THE PEOPLEHOOD PAPERS

Cultivating Jewish Peoplehood at Camp

The Peoplehood Papers #36

Edited by Shlomi Ravid and Avi Orlow

A joint initiative of Foundation for Jewish Camp and

the Center for Jewish Peoplehood Education

Jewish summer camps offer campers a gateway to belonging to a people.

For a few weeks each year campers live inside a Jewish collective rather than learning about one, and much of what they carry home was never written into the schedule.

This edition asks camp practitioners and scholars to write down what usually goes unwritten.

In Jewish terms, what is camp's value proposition?

How do the values taught at camp, the pedagogies used, and the practices nurtured there inspire a sense of belonging to the Jewish people?

How does a pluralistic vision translate into the camp context?

And how can camps make room for multiple, sometimes conflicting views of Israel while holding a core commitment to the Jewish State?

Seventeen writers answered. Their essays appear below, grouped into five sections, and each can be downloaded on its own.

Download full edition

In this edition:

Peoplehood, Embodied.

Erica Goldman

"You don't have to know a dance to do a dance" was Goldman's rallying cry as Israeli dance director at Camp Alonim. She traces Israeli folk dance from the pre-state aliyot to the weekly sessions now running from Los Angeles to Melbourne, and argues that the forgiving circle campers step into teaches the Jewish habit of na'aseh v'nishma, doing first and understanding later.

The Thrill of Peoplehood

Adam Morris

Morris is the camp rabbi at URJ 6 Points Sports Academy, where every camper picks a sports major. He argues that a dividing line which could have siloed the camp teaches the opposite lesson, and points to the night the whole camp turns out to watch the cheer and dance majors perform as the moment when belonging beyond one's own particulars becomes visible.

Rooted in Love: Investing in the Future of Jewish Peoplehood at Scale

Jamie Simon

Simon makes the case that the infrastructure for strengthening Jewish life already exists. More than 300 camps and nearly 200,000 campers and staff each summer make camp the most scalable investment available, and the friendships formed there proved their worth after October 7, when teens who felt isolated turned to their camp communities.

Two Canoes: On the Jewish Tribe

Joel Seltzer

A Native American educator in Santa Fe told a group of Jewish camp directors that his people must always stand in two canoes, balancing their own culture with the American one around them. Seltzer carried the phrase back to Camp Ramah in the Poconos, naming cultural entropy as the real threat to camp and near-peer mentorship as its strongest answer.

Global Jewish Camping

Michelle Mohnblatt

Mohnblatt grew up in a Jewish community of about 4,000 in Bogota and later moved to Mexico. She first met the full range of Jewish practice at 13 at Camp Young Judaea Texas, where bunkmates ranged from fluent Hebrew speakers to campers who had never prayed Shacharit. Now hiring staff at that camp, she argues there is no single right way to be Jewish.

A Peoplehood Derech: Establishing an Irbutz

Rose Clubok and Ian Rosenrich

Two graduates of Habonim Dror Camp Tavor were raised on kvutzah and the expectation of joining a kibbutz, then found that world gone. Their answer is an Irbutz, a kibbutz in a city, beginning this fall in Chicago, where several apartments function as kvutzah units pooling weekly avodah and monthly dues to provide for one another.

DMC: Turning a Phenomenon into a Peoplehood Pedagogy

Benji Davis

The Deep Meaningful Conversation, the unplanned talk on the tennis court or on the walk to the next peulah, is one of Jewish education's most underrated pedagogies. Davis offers three ways for camps to cultivate it on purpose: trust campers to deliberate for themselves, make formal programming charif enough to be worth arguing about, and keep staff bein hachanichim, among the campers.

What Camp Teaches Us About Accountability and Belonging

Diana Bloom

Accountability usually shows up only when something goes wrong. Bloom, who trains camp staff, defines it instead as doing what you said you would do for the people relying on you, and shows how camps teach it through proximity and visible consequences rather than checklists. Kol Yisrael Areivim Zeh Bazeh, she argues, is learned as behavior long before it is learned as a phrase.

Hidden Treasure: An Outsiders View

Helen Grogutt

Grogutt is a lay clergy member of the Anglican Church who traveled from England in 2023 to visit family at a Jewish camp in New Hampshire and stayed on to work there. Her account of Shabbat by the lake, and of learning how many campers are the only Jewish student in their school, is an outsider's reading of what camp gives young Jews.

Manifestation and Microcosm: Camp as a Revealing and Repeating Pattern

Avi Katz Orlow

An 18th-century kabbalist taught that every stone of Sinai holds the image of the burning bush, and that breaking a stone only produces smaller bushes. Katz Orlow reads camp as the same fractal. Bunk, edah, camp and Jewish people repeat one pattern of self-actualization, with the 18-year-old counselor at its center.

The Radical Act of Presence: Why "Showing Up" is the Strongest Form of Shlichut

Lotem Eilon

Eilon arrived at camp believing she had to be a flawless ambassador for Israel and learned otherwise. Writing from her years as a shlicha, including the Parkland shooting in 2018 and her return to camp in 2024 while grieving her father, she argues that shlichut rests on presence rather than programming, and that trust earned that way is what makes hard conversations possible.

Sacred Disagreement: Jewish Summer Camping and the Future of Jewish Peoplehood

Jonathan B. Krasner

Kaplan popularized the term Peoplehood precisely to avoid the connotations of nationalism, so using it now to police who counts inverts its purpose. Drawing on Arendt's plurality and the tradition of machloket l'shem shamayim, Krasner argues that camps, ideologically distinct one by one and plural as a field, are the natural home for a Peoplehood that can hold disagreement.

Episodic Immersive Jewish Peoplehood

Julie Finklestein

Finklestein kept kosher a few weeks a year because she went to Jewish camp. Rather than treating the fading of camp practice as a loss, she reads it as the Jewish rhythm of intensity and retreat that already runs through Shabbat, holidays and lifecycle events. Camp taught her that Jewish ritual is a tool for building community whenever she needs it.

Philanthropy With Purpose: Building Endowed Capital for Generational Impact

Natana Shek

Montreal's Jewish community of fewer than 90,000 people ranks among the highest in North America for per-capita Federation giving. Shek traces that to a decision made more than a century ago to treat Jewish overnight camp as communal infrastructure, and to the endowment Federation CJA built twenty years ago to keep camp within reach of every family.

A Camp Created on the Values of Spiritual Peoplehood

Jeffrey Eisenstat

Twenty-five years ago Eisenstat told the Jewish Reconstructionist Federation board that the movement needed its own camp. He recounts building Camp JRF, later renamed Camp Havaya, on Mordecai Kaplan's teaching that Judaism is the evolving civilization of the Jewish people, and lays out the framework the camp grew into, from belonging and behaving through believing, becoming, and finally BEEing.

The Power of Hebrew Immersion

Ami Hersh

A nine-year-old camper cries in a July rainstorm and her Israeli counselor talks her down, entirely in Hebrew. Hersh directs Ramah Day Camp in Nyack, where the Sha'ar immersion program grew from 17 kindergarteners in 2013 to roughly 150 campers a year and has since spread to other camps. He describes what happens to campers and shlichim alike when camp becomes a Hebrew playground.

The Revolution of Belonging: Nurturing Jewish Peoplehood at Camp Be'chol Lashon

Jonah Tobin, Claude Lewis, Satya Sheftel-Gomes and Ella Damaser

The senior leadership of Camp Be'chol Lashon, all of them former campers, describe eighteen years of a camp where nobody asks a Jew of Color whether they are really Jewish. Tobin, adopted into a white Jewish family and often the only Black student at his day school, found a place where difference was the norm, and campers leave knowing they are not anomalies.