protected the land and understood how to use its resources wisely. With the increasing urbanization of American life, this return to the land was romanticized and manifested itself in "Jewish" camp with names like Cayuga, Jekoce, Ramapo and Wehaha.

In addition, American Progressivism, spearheaded by a number of pioneers in education like John Dewey and William Kilpatrick, stressed the role of camp as an educational laboratory to improve character and learning. Clergy, not only educators, were also at the head of this movement, and they hallowed campgrounds by bringing in prayer and other religious values and behaviors to an outdoor setting that would naturally inspire.

Jewish camping, however, did not emerge to meet any spiritual needs. It developed to manage and Americanize European immigrant children and provide a setting for the Jewish needy in an atmosphere of the simple and healthy outdoors. According to Zola, "these first Jewish camps were Jewish primarily because of their constituency, not because of their mission" (14). Only later did Jewish camps appear with specific missions, whether Zionist, Yiddish, or denominationally oriented.

Jonathan Sarna, in "The Crucial Decade in Camping," discusses the camping experience during its period of turbulent growth, 1940–1950. Suddenly, there was—in addition to Olin-Sang-Ruby Institute—the Brandeis Camp Institute, Massad, Ramah, Yavneh, and Agudah, among others. Federations and Jewish communal institutions developed and supported some of these ventures, taking Jewish camping to a new level of communal organization. At the same time, the efforts to move youngsters away from Jewish urban centers to strenuous outdoor facilities was also to acquaint them with the "rural world of American gentiles"(30). These camps were hardly the Jewish identity making institutions they are known for today. With these intentions, Sarna quips that it was no "small wonder that at most of these camps Judaism was reduced to a whisper" (30).

Only later did camps appear that represented specific ideological commitments to Judaism in its various forms. Jewish camping also expanded to include private, for-profit camps aimed...