Ah, summer camp. The good old days of color war, campfire sing-alongs, counselor pranks and talent shows packed with parodies of the latest top-ten hits.
Did I get that right?
Unlike many fellow Jews in America, most of my perceptions of Jewish sleepaway camp draw upon stories that I’ve heard from friends or bits that I’ve seen in pop culture rather than personal experience.
And yet, I did go to camp. My own camp experiences, in contrast to the typical ones, were a bit unorthodox — though in fact oddly quite Orthodox. Instead of being shipped off to Upstate New York every summer from second grade through the end of high school, I was driven to a Chabad-owned day camp in Queens for three summers, between the ages of 9 and 11, until I decided that camp was just not for me.
The first hour of camp consisted of reciting the daily prayers, or davening, after which the girls in my “bunk” (there were, of course, no beds of any kind) vied to be deemed the day’s “best davener” by the counselors. I was able to keep up with the first few sets of prayers using my Hebrew school education but got lost after Adon Olam, attempting to mimic the other girls’ page-flipping and bowing for the rest of it; most of them, unlike me, went to religious Jewish day schools during the academic year. One year, a kind counselor saw that I was trying and gave me the honor of best davener despite my limitations.
To my understanding, the rest of the experience was pretty normal for a day camp — we did arts and crafts, had daily swimming in a nearby public pool and were bussed out on various field trips every Wednesday: laser tag, Dave and Buster’s, indoor rock climbing. As most young girls do, the girls in my bunk quickly formed cliques at the start of each summer, which generally corresponded to the schools they attended. I couldn’t quite settle into one, but I still enjoyed my camp experience and knew little about any alternatives.
I didn’t know that sleepaway camp was such a core Jewish experience until I got to high school, where I met Upper Manhattan Jews who had gone to the same camp for a decade, and continued going to camp until the obligatory trip to Israel between their junior and senior years of high school. When my classmates played Jewish geography with me, camp was one of many places where we got stuck. Though they didn’t say it out loud, the question hung in the air: How could I not have gone to sleepaway camp?
I distinctly remember a time I thought I was making progress with a crush from the Upper East Side who had previously ignored me, until he mentioned going to Camp Ramah in the Berkshires. To my surprise, he suddenly took interest in me when I told him that my mom used to work there — she was 13 years old and a new immigrant from Uzbekistan who babysat an administrator’s young children for some extra cash, but I chose to omit those details. He asked me to name her, thinking she was some legendary counselor, and I skirted the question for a bit. When I admitted she was just a babysitter, his crestfallen “oh” said it all. The conversation ended there.
At the time, I was convinced that relatability was the way to break in with the Upper Manhattan Jewish crowd, whom I subconsciously viewed as more sophisticated and socially elite than the Mizrahi immigrant Jewish community that I came from. (In hindsight, of course, I have realized how much of social elitism is a facade and take great pride in my origins.) I grasped at whatever straws I could to establish common ground, but doing so was difficult given that even the things we had in common — Jewish holidays, participation in synagogue services, community activities — were approached through completely different cultural norms.
I am fully American and fully Jewish, but I have always seen “American Jews” as a somewhat distinct entity because of their association with a subculture established far before my family immigrated to this country: Chinese food on Christmas, Coke and Pepsi at b-mitzvahs, events at the local JCC and of course, Jewish sleepaway camp.
To many of my Jewish high school peers, such quintessentially American Jewish experiences were inextricable from, or sometimes even equivalent to, their senses of being Jewish. Meanwhile, for some of my day camp friends, daily davening and living a strictly religiously observant lifestyle comprised the essences of their Jewish identities.
Though I may eventually get to a point where the latter sense of Jewish identity becomes my own, it is not one that I fully resonate with as of yet, and I certainly could never relate to many of the Jewish experiences of my high school peers (though who knows — maybe my future children will be able to).
Yet my Jewishness is wholly linked to who I am, to an extent that even the most profound metaphors could not possibly convey. Paving my own sense of Jewish identity, one that is deeply personal to me and also remains true to my ancestry, has become an essential goal of mine that has taken me on an intensely introspective journey over the past several years.
For now, I have settled upon something somewhat in between what I found at Chabad camp and in high school, yet distinctly my own: a wonderful fusion of religion as I currently connect to it, culture — specifically, my Bukharian culture — and a deeply rooted 3000-year history.
I have accepted that this sense of identity will evolve as I mature and experience more, and that it will inevitably be inspired by the ways of others around me, but I’m truly happy with where I am right now.
If my Jewish experiences were identical to those of my peers, perhaps I would have had to wait a little longer to appreciate all of this; after all, a large portion of us, and not just those who didn’t fit in as kids, have to resolve a Jewish identity crisis at some point or another in our lives.
These days, my summers look quite different. Instead of practicing my flip-turns in the pool and going on field trips, I run about the city pursuing internships and new opportunities — helping out at a hospital clinic, doing research, shadowing physicians — with some more traditional fun sprinkled in here and there. Oddly enough, I might like these sorts of summers more than those of my childhood, because I design them and build them up from scratch to achieve my unique set of goals.
Of course, my summers are still Jewish, as I carry my Jewishness with me wherever I go. In parallel with my Jewish identity, they are shaping up to be increasingly reflective of who I am. Though I have historically sought comfort in shared experiences, whether camp-related or not, I am gradually learning to be less reliant on them and appreciate the beauty in forging my own path.
Welcome to Hey Alma’s 2024 Camp Week! We’re celebrating the unique experience that is Jewish summer camp. Check back in all week long for personal essays, pop culture moments and great memes that encapsulate Jewish summer camp.
