Table of Contents

Introduction: The Jewish Summer Camp: Between Fantasy and Reality
1. "Under Optimum Conditions": American Jews and the Rise of the Summer Camp
2. A Matter of Time: Constructing Camp Life for "Creative Survival"
3. Jews Playing Games: Role-Play, Sociodrama, and Color War
4. "A Little Suffering Goes a Long Way": Tisha B'Av, Ghetto Day, and the Shadow of the Holocaust
5. The Language Cure: Embracing and Evolving Yiddishism and Hebraism
6. "Is This What You Call Being Free?" Power and Youth Culture in the Camper Republic
7. Summer Flings and Fuzzy Rings: Camper Romance, Erotic Zionism, and Intermarriage Anxiety
8. Jewish Camping Post-Postwar
Conclusion

About the Author

Sandra Fox is visiting assistant professor of Hebrew Judaic Studies and Director of the Archive of the Jewish Left Project at New York University, and founder and executive producer of the Yiddish-language podcast Vaybertaytsh: A Feminist Podcast in Yiddish.

Reviews

"The Jews of Summer is an important contribution to the study of postwar Jewish life. Sandra Fox's engaging and highly readable study of Jewish summer camping offers its fullest and most complex analysis, taking readers into every facet of Jewish camping. An original and essential contribution."-Riv-Ellen Prell, University of Minnesota
"Rare is the book that is scholarly and entertaining, but The Jews of Summer is just that. Transporting the reader into the rhythms and romances of summer camp, Sandra Fox offers a deeply compelling lens into the profound and often generative ambivalences of postwar American Jewish life."-Lila Corwin Berman, Temple University