In a frenzied media cycle, Identity/Crisis creates better conversations about the issues facing contemporary Jewish life. Host Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute, talks with leading thinkers to unpack current events affecting Jewish communities in North America, Israel, and around the world, revealing the core Jewish values underlying the issues that matter most to you.

Claire: Nearly 20 years ago, I was part of a research team visiting a private Jewish girls camp in Western Massachusetts to observe and then to conduct focus groups with staff members. When we arranged the visit, the director indicated that they were happy to have us, and she noted that we should wear blue bottoms and white tops for Shabbat. She welcomed us when we arrived early Friday afternoon and another staff member showed us the guest house where we’d be staying.

Everyone was polite, but it was only when we showed up to Friday night services, actually attired in blue and white, that we were received with wide smiles that truly made us feel welcome.

An outsider might say that wearing blue and white on Shabbat at this camp was a dress code. And yes, I assume that any camper who turned up for services in a green plaid jumpsuit would be sent back to her cabin to change. But in the moment that I was there. I wasn’t exactly an outsider. I was a participant observer, and I understood that wearing blue and white for Shabbat at this camp is a ritual.

The anthropologist, Clifford Gertz talks about the way that a group’s symbols and ritual behaviors turn the world from the way it is into the way it should be, affirming the group’s beliefs or making them real. For Jews around the world, the rituals of lighting candles and saying Kiddush, of receiving the Sabbath, turn what would otherwise be an ordinary setting of the sun into a transition from the mundane to the sacred.

For the campers at this Jewish camp, wearing blue and white was one of those rituals, but it was about more than Shabbat. It was also a ritual that brought the camp together as a particular Jewish community sitting outside in a clearing surrounded by tall trees. Each of our white shirts evoke cleanliness and purity, and each of our blue skirts or pants evoke Jewishness. But all together, the combination of the white and the many shades of blue gathered together in this clearing surrounded by these tall trees singing together, signaled the connection and unity of campers and staff as a single community. And on this night, my fellow researcher, Shira, and I were now part of it too.

Hi, and welcome to Identity/Crisis. I’m Claire Sufrin, senior editor at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, an editor of sources, a Journal of Jewish Ideas. I’m stepping in for Yehuda for today’s episode. We are recording on Friday, August 1st. I’m happy to share that the newest issue of Sources was just recently published. Subscribers should be receiving the beautiful printed edition in their mailboxes very soon, and you can find the digital edition online for free at sourcesjournal.org.

The theme of the new issue is “Concerning Community,” defining, building and sustaining community is an ongoing project for the Jewish people on local, national, and global levels. But in the 22 months since Hamas’ attack on Southern Israel on October 7th, 2023, many of us have been turning our attention to community with new concern and anxiety. Some communities are growing, as individual Jews who had been less connected, seek belonging. Others have fractured around political or religious differences, and the connection between Israelis and diaspora Jews, though still strong, is being challenged in new ways.

The new issue of Sources addresses these concerns, offering new Jewish thinking on defining and maintaining boundaries, recognizing and managing diversity and speaking, maybe even connecting across difference. I hope you’ll check it out.

This is my third summer as editor of Sources. It is also the first summer both of my children were at overnight camp. My husband and I enjoyed our few weeks as empty nesters. It turns out we still like one another’s company after 14 years of child-rearing. And together we marveled at the work of camp, bringing children together under the care of teenagers, who are themselves under the care of a smaller number of college students and recent grads, who are themselves under the care of a yet smaller number of “real adults.”

Things can and do go wrong at every camp during every summer, but when it works, camp is tons of fun. It can also be a place of personal growth and development for everyone who is there. My younger son went to camp as a very picky eater, and in the four days since he came back, he has eaten asparagus and broccoli without hesitation. I’m looking forward to my older son returning so I can ask him about his recent experience planning a synchronized swimming routine with friends. What was it like to work together on something none of you had done or probably even seen before?

These things could happen at any camp, of course. Jewish camp also offers the opportunity to learn Jewish skills, and it strengthens Jewish identity as a camper, myself, as a researcher, and now as a parent of campers, it seems to me that it does this by strengthening individual participants’ sense that they belong to something bigger than themselves. The fun, the taking chances and trying new things, the independence they all add to this.

The history of American Jewish camping tells us a lot, not only about why parents like me send our kids away, but also why funders have poured money into it. And many people have committed their careers to it. The promise of time away from phones and iPads has largely replaced the original promise of fresh air. But the basic idea that it’s good for city and suburban kids to spend some time in the country has long been a driving force behind all American overnight camps, Jewish camps included.

What makes Jewish camps Jewish? There’s a whole bookshelf of research. I’ll sum it up quickly. Some Jewish camps are what’s called movement camps. They reflect the principles of either different religious movements of Judaism like Reform, Conservative or Orthodox, or different political movements. There were Bundist camps, not all that long ago, but today it’s mostly Zionism of different sorts. At these camps, movement camps tend to have more formal educational goals, and for a long time, they were a major source of future leaders for the movements that ran them. Or to put it another way, for some campers, learning new Jewish skills at Jewish camp became a slippery slope to rabbinical school.

Now, campers like this are more likely to grow up to become lay leaders and philanthropists. It reflects larger changes in American Jewish life and leadership. But back to the taxonomy, other camps are less ideological.

The JCC movement runs camps in different parts of the country, for example, and there are also private Jewish camps generally owned and run by a Jewish family with no other affiliation. That’s the sort of camp where I was doing my research all those years ago. Though the educational aspect of these camps tends to be far less formal, campers still learn a ton. They’re taught mimetically, through the mentorship of their counselors and other staff, that Jewishness is something to celebrate, especially for campers who aren’t part of strong Jewish communities at home. The experience of being part of a camp community can really change their sense of what being Jewish entails. Camp can be transformative.

Across the board, Shabbat is a central aspect of what makes Jewish camps Jewish. The presence of a Mishlachat, a delegation of staff and sometimes of campers from Israel, is very often another component of what makes Jewish camps “Jewish,” whether or not they are explicitly Zionist. Any director will tell you that being able to hire Israelis who are eager to travel to North America makes it a lot easier to fill the many staff roles that need to be filled. But a mishlachat comes as a group, not as a collection of random individuals, and so the camps who choose to have a mishlachat are choosing to bring Hebrew language and Israeli culture into camp.

Sometimes you can see this in formal ways. When we visited our kids midway through the summer, three of the Israeli staff members were helping campers cook pita on grills set over small but lively fires. The informal education is everywhere, but maybe harder to pin down. The Israelis who join a camp mishlachat often do so because they are interested in encountering American Jews and doing so for them can be transformative.

Mostly though, Israelis at camp are just part of this special temporary community where some people sing and dance and others shoot hoops, and everyone spends time talking and sharing life experiences, relationships, and emotions are at the center, and that’s where the learning happens. But despite all these elements that make Jewish camps different from other Jewish communities, what I’m interested in today is the similarities between what happens at camp and what happens in other places, and more specifically, what we can all learn from the very purposeful community building that happens at camp.

My guest today, Adina Ferydman, is uniquely situated to answer this question. Adina is the CEO of Young Judea Global, the oldest Zionist youth group in America. Before she took on this role, Adina worked at UJA Federation of New York for 12 years, focusing on strengthening the New York Jewish community and its organizations. Earlier in her career, she was the director of Focus Israel at the St. Louis Jewish Federation. Adina, welcome. I know this is your busiest season, and I’m so grateful that you are here. For this conversation.

Adina: Hi Claire. Thank you so much for having me.

Claire: It’s really my pleasure. I wanna start with a, a really maybe basic or general question, which is as we’re coming to the end of the summer of 2025, I’d love to hear about what the greatest challenges have been this summer and maybe a little bit about how it’s been like other summers and also unique.

Adina: So it happens to be that I just have returned from a, what is my summer tour of all of our summer camps. Young Judea has seven summer camps, five overnight and two day camps around the country. And I often tell my board members that this is the, my favorite part of the work is actually being on the ground at our camps and seeing the smiling faces of both our campers, our chanichim, and also our tzevet, the staff, because it really does bring to life a lot of the things that you alluded to in your opening, right? We see community and community building and living in reality, right? It’s actually happening.

This summer in particular, I would say, on the one hand it’s a summer, like every other summer, right? We have campers that are in some cases for the first time coming to summer camp and experiencing both the fear and the anticipation and the anxiety of being away from home for the first time. And then by the end of the four or eight weeks, they actually have realized that they are perhaps somebody different than they thought they were, or they got to try on a new skin, or they got to find a new set of friends, right? That process of self-realization that happens at camp. And most importantly, they really built a chevra, peer group, a group of friends, a, you know, a micro community within this camp community. So that’s the—this is a summer like every other summer, a summer of joy, a summer of outdoors, a summer of joy and ruach and simcha and identity building and all of those wonderful things.

And on the other hand, this is not like every other summer, right? We are, in fact, the start of this summer was quite abrupt and quite unusual. And just to remind us all and to situate us into the, literally what was the first two weeks of camp for many of our summer camps was the onset of the 12 day Iran war, where already at the beginning of camp, we were not sure if we had our full staff, because many of the staff are Israeli staff from the mishlachot that you mentioned, right, are coming to our camps and we weren’t sure whether they would even be there. So there was an initial scramble and panic of—will we actually be able to staff our camps this summer?

And of course our Israelis who were sitting on the other side of the ocean, wondering am I going to actually be able to come to the American Jewish summer camp experience that I had been looking forward to, anticipating, and so that was quite a difficult and challenging start. At the end of that, we were able to bring most of our Israeli mishlachat to our camps, and start camp, although it was, again, as I mentioned, very rocky, not only from a logistical perspective, but also—think about what the Israelis were coming from, right?

The Israelis who were coming to camp were literally coming out of having been in shelters for the last 12 days. They were juggling their families and trying to maintain some sense of normalcy in terms of their everyday lives. The interruption of school, of work, the fear, and a concern about the unknown of what was going to happen, and then kind of holding the irony or the paradox of, and within, you know, 12 hours, I’m gonna be sitting in an American summer camp, you know, enjoying s’mores and hot chocolate by the medurah, by the campfire with American campers, right? So kind of like this, literally different realities and holding these two worlds. So that was… the start of the summer was obviously… set us up for what would we knew was going to be a very interesting summer.

Claire: So I wanna pick up on something that you said about the reality that Israelis were coming to, you know, setting aside even that moment of panic of whether or not they were gonna make it, but simply that they’d been coming from this year and a half of great intensity. How do you think about that? Or how do the directors of your different camps think about it, plan for it, and then implement some kind of a, a program to bring together Israelis and the situation that they’re coming from with the North American campers and staff who are, who have been living through a very different reality and the war, for example, we all know about it, but it’s much more abstract. What do you actually do to help people bridge that difference?

Adina: So sadly, this is not the first summer that we have had to encounter, right? Since, ever since October 7th in particular, we have had to think about how we bridge these two communities and how we prepare on both sides of the ocean for what would be both a positive encounter, a productive encounter, one that can be reparative healing, and actually ultimately bring together to create one community, right? We’re bringing people from two very different settings and different communities and different lived experiences into a very, very close space. An intense experience, right? We talk about camp being one day is a week, a week is a month, a month is a year, right? How are we going to do that in a way that’s generative?

So we’ve taken a number of steps in our camps as part of the training for the American staff. We have many, many conversations and there are sessions around preparing for the arrival of the Israelis. What might they be coming with? What is it that in fact has been lived through over the last period of time, whether it’s the last year, the last two years, right? What are the lived experiences that they’re coming with?

The same kinds of training are happening in Israel. Most of our Israeli staff, the delegations are coming through the Jewish Agency and they spend a lot of time in sessions and seminars leading up to their arrival at camp to understand the general North American climate and setting. And then specifically, we send delegations of our senior camp staff to Israel in the spring so that they can meet the actual Israelis who are coming to camp, and give them a, I would say a crash course in our specific context, right?

Like the Young Judea context you mentioned before about how every camp and every movement has its specific rituals, its specific cultures, so we certainly do, having been founded in 1909, and so that’s a big part of the work that is happening is the preparation. In addition, this year in particular, we brought our unit heads, what we call our Merkazim and our Roshim, our specialists to Israel. Most of this group are current college students, because we are in fact a youth movement, so this is a peer led camp.

We brought them to Israel actually through a Birthright Onward Israel volunteer program. And with the generous support of the Jim Joseph Foundation, we brought them to a 10 day program where they both had the experience to volunteer and to actually learn about what has been happening in Israel over the last couple of years, since October 7th, but also to talk about how they were gonna bring that back to camp. And certainly a part of those discussions, a part of that preparation was how do we healthily and most holistically incorporate the Israelis who are coming into our camp settings.

And I’ll just mention one other thing, Claire, which is that in our movement in particular. We don’t only have Israeli adults, right, Israeli, delegations, shlichim, who come to our camps, but we’re also committed to the peer-to-peer connection. So we actually have Israeli teens, Israeli campers who are at our summer camps, which is even, it’s a different experience, right? Because you are actually dealing with, in some cases 14, 15, 16, 17 year olds who are going to be in the same bunks, living and bridging the, the language barrier and the cultural barrier and all of those things alongside our North American campers, and that’s a very different kind of preparation for sure.

Claire: So you’ve described a lot, not a lot, you’ve described all of the incredible effort that goes into preparing for camp. I’d love to hear a little bit more about what’s happened this summer that isn’t so tightly controlled. Like once everybody is trained and educated and prepared in all the ways that you can prepare them—can you share a little bit with me about some of the challenges that camps are facing or have faced over the summer, like actually at camp?

Adina: So this summer in particular, given the rough or abrupt start of the summer, we actually did not have the on-ramp that we often do, which is like the multiple days of onsite training that happens with the Israelis. So that, I would say, made for a challenging beginning. What happens during those orientation training days aren’t only hard skill building, but also it’s some of that community building that you mentioned, that integration, that natural integration before campers even arrive at camp, right? You have the kind of community building that happens amongst the staff and tzevet. So that was an initial challenge and I think it took longer to build that sense of cohesion, that sense of community at camp this summer. That was the first thing.

The second thing was probably that the Israelis that are now coming to our camps are coming with a cumulative trauma, let’s call it that, that has been built over the last two years. Many of us have thought about and discussed the fact that this is, this is not even a post-trauma, right? We’re still in the trauma, considering that the various… the conflicts and the multiple wars continue to happen, and this is very much a part of their lives.

And so there are things that emerge over the course of this summer which of course we don’t anticipate or cannot plan for in specific. We know that they might come up, but we don’t know the exact thing. So for example, there might be triggering events, right? There might be conversations that take place specifically with campers or with other staff that might be become a trigger point.

There might be something in the physical environment. I’ll say something perhaps that is not obvious to most, but think about what happens on July 4th at most summer camps, because we are in North America and people are celebrating July 4th with fireworks, which can be quite alarming. Quite startling. And so even though we are not doing it within our camp, because we know and would try to be as sensitive as possible, we know that that can be particularly triggering to have a loud boom explosion in the middle of the night for an Israeli, where they’re suddenly wondering what is going on and what is happening, it’s still happening in the, out in the outsides of camp, right?

So they’re hearing it, and then immediately we have a mental health team at camp that is mobilized and that is quite literally comforting explaining and dealing with the, you know, the emotional aftermath of that experience. That’s the second thing.

The third thing is, you know, some of the unanticipated and challenging conversations that might happen between Israelis and North Americans, and I would say at the risk of putting one or the other in a particular category, ’cause as we try to say to our Israelis and to our Americans, no one person represents the entirety of a particular community or population. And still, despite that, I think that there are sometimes assumptions made, right?

So like the North Americans, as they’re meeting the Israelis, um, often the Israelis have to say, I am not October 7th, right? Or I am not Israel, I don’t represent the entirety of Israel, or I don’t represent the government of Israel, or I don’t represent the entire army of Israel, or whatever the various things are. And so I think to, as campers and staff start to build more personal and individual and deep relationships, I think those barriers and those assumptions start to come down.

But initially it’s, you know, it’s, it’s not so simple. I think that there are a lot of assumptions made and so. There are quite a few efforts that are made throughout the time at camp to create intentional spaces for real conversation, real dialogue. I think we have the benefit within the Young Judea camp that we are by design, I think we try to build what we call a big tent community, which really means that we make space for lots of different perspectives, particularly perspectives around Israel, and so it lends itself quite naturally that we would have forums, panels, conversations where we are encouraging the Israelis and the Americans to come with their full selves, right? With all of their experiences and their individual perspectives and to actually voice them in a safe setting where they can engage in, you know, in civil discourse and in conversation and ask themselves deep questions and be curious and authentic and vulnerable in all the ways. And so, yeah, there are, I think, moments of challenge, but I think that general setting creates a safe and open and welcome environment for those kinds of discussions.

Claire: So I wanna point out something for our listeners. I don’t mean to make you self-conscious, but already in the little bit that you’ve said, you’ve used a lot of vocabulary that is from Hebrew, right? Lots of Hebrew words, but used I think in a unique way or in a different way. Let’s put it that way, in a different way in camp settings, and you’ve translated most of the words and, but not all of them. Not to put you on the spot, but just to point out that that’s one of the ways that you build community at camp.

And I know that there’s a lot of research showing how important camp language is to creating an identity of a particular camp and creating community each summer. And you know, I know that I smiled when you said medurah, meaning campfire. In the camp where I grew up, we had chadar medurah, right? The room, the campfire room, which sounds like it really makes no sense, except it was a room that happened to have a fireplace in it.

And I know that for, you know, Israelis for whom Hebrew is their mother tongue, the language they speak every day, camp Hebrew is really strange and, you know, not, not real Hebrew, and yet probably by the end of the summer or even within a week or two, they’re speaking it as well. So I just wanted to, to point that out.

Adina: Can I say something quick about that? Which is, there was a wonderful book that was written, I think two or three years ago about Camp Hebrew and how there, while there is a valiant attempt to incorporate Hebrew, both from a cultural standpoint, from a Jewish identity standpoint, and I think also to incorporate and bring Israel into camps that often this Camp Hebrew or Hebrewish, you know, is, sounds very different or sometimes it’s truncated. Not to mention obviously that the accent is quite different, but that is something that is specific and unique to each camp.

I think in a, in camp, Young Judea camps in particular, the bringing Ivrit, bringing Hebrew into the camp setting is quite intentional. We try to bring a lot of elements of Israeli tarbut, Israeli culture into camp, including in our shirah, we spend a lot of time in Israeli song, Israeli poetry, rikud, that very much becomes a part of the camp setting. And I think that that is, it is very much a hallmark of the Young Judea camps.

The other thing I’ll say about language and community, just because I might be an interesting tidbit, is that when I first started working with, with Young Judea, one of the, and my staff actually now they know that this is, it’s a, become an internal joke, is that I banned the language of non-Judean. Because young Judea, like many other youth movements, I think has this wonderful feeling of real closeness and connectedness, and in some cases we’re like a cult in the best possible way. And yet there are things that we do that can potentially feel exclusionary to those who have not been part of Young Judea for their entire lifetimes.

And one of the pivots that we’ve made in the last few years has really been to try to become a much more welcoming and warm community to folks who might become a part of our community or come to our programs perhaps at a later stage in life. They’re not “lifers.” And one of the first things that can feel alienating is to be called a non-Judean, right? We have like Judeans and non-Judeans. And so we started to use the word “new Judean,” or as some of my colleagues now say “newdeans,” which is, on the one hand sounds like a really minor thing, but again, from the perspective of trying to build community and belonging and connection can really send this, this real message of you are part of this and not you are on the outside of it.

Claire: So thank you, that’s a great, a great example and a great way of talking about the challenge of having a strong identity for our community and being accessible to people who might wanna join and need to find a way in. And I hope we’ll have a chance to, to circle back to it. We’ve read the same book, appreciate the same research. So I just wanna mention it’s called Hebrew Infusion Language and Community at American Jewish Summer Camps. Ironically, it came out in 2020, which was COVID and a summer without camp.

I wanna go back though to the idea of a big tent, which you mentioned as a goal for the camps that you oversee. And I know having a big tent is a goal for many, many Jewish communities. So if we think back, I don’t know, 15 ish years ago in the 2010s and really until today, there have been a lot of Jewish young adults who’ve been very critical and very loudly critical of the day schools and the camps where they grew up, where they were educated and their criticism centers on their sense that they’d been taught to love Israel but had never learned some of the more complicated aspects of Israel’s history, of its reality. They hadn’t engaged in these institutions with anything that would make them question the Jewish state, and they were very, not only critical, but angry.

Israel remains polarizing in American society broadly, it remains polarizing in the American Jewish community. And we definitely know, according to survey data, that there’s a generation gap and that Jewish young adults in particular struggle with Zionism and struggle to understand what it means to have an emotional connection with Israel, how to balance that with challenging information and so on and so forth.

So I guess if we flip, you know, we’ve been talking a lot about the mishlachat and the Israelis and what it’s like to bring them into a camp community. I am curious to know what that, that phenomenon has been like at camp. I’m thinking in particular of stories that reached me, for example, staff members, college students, many of them, you know, alums of many years of being campers who were hired, right, to be a counselor, to be on staff in some other role, and then had their contracts canceled because someone had discovered they had posted anti-Israel messages, let’s say, on their social media, or participated in some kind of anti-Israel activism on their college campus.

I’m curious what that was like from the perspective of camp, so maybe a little bit what it was like, you know, at your camps, but also in conversation with directors of other camps. What are the things that you have struggled with collectively in these moments?

Adina: One of the wonderful blessings and also challenges of our, having been in existence as long as we have, which means that we have an alumni community of something like, you know, 50,000 plus alumni in addition to the active, you know, four or 5,000 participants that are there throughout the year is that when we talk about a big tent, and trying to be a big tent, moving that from a theoretical to a practical, it actually gets quite messy. And I’m saying messy in the best possible way. Right.

I’m happy to give you specific examples, but this notion—I’d wanna say just one more thing about this—this notion of being, trying to be a big tent, particularly in a time that is increasingly polarized, as you mentioned, is… it’s quite counter-cultural actually.

The way that we do this big tent building is both about building skills and muscles and experiences so that people feel uncomfortable with the uncomfortable, right? Being able to have the tolerance to have difficult conversations or challenging conversations or to sit face to face with somebody who doesn’t necessarily hold your perspective or your opinion is the essence of what we’re trying to do, with a real understanding that it’s this machloket le-shem shamayim, and we are having this discussion, this discourse, this disagreement for the sake of something higher. And that is, as I said, much easier done in the theory than in the practice.

And particularly today when most of these discussions are happening online and not face to face. I think it is much easier to hide behind pithy statements or short sound bites or memes or tweets or bites that these kinds of… or short reels. It’s much more difficult to get into the nuance and like the real, the real meat of it, the real complex discussions.

The benefit we have in a camp setting, and it’s a benefit and it’s… and it’s challenging also, is that we actually have face-to-face discussions. We have to sit in front of somebody else, use real words, deal with real emotions, right? And there’s a real person right there, that has a, you know, has a backstory and has experiences and is coming with all the things. And so even if we do everything we can to prepare ourselves for those moments, inevitably there are going to be individual personalities, strong personalities that come to play. And there’s also group thinking, right? Group thinking that I think comes into the setting.

So I will mention a particular instance we had last, not this summer, but actually last summer, which was much, even, even more close to October 7th, which was where we did have exactly what you described. We had a, a staff member who had been, you know, a long time Judean and very, very involved in camp, and now was a staff member, and then it was, it had come to light because some of the campers had, I guess, been looking them up on social media, maybe to follow them, maybe to, who knows for what, that they had in fact posted more… I would not necessarily call it anti-Israel. I think those were the words that were used by the campers and, and those who literally came after this staff person and demanded their resignation and demanded that they leave the camp, that—how could they possibly have been hired in this place?

You know, I think if anything, they were articulating views that were, that were critical of certain specific actions or decisions or things that were happening in Israel right now or daring to question, right, something that was happening in Israel. And we have grown very intolerant of these things, and I think particularly in North America where we don’t have that muscle of criticizing in a healthy way or again, asking the question even, it becomes immediately categorized or read as we are “anti,” right, or “non” Zionist.

Actually in this way, having Israelis at camp is really helpful because to have an Israeli who comes to camp and, and articulates some kind of disagreement or dissent with any aspect of Israeli society or the Israeli government or the army or anything, it can be very eye-opening to a North American camper or staff member who, it’s kind of a shock to them, even though we’re, we’re quite, we’re quite willing and ready to criticize our own country, right? Like in a lot of the decisions. And that doesn’t mean that we’re anti-American, right? Or we’re anti-democracy? And, and yet sometimes how this is like a news flash. This is a, it feels like a, a new muscle, a new way of being.

I actually had a wonderful conversation with an alum of ours, and I think he’s actually put this in writing, so I’m happy to quote him, Dan Elbaum, who worked for the Jewish Agency and he grew up in one of our camps and he said that it was the first time he actually encountered or was given permission to voice any kind of, again, disagreement or anything with Israel was when he saw it modeled by, you know, an Israeli staff member at one of our summer camps when he was a young camper, and that that kind of stayed with him throughout his adulthood, as you know, again, really expanding his ability to think and to articulate his perspective.

And so I don’t think we’re perfect at it. We’re absolutely not. It’s an aspiration, right, that we, that we are able to really hold this space. But like I said, we definitely had, have had situations and then we have to reground, right? In that particular example that I gave about that camp, right? We had to, we did have to have an intervention mostly with the campers and the staff to say like, A) You know, bullying is not acceptable. Like, let’s just start with that. Forget about the content. Like you can’t just come after, you know, with your virtual pitchforks, you know, and, and, and this, the, became like a bit of a witch hunt, and that’s not from a value standpoint how we want to manage or comport ourselves.

And secondly, to really try to challenge them to say, look, people have lots of different perspectives, and I think it’s part of the strength of our community is actually that we’re coming to this with diverse viewpoints. And this particular staff member, it wasn’t a surprise. They knew they were coming… they grew up in this camp. They knew they were coming to work at a Zionist camp, and so it wasn’t like they were parking their identities or shaping them. For them, this notion and their understanding of what it means to be a Zionist or what it means to be connected to Israel or have a personal relationship was much more expansive than perhaps the set of campers could, you know, themselves, understand or tolerate. And so we’re just, I think that’s part of what we’re often trying to navigate.

I wanna give one more anecdote. So I recently was in Israel and I actually had a conversation with a, an alum who actually grew up in that era that you mentioned, Claire, that era where perhaps people were kind of, had emerged from that state to say, you know, how come I never knew or why didn’t you ever teach me this?

I think in some ways Young Judea was actually, we’re not perfect, by far, but I think we were probably one of the first movements that was using this language of… kind of more complexity, honest conversations around Israel, hugging, wrestling, all of those things. We probably could have done it earlier, but we definitely were doing it earlier than most. And yet there are still alumni who come back and say, you know, as I’ve gotten older, as I’ve gone to college, as I’ve spent more time in Israel, perhaps immersed in various settings and learned more about the multiple narratives, I’m now kind of reconciling or trying to make sense of what this all means and how to integrate it with my Zionist identity.

And I was sitting with an alum recently in Israel who looked to me and said, I just made Aliyah. This was, I think she had moved to Israel the day before October 7th actually.

Claire: Wow. Yeah.

Adina: And she said, and I’m here, and in a way it’s really on the surface, it’s kind of counter to what you might imagine, because I hold a lot of values and a lot of commitments to a more progressive or universalistic ideology. I am here because I want to make things better and work toward that—to use Hartman language, aspirational Zionism kind of framework. And yet there’s a lot of things that I really disagree with. And she spends much of her time actually advocating on behalf of Palestinian rights in the West Bank and now in Gaza.

And she looked me straight in the face and she said, I know I’m a disappointment to you and to the movement. And I was stunned. I couldn’t believe that she was saying that. And I, I took a breath and I said—totally the opposite. I mean, first of all, you are choosing to make a life in Israel. You are choosing to, again, through your own lens and perspective, to make it better, to be different, to be part of this project, to be part of the next chapter, a Zionist chapter of what Israel is going to be. How could you think that you are a disappointment, right? Or that somehow you’re no longer part of this community, this tent, right? I said, absolutely not. And if that’s what you’re feeling and that’s who we’re communicating, then that’s the failure, right.

And our job actually, and our mandate now is to expand the tent, right? I, I literally am watching myself visually pushing my elbows out to say, we have to be more tolerant. We have to expand that, that center, that middle, right? We cannot let it be co-opted by neither the extreme right or the extreme left. And those who have chosen to make a place in our community who is perhaps, who are perhaps feel like they’re on the margins. Right or to use last week’s Torah portion, right? Like right outside of the machaneh, right, outside of the tent. But they’re with us. They’re willing to fight for it and to make it better, how dare we say that they’re not a part of it. And I think that that’s really become my most recent crusade or charge within the movement, is to expand even more the tent than is what is comfortable for most of us.

Claire: So with what you’re saying, I don’t think you’re alone and I’ll explain. Let me explain why. It’s in connection with this new issue of Sources. So the work on this issue about community started last fall, let’s say, right around the one year anniversary of October 7th. And during that first year, I feel like I was surrounded by and participating in all of these conversations, about the lines of community and where is the line and what do you have to agree to, to be part of? You know, and I’m gonna really put the emphasis, “the” Jewish community. And so that’s where the issue really began.

And as I reached out to potential authors and we got some unsolicited submissions that ended up fitting into this issue, and as the authors were working on their pieces and we were editing, it began to emerge over those, those nine months of working on it, that we are starting to turn a corner in our conversation.

And there are a number of pieces in the issue that are not about drawing lines or respecting lines. They’re really about how do we talk across, right? How do we talk across, not just how do we talk with people who are different, but how do we learn from them? How do we really listen and understand what our differences mean and things like that.

And in particular, like, there are a couple of pieces that invite us to reflect on the emotions, right? Sometimes it feels good to declare somebody out of the tent and it’s harder to say, no, I want you here. I want to be challenged by you, and I want you to be open to being challenged by me because we’re here. We’re here together.

And so I wanna spend the last bit of our time together thinking about what the… let’s call it the adult Jewish community or the regular Jewish community or the home, let’s call it, the home Jewish communities can learn from camp. And I’ll point out a couple of things that do make camp different, in addition to everything we’ve talked about already.

And one is that camp is closed, right? You can control, to a large extent, both who comes into camp, you have the ability to kick people out if they break certain rules. And also camp is temporary, right? It’s four weeks, it’s eight weeks, and in between summers you have 10 months to plan very carefully and to make lots of decisions, to educate, to accept or reject, and so on and so forth.

As we’ve talked about, home communities don’t have either of those things, right? There’s no way to control information. There’s limited control on this idea that you can accept or reject, and it’s also constant, right. There’s no time when you could say, all right, goodbye everyone. I’m going to take a really long nap and we’ll see you next June.

So bearing in mind those differences, and I’ll say also as somebody who, you know, runs camp communities, but also lives your life in a home community, what can the rest of us learn from camp about building community, about telling the story of community, which is another really important theme in this issue of Sources, and also that Israeli diaspora bridge that camp really leans into. What can the rest of us learn from it? It’s a lot. So pick up wherever you’d like.

Adina: We often talk about camps, and particularly our camps as a Zionist youth movement being a microcosm of the kind of communities that we wanna build out in the world. And in fact, we, you know, we don’t say this overtly to our campers, but it’s part of the design and the experience, right, that they will live and they will build the kinds of communities in the summer that they hope to see replicated and that they might one day build themselves, right. Seek out and/or build. That’s the outcome language that we use in their lives every day.

And so it’s, it’s true what you’re saying that there’s a controlled, semi-controlled… I already, we, we spent a lot of time on this episode talking about the various inputs and variables that come in that we do our best to design for and control for, and yet you’re still dealing with human beings and you’re dealing with people from different backgrounds and communities and, and things that happen in real time that, that have to be navigated.

And so it’s more about actually what plays out in the day-to-day life of camp and, and can that become a model for how we comport ourselves, how we encounter one to the other, right? How we set certain ground rules, how we set boundaries within, and more so even the, and kind of like the, the culture, the value of the kind of community that we wanna build out there, and the intentionality around that.

I would say even more so with our staff, right? Cause the campers are experiencing it, they’re living it, we don’t necessarily, like, deconstruct it until they become staff. And then it’s like, “There’s a magic behind this! And there was actually thought behind this!” And hopefully they don’t feel like Guinea pigs, right? Hopefully they actually feel like this was good pedagogic design. And so that… I would say that is absolutely true. I’d say the complete opposite of that kind of community, that bubble insular community that we’re trying to create or that idyllic community is the wild, wild west that is social media.

So where we mentioned, earlier in the episode, the difference between in-person, face-to-face communities, right, or relationships, synagogue communities, home communities, JCCs, schools, right? There’s lots of other places where this kind of community can be created. I think it’s perhaps easier there, and it’s one of the reasons why we invest not only in camp, but in other immersive experiences, right? We have gap year experiences and we have short term Israel travel programs. And I think through those also, we are able to, to replicate or simulate those kinds of community experiences that then will build the kinds of muscles and interest and replication moving forward.

I think in the social media space, it’s just much, much harder. On the one hand you have echo chambers, which perhaps feel like community, right? Because you’re surrounding yourself, or you have been surrounded by virtue of an algorithm, right? So it’s not even, like, choiceful, by people who are in your circle, whatever that might mean, and in, in some ways, actually in that setting, you have to push even harder and more intentionally to, to unbound your community or to break beyond the bounds of that specific echo chamber.

It’s, it’s, it’s like actually the opposite of, you wanna surround yourself with the people who think exactly like you, or confirm your particular perspective or biases, but you have to be intentional about going outside of that, right? Read sources that aren’t just yours, like and comment on posts that aren’t necessarily reinforcing your perspective so that you are fed, it’s, you know, fed some other other information.

So I think that’s where it’s the most challenging is, is online. And so we try, try to, try to encourage both our participants, but also I would say to you and me like we need to make an effort to have as many face-to-face conversations and build real community experiences that are not just in that virtual space. And if we do find ourselves in that virtual space to be mindful of how it is biased, or it leans toward wanting to create these silos.

Claire: So it’s interesting. I just wanna mention one last thing from the issue, which is we have two articles, one by Michael Koplow and one by my Hartman colleague Josh Levisohn, about bringing Palestinian narratives into Jewish educational spaces and really sort of reframing into some degrees Zionist narratives to recognize those experiences.

And what stands out to me most that the articles share is they both talk about the importance of Zionists engaging with Palestinians as they understand themselves. And I think maybe that’s something that we could say is happening at camp as well. When you remove, you know, the phones and the social media and all of that, and you throw people together, you make them live together, especially maybe across this Israeli-diaspora divide. And when people are together in that way, it increases the chances that we can understand one another in that way, that I can understand you as you understand yourself, and you can understand me in the same way.

And I’ve, I’ve just been thinking about it a lot in the many ways in which it’s challenging to understand people in their own words, but maybe it’s at the heart of this whole project. It’s at the heart of what we might need to do to expand our tent or to figure out just how wide it can stretch.

I wanna thank you so much for being here. There’s a lot about camp we haven’t, we haven’t talked about, but you’ve raised some really, I think, interesting questions and hopefully made us all a little bit more sensitive to what goes on behind the scenes at camp, especially us parents who send our kids away.

And I’ll tell you, half of the letters that my son sent back were just a smiley face, which is great, but also, who knows what’s going on. And really wonderful. So thank you so much and hope to talk to you soon.

Adina: Thank you so much, Claire. It’s really been a pleasure and I appreciate the thought provoking conversation that you invited me to.