"Those Days Are Gone Forever." Review of The Jews of Summer: Summer Camp and Jewish Culture in Postwar America by Sandra Fox. Jewish Review of Books 14, no. 2 (Summer 2023): 30–32.
My review of Sandra Fox's important new history of Jewish summer camp, The Jews of Summer, appears in the summer issue of the Jewish Review of Books.
Fox's history is an accessible overview of a century of Jewish camping, focusing on the postwar era from the fifties to the seventies. She argues that summer camps across the spectrum were all invested in producing "authentic Jews," whatever their particular ideology (Zionist, Hebraist, Yiddishist, etc.).
My review is appreciative but critical. I criticize Fox's claim that to understand the experience of camp you have see how campers subvert and negotiate the ideologies foisted on them. I criticize the claim not because it's wrong per se; the book just doesn't make a convincing case. Often Fox's examples can be interpreted quite differently than she does, making it seem as if the resistance to camp ideology (esp. Zionist) is the author's, not the campers'. Moreover a selection bias in her archive (favoring nostalgia) ends up sidelining darker elements of camp life that a history of camp "experience" is surely expected to address.
Thanks to the editors at JRB for accepting my review and offering the fantastic feedback that made it really come together. You can read the review here.
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