ions. By the 1920s, according to the United Synagogue Recorder, summer synagogues with memberships “equally divided between men and women” began to take root in resort towns everywhere.
For many Jews, camp provided the best solution to the doldrums of “summer Judaism” and, by extension, the anomalies of the American Jewish experience. “American Jewish children ... do not live a natural Jewish life,” explained Shlomo Shulsinger, who, with his wife, Rivka, founded Massad Camps in the 1940s. “Radio, movies, newspapers, books, games—all the factors which go towards developing a child’s character and mode of living are far removed from Jewish realities.” At a Jewish summer camp, however, youngsters could live in an environment where Jewish culture mattered: Buildings and walkways carried the names of legendary Jewish personalities, while lively, contemporized Yiddish or Hebrew could be heard on the baseball diamond and on the outdoor stage.
Initially, Jewish summer camp was inspired more by charitable than cultural concerns. As “armies” of poor, unsupervised Jewish children took to the streets in July and August, many communal leaders such as Rabbi Maurice Lewisohn worried about their physical and moral well-being. “There is no plainer fact than the relation of the lack of recreation to moral breakdown,” he observed, adding, “recreation is not only educational, it is a moral force.” To Lewisohn’s way of thinking, supervised play, especially in the form of a two-week stint at a summer camp, was the perfect antidote to the anomie of the slums. In the early years of the twentieth century other like-minded Jews formed a number of “philanthropically correct” summer camps where young boys, “far removed from the temptations and pettiness of city life,” learned the gentleman’s code of behavior. “Camp should become the Mecca for every young man who enjoys camping and is willing to live up to the rules,” stated William Mitchel, the director of Surprise Lake Camp in 1910.
In the years that followed, girls, too, raised their eyes 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