The Women’s Initiative for Jewish Studies (WIJS) at Young Israel (YINR) of New Rochelle, New York is proud to present Dr. Sandra Fox on Wednesday, Sept. 18, 2024 at 8:15 p.m. on Zoom. Fox will be the first speaker of the 2024-2025 season in the monthly scholarly programming offered by WIJS at YINR.
Fox will speak on the topic “The Jews of Summer: Summer Camp and Jewish Culture in Postwar America.” How did the residential summer camp become an integral part of American Jewish life? Is there something special about the relationship between Jews and camp?
In the decades directly following the Holocaust, American Jewish leaders anxiously debated how to preserve and produce what they considered authentic Jewish culture, fearful that growing affluence and suburbanization threatened the future of Jewish life. Many communal educators and rabbis contended that without intervention, Judaism as they understood it would disappear altogether. They pinned their hopes on residential summer camps for Jewish youth, institutions that sprang up across the U.S. as places for children and teenagers to socialize, recreate and experience Jewish culture.
The fears, hopes and dreams of adults about the Jewish future inflected every element of camp life, from the languages they taught to what was encouraged romantically and permitted sexually. But adult plans did not constitute everything that occurred at camp: children and teenagers also shaped these sleepaway camps to mirror their own desires and interests and decided whether to accept or resist the ideas and ideologies their camp leaders promoted. In this lecture, Fox will explain how a sense of cultural crisis birthed a rite of passage for Jewish children across the country.
Fox is a visiting assistant professor of American Jewish history and Yiddish studies at New York University and director of its archive of the American Jewish Left in the Digital Age. She received her Ph.D. from New York University. Her book, “The Jews of Summer: Summer Camp and Jewish Culture in Postwar America” (Stanford University Press, 2023), addresses the experiences of youth in postwar Jewish summer camps and the place of intergenerational negotiation in the making of American Jewish culture. In addition to her research, Fox is the founder and executive producer of the Yiddish-language podcast “Vaybertaytsh: A Feminist Podcast in Yiddish” and is on the editorial board of In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies.
All WIJS programming is open to women and men. Visit www.yinr.org/wijs to view the complete WIJS 2024-25 schedule. For more information, to be added to the WIJS email list or for Zoom information, call (914) 636-2215 or email [email protected]. Individuals on the WIJS mailing list will automatically receive the Zoom information.
