Toasting marshmallows around the campfire, splashing in a lake and competing in color wars are all images that come to mind when we think of classic summer camp activities. Comparing narratives about Jerusalem by reading the poetry of Israeli and Palestinian writers Yehuda Amichai and Mahmoud Darwish, or stepping into the shoes of Jewish, Christian and Muslim social justice activists? Not so much.
But a new program launched this summer in the United States, called “Breaking Binaries, Creating Connections,” is attempting to add a new dimension to the Jewish summer camp experience.
Camp, after all, has historically been a linchpin of North American Jewish upbringing. Across the religious spectrum, from the most leftist, socialist-leaning programs to the popular networks operated by the Reform and Conservative movements, to modern Orthodox camps – Israel is viewed as an integral part of the concept of Jewish identity that is communicated to campers through food, music, folk dancing, and often, counselors imported from Tel Aviv or Haifa, fresh from their army service.
The curriculum of the new program, developed by the New Israel Fund nonprofit in Jerusalem, is based on the premise that summer camps that attempt to instill a strong connection to Israel among children and teenagers also have a responsibility to give them tools to learn about and grapple with the complexities of current cultural and political realities in the country.
‘The honest truth’
In 2018, the need to better equip young Jews for such future challenges came to the fore when the leftist-activist group IfNotNow launched its “You Never Told Me” campaign.
In an open letter that year to their day schools, youth movements and summer camps, a group of young Jewish Americans asserted that they had been denied “the honest truth” about Israel and would “no longer accept an educational approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that ranges from open endorsement of indefinite occupation to saying ‘it’s complicated’ and leaving it at that,” nor “accept a communal norm that will force another generation to only learn about the occupation only once they leave these institutions.”
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That campaign (which led to a syllabus drawn up by Jewish educators, spiritual leaders and students to be used as a resource by institutions and individuals) “rattled” the world of Jewish summer camps and the wider community, said Libby Lenkinski, the NIF’s vice president of public engagement, who is spearheading the new camp curriculum effort.
It wasn’t only her own formative experiences at summer programs run by the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair that led her to focus on camp. Studies show that while Jewish day school enrollment is falling in the United States, Jewish camps are still going strong. At first, Lenkinski said, she questioned whether NIF, which focuses primarily on fundraising, was a proper vehicle to launch such a program. Then she saw a study, conducted in Israel by the Jewish Funders Network, on the alienation of young progressive American Jews that recommended “raising the volume on progressive Israeli voices and activism.” The researchers suggested that “one of the things that could depolarize and provide some middle ground for students on college campuses, was getting to know Israeli activists working for change.”
If there was one thing that NIF was familiar with, Lenkinski knew, it was Israeli activists.
A traditional campfire singalong at a Jewish summer camp in the United States.Courtesy of Foundation for Jewish Camps
She was thus inspired, about three years ago, to develop what she describes as a “helpful intervention” – a pioneering curriculum of informal educational activities for summer camps, aimed at helping young American Jews to understand the complexities of issues relating to the Jewish state at a young age, so as to arrive at college better informed and prepared.
Bringing together people with experience in informal education, Lenkinski formed a committee to develop activities – in Hebrew camp parlance pe’ulot – focusing on giving older campers and counselors an opportunity to discuss competing narratives, built around real people with experience working for change in Israel and the West Bank.
The activities – all camp-style and interactive – involve “real places and real people” with each curriculum unit “about a place and a set of people who actually are in that place, what their histories are and what they’re doing about them,” Lenkinski explained.
Initially, the program was piloted in the summer of 2019 at Hashomer Hatzair and Habonim Dror camps, in progressive settings where she said “not a lot of persuasion was necessary” to try out the curriculum. Expansion of the project among those youth movements’ camps – and signs of interest in it among more mainstream institutions in the U.S. Jewish community – was stymied by the COVID-19 pandemic that shuttered camps the following summer.
Lenkinski kept her expectations modest this summer, knowing that so much of the energy of camp management would be focused on coping with the virus, with little time or energy left for new and adventurous programming experiments.
Still, she said, interest in the “Breaking Binaries” initiative received a boost in May when fighting broke out between Israel and the Gaza Strip, and when a Zoom training session was held about the program ahead of the summer it included representatives of Jewish Community Center camps and Camp Ramah.
She has received positive feedback from the camps that have used the materials she and her colleagues prepared – and from educators who have seen the curriculum, even if they haven’t yet had a chance to use it due to the limitations of the pandemic. Knowing that implementing all of the program would be unfeasible for most, she pulled out three free-standing units to be used this summer.
Tom BenAmram, 25, who directs educational programming for Camp Galil in Ottsville, Pennsylvania, affiliated the Habonim Dror movement, worked with his counselors to present the materials to campers and found that this also helped addressed a traditionally problematic situation.
“Having this program to turn to, rather than the issue falling on the camp’s educational director every single year … is really helpful,” he explained. “We often feel really awkward about entering into this space. And this program is saying: Here’s how you can do it. And an important part of the approach is focusing on real people who live there. I think often, in the North American Jewish world, there are all these people talking about Israel from a distance who have no connection and can’t visualize [the situation there]. … This really plugged that hole.”
For example, when leading a session featuring multiple perspectives and based on the works of Amichai and Darwish, as part of the unit called “Two Jerusalems: An Exploration of Poetry and Place,” BenAmram said, “we discussed how the two peoples have different perspectives and why that might be. This, I think, got to the core of this program. That it’s not that there are good guys and bad guys, as much as there are people. And those people have real lived experiences.”
A traditional Jewish summer camp in the United States.Courtesy of Foundation for Jewish Camps
In activists’ shoes
In another part of the program that was used this summer, called “Ripped From the Headlines: Current Events Through a Values Based Lens,” campers stepped into the shoes of an Israeli activist by learning about their personal backgrounds and experiences. The campers then read a recent news story and discussed how that activist would react to it and what they would do about it.
As a progressive Israeli-American living in New York City, BenAmram is all too familiar with the challenges many of his campers will face in the future.
“I’m currently exploring how I feel in certain spaces. In the leftist community that I’m in, a lot of the Jewish people who are activists seem to be anti-Zionist, people who are members of IfNotNow or members of JVP,” said BenAmram, referring to the leftist Jewish Voice for Peace nonprofit. “And it’s deeply weird for me. It’s hard for me to identify with that kind of understanding as a person who has a connection to Israel and who has real people – family and friends – living there.”
Recently, he continued, “my girlfriend’s roommate was wearing a shirt that said ‘Decolonize Palestine.’ And I was like: ‘What does that mean in practical terms? Does that mean, you know, kick all the Jews out [of Israel]?’ The point is, when I discuss these issues, I am able to think about all of the people who I actually know who live [in Israel] and are real people. And so I think that having that kind of connection and learning about these people [in the camp curriculum], and being able to read their profiles – while it’s not the same as interacting with them, is really important…..And, you know, having those spaces and being able to think about these really strong activists who are working super hard to break the status quo in all these different ways, whether it’s with regard to the occupation or to feminism in Israel or any of these things that the program talks about, would benefit them [the campers].”
Israeli-born Lee Oz, 38, director of English-speaking countries for Hashomer Hatzair World Movement, which piloted the “Breaking Binaries” programming in Camp Shomria in both the United States and Canada, targeting counselors and teenage campers, said she felt “a definite hunger” for a program that “brought the complexity of Israel” and critical thinking to a camp setting where “often we only see one perspective being presented.”
“Until now,” Oz said, “I haven’t seen any camp programming that even tries to present more than one narrative. This one is special, and particularly because it does it in a nonjudgmental way.”
While NIF’s Lenkinski admitted that “it will be hard for some establishment and right-wing groups to get on board with an intervention that elevates progressive Israeli activism,” she aspires to get more mainstream Jewish camping movements to buy in.
Lenkinski: “Even with the COVID setbacks – for the world and, more narrowly for this curriculum – we feel like it has now been beta tested and people really do like it. And so now we’re just thinking about how to get it in the right places, and what additional units we need to build in order for it to be useful for a wide range of camps. We do really want camps who are hesitant to ‘do Israel’ to feel like they can do some of this. And we definitely want camps that are not necessarily part of the progressive Israel network, and are not that activist in their approach, to feel like there’s material they can use here….and we’re very open to adapting it.”
For his part, Rabbi Josh Weinberg, vice president for Israel and Reform Zionism for the Union for Reform Judaism and executive director of ARZA, the Association of Reform Zionists of America, said that the “Breaking Binaries” curriculum is “100 percent necessary.”
Rabbi Josh Weinberg, executive director of the Association of Reform Zionists of America.
Although every Reform movement camp in America “has its own identity and way of doing things,” he said the he plans to use the NIF program and “share it with our educators and faculty, and include it in the mix of approaches of Israel education and parse out how it can be used and to which audiences.”
While camp, Weinberg cautioned, “is not an academic course on the Israeli conflict,” fresh thinking on how that topic is approached is vital.
“I want to instill a love of Israel and a strong connection, that it is part of our Jewish identity and part of being Jewish. I want campers to have a relationship with Israel, I want it to be a visible and tangible thing – when someone walks into camp to live it and breathe it,” he explained. “For this, some have accused me of encouraging a romanticized version of Israel. But with that, I think we can start asking big questions even at a young age. Would I bring up issues around the occupation to 8-year-olds? Not necessarily. But I would do it with 13- and 14-year-olds. They are sophisticated when it comes to politics, they understand what’s going on, they’re curious and they are all over social media. So how can we not have these conversations?”
While the issues of who presents the materials and to which campers are key, Weinberg said that “in terms of content” the NIF curriculum “offers a rich opportunity to engage in multiple narratives and to look at things in a nuanced way.”
That said, however, he acknowledged that some directors and staffers will remain resistant to the entire idea of engaging in deep conversations about Israel at camp and won’t be interested in availing themselves of the NIF’s curriculum.
“Some people at camp are really interested in doing these things. And some say, ‘I don’t want to be part of this.’ I see Israel as a part of Jewish identity, not some separate issue that we get to choose whether or not to deal with,” Weinberg said. ‘But just like God, or Torah, no two people are going to see it exactly in the same way.”
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