[This week my sons return to their favorite sleepaway camp, this time with my older son as a Counselor-in-Training! As ever that gives me serious empty nest syndrome, but more relevantly it also gives us an opportunity for some Summer CampStudying.]
On
ethnicity, community, and the preservation and revision of tradition.
In the
nine first-year writing courses I taught
as an adjunct at both Boston University and UMass Boston, I focused on one
aspect or another of immigration and American identity; as a result, I found
that the conversations and work in those courses circled around again and again
to some key topics and themes. Many were what you would expect: the old and new
worlds; assimilation
and acculturation; hyphens and hybridity; multi-generational
continuities and changes. But nearly as frequent were our discussions of ethnic
communities and neighborhoods in the U.S., the areas early scholars of
immigration dubbed ethnic
enclaves—we talked a good deal about the limitations and strengths of such
enclaves, the ways in which they can on the one hand foster isolation and
separation (and even ghetto-ization),
sub-standard living conditions and inequal schools, prejudice and ignorance
toward immigrant groups, and other issues; but at the same time can preserve
specific cultural identities and customs and languages, build community and
support across generations, become potent new world homes for immigrant
communities.
In the
late 19th and early 20th centuries, following the era’s
sizeable waves of Jewish immigration to the United States, many of those
arrivals settled in such ethnic enclaves, most famously in the tenements of the
Lower East Side of Manhattan (as
described at great length in early 20th century literary works such
as Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky [1917]
and Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers [1925]).
While some of those neighborhoods and communities persist to a lesser degree,
they have mostly dissipated over the subsequent century, as Jewish Americans
have spread out across the country. Yet like members of most ethnic and
cultural, as well as most religious, communities, many Jewish Americans have
worked for continuity despite these historical and social changes, particularly
by passing along customs and beliefs, traditions and ideals, to their younger
generations. Education
and activities, schools and community
and cultural centers, have provided vehicles for such preservation
of culture—but another, complex, and I believe more easily overlooked, such
vehicle has been the Jewish
summer camp.
For well more than
half a century, Jewish schoolchildren (and of course some non-Jewish
schoolchildren) have spent portions of their summers at sites such as
Wisconsin’s Camp Ramah, Camp Woodmere in New York’s Adirondack Mountains, and
New Hampshire’s Camp Tevya, among many others. In many ways these camps have
facilitated and continue to facilitate a preservation
of Jewish culture and community across the generations: with Hebrew
and Talmud instruction, historical and social lessons, and other communal
activities and connections. Yet at the same time, if we parallel such camps
with those attended by American schoolchildren from all cultures and
communities (and it seems clear that these camps have also featured all of the
stereotypical camp activities: boating and hiking, capture the flag and
campfires, and so on), we could argue the opposite: that they have offered
another avenue through which Jewish American kids have connected to a broader,
non-denominational American society and experience, one shared by all their
peers. A tension between ethnicity and acculturation, tradition and revision,
the Talmud and campfire sing-alongs—what could be more American than such
dualities?
Next camp
context tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Summer camp stories you’d share or histories you’d highlight?
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