 toward these mountain Meccas, and began to enroll in summer camp. “Nowadays even the girls may go to a camp, though they may not live in tents,” reported the American Hebrew in 1911. Over the next two decades, as camping increasingly became an acceptable middle-class phenomenon, the number of Jewish camps catering to girls grew dramatically. Eager to throw off their previous association with the poor, these camps made a point of stressing their affluent clientele and well-equipped campuses. Camp Jo-Lee for Girls in North Belgrade, Maine, for example, was “limited to girls from the finest American Jewish homes throughout the United States.” Meanwhile, Jo-Lee’s competitor, Camp Dunmore for Girls in Brandon, Vermont, advertised its “atmosphere of refinement” and promised to “develop the mind and body of the growing [Jewish] girl along the lines of recreational play and sports.”
Whether single sex or coeducational (increasingly “the thing to do,” reported one disgruntled camping professional in the 1930s), Jewish summer camps tended to reflect and promote gendered notions of play. Boys played basketball; girls gardened. “Boys had a lot more sports and girls a lot more culture,” recalled veteran Cejwin camper and counselor Susan Addelston. Even popular pursuits commonly associated with Native Americans, from council ring to tracking, were experienced differently by the sexes. “Young boys,” observed Surprise Lake Camp’s longtime director Max Oppenheimer, “like to play at games in which the cunning and swiftness of the Indian is brought out.” The girls, by contrast, associated Indians with more sedentary matters. “I have good and bad news,” wrote Ruth Braude, a camper at Camp Waziyatah, to her parents in the summer of 1932, informing them that at a recent Indian council ring, green feathers were awarded for good posture, yellow feathers were distributed for fair posture, and red feathers were given out for poor posture. “I got a green feather and Hilda [her sister] got a red one. My feather is good news. Hilda’s is bad.”
With their emphasis on feathers, fun, and friendship, bygone summers inevitably yielded to new seasonal demands. Little by little, advertisements for school shoes replaced those for sandals, while the sale of seats in synagogues and temples, “the first premonition of the approach of fall,” replaced those for summer getaways. But no sooner did worshipers, bedecked in their holiday finery, exit the synagogue, their collars turned up against the autumn chill, than thoughts turned once again to the “vagaries of vacation.”
Cahan, Abraham. The Rise of David Levinsky (1917); “The Ghetto and Summer Resorts.” American Israelite (August 20, 1903): 8; Joselit, Jenna Weissman, and Karen S., Mittelman, eds. A Worthy Use of Summer: Jewish Summer Camping in America (1993); Kanfer, Stefan. A Summer World (1989); Rhine, Alice Hyneman. “Race Prejudice at Summer Resorts.” Forum (July 1887): 523–525; Ruskay, Esther Jane. “Summer Resort Judaism.” American Hebrew (August 18, 1905): 351–352; Wouk, Herman. Marjorie Morningstar (1955).
How to cite this page
Joselit, Jenna Weissman. "Leisure and Recreation in the United States." Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. 1 March 2009. Jewish Women's Archive. (Viewed on May 27, 2016) <http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/leisure-and-recreation-in-united-states>.